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I pulled my coat tight against the falling down
1. My poem "The Wearing Season" has been accepted by Through the Gate. Traditionally, my best working environment is an overlit computer screen far too late at night, so the fact that I wrote this entire piece while sitting in on the dress rehearsals for Tomes of Terror: New Arrivals was a new one on me. It started as lines on napkins. I stole ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel's pen. It's one of the ways I feel about autumn, but not all of them.
2. I watched Carl Theodore Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). It is as powerful as its reputation; I have rarely seen a movie with that immediate and iconic a grip on the viewer. Dreyer's film language is not that which followed after him; Renée Jeanne Falconetti's face is like nothing else onscreen in '28. I want very much to see Vampyr (1932) now, but first I am going to continue to be amazed/troubled/awed by the things I saw on a flatscreen TV this afternoon, in fifteenth-century France.
3. I do not have much to say to the "Unfuck Your [Whatever]" movement. If I want to reorganize my life, I don't need a trendy slogan to do it; and let's face it, I already personify two of my neuroses and a person has to draw the line somewhere. That said: fuck you, notes all over my desktop that never became posts. Some of you go back two and three years at this point. Some of you are promises I never kept. (Some of you don't exist for movies I wish you did, but that's a different problem.) This one was only supposed to go up in March, elaborating on an e-mail tostrange_selkie with comments made to asakiyume, but then it didn't and I have no idea why. I may have thought it was superfluous. It may still not be very relevant, but at least it's going to be off my hard drive.
Nowadays, Robert Newton is probably most famous for inspiring International Talk Like a Pirate Day with the flamboyant West Country accent he used for Long John Silver in Disney's Treasure Island (1950), before which no one had ever imagined that historical pirates said "ARRRR!" on a regular basis. He really was from Dorset, although I don't know any other roles where you can hear it. He was a painter's son and a writer's; in his early career, he was a scene painter and a stage manager as often as he was an actor, and I don't know that he was ever handsome, but I think he was beautiful. Solid-browed, dark-eyed, with a long wry mouth and softer eyelashes than they used to like on leading men; he wasn't lanky, so I never remember he was six feet tall. He could look puckish; he could look like a thug. He would have been a perfect Heathcliff in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939), but Samuel Goldwyn didn't like his looks and demanded a more conventionally modeled actor. I saw him first as Bill Walker in Major Barbara (1941), a complicated tough who comes to fetch his girl back from the Salvation Army and stays to argue social activism and hypocrisy with the title character, although neither of them are quite aware that's what he's doing. He's a scarier Bill Sikes in David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) than Oliver Reed in Carol Reed's Oliver! (1968) because there are moments where he looks as much of a lost child as Dickens' eponymous orphan, only glowering man-size and taking it all out on Nancy. He's a horribly selfish artist in Reed's Odd Man Out (1947), but he's painting something beautiful out of a man's dying; I can't really speak to his Ancient Pistol in Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944) because I haven't seen it since high school, but he takes a stock character in Robert Wise's The Desert Rats (1953) and makes him real in directions the audience isn't trained to expect. I find him very impressive for similar reasons in Edward Dmytryk's Obsession (1949), because the murderer's role is written to chew scenery and he plays it as low-key as if killing a man were as serious small-scale business as a model railway, and although Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939) is a deeply flawed film, it gives Newton the chance to play for once the sweet, brave, true hero, an officer of the law undercover in a gang of wreckers, being rescued by Maureen O'Hara and looking not bad at all with his shirt half ripped off from the sea, and there's nothing starchy or saccharine about him. There are many films of his I haven't seen. This Happy Breed (1944), for example, is one of the legendary collaborations between Noël Coward and David Lean and it's only just become available on Region 1 DVD. I can't find more than a minute of the biopic They Flew Alone (1942) even on YouTube. I probably don't need to see Long John Silver (1954). And he drank too much and he died at age fifty and I am sorry every time I remember that, because he was really, really talented and it is not fair to remember him only for pirate movies. If this was not the best exegesis of Robert Newton ever, at least you get the idea.
(And now, because I have to call doctors and housing-related people tomorrow, I am going to sleep.)
derspatchel's pen. It's one of the ways I feel about autumn, but not all of them.2. I watched Carl Theodore Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). It is as powerful as its reputation; I have rarely seen a movie with that immediate and iconic a grip on the viewer. Dreyer's film language is not that which followed after him; Renée Jeanne Falconetti's face is like nothing else onscreen in '28. I want very much to see Vampyr (1932) now, but first I am going to continue to be amazed/troubled/awed by the things I saw on a flatscreen TV this afternoon, in fifteenth-century France.
3. I do not have much to say to the "Unfuck Your [Whatever]" movement. If I want to reorganize my life, I don't need a trendy slogan to do it; and let's face it, I already personify two of my neuroses and a person has to draw the line somewhere. That said: fuck you, notes all over my desktop that never became posts. Some of you go back two and three years at this point. Some of you are promises I never kept. (Some of you don't exist for movies I wish you did, but that's a different problem.) This one was only supposed to go up in March, elaborating on an e-mail to
strange_selkie with comments made to asakiyume, but then it didn't and I have no idea why. I may have thought it was superfluous. It may still not be very relevant, but at least it's going to be off my hard drive.Nowadays, Robert Newton is probably most famous for inspiring International Talk Like a Pirate Day with the flamboyant West Country accent he used for Long John Silver in Disney's Treasure Island (1950), before which no one had ever imagined that historical pirates said "ARRRR!" on a regular basis. He really was from Dorset, although I don't know any other roles where you can hear it. He was a painter's son and a writer's; in his early career, he was a scene painter and a stage manager as often as he was an actor, and I don't know that he was ever handsome, but I think he was beautiful. Solid-browed, dark-eyed, with a long wry mouth and softer eyelashes than they used to like on leading men; he wasn't lanky, so I never remember he was six feet tall. He could look puckish; he could look like a thug. He would have been a perfect Heathcliff in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939), but Samuel Goldwyn didn't like his looks and demanded a more conventionally modeled actor. I saw him first as Bill Walker in Major Barbara (1941), a complicated tough who comes to fetch his girl back from the Salvation Army and stays to argue social activism and hypocrisy with the title character, although neither of them are quite aware that's what he's doing. He's a scarier Bill Sikes in David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) than Oliver Reed in Carol Reed's Oliver! (1968) because there are moments where he looks as much of a lost child as Dickens' eponymous orphan, only glowering man-size and taking it all out on Nancy. He's a horribly selfish artist in Reed's Odd Man Out (1947), but he's painting something beautiful out of a man's dying; I can't really speak to his Ancient Pistol in Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944) because I haven't seen it since high school, but he takes a stock character in Robert Wise's The Desert Rats (1953) and makes him real in directions the audience isn't trained to expect. I find him very impressive for similar reasons in Edward Dmytryk's Obsession (1949), because the murderer's role is written to chew scenery and he plays it as low-key as if killing a man were as serious small-scale business as a model railway, and although Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939) is a deeply flawed film, it gives Newton the chance to play for once the sweet, brave, true hero, an officer of the law undercover in a gang of wreckers, being rescued by Maureen O'Hara and looking not bad at all with his shirt half ripped off from the sea, and there's nothing starchy or saccharine about him. There are many films of his I haven't seen. This Happy Breed (1944), for example, is one of the legendary collaborations between Noël Coward and David Lean and it's only just become available on Region 1 DVD. I can't find more than a minute of the biopic They Flew Alone (1942) even on YouTube. I probably don't need to see Long John Silver (1954). And he drank too much and he died at age fifty and I am sorry every time I remember that, because he was really, really talented and it is not fair to remember him only for pirate movies. If this was not the best exegesis of Robert Newton ever, at least you get the idea.
(And now, because I have to call doctors and housing-related people tomorrow, I am going to sleep.)
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(But no real pirates are coming. If they were, she would not want to have the party. She only wants to pretent to be pirates.)
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I think that will be a very fine salute.
(But no real pirates are coming. If they were, she would not want to have the party. She only wants to pretent to be pirates.)
Heh. That shows an admirable grasp of the differences between fantasy and reality, and not the kind children are usually asked to make, either. (Which reminds me: there's Yuletide for Hobbes and Bacon.) I feel like you should show her The Pirate (1948) when she's old enough to get that that's what it's about, but any earlier and neither of her parents would make it through the boneheaded gender relations of the first half-hour.
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I need to see more of Newton; I know Sikes and Silver and that's about it.
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Thank you! I'll have to write more!
I need to see more of Newton; I know Sikes and Silver and that's about it.
I wouldn't start with Jamaica Inn, although ironically I did (it got me to notice Emlyn Williams, too, but it is not otherwise Hitchcock's finest hour); I really think I'd recommend Major Barbara and go from there, because the same cast contains Wendy Hill and Rex Harrison and Robert Morley, although of course Odd Man Out also gets you amazing James Mason and one of the more randomly interesting female leads I've seen from the 1940's in the person of Kathleen Ryan. You could watch something that isn't readily accessible in the States and let me know how it is!
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Carl Theodore Dreyer made one of my favorite movies ever (Ordet). I should try The Passion of Joan of Arc.
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Thank you! Four years ago I had to watch it on crackly library VHS with terrible sound problems, but it's now available on DVD from Netflix. (It's Eclipse, not Criterion proper, so the transfer probably isn't the best quality, but it should still be a lot more convenient than tape.) It should definitely tell you whether you like Robert Newton or not, but I'd love to hear what you think about the rest of the story, too.
Carl Theodore Dreyer made one of my favorite movies ever (Ordet).
I know nothing about Ordet! What it's like?
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... This was a movie someone told me about years and years ago, and it was described to me so vividly that I got chills, and remembered the word, Ordet, for more than twenty years, until at last I located the film, watched it, and then bought it.
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Whichever way, it sounds like something I should try: at the worst, it will leave me emotionally cold and I will appreciate the technique. But I don't know if I believe that God and the saints were speaking to Jehanne from Domrémy and it made no difference to the power of Dreyer's film.
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My father reported this: he's seen it three times now, in the space of something like two weeks. I can't imagine going back so soon, but it doesn't surprise me.
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Thanks for making the Robert Newton post. It's interesting to hear what else he did, besides playing Long John Silver. And it's always good to deal with notes left lying about. I've a few I should be dealing with myself.
I hope you found sleep. I hope all's gone well with the calls you had to make. And with all else.
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Thank you! It feels like a good way to start the year, even if we're a week (yikes) into it already.
Thanks for making the Robert Newton post. It's interesting to hear what else he did, besides playing Long John Silver.
I like character actors. It shouldn't surprise any reader of this journal, but still. Makes me happy.
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You're welcome!
I like character actors. It shouldn't surprise any reader of this journal, but still. Makes me happy.
I might have noticed that, yes. I'm glad it makes you happy.