I'll wrap in you like I'm sleeping in my grave

[sovay]

I am still coughing and have not had the mental wherewithal to do much of anything with my night. Have two music videos. Both come from Sxip Shirey's A Bottle of Whiskey and a Handful of Bees (2017): handful_ofdust linked Rhiannon Giddens' "Woman of Constant Sorrow" and I found Xavier's "Cinnamon Stick" on my own. Some of the visuals of the latter almost remind me of Derek Jarman. The former is just really great.

I was also impressed by this article on the metrics of the shitgibbon, by which I mean that I read it to derspatchel and made it all the way to the last word of the next-to-last paragraph before cracking up. The same blog offers a more serious and useful perspective on microaggressions.

The other night in the shower I was revisiting the fantasy casting of film noir Blade Runner and realized that the last time I asked myself the question, I just hadn't seen the actor I really wanted for Roy: a very young Kirk Douglas. He is stupidly beautiful in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) and rewatching Spartacus (1960) last year reminded me of his physical intensity and then I think pairing him with Veronica Lake as Pris would be fun, because she would look exactly, disarmingly like a china doll next to him. He could do the charm and the danger (and the running around shirtless in the rain) and I wouldn't even mind the absence of accent. So that's nice to have cleared up.¹



1. The other actor I keep coming back to is Philip Ahn, who was also ridiculously beautiful, with a speaking voice to match. The stills and production photos I've seen from Daughter of Shanghai (1937) tempt me to pair him again with Anna May Wong, and since at this point I believe I have departed entirely from plausible Hollywood casting in the era of the Production Code, then the only thing I can't decide is whether I should cast Canada Lee as Deckard or swap him with Ahn for Roy. I could see it either way. I'd love to get Theresa Harris into this fancast, but she'd have to be Rachael and then the slightly blank quality that made me think of Kim Hunter would disappear. Still want Joan Bennett as Zhora, though.

Comments

[sovay]

I wonder if Joel McCrea would work as Deckard? He's always struck me as having a slightly confused, ill-fitting quality.

Interesting possibility! I haven't seen him in many films—Girls About Town (1931), The Most Dangerous Game (1932), and Foreign Correspondent (1940) are the ones that come to mind—so I don't think of him as having Deckard's weariness, but it is true that he can look awkward in a trenchcoat. I've seen it.

I looked about for suitable images of Lake. Here she is looking even tinier than usual next to Laird Cregar

That's from This Gun for Hire (1942)! I saw it last spring and never managed to write about it, but it's amazing. Essentially it's a wartime spy story that turns into film noir by making its protagonist, instead of the sterling cop pursuing the sticky threads of industrial and international espionage through more than one murder and the kidnapping of his girlfriend, the double-crossed hitman who's in possession of a vital chemical secret but only wants to get back at the boss who set him up; even when the rest of the movie around him behaves like action-comics pulp, he and his relationship with the heroine are complex and ambivalent and unpredictable enough to pull the other genre through. Alan Ladd plays the hitman and seeing this movie after Jean-Pierre Melville's Le samouraï (1967) was actively disorienting, because I hadn't realized until then what a pure homage Jef Costello is. Veronica Lake is a professional magician freshly recruited by the U.S. government to spy on new employer Cregar, who happens to be the hitman's double-crossing boss. Ladd is also tiny, beautiful, dark-haired in this role so that he and Lake look like a strange matched pair; together they feel simultaneously more real and more fairytale than anything else happening in the movie. Robert Preston plays the cop who is also Lake's boyfriend, but he was always better at slippery than sterling and he doesn't have a chance against the leads' chemistry. It's such a weird movie. I loved it so much.

Or would she have been too old by 1948?

I hadn't thought of Vivien Leigh simply because I started brainstorming actors I'd seen in film noir and generalizing from there! That's a great shot of her. What's it from?

[moon_custafer]

The caption just said "photo by Angus McBean." I think from the Wikipedia entry on McBean that it may have been a production photo from the 1936 stage version of The Happy Hypocrite for which McBean did the masks and in which Leigh played Jenny Mere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_McBean

[sovay]

I think from the Wikipedia entry on McBean that it may have been a production photo from the 1936 stage version of The Happy Hypocrite for which McBean did the masks and in which Leigh played Jenny Mere

When I've finished unpacking my books, I should be able to check: I have at least two volumes of Angus McBean's photographs because he was awesome.