Between the bed and the door there was acres of ground I'd not noticed before
I had clam chowder for dinner tonight. Last night, at Saint Anthony's Feast in the North End, I had a plate of fried shrimp, steaming hot, which I ate as ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I wandered among the stalls. The night before that, fried clams with my mother. I do not know if I can make up for a month's absence of shellfish from my diet before I run out of summer, but I am going to do my damnedest to find out.
1. Well, if I was disappointed in the lack of personal letters from Alan Turing, tonight I discovered Gilbert Bradley and Gordon Bowsher. I'm not sure how I missed hearing about them in February except I guess my country was on fire, never mind. I think one of the things I like best about their story is that while it did not apparently end with a happily ever after, it doesn't look like a tragic ending, either: neither of them was lost in the war, nobody got queer-bashed to death, they just broke up. Looking for more information on the internet, I found this project upcoming as part of Heritage Open Days: "Gilbert & Gordon: Then All the World Could See How in Love We Are." It would be a nice thing to attend withrushthatspeaks for our anniversary if we had a teleporter. I hope there will be a published book.
2. Right before I left the house this afternoon,ladymondegreen sent me a photo of a flyer for a "genderbending surrealist burlesque" by the name of Tiresias' Tits. I hoped from the name that it was a burlesque version of Apollinaire's original surrealist play Les mamelles de Tirésias (1903). It was. I couldn't have seen it even with a teleporter, but I'm delighted.
3. Dorothy Arzner's Get Your Man (1927) was delightful if fragmentary; it lost two reels out of six to nitrate decomposition during the decades it was out of the public eye and was reconstructed with stills by the Library of Congress. The proto-screwball romantic denouement is intact, but much of the set-up is missing, frustratingly including the majority of the night in the Parisian waxwork museum where Clara Bow and Buddy (credited as "Charles") Rogers fall in love among the exhibits, mixed-up-files-style. Not only were the tableaux considered one of the highlights of the film on release, they were choreographed and staged by Marion Morgan, Arzner's long-term partner, and performed by dancers from Morgan's troupe. What survives on either side of the lacuna where the film bubbles and flickers out certainly looks elegant, with the uncanny valley double whammy of human actors imitating imitations of human life. Otherwise the film is a funny, freewheeling showcase for the force of charisma that is Bow, a New York girl with her sights set on a French boy resigned to going through with his arranged marriage for the honor of his aristocratic family—I don't think it's a spoiler to say that anyone who backs tradition against our heroine is going to lose their shirt. It's not just that she can charm anyone in this film she feels like, and the audience just as effortlessly; she always looks like she's having fun and she wants us to have fun with her. We're in on the joke when she arranges herself dramatically among the scattered luggage of the taxi that fortuitously crashed outside her love object's ancestral chateau, then powders her nose in afterthought before languishing again. She doesn't undertake to bust up a seventeen-year engagement without first verifying that the other woman has her own man on the side, but the middle-aged marquis playing a hopeful flute underneath her balcony had better watch out. She's as tricky as fate; she's exuberant and sweet. David the projectionist introduced the film with an anecdote included by David Stenn in Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild (1988), concerning Bow's initial disappointment at being directed by a woman: "After all, girlfriends like me she could lose, but a gorgeous man was 'divine,' and Dorothy Arzner was going to make one less man around." To which I am afraid my response is: come on, have you seen Dorothy Arzner? Here as Exhibit A is my favorite photograph of the director, actually taken with Bow on the set of The Wild Party (1929), their second collaboration and Bow's first talkie:
Seriously, Clara. Go for it. That was a woman who knew how to wear a suit.
spatch and I wandered among the stalls. The night before that, fried clams with my mother. I do not know if I can make up for a month's absence of shellfish from my diet before I run out of summer, but I am going to do my damnedest to find out.1. Well, if I was disappointed in the lack of personal letters from Alan Turing, tonight I discovered Gilbert Bradley and Gordon Bowsher. I'm not sure how I missed hearing about them in February except I guess my country was on fire, never mind. I think one of the things I like best about their story is that while it did not apparently end with a happily ever after, it doesn't look like a tragic ending, either: neither of them was lost in the war, nobody got queer-bashed to death, they just broke up. Looking for more information on the internet, I found this project upcoming as part of Heritage Open Days: "Gilbert & Gordon: Then All the World Could See How in Love We Are." It would be a nice thing to attend with
rushthatspeaks for our anniversary if we had a teleporter. I hope there will be a published book.2. Right before I left the house this afternoon,
ladymondegreen sent me a photo of a flyer for a "genderbending surrealist burlesque" by the name of Tiresias' Tits. I hoped from the name that it was a burlesque version of Apollinaire's original surrealist play Les mamelles de Tirésias (1903). It was. I couldn't have seen it even with a teleporter, but I'm delighted.3. Dorothy Arzner's Get Your Man (1927) was delightful if fragmentary; it lost two reels out of six to nitrate decomposition during the decades it was out of the public eye and was reconstructed with stills by the Library of Congress. The proto-screwball romantic denouement is intact, but much of the set-up is missing, frustratingly including the majority of the night in the Parisian waxwork museum where Clara Bow and Buddy (credited as "Charles") Rogers fall in love among the exhibits, mixed-up-files-style. Not only were the tableaux considered one of the highlights of the film on release, they were choreographed and staged by Marion Morgan, Arzner's long-term partner, and performed by dancers from Morgan's troupe. What survives on either side of the lacuna where the film bubbles and flickers out certainly looks elegant, with the uncanny valley double whammy of human actors imitating imitations of human life. Otherwise the film is a funny, freewheeling showcase for the force of charisma that is Bow, a New York girl with her sights set on a French boy resigned to going through with his arranged marriage for the honor of his aristocratic family—I don't think it's a spoiler to say that anyone who backs tradition against our heroine is going to lose their shirt. It's not just that she can charm anyone in this film she feels like, and the audience just as effortlessly; she always looks like she's having fun and she wants us to have fun with her. We're in on the joke when she arranges herself dramatically among the scattered luggage of the taxi that fortuitously crashed outside her love object's ancestral chateau, then powders her nose in afterthought before languishing again. She doesn't undertake to bust up a seventeen-year engagement without first verifying that the other woman has her own man on the side, but the middle-aged marquis playing a hopeful flute underneath her balcony had better watch out. She's as tricky as fate; she's exuberant and sweet. David the projectionist introduced the film with an anecdote included by David Stenn in Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild (1988), concerning Bow's initial disappointment at being directed by a woman: "After all, girlfriends like me she could lose, but a gorgeous man was 'divine,' and Dorothy Arzner was going to make one less man around." To which I am afraid my response is: come on, have you seen Dorothy Arzner? Here as Exhibit A is my favorite photograph of the director, actually taken with Bow on the set of The Wild Party (1929), their second collaboration and Bow's first talkie:
Seriously, Clara. Go for it. That was a woman who knew how to wear a suit.
Clara Bow tangent
Re: Clara Bow tangent
I have not! I've seen her in The Wild Party and in It (1927), where she was in fact wonderful. The title does suggest OMG RACEFAIL, so please talk to me about the rest? [edit] I mean, also talk to me about the racefail since it's relevant, but the nuanced mental health issues, for example, are not immediately apparent.
Re: Clara Bow tangent
As I recall, the racefail is a combination of "noble savage" stereotyping, and some implied anti-miscegenation in the plot structure. Although honestly, to an audience like me (and, I suspect, thee), it comes out more like an argument *for* hybrid vigor :-)
Re: Clara Bow tangent
And I even commented. Thanks, brain.
Re: Clara Bow tangent
Basically, Clara Bow in 1932 was post-"It Girl", recovering from a breakdown which followed a string of public scandals (and a stressful transition to talkies). And Call her Savage is visibly grappling with/playing out a version of that, and it was striking to me because on one level, it's a really sympathetic portrayal of a woman who's a public trainwreck.
She clearly has mental health issues that nowadays might get her a label of borderline or rapid-cycling bipolar or something in that bundle: she has huge anger management issues, she lashes out, she's got mood swings, and zero impulse control/self-regulation at all.
And the movie is utterly unsparing about the way society treats her: she's constantly being punished for breaking the rules, while other people's awful behaviour towards her is ignored because they can successfully stay within the rules of correct behaviour. She's a rich heiress, so the newspapers treat her as a source of salacious and hilarious gossip. Her stern father rejects her. She's considered fair game by a playboy who marries her largely as a kind of joke, to spite his girlfriend.
And the film's sympathies are with her throughout (though it does demonstrate this by piling tragedies on her in a way worthy of a Lilian Gish film, but at least its expectation is that we'll see her as being cruelly martyred), and it ends by suggesting that she'll be able to move on through increased self-knowledge and acceptance about who she is, which is where we run into the OMFG RACEFAIL --
Because the movie's implied explanation is that her personality is what it is because she's SECRETLY HALF-NATIVE AMERICAN, and thus a Noble Savage.
The other Native Americans who feature in the film (naturally not played by Native Americans) are Noble Stereotypes; Bow's character's Native American childhood friend is a paragon of placidity and calm, but there's a horrible possible implication that this is because he Knows His Place and is not trying to participate in wealthy white society.
So yeah, the racefail is self-evidently huge and blatant, but the depiction of the central character is ... actually unexpected.
Re: Clara Bow tangent
I'll watch it if it comes around on TCM. It sounds worth it for Bow and everything up until the noble savage ex machina.
(Speaking of inextricable racefail, did I point you toward Girl of the Port (1930)? The ratio came out the other way on that one, I think, but I don't regret seeing it just for the WTF of its trainwreck, even if thinking about it still makes me want to shout at people across time.)
What this is also making me think of is Massacre (1934), a Warners pre-Code that does some really interesting stereotype-busting at the same time as it does some really irritating stereotype-reinforcing, also Richard Barthelmess and Ann Dvorak are not Native and no amount of script insistence is going to make them so.
no subject
no subject
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Arzner
https://sovay.dreamwidth.org/821432.html
https://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/450816.html (not really a review so much as annotated screaming, I should warn you)
no subject
no subject
Some comment discussion between me and
https://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/449188.html?thread=5028004#cmt5028004
no subject
Do you have a post about Safe in Hell? It will be playing near me as part of what looks like an upcoming William Wellman retrospective (I get to see three of my all-time favorite pre-Codes on a big screen!) and I was attracted by the title.
no subject
Nope, just shellshock. It's as relentless and claustrophobic as the other two, but on the subject of rape and sexual coercion. And flawed but very, very good, and worth seeing.
no subject
Fine; that's mostly what I wanted to know. If it had been upsetting but not worth it, life's too short.
no subject
The major, possibly still only biography is Judith Mayne's Directed by Dorothy Arzner (1994). Everything I've seen of hers has been worth it, even when it involved screaming at the screen. She is fantastic.
no subject
And for which, according to legend (and fairly credible reports), Arzner invented the boom mike to allow Clara Bow to move around on set (whereas previously actors had to stay very close to where their microphone was placed):
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1920s-dorothy-arzner-paved-way-female-directors-today-180955904/
no subject
Yes! Dapper and brilliant.
no subject
no subject
"Well, I can't make love to a bush!"
no subject
the uncanny valley double whammy of human actors imitating imitations of human life.--that's a great line.
And wow, yeah, Dorothy Arzner puts the men to shame in that suit!
no subject
It was the kind of movie that sent its audience out smiling. I really doubt it was a masterpiece, but I am very glad not to have missed it.
I've only ever just heard Clara Bow's name; it's great to learn she was so engaging.
I have really liked her in everything I've seen her in, even when the thing itself was only all right. She did not transition well to sound and by the early '30's was out of film acting entirely, which is a shame because she's just as good in talkies as she was in silents. She is so unselfconsciously sexy that there's no way she would have made it past the pre-Code era, but even so.
And wow, yeah, Dorothy Arzner puts the men to shame in that suit!
I've run into portraits where she is wearing skirts, but always that haircut and sharp-tailored jackets and ties, which I assume at the time was taken as the signature of a professional, modern woman (with connotations for those who could read them) and now looks like glorious genderfuck. But all sources I can find agree that men's trousers were her preferred and default style.
I'm not even sure of the context here, but I love this photo. She looks like either a surrealist film or David Bowie three decades ahead of schedule:
no subject
no subject
You are very welcome. All of a sudden I have many more photos of Dorothy Arzner.
no subject
no subject
Fair enough. I don't usually post a lot of images, but I will see what I can put together. (Meanwhile, scroll down for further discoveries.)
no subject
no subject
no subject
It makes me pretty happy.
I just found this shot of Arzner and Merle Oberon during the making of First Comes Courage (1943), Arzner's last film. Dirk Bogarde should have hair that good.
no subject
no subject
Agreed!
I can't find very much information about this one, but the date makes me think it must also have been taken around the production of The Wild Party and I wish it weren't so blurry:
no subject