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I don't need that DJ, 'cause in my head I can hear these records play
Sunday night in the ER at Mount Auburn, I was reading John le Carré's The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016) when I ran into the following passage at the beginning of a chapter about Martin Ritt, Richard Burton, and the filming of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965):
I was a serving diplomat of thirty-two and I had never met movie people before. In childhood, like all boys of my time, I had fallen in love with Deanna Durbin, and rolled in the aisles over the Three Stooges. In wartime cinemas, I had shot down German aeroplanes piloted by Eric Portman, and triumphed over the Gestapo with Leslie Howard. (My father was so persuaded that Portman was a Nazi that he said he should be interned.)
At which point I exclaimed out loud to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel, because the Deanna Durbin and the Three Stooges could be anything, but the Leslie Howard is Pimpernel Smith (1941) and the Eric Portman is Squadron Leader X (1943) and if le Carré really has a memory of the latter rather than just using it as cultural shorthand, I want to ask him what it was like, because it is famously a lost film.1 It was written by Emeric Pressburger and directed by Lance Comfort and I have wanted to see it ever since I discovered the Archers and Eric Portman simultaneously with A Canterbury Tale (1944). Thanks to the good grace of Olive Films, Pimpernel Smith finally does exist on DVD and Blu-Ray and someday when I have money I will purchase a copy, but as regards Squadron Leader X I've been as much out of luck as the BFI. There's pictures and a summary and a reputation. I don't usually think of movies as one of the things that can be lost with the ceaselessly moving window of living memory, but here we are. I wonder if there's anyone alive who remembers London After Midnight (1927).
1. Portman also plays a Nazi in Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941), but there is no shooting down of a German airplane in that movie; there is a stolen Canadian seaplane, but Portman isn't the guy flying it when it crashes in a lake in Manitoba.
I was a serving diplomat of thirty-two and I had never met movie people before. In childhood, like all boys of my time, I had fallen in love with Deanna Durbin, and rolled in the aisles over the Three Stooges. In wartime cinemas, I had shot down German aeroplanes piloted by Eric Portman, and triumphed over the Gestapo with Leslie Howard. (My father was so persuaded that Portman was a Nazi that he said he should be interned.)
At which point I exclaimed out loud to
derspatchel, because the Deanna Durbin and the Three Stooges could be anything, but the Leslie Howard is Pimpernel Smith (1941) and the Eric Portman is Squadron Leader X (1943) and if le Carré really has a memory of the latter rather than just using it as cultural shorthand, I want to ask him what it was like, because it is famously a lost film.1 It was written by Emeric Pressburger and directed by Lance Comfort and I have wanted to see it ever since I discovered the Archers and Eric Portman simultaneously with A Canterbury Tale (1944). Thanks to the good grace of Olive Films, Pimpernel Smith finally does exist on DVD and Blu-Ray and someday when I have money I will purchase a copy, but as regards Squadron Leader X I've been as much out of luck as the BFI. There's pictures and a summary and a reputation. I don't usually think of movies as one of the things that can be lost with the ceaselessly moving window of living memory, but here we are. I wonder if there's anyone alive who remembers London After Midnight (1927).1. Portman also plays a Nazi in Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941), but there is no shooting down of a German airplane in that movie; there is a stolen Canadian seaplane, but Portman isn't the guy flying it when it crashes in a lake in Manitoba.
Manitoba
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109823/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_36
In my mind, it's a double feature with Map of the Human Heart, because of the pilots' uniforms. They came out a year apart, though
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104812/
Re: Manitoba
Re: Manitoba
Well, that's a sterling recommendation!
Re: Manitoba
Re: Manitoba
It's okay; I figure at this point it's the kind of lost film which will either surface someday on 16 mm in a broom closet or will never be found because the original elements and the only print melted during the Blitz.
In my mind, it's a double feature with Map of the Human Heart, because of the pilots' uniforms.
I can see how that happened.
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It remains one of my very favorite movies of his. And it has a lot of competition!
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I've only ever seen the versions with Leslie Howard! I keep feeling I should check out Powell and Pressburger's The Elusive Pimpernel (1950) on general principle, but I haven't. What other screen versions do you recommend?
(I love the music for Frank Wildhorn's stage version; I have the original cast recording. The one production I saw, though, the book needed work.)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Pimpernel
but I liked the James Mason one and the David Niven one. Until I read the wiki I had forgotten about the Hugh Grant tv show version too, and I think I saw a couple eppies of it and he was quite good as our foppish spy. And of course, the Daffy Duck version.
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Okay, so I knew about the David Niven one—that's The Elusive Pimpernel—but I had no idea about the others. James Mason? Was he Chauvelin? (I could see that.)
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According to the BFI, there was a press screening in November 1942, a general UK release in January 1943, and then no record of it being shown in the country again. It got a review from the New York Times in July 1943 which implies to me that there was some kind of American release—IMDb confirms it and adds a Mexican release date in April 1944. (I can't tell from the existence of Brazilian and Greek titles whether it was shown in those countries or just advertised or what.) All of this makes me feel that there should have been multiple prints swanning around on both sides of the Atlantic, but the BFI has nothing but some stills and a pressbook and they've been looking for some time.
I don't suppose it could have been deliberately suppressed as detrimental to the war effort?
That kind of happened to Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), so I can see why you ask, but Squadron Leader X got great reviews in the UK—its German protagonist seems to have been entirely unsympathetic, no danger of accidentally contravening propaganda. That's part of the reason I wonder about something like accidental destruction in war; it was popular and well-reviewed enough that I would have expected the studio to hang on to it!
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I saw a reconstruction-from-stills of London After Midnight a few years ago, which only made me wish more fervently that a print would turn up.
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I didn't know enough stills of London After Midnight existed to do even that! Wow.