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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.
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It remains one of my very favorite movies of his. And it has a lot of competition!