And a ceiling that's peeling all over the floor

[sovay]

Today has been very quiet and characterized by cats. This is a good thing.

1. In this week's issue of The New Yorker, Anthony Lane writes about Churchill and movies, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) from a perspective I had not previously considered:

Certainly, "Colonel Blimp" presents no detriment to morale. Indeed, the gist of the plot is that the future and the defeat of Hitler lie squarely in the hands of modern soldiery. Did Churchill fear that viewers might see in this fuchsia-faced, harrumphing old grump a trace of their determined leader, his jaw jutting out like the prow of a dreadnought? Did he maybe see that trace himself? "War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid," he declared in "My Early Life," in an outburst of pure Blimpery. He added, "In fact it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of Democracy and Science." He and Wynne-Candy even attended the same boarding school, Harrow. In other words, Powell and Pressburger had conjured a fictional life that veered perilously close to Churchill's, as dense with derring-do, divisiveness, emotional extremes, and lurching reversals of fortune as his had been. By showing the ages of Blimp, they made the Churchill film that never was. And what they omitted, perhaps to his dismay, was his extraordinary late bloom. That would be more than enough to hurt the Prime Minister's pride.

2. I can see that I will have to check out Joseph Losey's Blind Date (U.S. Chance Meeting, 1959), because a rather inefficient search for "film noir" and "blind date" just threw this recording at me of Hardy Krüger singing "Blind Date (I'm a Lonely Man)." I had no idea that was even a thing. My favorite what-the-hell-they-can-sing moment will probably always remain Peter Lorre bouncing along to "Ja, die Polizei" in Was Frauen träumen (1933) with the recent discovery of Anthony Perkins coming a close second, but I still want to know the context here.

3. Plans for this evening have to do with meeting rushthatspeaks for Track of the Cat (1954) at the HFA. It's the next-to-last night of the Wellman retrospective. I would still like to write about the three pre-Codes I saw last week. If I can't get a time machine, maybe a pocket dimension?

Comments

[alatefeline]

I am in favor of days characterized by cats. :)

[moon_custafer]

I liked Peter Lorre anyway, but that just took him up another notch in my estimation.

[selenak]

Re: Lane's speculation as to why Churchill had it in for Blimp: sounds plausible enough to me. Re: Churchill's image in the public consciousness pre-WWII (which would have been very recent on his mind), and his own self image, and how very Victorian he was to his core, let's not forget that contrary to what The King's Speech claims, Churchill sided with Edward/David 100% in the abdication crisis, tried his damn best together with Lord Beaverbrook to keep him on the throne, and declared Edward would "shine in history as the bravest and best beloved of all the sovereigns who have worn the island Crown", I kid you not. (His relationship with Bertie/George was lukewarm at best until the war.) At the suggestion of Beaverbrook, Edward summoned to Fort Beldevere Aneurin Bevan, in order to see what the Labour Left thought about the whole thing. (Answer - not much, but Nye was always up for champagne for which someone else was paying.) He found himself sharing a sideroom with Churchill, on with whom he already did not get, and heard Churchill complaining that the circumstances indicated that he, a Churchill, scion of a noble house, would have reluctantly to betray his king. 'Never mind, Winston', Nye piped up to the biographer of Marlborough,' it's not the first time.'

(Sidenote: given that Jack Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, started his career by sex with Charles II. mistress Barbara Villiers, complete with jumping out of Barbara Villiers' bed and into the dungheap beneath the window when Charles II. showed up (I always loved Charles' commentary: "Young man, I do forgive you, for you do it for your bread."), and indeed Barbara's 5.000 pounds for that jump found the Churchill family fortune, Nye certainly had a point. *g*)

So yes: definitely sounds like a man who could see himself caricatured as Colonel Blimp, overlooking how sympathetic a character the hero of that movie is.

Incidentally, re: Churchill on screen, Lane missed out one (admittedly tv, not movie) example of where he came across as human rather than as a collection of famous moments and mannerisms, which was the series about his Mum, scripted by Julian Mitchell, with this tongue-in-cheek gem in the last episode, in a post WWI party:

Supporting Character A: Everyone keeps saying "Freud says" or "according to Freud" - who IS Freud, do you know?
Supporting Character B: The chap who claims all men are really in love with their mothers.
Camera: pans to Winston, watching Jennie dance enchantedly
Supporting Character A: How ridiculous.

Hardy Krüger

[selenak]

P.S. re: Hardy Krüger - I saw him last year at the Frankfurt Book Fair; still mentally and physically firm. He talked about growing up as the son of Nazi parents, being sent to a Nazi elite school, waking up to the horror as a young actor, about his deep anger about the current resurgence of fascist populists everywhere right now, and about the way it was being normalized. Which, btw, wasn't an unusual thing for him - he's been an anti-right wing violence & extremism activist since many years, and founded the intitiative "Gemeinsam gegen rechte Gewalt" (Together against violence of the right).

[cmcmck]

The Blimp in the film is nothing at all like the Blimp in the well known cartoons. I suspect Blimp was also a much more thoughtful soldier than Churchill ever was.

I find him an appealingly deep character.

[thisbluespirit]

If I can't get a time machine, maybe a pocket dimension?

Oh, hold out for a time machine! The pocket dimension won't help with the theatre trips plan. ;-)