Myth Happens

Even for a conspiracy thriller, Defence of the Realm (1985) is an uncomfortable film. Its newsroom seems wrapped in a clingfilm of nicotine, its night scenes suffused with the surreal ultramarine that blurs dusk into dawn, its streets and offices as fox-fired with fluorescence as if faintly decaying throughout. An airbase glows as suddenly out of a darkness of fenland as science fiction. Precisely because no one can be seen in it, a window becomes a threat. It is not a sound or a secure world to inhabit and yet because it is ours, its characters walk on our own plain air of pretense, behaving as if its tips and headlines can be relied on until all at once the missed footing of a microcassette or a photocopy becomes an abyss and the most accustomed institutions nothing to hang on to after all. It came out of a decade whose mistrust of its government was proliferating through public discourse and art and felt neither safely transatlantic nor old-fashioned when I first learned of the film, twenty years ago when top-down lies about weapons of mass destruction were particularly au courant. Forty years after its release, its anxieties over the exercise of unaccountable power within a superficially democratic state haven't aged into a fantasy yet.

As a conspiracy thriller, it is not an especially twisty one, which works for rather than against its escalation from tabloid expediency to an open referendum on the British security state; it has one real feint in the juicy hit of its Profumo-style affair after which it can let itself concentrate on the unnerving, bleak, inevitable revelation of a world whose dangers spring not from the rattled skeletons of the Cold War but the actorly handshakes of the Special Relationship. We hear a bulletin on the bombing of the American embassy in Ankara before we see the titles that set the isolated scene of a car speeding down a night-misted road somewhere in the sedge flats of "Eastern England." Further overlays of current events will come to sound more like the Lincolnshire Poacher than Channel 4, a wallpaper of committee hearings and police reports pinging their transmissions among the paranoid legwork of blow-ups and coil taps. "Clapping eyes on it is one thing. Getting a copy out is another. " The flame of truth in this film is more like one of those old incandescent bulbs that take a second or two to sputter on, dust-burnt and bug-flecked. For a while it seems not just carried but incarnated by Vernon Bayliss, one of the rumpled nonpareils of 1980's Denholm Elliott—nothing but the rigs of the Thatcherite time explains what his old leftie is doing as the veteran hack of a right-wing rag like the Daily Dispatch, but it's a riveting showcase for his voice that crackles with cynicism while the rest of his face looks helplessly hurt, his disorganized air of not even having gotten to the bed he just fell out of, a couple of heel-taps from a permanently half-cut Cassandra of the Street of Shame. "Vodka and Coca-Cola! Détente in a glass." His inability to drink his ethics under the table and accept the gift-wrapped stitch-up of the Markham affair may be a professional embarrassment, but it gives him a harassed dignity that persists through his cagily tape-recorded conversations, his blatantly burgled flat, his obsessive spiraling after something worse than a scoop, the facts. "Oh, well," he snarls with such exasperated contempt that the cliché sounds like another shortwave code, "don't let the truth get in the way of a good story." It makes his successor in the threads of the conspiracy even more counterintuitive and compelling, since just the CV of his byline establishes Nick Mullen as the kind of ingeniously shameless journo who never has yet. Gabriel Byrne looks too wolfishly handsome for an ice-cream face, but he has no trouble passing himself off as a plainclothes copper in order to upstage the competition with an extra-spicy soundbite gleaned from an all-night stakeout and a literal foot in the door. His neutrally converted flat looks barely moved into, its mismatched and minimal furnishings dominated by the analog workstation of his deep-drawered desk with its card file and telephone and cork board and typewriter, a capitalist-realist joke of a work-life balance. Whatever he actually believes about the exposé he's penned with everything in it from call girls to CND, it comes an obvious second to drinks with the deputy editor and being let off puff pieces about the bingo—fast-forwarded four decades of slang, Nick might say in line with his corporatized, privatized generation that caring is cringe. "Give me a break. You know how it is. It's a bloody good story!" And yet because he's not too successfully disaffected to show concern when a mordantly ratted Vernon raises a belligerent glass to his shadow from Special Branch, in little more than the time it takes to jimmy open a filing cabinet he will find himself not merely retracing his older colleague's steps but telescoping through them, the real story coming in like a scream of turbines and terrifyingly so much less clandestine than it should have had the decency to be. Le Carré is invoked with debunking condescension, but it is just that chill of his which pervades this film whose obscured, oppressive antagonist is not a foreign power or a rogue agent or even a sinister corporation but the establishment itself, blandly willing to commit any number of atrocities to contain a scandal that goes considerably further than the death of a young offender or the indiscretions of a former chairman of the Defence Select Committee. The old scares still work when Vernon's integrity can be questioned with the reminder of his Communist youth, but the cold isn't coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain: if you can't see your breath in Whitehall, you must not be looking. Hence the warmest character on this scene is its most disposable and its antihero in ever greater danger as he makes not only the tradecraft connections of collated data, but the human ones of outrage, trust, and shame, learning to shiver as he goes, but fast enough? His faith in his own disillusion is touchingly unequal to the pitiless weirdness of the tribunal of nameless civil servants who cross-question him like judges of the underworld in triplicate before turning him loose into a night so vaporous and deserted, its traffic lights blinking robotically in the mercury sheen, it seems that in the ultimate solipsism of conspiracy Nick has become the one real person in all of London. After all, a state need not kill if it can atomize, terminating communication either way. "The only person who knew the answer to that question was Vernon."

Originating as a screenplay by Martin Stellman who already had the anti-establishment cult non-musical Quadrophenia (1979) under his belt and directed by prior documentarian David Drury, Defence of the Realm had grounds for its nervous clamminess even before the photography of Roger Deakins, who gave it a color scheme which tends even in natural light toward the blanched or crepuscular and a camera which monitors its subjects from such surreptitious telephoto angles—when it isn't jostling against them like an umbrella in a crowd—that no closed-circuit, reel-to-reel confirmation is required for it to feel unsafe for them to be captured on film at all. "Age of Technology, eh?" Nick remarks affectionately, rescuing Vernon from the poser of the portable tape recorder. "You haven't even caught up with the Industrial Revolution." Suitable to its techno-thriller aspects, the film is as mixed in its media as parapsychological sci-fi, but whatever pre-digital nostalgia the viewer may feel toward an Olympus Pearlcorder S920 or a Xerox machine should tap out at nuclear-armed F-111s. "R.A.F. Milden Heath, Home of the 14th Tac. Fighter Wing U.S. Air Force" hardly needs the geographical triangulation of Brandon and Thetford to translate it into RAF Lakenheath where two separate near-accidents involving American nukes on British soil really had, in 1956 and 1961, occurred. Only the first had been officially acknowledged at the time of the film's production and release. The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was still in full protest, the American nuclear presence a plutonium-hot, red-button issue; it was no stretch to imagine another incident kicked under the irradiated carpet at all costs. The film's more disturbing skepticism is reserved for the trustiness of its hot metal news. Its portrait of the fourth estate is not wholly unaffectionate, especially in cultural details such as the racket of a banging-out ceremony in the composing room, the collage of pin-ups in the stacks of the manila-filed morgue, or even the pained groan with which Bill Paterson's Jack Macleod observes the disposal of a cup of cold coffee: "Aw, Christ, what did that geranium ever do to you?" The Conservative sympathies of the paper, however, are flagged on introduction as its senior staff slam-dunk the character assassination of a prominent opposition MP and it is eventually no surprise to find its owner in more than tacit collusion with the faceless forces of the security services, considering his side hustle in defence contracting. "The man's into the government for millions . . . They build American bases. Can't jeopardize that, old son." It is not just the individual journalists in Defence of the Realm, but the entire concept of a free press that seems fragile, contingent, compromised. For all its triumphal, classical headline montage, the film goes out on a note of thrumming ambiguity, whether the conspiracy will perpetuate itself through its own media channels, whether everything we have seen lost will be worth the sacrifice or merely the valiant humanity of trying. These days I would be much more hostile to the magical thinking of a secret state except for all the authoritarianism. Move over, Vernon, even if both halves of your favorite beverage would try to kill me. "It's a free country. I think."

Denholm Elliott won his third consecutive BAFTA for Defence of the Realm and deserved to, stealing a film so three-dimensionally that his exit leaves the audience less twist-shocked than bereft: what a waste that he and Judi Dench never played siblings or cousins, their cat's faces and wide-set jasper eyes. Ian Bannen appears even more sparingly as Dennis Markham, but he only needs to be remembered as Jim Prideaux to trail that cold world in with him. As his PA, Greta Scacchi's Nina Beckman is self-possessed, unimpressed, and it feels like a mark of the film's maturity that she does not fall into bed with Nick when he's of much more use to her as a partner in counter-conspiracy, meeting on the red-railed Hungerford Bridge where we cannot tell if the reverse-shot pair on the concrete arches of Waterloo Bridge should be taken as tourists, commuters, more of the surveillance apparatus that feels so very little need to disguise itself. It is not faint praise that Gabriel Byrne thinks convincingly onscreen, especially when Nick gives an initial impression of cleverness rather than depth. I can respect the way he lives in the one tweed jacket down to falling asleep in his car in it. After two decades of keeping an eye out, I pounced on this film on Tubi despite its rather disappointingly scrunchy transfer and enjoyed it in much better shape on YouTube. Whatever else has dated of its technologies and mores, I have to say that a distrust of American nuclear capacities sounds healthy to me. This détente brought to you by my industrial backers at Patreon.

I rarely see movies like Mark Jenkin's Enys Men (2022). More often I dream them.

A sort of double hat trick for its writer-director-cinematographer-editor-composer, it could as easily be described as the ecology of a haunting. In post-synched 16 mm as brilliantly saturated and scratchy as home movies, the woman whom even the credits identify only as the Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) moves through the ritual of her days on a small island off the westernmost coast of Cornwall where she seems to have been stationed as the observer of a clump of rare flowers, nodding their stiff white petals and bright red pistils at the edge of the sea-cliff whose soil temperature she meticulously records in her logbook along with the date and the customary observation No change. Each time she climbs the loose-bedded step-stones to the cold chimney of the abandoned tin mine, she drops a stone down the drowning black of the shaft just to hear the distant, ricocheting splash. Each time she returns to her slate-shingled, ivy-striped cottage, she fires up the petrol rale of the generator and makes herself a cup of tea while the lucky dip of her cream-colored Dansette breathes through static as if through storm. If the near-total isolation troubles her, she doesn't show it, an elfin figure in her middle fifties with a barely silvered shag of brown hair and a wry weather-grained face, characteristically layered in her white seaman's jumper and red rain jacket and jeans as blue as her Atlantic eyes. Roaming the island between duties, she seems as self-sufficient as her candlelit bedtime reading of Edward Goldsmith and Robert Allen's A Blueprint for Survival (1972). Periodically she receives supplies and wall-banging sex—she bakes him saffron buns—from the rugged, just as namelessly credited Boatman (Edward Rowe), but no other presence seems as important as the standing stone she crosses in her daily transit of the island, its angular hunch eclipsing her from view so that she seems to pass through rather than behind it. The woodcut in her cottage depicts it ominously rooted among ribs and skulls, but its silhouette seen from her front door suggests rather a cloaked, skirted figure proceeding at tectonic speed. In her dreams, perhaps, it comes like a guiser to her door. The film lingers with animate richness on such details of the natural world, the yolk-flowered tremble of gorse in the sea-breeze, the swing of a black-blacked gull above the ledges, the lichen everywhere scaling and tufting the old walls and outcrops of the stone of the island's name. It lingers the same on apparently unnatural ones, the ring of bal maidens stamping the earth like the engine-clank of the old workings, the miners whose smutched faces peer out at her from beneath the candle-melted brims of their hats, the ruined church clean and whitewashed, its altar piled with branches of flowering hawthorn. What narrative emerges from the sparsely worded script is done with chimes and discontinuities, refrains and layers as reliable as any residual haunting. Actually, however mystifying, contradictory, folded, spindled or mutilated it may look, it is time in this movie that doesn't lie.

Much more of a tone poem than a puzzle for the viewer, Enys Men inhabits with ambitious directness its nonlinearity that another film might have been tempted to treat more trickily, observing effects before causes and explanations before questions as though there were no more ordinary way to exist in time. On the one hand, some kind of progression can be tracked in the dates of the logbook, the growth of lichen, the wear and tear on a pair of brown walking boots whose brave red laces are part of the film's primary rhyme of colors. On the other, persons attempting to pinpoint the break in its objective hour and a half will be peeved. Time on this island has always—when has it ever done anything else, anywhere—gone strange. As incongruous as her modern, transient figure appears against the immemorial spaces of wind and moor and wave, the Volunteer should be regarded as no less a part of their accumulated fragmentation of personal history with history of place, the history of Cornwall that renders a quizzical joke out of the earnest check-in, "Do you like it here on your own?" She couldn't get a layer of time to herself if she tried with so much of it underfoot in the flaking rust of old rails, a brand name of tinned skimmed milk. Her cottage's history wakes her with the coughing of the burly Miner (Joe Gray) who borrows one of her books to read on the toilet like any careless flatmate before collecting his pick and hammer for a day's work that by his clothes must have gone off shift before the First World War. Its future ghosts in with the teatime broadcast, tinnily exploding any meaningful sense of a present that seemed as factual as her thin strong hand pencilling in 21st April 1973 when the memorial it describes has stood for "nearly fifty years," the harbor-set cenotaph of a loss at sea scheduled for "the 1st of May 1973, near the old miners' quay on the abandoned island of Enys Men." From their rag-white ribbons and stockings, the children who sing daleth an hav with a drum and sprays of newly broken may-blossom are older in the island than the crew of the late nineteenth century lifeboat who grin still dripping with the sea that drowned them, but behind them the cottage is a gape-roofed, ivy-tumbled ruin, as long uninhabited as it might be explored to this day. At its door in her nightdress as when, face to face with the standing stone on her threshold, she juddered like a frame of gate-stuck film, the Volunteer calls, "Who's there?" She has already been answered. The dark-haired, impassively adolescent Girl (Flo Crowe) perches like a cormorant on the cottage's glass-roofed shed, her corduroys white and her cardigan blue so that a viewer may wonder where the red will come in. The Preacher (the late, great John Woodvine) in his clerical black and white bands addresses her with the solemn injunction of a maritime hymn, the Bible under his arm glistening like the mica-misted granite of the menhir at his side. Picking over the jumbled crags of the shore with their verdigris stains and sunbursts of orange sea-lichen yields a bloodied oilskin and a paint-cracked plank, the foretellings of once and future tragedy. "Are you there? Hello? Can you hear me?" Time isn't even looping so much as it's free-associating, cross-linked even more obviously than a VHF transmission we hear from both ends of the airwaves. Now it folds on a single point, the lace-and-thorn christening of the Baby (Loveday Twomlow) whose addition to the company of the Girl and the Volunteer lends a sort of pitch-shifted triple-goddess vibe to the slowly remembered singing of Philip Paul Bliss' "Let the Lower Lights Be Burning" in which the Preacher with his aged rock of a voice leads them. Now it merely reverses, an upward glitter of water in the flooded mine. Above all, it seems to be bending toward the event horizon of May Day, a painful double entendre when the failed rescue of the supply boat Govenek scores the date through from 1897 to 1973, but earth is as powerfully commingled with sea in the changeover as they always have been in the ore-riddled, salt-girt life of Stone Island. Lichen has appeared on one of the flowers, the Volunteer records for the first time in the last days of April, before discovering a grey-green frill of her own in the white scar that twists across her stomach. The lichen has grown on the flower, thickening over the seam of her skin like the coat of the standing stone. Her entries stop like a clock: The lichen has spread to all of the flowers. No change. No change. No change. Its proliferation suggests its own explanation for the haunting, if that's even beginning to sound like the right word for a process as natural as reclamation or grief: a new organism created by the symbiosis of the human and the land. How should it surprise us to see the Volunteer presently step out of the menhir as if leaving the house on her usual rounds? The earth, like the body, keeps the score.

Enys Men was one of the few movies I was able to watch last summer when I had functionally ceased to sleep and was in no state to say anything about it except perhaps to have likened it to the film of a novel never written by Alan Garner or suggested that when Scarristack of Greer Gilman's Cloud gets its film industry up and running, it might produce cinema like Jenkin's. Like a descendant of Powell and Pressburger, it has all the ingredients of folk horror arranged to much more numinous than jump-scaring effect, the enmeshment of memory with the land that does not so much return the repressed as hold it in trust. The sound design is compact with anachronism, both in the sense of cues and voices bleeding back through the picture and the persistent reminder that the AM radio seems to be tuned to the twenty-first century, its local news and football scores cut with Brenda Wootton's "The Bristol Christ" (1980) and Gwenno's "Kan Me" (2022), which is incidentally the credits music. The hand-processed film flares and flickers like an unrestored rediscovery, washing nature and spirit photography alike with neg sparkle and the occasional vinegar-red flameout. Sifting its symbol-set of recurrent images and phrases for a key feels beside the point when so much of the movie exists in multiplicity—even the standing stone has a stunt double, its original being Boswens Menhir—and its makers' resonances may not be mine, but its tactile, liminal landscape is live with them. I thought: We have become stone in the stone. Earth mastered us. I thought: But everywhere in the room, that morning, there was a great mess of little twigs and leaves, hawthorn leaves, and rowan. And everywhere a great smell of the sea. I got it from Kanopy, but in the right region it can be viewed on BFI Player or Blu-Ray/DVD and it streams on all the usual suspects. I may not know enough about lichen to be its ideal audience, but I do care enough about time. This year brought to you by my own backers at Patreon.

I have joked for years about my paper gaydar, an improvement on my previous gaydar of a rock, but a viewer should not need even the gaydar of scissors to appreciate the rarity and joy of the happy ending granted its candidly queer couple by the semi-precious shoestring gem of Girl Stroke Boy (1971). It has as little time for coding as for pleas for tolerance when it can have a snow fight instead. Especially in these ever more gender-essentialist days, its cheerful one in the eye for cisheteronormativity feels more than historically affirming.

Queering its social message conventions from jump, the film wastes no time setting the outrageous scene: the straight, white, snowbound middle-class home which a jam in the central heating has rendered a sort of Buñuelian steambath of locked windows, stuck doors, and taps that burn to the touch in which George and Lettice Mason (Michael Hordern and Joan Greenwood) are literally sweating the arrival of their adult son with his girlfriend, a momentous day for a household that has not so covertly worried about his sexuality for years. "Mallinson, you know, woodwork and biology, said that Laurie was the only boy in the class who never giggled during sex instruction." He's never had a girl that his parents know about, much less brought one home to meet them. Anyone expecting a white wedding reset to straight time, however, should clutch their pearls now because while the Masons have braced their suburban sensibilities for the daughter of a West Indian High Commissioner, at the sight of the resplendently femme Jo Delaney (Peter Straker) with her soft midi-Afro and fashionably leopard-lined eyes and several inches on their son even without the go-go heels, their social script drops all its pages on the floor. The appalling scribble shoved by Lettice at her mortified husband says it all: Is it a man? To the credit of the lovers, neither of them has walked into this ordeal unprepared. Fresh out of hospital for some unspecified crack-up which may have boiled down to contact with his family, Laurie (Clive Francis) is fair and fragile and sardonic and devoted to Jo, emphasizing her pronouns with dry unexpected firmness where he remarks ruefully of himself, "Mother really wanted a romantic hero for a son. I must have been a terrible disappointment." Jo kisses him lightly but meaningfully on the cheek; her own introductory act after an altercation with the radiator is a grave, sly fumigation of the parlor with her cologne, sounding out the local density of whiteness with icebreakers of mud huts and Tarzan. They may have an ally in George, the beleaguered secondary modern school head whose air of vague acquiescence to the absurd suggests an openness to new ideas so long as his instinct to please everyone doesn't strand him on the side of the status quo. "Your father's all right. I like him. Well, the bits of him that she's left." The problem is Lettice, the tiny, implacable romance writer who plumes herself on her progressive bona fides while blithely describing the heroine of her latest novel as an "octaroon" and professes confidence in her son with the lethal encouragement, "Darling boy, I hope you'll always do exactly what you think is right, after first having talked it over with me." Her conversation is a textbook in transmisogynoir, starting at microaggressions about spices and hair and spiraling into the ludicrous yet all too real determination to prove the masculinity of her son's girlfriend as if it would be news to him, the virginal innocent deceived. Her eye on the position of the toilet seat would challenge a cat at a mousehole. Her baited hooks on the natures of the sexes are as uncalled-for as they are off-base. At least when she bullies her inarticulately uncomfortable husband into dialing the Delaneys (Rudolph Walker and Elisabeth Welch) at their official address in Belgrave Square, the inappropriateness of her enquiry provokes the clapback it deserves: confused, scandalized, and inevitably, "Is that girl Laurie a boy?"

As a comedy of manners whose joke is not after all on the outré intersections but the straight and exceeding narrow, Girl Stroke Boy is an amazing transmission from 1971. As an experience of cinema, it's a more awkward proposition. Director Bob Kellett was an accomplished farceur and it's a clever reversal to play the cishet older generation for burlesque while allowing the queer young lovers to be the mimetically textured pair, but since most of the scenes are four-handers, the tonal results are uneven and the shedload of transphobia can wear on the viewer even when it is visibly, risibly in the wrong. It would slice the 86-minute runtime in half, but no member of the audience who ever once had to grit their teeth through misgendering, passive-aggression, or just plain familial rudeness would fault Jo and Laurie for lighting out for London in the middle of the night. What saves the film is that it is always on the side of the lovers, especially the self-possessed Jo who meets this nightmare-in-law with the grace and fierceness of someone long past needing to explain herself, if she ever did. "Well, there's at least six couples in my block of flats that don't agree." She is never treated as a trap or a riddle, her femininely tilted presentation as drag or a gag or an effort at heterosexual camouflage. Beyond her portrayal by a cis male actor, the character can be textually confirmed as AMAB and so what? Both she and her boyfriend arrived as flamboyantly as if they had heisted half of Carnaby Street on their way out to Shenley Hill and it just happens that she's minimally accessorized with polished nails and her mod handbag and a silver labrys pendant when she says bluntly across the breakfast table, "Sex isn't what you wear. It's not being face up or face down in bed. Nowadays it's simply a matter of personality . . . Look, who gives a hell whether it's a girl or a boy? We're all a bit of both, aren't we, Mrs Mason? I bet you don't get many absolute heteros in your school." Full Judith Butler ahead, gender as performance does not require conformation to its most stereotypical signifiers. Jo's level-headedness does not invalidate her femininity any more than her light-chested voice, any more than Laurie should be considered less of a man just because his sharp-tongued inclination to put in his oar casts him fairly as the bitchier of the two. Certainly the higher-strung, he channels the audience's own incredulity in the face of a delusion that might nowadays call itself gender-critical feminism: "Mother dear, doesn't it ever occur to you that I might know everything that she is and isn't by now? I know that she's never going to beat you at Scrabble. I know that she's never going to be Home Counties Badminton Champion or President of your Needlewomen's Guild or good at church flower decoration—" The most extensive meditations on sexuality and gender are not loaded onto the queer characters, however, but free-associated by the heat-rumpled George as he botches his way toward acceptance through a waveringly touching mix of conviction and cluelessness, early on throwing down the unprecedented gauntlet of "Laurie says she's a woman, she says she's a woman. With such evidence, I am prepared to take her femininity on trust," and even after his wife has browbeaten him to accept her conclusion of the assembled facts, holding his ground as if somewhat surprised to find himself standing on it:

"Whatever my son's taste in sex, I'm not ashamed of him. If Jo is a man, I don't think I'm disgusted. If they have a taste for one another and it adds to their life, then as far as I'm concerned they can be as loving as they like. We're none of us so normal, so self-dependent that we can turn down all the good sex that comes our way—or the chance of having someone to love us. Don't you agree? I don't give a damn if she's a man. If she is, she's a jolly good chap."

Coming from a father so generally, pricelessly flustered that he fumbled which sexual orientation he was supposed to be championing in the clinch, it's an extraordinary statement. It is not at all clear that he has a real handle on the concepts of sex and gender that he mangles so magnificently together in his last word and it doesn't matter. Jo was right to single him out for a sotto voce appeal for support. Quite a lot of parents in 2025 can't get as far.

( And no one is coming to dinner tonight! )

The title remains unfortunate. Girl/Boy obviously plays on the perceived ambiguity of Jo as well as her pairing with Laurie, but it's naughtier than it needs to be when spelled out; it misserves a film that is relaxingly, radically matter-of-fact about the presentation of its lovers. I cannot speak to the stage source material of David Percival's Girlfriend (1970), but the screenplay by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin steers remarkably clear of sad, hysterical, desexualized queer clichés while its intimacy is sexily, dreamily limned in montages of languorous heat and playful cold by DP Ian Wilson who would later shoot both Edward II (1991) for Derek Jarman and The Crying Game (1992) for Neil Jordan, the latter of which reassured me that I had not been reminded occasionally of Jaye Davidson's Dil by Straker's Jo only through the common ground of transfeminine Blackness. One especially lovely composition offsets her with orchids in the conservatory, a sensuous one intertwines their fingers over the curves of a tiger cowrie and interchanges their profiles like coins, a droller one cages the Masons behind the rungs of a ladder as they attempt to extol the virtues of heterosexuality to an openly hilarious Jo and a Laurie who looks distinctly as though checking himself back into hospital would be less of a strain on his disbelief. "Dad, is this what is called a man-to-man talk?" So soon after decriminalization, so soon after Stonewall, the film shows no self-consciousness or sensationalism over the kisses and embraces of a pair of actors, their stymied efforts at lovemaking. They touch one another with casual affection, sometimes with active desire, sometimes in defiant, assertive display. They are not a perfect couple. On the floor in front of the opened refrigerator on the theory that it should be the one place in the house cool enough to fuck, they briefly fight instead, the mood spiked by the cramp in his calf and her discomfort in the fish-fry heat even before his territorial nerves irritate her into an allusion to some past sexual failure and just a moment ago they were lying so comfortably together even in the horrible wicker of the guest bed, it's a relief to the viewer when they manage to laugh it out and get on with the getting off. "Not so loud! Look, I can't put a notice on the door—coitus don't-interrupt-us." It makes them more real, less like any idea of representation beyond the fact of their love for one another, their individual quirks, and the genuine stress of spending any kind of night in a house containing racist knick-knacks and a TERF. "It's like having it off in the British Museum!" Structurally, the interracial angle is submerged almost at once in the gender trouble, but it does persist in the reality of their relationship and it's pleasant to see just how much of an issue it isn't for Jo and Laurie, an entire other message picture dodged. That said, I had no idea a film had been released ten years before my birth in which a character defends their partner's pronouns to their parents, giving yet another lie to this tsunami of transphobia currently swamping the U.S. and the UK. The arc of the moral universe could tesser any time now.

I had no idea about this film, period, and in its small, contrary way, sometimes well-made and sometimes wobbly and often suggesting that someone forgot to fetch the budget out of the boot of the car—it was shot in two weeks in an actual house credited to "Faggot's End," which looks in real life like Faggotts Close—it may be important beyond its apparent premise of Guess If Pat's Coming to Dinner. I found it in the filmography of Clive Francis and then on MyFlixer, although if you prefer not to wrestle with the necessity of adblock it can be more usually streamed and against all odds exists on a rather handsome Indicator Blu-Ray. I wouldn't hold it against any viewer not to want to spend a weekend melting with the Masons, but my hard sell on romance had no defenses against Laurie and Jo with their in-jokes and frank sex talk and soft gestures of loving, their astringent and forthright complement that I imagine made them treasures of elder queerhood. "We care for each other. We show others we care. Isn't that how it's done?" And let them still be doing it, onscreen and off. This personality brought to you by my absolute backers at Patreon.

The sheer lamination of meta in the source material must have attracted Orson Welles to The Immortal Story (1968): a story about the failure of the creation of a story. Perhaps to cap the parallel, it should have remained, like so many of its writer-director's projects before and after, unfinished, but instead it was the last non-documentary feature he completed in his life, a lyrical, theatrical, troubling curio around which the rest of a projected anthology of adaptations never materialized, stranding it like a chip from a mosaic of dream. The 58 minutes it clocks in at are at once ethereal and formal, so sensorially precise, what they detail cannot be real. If I had heard of it before last week, appropriately I had forgotten.

The screenplay by Welles from the 1958 Isak Dinesen novella preserves its nest of narratives sometimes down to the word, even as it chronicles how slipperily they can twist away from even the most controlling teller. Late in the nineteenth century of tea-trading Macao, the autocratically self-made Mr. Clay (Welles) has become obsessed with a story he heard long ago on his passage to China, of a penniless sailor hired by a childless old man to service his beautiful young wife for a fee of five guineas. It is not the titillation of this scenario that occupies his gout-ridden hours in the great house that belonged originally to the partner he ruined over the miserly debt of three hundred guineas, which may be the stuff of scandal to the European colony but for the aged merchant is merely one more sum in the million-dollar litany of his own ledgers read nightly back to him by his head clerk Elishama Levinsky (Roger Coggio). It is its unreality, which so offends this man of closed accounts and futures only in the sense of investments that he determines to render this maritime legend fact: "People should only record things which have already happened." Unmarried himself, he will arrange for the union of a woman procured for the role of the wife and a sailor authentically solicited from the docksides, wined and dined, proffered the traditional piece of gold and brought to the candlelit bride-bed "in order that one sailor in the world will be able to tell it from beginning to end as it actually happened to him." They will engender between them not a child, but a true history. The defeat of this project will be apparent to anyone with half a head for story. The tale of the lucky sailor has its own reality to which historical truth is irrelevant, its own vitality of the oral tradition which is predicated on exactly the fact that it can be told by any man on the sea as if it happened to him because it never did. It is known across ships, it lives on them, it replicates itself through the reception of travelers from London to Singapore. It can never be made to happen for scare-quotes real because in the narratological sense which eludes the literal-minded god-game of Mr. Clay, it happened the first time it was told. The most he can achieve with his mortal marionettes is the second order of a reenactment, inescapably aware of its own script—Welles doesn't need to force the further metatext of capturing this stagecraft of bodies on film, it shimmers under the surface of the production like the ironies inherent in Dinesen, the pitfalls of collective art. "You move at my bidding," Mr. Clay crows at the hymeneal scene, directorially prepared to oversee its consummation until the curtains like a furious proscenium are jerked closed in his face. "You're two young, strong and lusty jumping-jacks in this old hand of mine," but his desire can dictate only the act. The idiosyncrasies of their chemistry, their conversation, their lovemaking and most of all what any of it may mean past the morning remain out of his grasp, these surrogates for his authorial potency whose own histories he seems curiously, adamantly oblivious to. Does he recognize the elegant, embittered Virginie Ducrot (Jeanne Moreau) as the daughter of the man he drove to suicide, now the mistress of another of his clerks after her own tumultuous sexual adventure at sea? Can he hear more than fantasized frustration in the reticence of his choice "catch out of the harbor of Macao," the ragged yet quietly independent Paul Velling (Norman Eshley), shipwrecked a silent, solitary year? It seemed not to register with him when Elishama alluded to a flight from Poland before reading from the amulet of the prophet Isaiah which is his one remnant of a trauma-drowned childhood. All these true stories lie within his reach and he disregards them, hellbent on masterminding the simulacrum of a meme, perhaps because in his greed for realism he prefers the roles to the actors, more likely because it has never occurred to him to listen. It is left to the other principals of this chamber fable to share themselves through their stories, their silences, their songs, their lies, a cat's cradle of relationships at once foreclosed and facilitated by the moves of the tale which from the start is unraveling beyond its boughten bounds. "No man in the world can take a story which people have invented and told and make it happen . . . One way or another, this story will be the end of Mr. Clay."

Of this folkloric quartet, I am predictably fascinated by Elishama, effectively the stage manager of this devil's comedy who explains his complicity in it with a sort of corporate stoicism: "I'm in Mr. Clay's employ. I cannot take on work anywhere but with him." With his Dickensian wire-rims and slicked-ink hair, he looks a familiarly servile figure in his coat as pen-black as his eyes, his hands so often folded as if with his hat in them, pale-faced as a horn-shell. The film flags his Jewishness long before he introduces himself by name, but any threat of caricature blows off with the wry courtesy with which he contradicts his master as to the nature of the story which he heard so many more times in the tempest-tossed travels that led him to Macao, and the longer the film spends with him thereafter, the more enigmatically he will emerge as a small man of substance, disillusioned, ironical, not without compassion, not even old for the concentrated fatalism of his scant room by the company's godown, "things not yet to be recounted which moved, like big deep-water fish, in the depths of his dark mind." Dispatched on a pimp's errand, he approaches it without excuse; the straw of his sober pork-pie hat is a concession to the climate, but it lends a dapper silent clown's dignity to the implacable matter-of-factness with which he waits for Virginie to realize that, like himself, she is infinitely purchasable by the mad rich men of the world. "I suppose that nobody could insult you even if they tried," she appraises him challengingly, meaning it to, like the slap in the face she gave him for delivering his master's proposition. With the same grave lightness as if taking it as a compliment, Elishama replies, "Why should I let them?" The executor of his employer's whims, he makes at the same time a strange, tacit confederate for his chosen heroine, so unfailingly respectful of her person rented for the three hundred guineas of her father's final debt—instructed to offer her a hundred, he in fact brought the correct amount—that when she begins to disrobe vehemently in front of him, the haste with which he gets the door slammed between them is the clumsiest we have seen this self-contained man, his faintest compression of reluctance as he reopens it at her call as good as another character's monologue. Paul he deals with as an impersonal factotum, but to Virginie he reveals his own stark, poignant history, hears out in turn her fears of reentering the house of her childhood, play-acting the seventeen-year-old innocent she has not been since the night of an earthquake in Japan. Her table is scattered with a time-stained deck of Tarot, but it is Elishama who foretells like the pattern in a shawl or a bottom line of figures the fatal conclusion of Mr. Clay's desire. He alone discerns that her real price is revenge. In our one direct insight into his interiority, we were assured by the intermittent narrator that he "might well have been a highly dangerous person except that ambition, desire in any form had been washed and bleached and burnt out of him," but he does not seem all that much more innocuous in its absence, a dispassion that should not be mistaken for weakness. From the right, unpredictable angles, his sharp-lined, heat-sweating face is more beautiful than the tall young sailor's in its aureole of angelically fair hair. "I thought you were a small rat out of Mr. Clay's storehouse," Virginie reconsiders him, standing before her still like a question she cannot avoid answering, "et toi—tu es le Juif Errant."

It is a stupidly gorgeous film to look at. If Welles had never worked in color before, if he spoke disparagingly of it as an element of film, he knew how to use it: cinnabar-red, malarially gold, boat's-eye blue or the bridal white of mourning, contrasted in such lapidary profusion by DP Willy Kurant that even open-air shots such as the veils of smoke against a dust-lichened wall that bloom across the initial conversation of Elishama and Virginie look as dreamily artificial as the room red-walled as sealing wax and side-splashed with the sheen of a five-guinea coin in which Mr. Clay makes his ritual pitch to Paul. The set decoration by André Piltant fabricates its port of Macao—in Dinesen it was Canton—out of landlocked Chinchón and a handful of its Spanish neighbors through the gloriously stagelike expedient of dressing their balconies and pillars and arcades with lanterns and banners, papering the walls like theatrical flats with signs in Chinese and the occasional Portuguese and stocking the market square with Chinese extras from chestnut-sellers to children at play. The harbor is suggested by nothing more than the ragged tilt of sails, just as the ellipses of the climactic sex act will be explicitized by the chirping of crickets in the equally imaginative sound design of Jean Nény. The score itself is selected from the melancholy solo piano of the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes of Erik Satie. Edited chiefly by Yolande Maurette, the film moves at a pace it is not meant as a disservice to call entrancing, since it isn't a euphemism for glacial, especially when it strolls into handheld camera or breaks itself up in a quick-cut flourish of gossip or conspicuous consumption or the blowing out of candles lensed like calla lilies. Every now and then it can feel caught between its art forms: the greyed and jaundiced streaks of makeup used by Welles for the ailing Mr. Clay would convince even from the front row of a theater, but at the distance of a close-up are obviously paint, all the odder since Moreau's rouge and powder are judiciously in character. If it makes the film feel a little handmade, it's of a piece with the carefully spare props and costumes, an ivory-headed cane, a poppy-colored wrapper, the nacreous whorl of a turban shell, a print of the Empress Eugénie of France. It's too tactile to reduce to a hall of narrative mirrors. After all its talking, it ends with an unheard song.

Because Welles hardly ever met financing without conditions, The Immortal Story was a co-production of the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française and can in fact be viewed in the alternate cut of Une histoire immortelle, shorter by eight minutes, deeper by a few lines, texturally altered by the revision of voices as well as language—Moreau handled her own ADR in French and English, but Welles was dubbed by Philippe Noiret while Coggio in the French-language version can actually be heard as himself; he has a drily musical, effective voice that runs against his deferential appearance and I prefer it to the lighter dubbing of Warren Mitchell, although the two versions are best viewed in any case as their own movies. I discovered the English-language one on TCM and it turned out to have an entire small collection on the Criterion Channel, but it can be watched on the Internet Archive from its fairy-tale-like opening to its ultimate, perhaps inevitable punch line. "Yes, a comedy. I'd forgotten the word." It would be nice if further little jewel-boxes of Dinesen had followed, but then I'm still bummed that Welles' film of Charles Williams' Dead Calm (1963) once again with Moreau fell apart in the final stages of production. At least, unlike Mr. Clay, he made this one story as real as any performance ever is. This ambition brought to you by my recounted backers at Patreon.

This afternoon I voted Miss Jessel from Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) one of my favorite ghosts on film, a tall order but a true one. A masterstroke of sound design and suggestion, she's not spectral, she's uncanny: as real as the reflection she casts on the sunlit shiver of the lake, as motionless in the heat as the bulrushes she stands so far out among, she could be walking on water, though we will learn she drowned herself in it instead. Her slight, dark-dressed figure in long shot gives no impression of a threat, nor even any particular emotion such as hunger or melancholy that would make her apparition easier to read. Her incongruity becomes its own eeriness, the noonday drabness of her presence more frightening than its disappearance between one look and the next, which is after all only characteristic of her kind, though part of the film's chill is that really it has no such rules by which a haunting may be mapped and governed, only the inexplicable facts of things that should not be. Once we have heard that she grieved sleeplessly for her rough, flaunting lover until she died of him, the governess played like a doorway of possession by Deborah Kerr can hear her sobbing, a desolate, gulping, wretchedly echoing sound that when finally traced to the schoolroom has nothing to do with the still-faced, dry-eyed imprint of Miss Jessel at her desk and yet when the governess rushes to the empty chair and touches the slate left by her own earlier lesson, it is wet with tears. Without a parapsychological conversation in sight, it gives the effect of a ghost that has stained through time in all its layers, desynched to perpetuity. The parallel sightings of Peter Wyngarde's Peter Quint with his cock-strut and his bestial snarl of a smile, always smeared through sun-mist, night-glass, steam-sweat until he can cast his unfiltered shadow from a crumbling ring of statues at last have their own rude potency, as malignantly charged as one of the more explicitly libidinous legends of Hell House, but it is his ruined lover who looks as though you could never scrape her off the air, so soaked into this patch of reality that trying to part her from the grounds of Bly would be about as efficacious as trying to exorcise an ice age. Their voices whisper like tape loops on the candlelit stairs. The children are watching. The children are watching. The children are watching. Like the uncredited radiophonics of Daphne Oram that accompany her first, summer-humming manifestation, Miss Jessel or whatever has been left of her belongs to the weirdness of time just really starting to flower in British film and TV, more Nigel Kneale than Henry James or even Truman Capote and yet she fits as exactly into the sensibilities of the Victorian Gothic as she would into the bright horror of that lakeside to this day. She was one of three images left on film by the artist and director Clytie Jessop and I doubt you could get her off the print, either. This excellence brought to you by my watching backers at Patreon.

The joke of The Perfect Murder (1988) is that it is neither. Then again, despite its production credit, neither is it a Merchant Ivory except in the sense that it was executive-produced by Ismail Merchant in Mumbai. Directed by Zafar Hai who co-adapted the 1964 CWA Gold Dagger-winning source novel with its author H. R. F. Keating, it is an endearingly unwieldy triple-decker of comedy, crime, and city symphony, not necessarily in equal proportions or even order of priorities, but in a film so lovingly dedicated to the significance of imperfection, perhaps to expect anything else would be, like the case that gives the story its aptly misleading name, upside down.

Take the plot, a rococo compendium of cases from a smuggling ring to an attempted murder to a lost item report which pile chaotically onto the beleaguered hero only to cross-link at the last minute into the pattern so beloved of classically constructed mysteries in which even the silliest and most discursive puzzle-pieces can find a home. Or don't, since its Chandleresque twists and turns serve just as well as the frame for an essentially hangout movie that makes as much time for a kidnapping of mistaken identity as for the lie detector of a Nandi bull. Brought to the screen for the first and only time in his forty-five-year career by Naseeruddin Shah, Inspector Ganesh V. Ghote of the Bombay CID is an everyman of detectives, concerned, harassed, and unassuming in the khaki of his policeman's uniform that gives him far less authority dealing with government ministers and affluent businessmen than he might wish in the pursuit of justice. His self-deprecating honesty carries him through professional pratfalls like arresting the colleague he was sent to collect from the airport and tenacious gambles like anticipating the secret of a monsoon-drenched chandelier, but can't do much about the mundane middle-class problems of his salary and his schedule. "At the moment I'm trying to save to buy a color TV." Especially facing an impatient ACP, the last thing this modest, apologetically persistent officer needs is a wild card in the delicate negotiations of his job and of course that's exactly what he gets with the arrival of Stellan Skarsgård's Axel Svensson, Sweden's contribution to an international study of comparative police methods who wouldn't last ten seconds in a Nordic noir. It is culturally clever, but also just fun that the criminologist from the global north is decidedly the sidekick of the adventure, a lankily cheerful add-on who can be distracted by the most routine details of life in modern India—the marigold-garlanded mahurat shot of a Bollywood musical, a saffron-swathed sadhu under the colonnade of the Taj Mahal Hotel—looking at all times with his wilted straw hair as though he's been pulled out of the laundry half-steamed. "I've been running since I came to this country." He messes about the crime scene quoting Hamlet in Swedish. He moons romantically over suspects and film stars and requires as dramatic a rescue as any damsel in distress. Just this side of a jam Watson, he isn't the total drag on the investigation that Ghote accuses on the sullen, tinderous afternoon their latest failure has left them uncharacteristically on each other's last culture-clashed nerves, but even after the rains have ecstatically broken and the whole back-to-front left-handed spanner of a case with them, he remains most valuable as the inspector's wingman, his flash-temper Viking-height backing up the Maharashtrian manners of Ghote as he holds his ground against official caution and unavoidable corruption and comes up at last with the colorfully elusive truth. "Upside down!" they salute the circumstances of their bonding, an affectionate in-joke now that Axel has fallen in love with the city in all its helter-skelter absurdity and Ghote has upheld the honor of its detecting. "Welcome to Bombay!"

Indeed, in the vibrantly semi-documentary photography of frequent Merchant Ivory DP Walter Lassally, The Perfect Murder is a love letter to Bombay on the verge of its millennial renascence into Mumbai, not merely in the historical tourist postcards of the Victoria Terminus or the Gateway of India, but the street-level flânerie which does not treat ironically a stately elephant proceeding with the rest of the rush-hour traffic down Marine Drive, a Lovemate local train rattling between the washing-strung frontages of chawls, the chlorine-blue of the swimming pool at the Oberoi Towers and the cupped hands of beggars thrust like razor clams through the sand of Chowpatty Beach. The flooded green of a lawn of black umbrellas under the monsoon's curtain has no less reality than the green baize of an office inside the liner-white block of Mantralaya. It earths the Dickensian tendencies of the human characters whom Ghote has to wend his dogged way among, inconveniently factual even at their most flamboyant. Amjad Khan pulls out the Sydney Greenstreet stops as the expansively blusterous and epicurean builder Lala Heera Lal while Madhur Jaffrey in two scenes as his imperious wife blocks even the mildest hints of questioning as keenly as crucible steel. "What a woman. She was all the time giving me the feeling of being without my trousers on." Approaching the rest of the suspicious household nets a varied array of deflection, obstruction, and wasted time from Sakina Jaffrey as the languid daughter-in-law, Dilip Tahil as her ostentatiously clubbable husband, and Nayeem Hafizka as the histrionic younger brother whose room is exhaustingly tacked with self-portraits as Sherlock Holmes and posters for Spellbound (1945) and Vertigo (1958), insisting on playing the proper part of a murder suspect all the while the victim who could be a witness lies shtum under medical care and Parsi prayers, Dinshaw Daji's Mr. Perfect. "This is the sort of difficulty you have in police work in this city. If only people would behave in a simple, reasonable, logical manner!" It's too much to ask of even the heroes of this caper, out of sorts, out of place, out of luck, splashed with Holi dye or literally losing their shirt. Spouses in real life, Shah and Ratna Pathak have fun with the fractious marriage of the Ghotes, which would be far less in the soup if he would just once come home from work on time; the wistful fantasy he builds of her as the tranquil, docile, ideal Hindu wife would swerve too close to a shrew joke except for the time he brings the rescued Axel home for supper and Pratima turns on the best-bangled, bindi-dabbed, lord-and-master act with cut-diamond sarcasm. To complete the family business, their infant son Ved is an early cradle-credit for Imaad Shah. The sun in the intermingled score of synths, sarangi, and tabla by Richard Robbins, Sultan Khan, and Zakir Hussein catches on fish-scale silver, mango-skin gold, the half-risen skyscrapers of a city pushing itself toward maximum. Keating who famously wrote the first nine Inspector Ghote novels without visiting India for himself makes his Hitchcock cameo at the international terminal, waiting to catch the next flight back to Europe.

It can be an awkward movie. Its mix of Englishes and untranslated Hindi is no strain to be immersed in, but the loose, improvisatory feel of much of its dialogue means it has no pacing to speak of even when it has to hit its marks of revelation and its tonal shifts are sometimes more collision than collage; it is refreshing to find a detective film without an exchange of gunfire, but it could have deleted one of its billboard-tearing, barrow-overturning chase scenes that never fail to leave a wackier level of disorder in their wake than the sufficient bewilderment of yet another investigative dead end. All the same, when Axel with his farewell gift of a kurta draped like a college sweater around his shoulders swings back at the gate to shout his characteristically no-chill support for Ghote across the crowded terminal, the viewer may regret that with an eventual twenty-five novels to choose from, there were not more screen translations made of these odd little mysteries, "altogether upside down." I watched this one because I was intrigued by its peripheral Merchant Ivory-ness in the same way as the occasional co-productions of Powell and Pressburger for other writers and directors and as was the case with Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley's The Silver Fleet (1943), I did not regret its hour and a half of my time. I got its dead-out-of-print DVD out of the Minuteman Library Network since the quality of the version available on YouTube actually is ghastly even without the random audio drop-outs or the smear like tape across the lens. It deserves better, this sweet and slightly bemusing snapshot starring a pair of actors who have had my phone book recommendation for years. This welcome brought to you by my upside-down backers at Patreon.

The silver lining of having to think about the 17th Academy Awards has been the discovery of I Won't Play (1944), the year's winner in the since deprecated category of Best Short Subject, Two-Reeler. It had minor competition. Its vignette of down time in the Pacific theater is a cut above ephemera. It has nothing important to say about the war effort or American values except in the back-handed, Runyonesque fashion of popular music and tall tales. Frankly, good for it.

Directed by old-school all-rounder Crane Wilbur, the screenplay by James Bloodworth sticks close to its source short story by Laurence Schwab in setting up and knocking down the riddle of Fingers (Dane Clark), the dog-tagged Baron Munchausen-in-residence of an unidentified island in the South Pacific so currently overrun with very bored Marines that it's a wonder no one's busted out with the Rodgers and Hammerstein, whom the ever-modest Fingers would no doubt take the credit for introducing. If you believe what the gum-cracking, Variety-paging little bluffer gives out, he had a hand in every success of stage and screen from Gershwin to Sinatra, not to mention some sideman action on his own account with the likes of Goodman and Dorsey. He gave a hot tip to Bogart. Even the luscious pin-up of Kim Karol, lately classing up the sandbag-and-stenciled-crate decor of their dugout, he claims to have discovered at the nightspot on 52nd Street where he taught her the schmaltz that took her to Hollywood. He'd be insufferable except for his nonchalantly chutzpadik air of not seeming to care whether he's doubted, always with a wisecrack in the face of a direct challenge—put on the spot about his anonymity compared to the stardom of his alleged protégé, Fingers who couldn't look more Brooklyn Jewish if he were my grandfather tosses carelessly back, "'Cause I ain't got her big blue eyes." The scornfully spellbound audience of Chicago (William Haade), Rusty (Warren Douglas), and Florida (William Benedict) can't figure it any other way: "Fingers is either the biggest liar in the world or the most important guy in show business." The favorite is not Option B. On the other hand, on this tropical swamp of an island with nothing to do but sit around and read months-late mail and listen to Tokyo Rose, even an A-1 line of bull is better than a total cultural blackout, the closest any of his buddies is getting for the duration to the movie-palace, big-band comforts of home. It is a truth reluctantly acknowledged that for all his backstage bantam swagger and the nickname none of them has even seen him play a piano to justify, Fingers can be "kind of nice . . . to listen to, I mean."

Obviously, a spiel of this caliber cannot run indefinitely without either putting or shutting up and the wave function seems to collapse catastrophically when the cargo off the latest LST includes a beat-up traveling piano and in front of a rec hall's worth of eager witnesses, Fingers approaches the ivories with amazement and then ingloriously balks. He can't come through for an audience who'd thrill if he played "Chopsticks." He gets threatened with a personalized anvil chorus and digs in his heels on the title drop. Even for the chaplain (Robert Shayne) who's just as sternly worded as the next disappointed Marine, he can't muster more than the weak sauce of "Look, I don't mean to be a crab, Padre, but, well, I—I kind of made a vow, see?" which goes over even less well than his theatrical bluster about military pay not covering the rates he used to pull down nightly in New York. By the time the chaplain's finished with him for cheating the camp of the treat he as good as promised every time he sounded off about his hot combo nights on Swing Street, even his most traditionally skeptical critics are actually a little stunned. "I knew he was lying about all those people he was talking about, but imagine not even being able to play!" Lucky Fingers, if, after that exhibition, he can even get launched on one of his former anecdotes without being drowned out by the worse than silent treatment of Jolson in sarcastically three-part harmony. His glum demotion to persona insta-non grata, however, is nothing compared to the pasting his erstwhile buddies are prepared for him to receive when an unplanned refueling at the airfield gives the entertainment-starved Marines the windfall of a USO show by none other than Kim Karol (Janis Paige) her curvaceous, vivacious, flame-haired self, all set to knock what Fingers would have called the cash customers dead, especially if an accompanist can be found for the little box of a piano which is missing a couple of keys and still a better prospect than a torch song accordion. In agreement, the trio head off to collar their musical phony for a never-better chance to show him off to his own invention: "I wouldn't miss this for Tojo's funeral!"

If I have to spell out the denouement of this mishegos, I Won't Play has made such a bad job of its telegraphy that it might as well have used the Pony Express, but the sweetest twist is not what happens when Fingers gets shoved down in front of the piano or even at the airfield where he sees off Kim, but the fact that the camp braggart turns out to be surprisingly sensitive to the kind of dreams that soldiers half a globe from home sustain themselves on, whether it's a picture of a redheaded starlet or a lot of glitzy tall talk. "Everybody kisses everybody in show business." Showing off the brash and vulnerable persona that would serve him so well in his post-war noirs, Clark drops into conversations like an all-time kibitzer and sees himself out of a roomful of cut dead air with an elaborately unconvincing effort of not giving a damn. Paige was already a Hollywood singer as well as an authentic pin-up and could have wowed her audience accompanied by nothing at all, but she does such a knockout rendition of "Body and Soul" that I get mad all over again about The Pajama Game (1957). Audiences who liked their brief chemistry would get to see him strike out with her a month later in Hollywood Canteen (1944). Except that it provides the necessary distance between its antihero's claims and any means of proving them, the war remains mostly a matter of palm trees and G.I. shirts and the occasional patriotic detail like a game of darts played on a photo of Hirohito, but it's still a little jarring to hear the scene-setting narrator sound so blasé about suggesting a location of "maybe Tarawa," considering the winner of that year's Best Documentary Short Subject. Is this short fiction comparable cinema? Like hell, it's Saturday Evening Post-cute and it answers its outstanding question with a wink through the fourth wall; it looks terrible on taped-off-TCM YouTube, but I am delighted to have proof that the channel's chronically prestige 31 Days of Oscar does periodically dip into the discontinued categories instead of just the warhorses. After all, "Even a good liar is not to be lightly dismissed." This vow brought to you by my big backers at Patreon.

Michael Curtiz's The Sea Wolf (1941) is spectrally salt-soaked, ferociously anti-fascist, and gives great Alexander Knox. On the first two of these factors much of its reputation justly rests; the third, if you ask me, is criminally overlooked.

Famously, in adapting Jack London's The Sea-Wolf (1904) for Warner Bros., Robert Rossen took the opportunity of the studio's impatient politics to kick an already philosophical adventure into high topical gear, explicitly equating the maritime tyranny of the novel with the authoritarianism that had been rising in Europe since the end of the last war while America stuck its fingers in its ears and occasionally hummed along with Lindbergh. It would be more than idiomatic to call the schooner Ghost a floating hell: its master takes his motto from Milton and reigns over the crew of his fin-de-siècle sealer with the brutal swagger of a self-made superman until like the true damned they become one another's devils, outcasts of the sea-roads, their only berth this three-masted, fog-banked Room 101. "No work is hard as long as you can remain a human being while doing it. I wouldn't sail on a ship like the Ghost if she were the only sailing vessel left on the Pacific Ocean." Its captain is no dictatorial caricature, however, as comfortably distant as a foreign newsreel. Edward G. Robinson had been in the vanguard of anti-Nazi pictures since Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and his Wolf Larsen has more than main force on his side, the heartless charisma of a demagogue whose sucker punches comprise as much of his unrepentant attraction as his short-cut promises, all-American as late capitalism and always a scapegoat in it to keep the crab bucket crawling. Press from the time indicates that the rest of the cast were on the same double-speaking, not overplayed page. Whether audiences recognized him from the headlines or the workplace, he had reality enough to break ribs on. But Rossen did more with his source material than just sharpen its critique or concentrate its villain—in a bold move even for infamously transformative Hollywood, he redistributed its hero, teasing out the shanghaied stand-in of London's narrator into the less autofictional, more expressive components of the rebellious drifter of John Garfield's George Leach and and the literary misfit of Knox's Humphrey Van Weyden. The effect it produces on the film is fascinating and slightly unstable. As they sweat out their different flavors of servitude under the shadows of the rigging that creak like nooses and chains, the characters seem sometimes to intersect, sometimes to contrast, sometimes to be switching off who gets the talk, the action, the future, the girl; until the drowning swirl of the climax, they function so clearly as a kind of double lead that it feels as though it should be possible to slip them back under one another's skins, like separable selves in a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, except that their ultimate disambiguation is riveting. Without disrespect to Garfield, the role of Leach fits vividly into his catalogue of proletarian heroes, a forgotten man with a prisoner's duty to escape, not too embittered by his rage against the machine to be romantically reachable. "Men like Larsen can't keep on grinding us down because we're nobodies. That ain't true. We're somebodies." Defying the captain even when he has to grin his insolence through the latest bruise, he looks less like the ringleader of a mutiny and more like the core of a resistance. Personally as well as politically, Van Weyden is something much more ambiguous; it inclines the viewer to stick around to try to find out what.

Even the allegorical frame of the film offers little assistance in placing his studious, reticent figure, his education and elocution confirming only that he's thoroughly at sea in more ways than one. Is he a neutral, an appeaser, a well-bred case of obedience in advance? Respectably anonymous aboard the ill-fated ferry Martinez, he signally retreated from the agitated pleading of Ida Lupino's Ruth Webster, apologetically citing "the law" as excuse for inaction when it would have been more like justice to lend a hunted ex-con a hand. Fetched up in flotsam bewilderment aboard the Ghost, he's the odd sailor out with his writer's profession that seems ironically to have done more to insulate him from the workings of life than instruct him in them. It's an inauspicious start for a hero, if he should even be considered one. Not actually all that tall for a man, he has the height in any scene with his higher-billed co-stars, but it diffuses him lankily against their compact authority and Knox in his early scenes is willing to make a lubberly spectacle of himself, pointedly overaged for his cabin boy's duties, a long-limbed jumble in the sealer's close-quarters roll—as the full panic of his captivity crashes in on him, he loses his head and shouts for help as futilely and demeaningly as any of the sots and jailbirds with which Larsen keeps his pleasure well supplied. "You're in a bad way," the captain contemplates his newest inmate, bitterly sick at himself for an instinctual blurt of empathy that couldn't have been less calculated to win him respect or reprieve aboard this devil-ship, "sort of in the middle. But then I suppose you're used to that. Your sort usually is." A dig at the privilege of the ivory tower which can afford not to have to choose sides, it sounds offhandedly like a sexual slur as well. London's Van Weyden romanced the novel's equivalent of Ruth, but Rossen's has already been judged "soft like a woman" and claimed as the captain's property according to "the law of the sea, which says anything you find in it is yours to keep," tacking close to the wind of the Production Code with the suspicious hours he spends in congress with the captain who will never admit how greedily he thrives on the company of this bookish sea-stray. Who else aboard this Pacific-moated prison hulk can appreciate not just his ravenous will to power, but the intelligence behind it which stocks his cabin with the unexpected culture of Darwin to de Quincey, Nietzsche to Poe? Who else will give him a run for his philosophy, however confident he may be of the contest's end? Derelicts off the docks of the Barbary Coast offer little more than the routine diversion of breaking, but Van Weyden still has innocence to be relieved of, the clean-handed illusion of himself as above the casual viciousness of this shark-world he's sunken into, the only one its captain recognizes: "Is this the first time you ever wanted to commit a murder?" Freezing at the coup de grâce still leaves the shame of seizing the skinning knife in the first place, the worse stain of Larsen's paternal beam. Any number of intellectuals went for fascism in its first-run days and our half-protagonist despite his ideological resistance may be nothing more than one of their cautionary tales, accommodating himself to his enthrallment by Renfield's degrees. Either way, his tarred standing as the captain's confidant counts him out of any organized effort to topple Larsen as contemptuously as a collaborator, an impression the writer does nothing to dispel when he silently holds the lantern for a midnight inspection of the faces of potential mutineers and his notes toward a memoir of his time aboard the Ghost have been appropriated for a manifesto of Wolf Larsen. It seems short-sighted of the captain not to consider that his vanity could be just as dangerous to reveal as the torturous headaches that periodically crush him blind, but not when we can watch him swell in the knowledge that only great men are anatomized for the attention of history, the mass-market immortality he deserves as much as the fallen hero of Paradise Lost. Who else of his plug-ugly crew is going to lean suddenly forward at the captain's own desk like a schoolmaster in sea-boots and a slop-stained work shirt and clinically read the man who holds his life in his hands for filth?

"The reason for his actions then becomes obvious. Since he has found it so difficult in the outside world to maintain that dignity, he creates a world for himself—a ship on which he alone can be master, on which he alone can rule. The next step is a simple one. An ego such as this must constantly be fed, must constantly be reassured of its supremacy. So it feeds itself upon the degradation of people who have never known anything but degradation. It is cruel to people who have never known anything but cruelty. But to dare to expose that ego in a world where it would meet its equal—"

The Sea Wolf keeps Van Weyden so close to its vest for so long, it's a sharp little victory in its own right to find that after all he's got a spine to go with his sea legs. His weeks in the barnacled snake pit of the Ghost have indeed altered him from the fine gentleman whose squeamish morals Larsen mocked with such barbed affability, but mostly, as so often in adventures and sometimes even real life, to wake him up to himself rather than grind him down. God bless the Warners grit, with a five o'clock shadow roughing in his disillusion and his thick dark hair stiffened with sea-spray he's better than handsome, he's delicious with those doe-lashes that show every deflecting flick of his gaze, his solid brows that can hold a straighter face. "You're wasting time," he says only, curtly, as if he had just revealed worse about himself than his loyalty to a pair of last-chance lovers and their private mutiny, not Larsen's creature after all and not interested in talking about it. What he is in the end is a trickster, Scheherazade-spinning the lure of his never-written book that stings and entices Larsen in equal measure, as good as a siren's bait of memory. Knee-deep in the tilting, salt-swollen cabin of the derelict Ghost with a pistol trained on his peacoat and time gulping out as fast as air through cannon-shattered decks, Van Weyden doesn't turn the tables with the captain's contagious brutality but the proof of his own incurable softheartedness, shadow-sided as the warning he quoted more than once to Larsen: "There's a certain price that no one wants to pay for living." Those liminal sorts, you have to watch out for them even between their own words. It was Knox's Hollywood debut and it confounds me that he was most acclaimed in his American period for playing Woodrow Wilson. But then the film is studded with these turns like nothing I have seen asked of their actors, even Robinson who stretches beyond the confines of current events and the extra-maritime echoes of Conrad into the kind of performance it would be fair to call titanic if it weren't so upsettingly human. Gene Lockhart stops the show as Louie, sodden beyond even the usual standards of pathetically drunken doctors in marginal haunts of the world—tormented past the last literal rags of his dignity, he doesn't just call down his curse from the rigging like some God-damned Melvillean oracle, he seals it to the ship with his own blood. The Sea Wolf would lose much of its jolt if it could be relegated to the twilight zone of a supernatural picture, but there is something weird and maudit about the Ghost which shuns the sea lanes, touches no ports of call, preys on other ships like one of the more piratical incarnations of the Flying Dutchman, its crew bound as if for their lives and its captain stalked by a brother with the implacable name of Death. It needs nothing more than its own manifest to be doomed. Howard da Silva's Harrison makes a surly enough, mob-minded representative sailor, but no one before this mast is as gleefully repulsive as Barry Fitzgerald's Cooky, all his familiar impish mannerisms curdled into real malevolence, knifing an argumentative seaman one minute and the next merrily suggesting a rape. "I'll not shut up! Let the chills of fear run up his spine, like they did mine when I made my first voyage aboard the foulest ship in creation." Especially with its fog-sweated photography by Sol Polito that bears comparison to the deep-focus, silver-carved shadow-work of John Alton or Gregg Toland, the film at times resembles a grimier, diabolical companion piece to my long-beloved The Long Voyage Home (1940), the oyster-gleam of overcast on the wave-splattered roll of the decks a testament to the model effects of Byron Haskin and the flood-capabilities of the studio's Stage 21. The spare, corroded, swirling score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold makes equally technical and expressionist use of a Novachord. How this film made it through the strainer of the PCA when its close contemporary Out of the Fog (1941) was depoliticized into meaninglessness, I give thanks to Neptune and have no idea.

The trick to The Sea Wolf is seeing it. Thanks to the lifesaver of the Minuteman Library Network, I was able to enjoy the 100-minute restoration released by the Warner Archive on Blu-Ray/DVD, but any shorter version is the hack work of the 1947 re-release, shorn of a quarter-hour of its more political scenes and some collateral connective tissue. It made the film fit on a nautical double bill with The Sea Hawk (1940), but in the year of the ascendance of HUAC and the Hollywood Ten, it is impossible not to wonder a little if the studio was already coming around to the prevailing Red-scared wind—for a film as far left in its capitalist-fascist indictments as The Sea Wolf, it may be impressive that the blacklist claimed only Rossen, Robinson, Garfield, da Silva, and the Canadian-born Knox, whose eventually permanent relocation to the UK in 1950 explains my previous experience of him strictly in British productions. As with so many of this country's self-devouring frenzies, it was America's loss. Van Weyden never feels like a spokesman for liberal democracy; he feels like a frightened, sheltered, ambivalent man with a trick up his sleeve he needs the strength to look for, which still puts him allegorically ahead of his resident country in the spring of '41. He is surprising beyond the wild card of his recombined plot. I like the Canadian flicker I can hear in his otherwise acceptably mid-Atlantic voice, another marker of difference from the Frisco-scraped rest of the crew. Without crudity, I would hope he was appreciated by Boyd McDonald in his late-night TV-cruising sometime. It is more slantly done, but there is something in this film of the same kind of spellmaking as Pimpernel Smith (1941), speaking itself into the future: all you fascists bound to lose. Or as Larsen remarks like a person who should know, "Milton really understood the Devil." It's a useful knack, these days when circles close. This price brought to you by my equal backers at Patreon.

City of Fear (1959) has no frills and no funds and it doesn't need either when it has the cold sweat of its premise whose science fiction had not yet become lead-lined science fact. It's late noir of an orphan source incident. Its ending is not a place of honor.

Unique among atomic noirs of my experience, City of Fear couldn't care less about the international anxieties of nuclear espionage or even apocalypse, at least not in the conventionally pictured sense of flash-boiling annihilation. More akin to a plague noir, it concerns itself with the intimately transmissible deteriorations of acute radiation syndrome as it tracks its inadvertent vector through the bus stops and back alleys and motor courts of the city he can irradiate with nothing more than a nauseated cough, the drag of a dizzied foot, the clutch of a sweat-soaked palm. As Vince Ryker lately of San Quentin, Vince Edwards has all the hardbodied machismo of a muscle magazine and the cocky calculation of an ambitious hood, but he's a dead man since he shoved that stainless steel canister inside his shirt, mistaking its contents for a cool million's worth of uncut heroin. It's a hot sixteen ounces of granulated cobalt-60 and it has considerably more of a half-life than he does. Well ahead of the real-life incidents of Mexico City, Goiânia, Samut Prakan, Lia, this 75-minute B-picture knows the real scare of our fallout age is not the misuse of nuclear capabilities by bad actors, but simply whether our species which had the intelligence to split the atom has the sense to survive the consequences. "I doubt if anyone can explain that calmly to three million people without touching off the worst panic in history."

The plot in this sense is mostly a skin for the philosophy, a procedural on the eighty-four-hour clock of its antihero's endurance as the authorities scramble to trace their rogue source before it can ionize too much of an unprepared Los Angeles. In slat-blinded boxes of offices as blank as concrete coffers, Lyle Talbot and John Archer's Chief Jensen and Lieutenant Richards of the LAPD gravely absorb the crash course in containment delivered by co-writer Steven Ritch as Dr. Wallace, the radiological coordinator of the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District who bears the stamp of nuclear authority in his thin intense face and his wire-brush hair, a lecturer's gestures in his black-framed glasses and his quick-tilt brows. Pressed by the cops for a surefire safeguard against loose ⁶⁰Co, he responds with dry truthfulness, "Line up every man, woman and child and issue them a lead suit and a Geiger counter." The stark-bulbed shelves of a shoe store's stockroom provide a parallel shadow site for the convergence of local connections such as Joseph Mell's Eddie Crown and Sherwood Price's Pete Hallon, whose double act of disingenuous propriety and insinuating jitters finds a rather less receptive audience in an aching-boned, irritable Vince, groaning over his mysterious cold even as he clings territorially to the unjimmied, unshielded canister: "Look, this stays, I stay, and you get rid of it when I say so." Already a telltale crackle has started to build on the film's soundtrack as a fleet of Geiger-equipped prowl cars laces the boulevards of West Hollywood and the drives of Laurel Canyon, snagging their staticky snarl on the hot tip of a stiff just as the jingle of an ice cream truck and the clamor of eager kids double-underline the stakes of endangered innocence. While Washington has been notified, the public is still out of the loop for fear of mass unrest, the possibility of evacuating the children at least. A night panorama of the dot-to-dot canyon of lights that comprises downtown L.A. recurs like a reminder of the density of individuals to be snuffed and blighted if Vince should successfully crack the canister into an accidental dispersal of domestic terrorism: "He's one man, holding the lives of three million people in his hands." At the same time, he skulks through a world that for all its docu-vérité starkness of Texaco stations and all-night Thrifty Drug Stores seems eerily depopulated, a function perhaps of the starvation-rations production, but it suggests nonetheless the post-apocalyptic ghost this neon concentrate of a metropolis could turn into. It might be worse than a bomb, this carcinogenic, hemorrhagic film that Dr. Wallace forecasts settling over the city if the high gamma emitter of the cobalt gets into the smog, the food chain, the wildlife, the populace, Chornobyl on the San Andreas Fault. "Hoarse coughing, heavy sweat, horrible retching. Then the blood begins to break down. Then the cells." With half a dozen deaths on his conscience as the picture crunches remorselessly toward the bottom line of its hot equations, we can't be expected to root for Vince per se, but he isn't so sadistic or so stupid that he deserves this sick and disoriented, agonized unraveling. His relations with Patricia Blair's June Marlowe are believably tender as well as studly, sympathetically admitting in her arms that he just wanted something better for the two of them than an ex-con's "dead meat dishwashing for the rest of your life." A cool redhead, she's a worthy moll, unintimidated by police interrogation or the onset of hacking fever. A sly, dark anti-carceral intimation gets under the atomic cocktail of tech almost in passing—the fatal canister came originally from the infirmary at San Quentin, where it was used in what Lieutenant Richards describes as "controlled volunteer experiments" and Vince more colloquially identifies as "secret junkie tests." Perhaps we are meant to presume that the prison grapevine jumbled the science, allowing him to confuse the expanding field of cobalt therapy for drug trials and thus a lethal radionuclide for a lucrative opioid. The fact of human experimentation regarded fearfully by maximum-security inmates remains. Their radiation safety was evidently nothing to write home about either way.

( It's worth a million. )

Co-written by Ritch and Robert Dillon, this terse little one-way ticket was directed for Columbia by Irving Lerner, a past master of documentaries and microbudgets and an alleged Soviet asset while employed by the Bureau of Motion Pictures, or at least he was accused of unauthorized photography of the cyclotron at UC Berkeley in 1944. Wherever he got his feel for nuclear paranoia, it is intensely on display in City of Fear, its montages a push-pinned, slate-chalked, civil-defense-survey-metered feast of retro-future shock. Lucien Ballard once again shoots a grippingly unglamorous noir of anonymously sun-washed sidewalks and night-fogged intersections. The low-strings score by Jerry Goldsmith pulses and rattles with jazz combo edginess, all off-beat percussion and unease in the woodwinds and jabbing brass, closing out the film on a bleak sting of the uncertainly protected city. I discovered it on Tubi, but it can be watched just as chillingly on YouTube where its existentialism, like a committed dose, spreads from the individual to the national to the planetary. No one in it wears proper PPE, but it names its deadly element outright. For a study in whiplash, double-feature it with A Bomb Was Stolen (S-a furat o bombă, 1962). This contamination brought to you by my controlled backers at Patreon.

No Publicity (1927) is a stupendous trifle of two-reeler silent comedy starring Edward Everett Horton, which was all the information I required to try it out and regret nothing.

Silent Horton would be even more of a novelty if I had gotten to know him first as the earnestly doubtful narrator of Rocky and Bullwinkle's "Fractured Fairy Tales" (1959–64), but thanks to my temporally ambivalent relationship with pop culture, it is a much surer bet that he introduced himself with Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), where his elastically flustered double-takes paid off the fretful set-ups of his lines. Kicked back a decade and change into a ganglier, go-gettinger, youthfully middle-aged incarnation, he's at once instantly recognizable and revelatory as Eddie Howard, the gamely gauche press photographer whom the intertitles inform us "would have gladly gone into the whale's stomach to get a flashlight of Jonah," which is about what it takes when his paper assigns him to steal a snap of an heiress well-guarded by a regiment of society dragons. Pertly modern with her bobbed hair and the asymmetrical dash of a single earring, Ruth Dwyer's Sally Lawrence wouldn't mind the publicity at all, but her conservative guardian is played by Josephine Crowell like all the aunts in Wodehouse rolled into one redoubtable bosom and Eddie immediately finds his polite, straightforward efforts complicating into such time-honored shenanigans as hiding in the drapes, impersonating an iceman, and imitating the action of a folding screen, inevitably culminating in a full drag escape attempt just as inexorably thwarted by the success of his imposture. "This is Sister Blue, who has come all the way from Kansas to lecture for us." Patently unable to think of anything "Wrong With Our Girls," but equally unable to sneak out under the expectantly clutched pearls of the guests of Mrs. Van Pelt, Eddie swathed in the dowdiest of bombazines and a feather-plated hat screws his pince-nez to the sticking place and launches into the bluest-nosed lot of nonsense until the enforcement of the Production Code.

Because so much of his screen persona as it solidified into the '30's exploited his knack for an old-maidish dither—of the stars of the lavender screen, Horton was one of the most enduringly implausible-undeniable—it is frankly charming that while Eddie can pass himself off as a temperance matron with little more than a roll of grey hair and one of his own demure simpers, his shotgun lecture owes more of its credibility to the attentional inertia of his audience which applauds the mere subject of the younger generation's turpitude even when improvised desperately from the wrong end of the stick. "I despise lip rouge, it has given painter's colic to more men and boys." His listeners are more suspicious when he relents on the rouge question than when he literally hangs on to his hat in the face of an electric fan or successfully passes off a madcap careen tangled in his own hems as a demonstration of the latest craze in "vulgar dance—the Ford-fender shimmy." I had known the actor could throw a wild take, but I had not properly understood it was part of a full-body repertoire of physical comedy which saw much less action even in the musicals of his sound career and here can't be missed from the moment he's so cheerfully focused on his latest experiment in photography that he almost ignites his editor with the flash. Shown the door for the first time by Mrs. Van Pelt under disdainful full sail, he packs his Brownie back into its cigar box with an insultingly diligent finicking of his fingers and saunters off with such ostentatious nonchalance that he seems to have thrown out one of his hips. He can't retrieve his hat from its currently occupied chair without being mistaken for a particularly brazen masher, but the topper of the offended dignity with which he dons its crushed platter is the slight philosophical shrug with which he almost immediately takes it off again. He may have been less of a stuntman than legends like Keaton or Lloyd, but no sooner has he emerged in his decorous drag than he pitches himself falsies over fundament down the curve of the stairs in a katamari attempt to recover a portrait which previously slipped his waistcoat; he spins out in a whirl of rucked skirts and garroting shawl and comes up with a breathless, incredulous wince at himself and his bright ideas, almost breaking the fourth wall in his side-eyed momentum. Sally rushes over solicitously, but we will shortly be signaled that she's more than the obligatorily pretty face when, bored out of her mind with the moral droning of the supposed Miss Delilah Blue, defiantly redoing her lipstick and slinging her shapely gams everywhere like the dapper flapper she is, she twigs to the game before any of the straitlaced company and flashes at once into co-conspirator mode, the proto-screwball assurance of a true match. They flee the house together, leaving respectively the red herring of a well-dressed hatstand and a maid covering for her mistress with a standee joke. They clinch in the flash powder fallout of his lovestruck distraction. It's a fast wrap-up with one last gag at the expense of the older, stuffier generation, but a surprisingly satisfying one. If you can't love a man for his drag act and his absentminded tendency to explode things, what's Cupid coming to anyway?

No Publicity was the first in a series of eight two-reelers produced for Paramount by Hollywood Productions, which is to say Harold Lloyd, thus explaining their survival when so much of Horton's silent career has gone the way of all nitrate. I am inexpressibly grateful for it: the actor truly has been one of my particular idols since childbirth and I had never seen him as such an uninhibited silent clown. I should have expected nothing less from a man who was thrown out of his first college for pranking his own suicide. The presence behind the camera of so many of Lloyd's regular crew makes it all the neater that the film doesn't feel mad-libbed from his own oeuvre, following its star's lead instead to its own distinctive, impish and beleaguered identity. For all its silent virtues, it's irresistible to hear Horton enunciating in his inimitably rattled fashion the triple-take subtitle of "W-e-l-l, I-er-I mean, well, no-I-yes about bad habits." I discovered this short on Dailymotion, but the whole series comes in a box set from Undercrank Productions and I hope to watch them all, especially since I am assured of a reteaming with the vivacious Dwyer, who looks practically new wave and utterly misplaced in a house accurately described as "one of the most magnificent cold-storage plants in Snob-haven." When she still thinks our cornered hero is the afternoon's tedious lecturer, she gives him a cross-eyed literal kiss-off, and as soon as she has him pegged as a picture snatcher en travesti, she glows. I was rather delighted myself. This shimmy brought to you by my glad backers at Patreon.