Rat Ghosts

If you're the corrupt mayor of a mediaeval town beset by rats and you wish to cheat the sorcerer doppelganger of your daughter's undesirable suitor into removing the vermin for free, pray to God, and your wish will be granted. This was the message conveyed to children in 1957 by NBC with the television special The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Appropriating the music of Edvard Grieg, most of its musical numbers are embarrassing and the plot is generally a dumbed down version of Robert Browning's poem with American Christian morality clumsily inserted. But it has its charm with a fine performance from Claude Rains as the mayor of Hamelin, an amusing appearance by Jim Backus, and the inimitable tight-tights and big stained glass aesthetic of pre-1970 Hollywood mediaeval fantasy.

For no apparent reason, Van Johnson plays two roles, the blonde village heroic dissident called "Truson"--I suppose I needn't mention Truson does not appear in Browning's poem--and, sporting a van dyke, the piper himself.

Johnson, according to Wikipedia, is fondly remembered for the role. I've never been a particularly big Van Johnson fan but I guess he does have a rough, natural quality to him. I remember getting impatient for his scenes to end in the musical film Brigadoon so having him the lead of this musical was quite tedious. Especially the excruciating "Flim Flam Floo" in a scene where he sings to the children about how magic he is, so magic he can turn milk red, and no-one in the films seems aware of how disgusting it is when he demonstrates this.

He's not helped by the fact that most of the dialogue, like Browning's poem, is in rhyme. Several lines are lifted directly from the poem but there are plenty of very unnatural sounding lines written for the film. "Your Excellency, if I do, there'll be a big hole in you," for when Backus is standing at the wrong end of a cannon. "Aye, you've robbed the children of learning, laughter and play, and darkened their lives in the sun of the day," Johnson, like a farmer reading psalms aloud, recites from the script to the mayor in reference to one of the contrived plot elements--the mayor forces the children to perform hard labour, mainly bailing hay.

Rains impressively manages to make most of his dialogue sound natural, essentially reprising his Prince John from the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood. This was the only singing and dancing role of his career and while he manages to stay in tune it's clear why this was his only singing and dancing role. Though considering he was 68 at the time, it's probably best not to judge his dancing. In fact, considering his death was just a decade later, the vigour with which he performs this role is rather impressive.

Jim Backus--best known as the voice of Mr. Magoo--makes an appearance in the second half as a king's emissary whom the mayor is keen to impress, a contrivance added to the film to explain why the mayor wants to get rid of the rats, apparently the hardships brought on by a rat infestation recounted at length in the poem not being deemed cinematic enough. But the most significant departure from the poem is the ill-considered happy ending. So typical of 1950s morality, in attempt to remedy something deemed ugly in the source material the adaptation ends up with something implying culturally licensed greed. As in the poem, the mayor's failure to pay the piper is shown as a bad thing. But unlike in the poem, everyone prays to God and all bad results of the mayor's greed are reversed instantly and the piper, despite the bromide being endlessly repeated in the film, is never paid.

Incidentally, this morning I came across this HTML version of an 1888 edition of the Browning poem with absolutely gorgeous illustrations by Kate Greenaway.

Beauty's Leisurely Pinball Game

Like wind-up toys, Marjorie and everyone she interacts with seem to unconsciously create the events of 1951's Lady Godiva Rides Again, released to the dullard U.S. as Bikini Baby. Watching the people in this movie feels sort of like watching a box of kittens testing each other with play or trying to get out of the box. It's a funny and rather adorable film.

And I'm by no means referring to just the female characters with the kittens simile--here George Cole as Marjorie's boyfriend Johnny enthusiastically makes a mess of himself with an ice cream, barely seeming to notice Marjorie swooning over the movie star on screen. He notices later when, after winning a national beauty pageant, that same movie star, Simon Abott (Dennis Price), invites her onto his yacht.

The famous movie star, too, is amusingly simple in his attempts to seduce Marjorie. When she notes the press couldn't possibly presume the two of them were engaged to be married if they saw them together because Simon is already married he tells her actually a "divorce is pending." Fortunately for him, Marjorie, like everyone in the movie, is just as guileless.

Well, except maybe for Alastair Sim in an uncredited cameo as a down on his luck film producer who shares his lunch bun with Marjorie in a sweet little scene. Marjorie is played very effectively by Pauline Stroud who doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry. She's the star of this movie but I guess her career's trajectory was not unlike Marjorie's arc. Almost twenty years later, she's credited as "Woman" in an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies. Which is too bad--she's so good at being so sweetly, earnestly daft in this movie. On a hotel balcony, she tells someone how she has no illusions about movie stars, how she expects they're just people in their private lives. The next instant, she spies Simon Abott's car pulling up below to screaming crowds and she begins breathlessly exclaiming how she can't believe Simon Abott himself is really here.

Marjorie is the daughter of the owner of a little corner store (Stanley Holloway). She impulsively enters a contest to become Lady Godiva for a community pageant when Johnny tells her she absolutely may not enter such a contest. A scene of the pageant organisers finds them belated talking about the logistics of a naked woman riding a horse in public. "What do you think the Watch Committee would do?" one of them asks and a shopgirl (Kay Kendall) puts in, "Watch." So at the end of the day, Marjorie ends up buried under an enormous wig and wearing something with full sleeves.

A Game of Sedatives

Saw this on the way to school a few days ago. I guess they're teaching hard lessons in Sunday school nowadays.

Last night I tried a liqueur that's been manufactured exclusively by a group of French monks for almost three hundred years, Chartreuse. Wow. 55% alcohol and it tastes like a candy apple. I was overcome with a feeling of universal benevolence, all right. Actually it tastes a bit like gin, as Caitlin told me years ago. It tastes a bit like gin with honey. It's a hell of a lot smoother than any gin I've tried.

The three monks who know the exact recipe have taken vows of silence. I suppose if they talk they'll probably be killed.

Then I watched the sobering premiere of the new Game of Thrones season--I'll avoid spoilers.

Well, really, it's not sobering at all, it's a fantasy melodrama of ultraviolence and revenge. Which is certainly great fun. But I find it a little disconcerting to read reviews like this (spoiler filled) review from the Guardian that talks about how this is what war and political manoeuvrings are really like. When Jaime and Brienne were on the road to King's Landing last season, how often did they talk about food and shelter? We mainly just saw them having their enjoyable pissing contest the whole way.

The war depicted in Game of Thrones is all about dramatic changes of allegiance, ambush, brilliant victories and humiliating defeats. We don't see people being starved, we don't see how the movements of an army and people are more about a cultural momentum than the grand plans of any dictator. But that's a much harder kind of story to write. Certainly Game of Thrones is a lot more about who's-sleeping-with-whom or who's-anatomically-equipped-to-still-be-sleeping-with-people than war tends to be.

But Game of Thrones has great characters. Tyrion and Arya being my favourite two, as well as maybe Tyrion's henchman Bronn. I love how there are no clear villains or heroes which assists in the kick viewers may get from watching characters take extreme, bloody revenge or spouting some cold philosophy of rule to justify slaughter.

In particular, Arya's story is like a modern pop fairy tale where everything that went right instead went wrong. Her experiences are so consistently horrible--I think the straw that really broke the camel's back, or at least succinctly crystallised the trajectory of her life, was when she saw the wolves being killed in season three. She's not even allowed that one, tiny turn. It's largely why her bit in the new episode is so good.

Twitter Sonnet #613 The connected call drives to no outlet.
All lines efficiently avoid the end.
Mad fossils jut from the hardened inlet.
Hats abscond into the migrating wind.
Thin bottles of gauze choke the Starbucks shelf.
The transient bird eyes the dry taco.
The impotent mayor digests his wealth.
Black armbands carried forth the Sulaco.
Clouds unearthed by steel straws spark the TV.
Pale hollow aqueducts howl through mountains.
Cloves propel chartreuse eels in the bee sea.
Canes ripened for the enslaved blood captains.
Wheat ripens nowhere for the Locksley lost.
Pinned mistakes won't repeat at static cost.

The No Shoes

Just because a movie is more impressed with itself than it deserves to be doesn't mean it's an entirely bad film. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1954 film The Barefoot Contessa demonstrates why writers are often advised to "show, not tell." That Jack Cardiff, one of the greatest cinematographers in history, shot the film makes its chosen storytelling method particularly tragic. But some of the dialogue is clever, particularly coming out of Humphrey Bogart's mouth and just taking in the splendour of Cardiff's work is a joy in itself.

The biggest problem with the film is its star, Ava Gardner as a movie star, Maria Vargas. I was reminded of Anne Baxter in All About Eve, another Joe Mankiewicz film, in that so much of the movie is hinged on the actress clearly possessing an extraordinary magnetism when she does not. All About Eve is saved by the fact that Bette Davis does have that--though the film doesn't work as it's intended because we never buy Baxter as any kind of real successor to Davis. I've heard Ava Gardner is one of the most beautiful women to ever work in Hollywood but, and maybe it's just me, while I think she's pretty, she'd be pretty far down my list. I sooner think of Ingrid Bergman, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo, Barbara Stanwyck . . . and many others. And those women, a lot of their appeal, an integral part of their beauty, is that they were capable of interesting performances. Gardner has always struck me as flat and lifeless.

The movie begins with a group of Hollywood bigwigs, headed by a cold and cynical Wall Street guy named Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens), showing up in a little nightclub in Spain to see the legendary performer Maria Vargas in the hopes of hiring her as a star to launch his career as a movie mogul. Also on hand is Humphrey Bogart as writer/director Harry Dawes, perhaps an avatar of Mankiewicz, which would explain why he's a dull paragon of virtue. His narration accompanies part of the film, blandly explaining everything, telling us he's a writer and director, and so on. He gives Maria a lot of fatherly advice--he's not the love interest because he's married. So obviously there can't be chemistry. He advises Maria to stop having her affairs with men he doesn't approve of but we never meet any of these men or learn why he disapproves of him. Because he disapproves of villains in the film like Kirk Edwards, and he's Humphrey Bogart, we take his word, but this still leaves a massive void in Maria's character development, not made up for by Gardner.

Another thing All About Eve had going for it was George Sanders' devilish movie critic who made being a soulless bastard terribly attractive. His counterpart in The Barefoot Contessa is Marius Goring as a South American dictator who steals Maria away from Kirk Edwards. It's a deeply flawed scene in which he does so, one that might have been easily fixed if someone like Sanders' character had been in the writing room to bonk Mankiewicz in the head.

It's at a party Kirk is throwing at Maria's house in Hollywood. Harry and Maria come inside when they hear there's a fight starting between Goring's character, Alberto Bravano, and Kirk. The whole fight consists of Alberto smiling, calling himself at length a coward, a weakling, an exploiter of people, and finishing, "But I'm willing to admit it!" to which Kirk only replies with things like "Shut up!" or pointing out that Alberto is a dictator. The scene, which ends with an awkward moment of Hollywood sentimentality as a washed up movie actress soberly explains she knows what she's doing when she goes home with Kirk, is meant to show us why Kirk is losing his status despite all his money and success. But it ends up only telling us that Alberto is a bad guy which makes the later reveal that he's actually a bad guy seem really flat footed. None of this is helped by the fact that Goring puts on a ridiculous accent that seems to come from somewhere between Argentina and Transylvania.

This was the second time Ava Gardner, Marius Goring, and Jack Cardiff all worked on the same film, the first being the superior 1951 film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. But in hiring Cardiff and Goring, I suspect Mankiewicz was thinking more of The Red Shoes, a film whose influence can be seen in Maria's relationship with men who try to control her or love her and in her preoccupation with shoes as a sign of something that confines her. The climax of the film all but screams, "Joe Mankiewicz likes The Red Shoes!"

But like I said, Cardiff's cinematography makes this film a joy to behold. I melted when I saw this early morning shot in the count's courtyard:

I love Cardiff's characteristic colourful chiaroscuro.

Trouble is Bland and Illogical

The weird logic of a misogynist's rationalisations taken slightly out of context can be sort of fascinating. 1952's The Last Page, a.k.a. Man Bait, a Terence Fisher movie for Hammer, plays like the film version of a male employer's deposition who's guilty of sexual harassment. A man who maintains an idealised view of women even as he's quick to blame women for his own libedo. It's an awkwardly shot and written film with lacklustre performances.

George Brent stars as bookshop owner John Harman. Brent had a career in American films going back to the 30s before which he was in the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence. He always reminds me of a quote from Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray: "Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating." By that logic, Brent must have been the IRA's own Rambo.

Much prettier and slightly less talented is Diana Dors as the "bait", Ruby Bruce, an employee of the bookshop who's consistently late to work. But she doesn't exercise the awesome destructive power of her eyelashes until she meets a thief named Jeffrey Hart (Peter Reynolds).

I like to keep myself as ignorant as possible about a movie before going in so I didn't know what the agenda was. So I just thought the scene where John and Ruby worked late cataloguing books was just very strange. Having exhibited no interest in John before or after, Ruby starts making eyes at him. Then she rips her blouse while reaching for a book, he walks over to see if she's hurt, and they kiss.

He apologises and says, "That was perfectly ridiculous," before the two of them casually go back to work.

John is married to an ill, bedridden, but loving wife. When Jeffrey talks Ruby into sending her a blackmail letter, John's wife drops dead from the shock. Of course, this is all Ruby's fault! Well, not hers alone but mastermind Jeffrey's. The movie doesn't even give her the dignity of being the genuine villain, just kind of the helplessly malleable tool of Jeffrey's machinations.

This all accidentally comes back on John who, after all, couldn't help kissing Ruby, could he? His one chance of clearing his name is by pointing out three books on a shelf are upside down. And now you're thinking there must be an explanation, some reason this clearly proves John's innocence. Well, he explains, when you take those books out they can be used as a spy hole into the backroom. That's it. It's almost like the screenwriter doesn't know how thought works.

Stones and the Burning Rock

People who believe in a fundamentally ordered universe might have no qualms about living near an active volcano. There are three settlements on the island of Stromboli to-day which still has one of Italy's three active volcanoes. I have no idea what motivates people to continue living there or if living conditions have gotten any safer in recent years. But in Roberto Rossellini's 1950 film, also called Stromboli, the motive seems to be a sort of communal fanaticism. The film is a beautiful portrayal of someone abnormally sane trying to live among these people and ultimately is about the cold, impartiality of nature in rigorous discord with the pious humans.

Ingrid Bergman stars as Karin, a young Lithuanian woman living in a prisoner of war camp at the beginning of the film just after World War II. She's carrying on an affair with an Italian man named Antonio (Mario Vitale) through a barbed wire fence. They can't even kiss but when Karin's attempt to get a visa to Argentina fails she impulsively decides to accept Antonio's marriage proposal. He takes her to the small fishing village where he grew up on Stromboli.

After she spent years working in Hollywood, a familiar figure on carefully controlled soundstages and limited location shots, it's fascinating to see Ingrid Bergman in this Neorealist film, shot almost entirely on location. Partly just because it's quite clear in this film that she's extraordinarily tall--taller than all of her male co-stars in fact.

I knew she was tall--there's the famous story about how Humphrey Bogart had to stand on boxes to dance with her in Casablanca. But she'd been so carefully shot usually sitting or cast only with very tall actors like Cary Grant that seeing her in this movie feels like a revelation anyway. It doesn't make her any less gorgeous.

Karin's beauty is an important part of the film as we learn she's accustomed to getting through life through the men she charms. Her happy rapport with the town prostitute suggests she may have even worked as a prostitute herself once though the only reason the other townswomen offer for shunning her is that she is "immodest".

She doesn't cover her hair in a mediaeval fashion like the local women and she puts away all of Antonio's religious heirlooms, much to his consternation. She also brings a cactus into the house as decoration, which also seems bizarre to him--it's one of the ways the film ties Karin to nature in opposition to the townspeople who would dominate it. In one of the most amazing scenes of the film, we witness her shock at the actual footage of the fisherman at their work hauling in tuna.

The massive fish writhe in the froth over an enormous net the men lift just enough to pull the creatures in with hooks. Two other occasions in the film show Karin's shock at the villagers killing animals as a matter of course. I was reminded of The Misfits and Marilyn Monroe's character attaching her own feelings of isolation to the cruelty with which animals are treated by men.

And, of course, Karin is tied to the volcano.

I really loved the end of the film which leaves no answers to this conflict--only an impressively ominous anxiety. Which is so wonderfully appropriate--attempting to provide a solution would have been insulting. Karin's lines as she sits on the volcanic slopes above the village, about how they're "horrible" but "they don't know what they're doing," seem to cast her as a Christ-like figure even as she condemns herself for being worse than the villagers. One could say if Christ died for man's sins, a woman like Karin suffers for man's God.

Twitter Sonnet #612

Bark infused with cinnamon extract popped.
Just broccoli brings trustworthy newspaper.
Twigs snapping signal the tree traffic cop.
Boots balanced on toe feet shod the tapir.
Blue singers recline upon felt peril.
Arteries crashing through ferns smell the boar.
Mi corazon's Lego cholesterol.
My useless paper tube though takes no pour.
Air gorillas glide through shopping mall sales.
Ice cracking under broken mammoths wrote.
Bugged animals scrambled stripes in tall sails.
Tight pocket watch gears conduct the dust mote.
Beef ignored burns a tree in Mexico.
Three visions of rain played for Noriko.

Apple Process

This morning I used my Japanese grater on an apple, held over my oatmeal, making a sort of apple sauce. I stirred it in with some cinnamon, it was pretty good. Milder than packaged apple sauce.

Japanese graters, oroshigane (下ろし金), work by smashing and twisting your vegetable or what have you into a bunch of metal pins. This is how you take wasabi, which is a hard root, and turn it into the paste served with sushi, assuming your sushi restaurant serves genuine wasabi and not horseradish with food colouring.

Last night I dreamt I was at a department store with a group of women who were laughing and having a good time trying on dresses fitted with explosives. In the middle of the store there were cliffs looking over an ocean and on the televisions suspended from the ceiling throughout the store was an Entertainment To-night style coverage of footage from an upcoming film featuring Xenomorphs crashing a John Hughes prom.

Well, I'd better get to school.

[a.f.k.] Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei - 05 from escape world on Vimeo.

Flame for the Fire

Barbara Stanwyck's magnificent legs, seen here in 1941's Ball of Fire, rampaged through cinemas in the 1940s. And in movies that were great for a million other reasons, too, like Double Indemnity and The Lady Eve. Ball of Fire is no exception, directed by the great Howard Hawks from an incredibly sweet and clever screenplay co-written by Billy Wilder, the film features one of the best casts I've ever seen in a comedy.

The stiff, emotionally reserved performance that made Gary Cooper perfect for straight shooting old west lawmen unexpectedly makes him perfect for the ascetic young professor of English Bertram Potts. Potts, along with a team of other professors played by an impressive assemblage of character actors, is devoting years of his life in a manor library, writing an encyclopaedia.

Among the professors is Henry Travers for geography--that's Clarence from It's a Wonderful Life and Charlie's father from Shadow of a Doubt--Leonid Kinskey, Oskar Homolka, and S.Z. Sakall as the physician. He so hated playing the German caricature in Casablanca, he was perhaps much happier playing this character given more dignity by German screenwriter Billy Wilder. Even though the professors are called "kids" by Stanwyck's character who's amused by the stodgy bunch of middle aged virgins, the movie doesn't take cheap shots at them and honours both their wisdom and capacity for affection.

Maybe the most memorable among them, though, is the widower and professor of botany Oddley, played by Richard Hadyn whose voice would be familiar to most as the Caterpillar from Disney's 1951 version of Alice in Wonderland. Here he exhibits the same tendency to add letters to words like "exaciticly" and "pracitically". As the group offer opinions over a table on marriage, he recalls his own wife, Genevieve, and wistfully advises Potts to treat his love gently like "anemone nemorosa".

But the impressive cast doesn't stop there--Stanwyck's character is a burlesque performer named Sugarpuss--her name, Potts helpfully explains, means she has a sweet face--and she's mixed up with the mob. Her fiancé, Joe Lilac, is a mob boss played by Dana Andrews. Working for him is a goon played by Dan Duryea who gives a nuanced performance here in even this tiny role that hints at his complex lead performance later in Black Angel.

There's even a brief appearance from Elisha Cook as a waiter at the club where Sugarpuss performs a musical number called "Drum Boogie" with bandleader Gene Krupa on drums. I found this song stuck in my head the next day--singing to myself the chorus which is just, "Drum boogie, drum boogie" repeated. Gradually this turned in my head to "Grey matter, grey matter" from the song by Oingo Boingo and finally into, "Stromboli, Stromboli," which was the name of the movie I watched the following night.

The plot of Ball of Fire involves Sugarpuss helping Potts with contemporary American slang as a cover for hiding out from the cops. Brilliant screwball high jinks ensue. It's best you see it for yourself.

Yesterday's Egg Sees To-day's Rain

I think I have an egg hangover. I have a headache but I had no alcohol last night. I did have two scrambled eggs and a Cadbury Egg for dessert. I loved Cadbury Eggs when I was a kid--I'm not sure it was ever the taste so much as I liked the idea of an egg made of candy. Chocolate shell and fondant yolk. And look at me, all grown up, eating fake butter and fake veggie burger patties.

It rained last night and at school to-day I noticed these interesting trees with dead looking, rust coloured leaves and bright pink blossoms drooping with rain water.

After school, I stopped at the beach to feed some stale whole wheat bread to the seagulls--I've gone to eating whole wheat exclusively because I read it was better for the seagulls. I also like it because it has lots of gluten. Gods, I love gluten so much. Fuck the anti-gluten lobby.

And here's me working on my True Detective cosplay:

Twitter Sonnet #611

Two metres of black replaced the visage.
White rolling alleyways brain the inkpot.
Die synapse dots pulse on the red cabbage.
A roving hedgehog would see thoughts besot.
Rot wishful thinking drums the faux matchbox.
Weird quiet concerts clatter by the rooms.
The unlooked for suspect heedlessly talks.
Sharp hours in live flowerbeds feed looms.
Steel ivy eyes scale a Norman bower.
The golden corn came back for the Seahawk.
Life fending off shade runs for the tower.
False faces on mountains said stones can talk.
Rain nourished seagulls chew the sandwiches.
Clay substitute bones loosen the stitches.