Children in the Ruins

Among the many difficult jobs Allied forces faced after World War II was reuniting families separated by the Nazis. 1948's The Search is about the small children found in concentration camps and the efforts to find their parents, who were often dead. Shot on location in the ruins of post war Germany, there's an astonishing feeling of authenticity to the film but also an extremely effective, bittersweet drama between its leads, Ivan Jandl and Montgomery Clift.

Karel (Jandl) is among a group of children found in various concentration camps before ending up at a UN transit camp. Karel was in Auschwitz and has a more difficult time mustering the courage to speak than the other children but all of them are traumatised. As we're told in voice over by Mrs. Murray (Aline MacMahon) the children are conditioned to fear adults, especially adults in uniform.

The voice-over and the authentic locations give the film a documentary feel but it becomes more of a story when the children escape from an ambulance and scatter through the ruins. Karel, believed by the UN workers to have drowned, ends up meeting an American soldier named Steve (Clift) who takes him in.

Clift and Jandl are so good in this movie. Unhappy with the dialogue, Clift also contributed to the screenplay and his performance has all the naturalism you'd expect from a method actor as well as Clift's natural warmth. Steve's been eager to get home but he quickly forms a bond with Karel--who he calls Jim--and wants to stay and care for him.

Jandl won an Oscar for his role but because his native Czechoslovakia had become communist he was not permitted to travel to the U.S. to accept the award. According to Wikipedia, he didn't know any English during the making of the film and learned all his lines phonetically. If true, that's amazing because he gives such a natural, emotive performance. This may be due partly to Fred Zinnemann's direction and I would suspect having someone as natural as Clift to play off of helped as well. The kid has naturally sad eyes, too.

But all this makes it hard to account for the adorably excited reaction he has when Steve gives him a new pair of shoes--"My shoes!" he cries immediately. Not just in individual moments but over the course of the film he gives a performance with a clear progression. From withdrawn and emotionally paralysed by trauma to a kid who's responded to the comparative normalcy of an affable anchor like Steve with some of the normal energy and curiosity of a child. I found myself getting caught up in the relationship between these two characters and I felt really happy for every good thing that happened and terribly anxious even at some of the most obviously manipulative moments.

These real war torn locations along with the performances give the film an Italian Neorealist feel and I thought of Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City. But it's a very good film in its own right.

True Love or the Currency of Debt

You don't need to be Machiavelli to see that the realms of politics and business are filled with opportunists, people who use the language of friendship and loyalty merely for their own gain. But now and then I suppose there must be a poor sucker who believes everything courtiers say and such a one is Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. Written by Shakespeare probably in collaboration with Thomas Middleton, I don't hate it but it's not one of my favourite plays, and maybe that's why I don't mind Jonathan Miller's direction in the 1981 BBC production. It's certainly helped a lot by a performance from Jonathan Pryce in the title role. An actor who's uniquely talented at coming off as simultaneously elegant and foolish, he sells this production's interpretation of Timon as a man who goes from an extreme, fervent love for humanity to an extreme, absolute misanthropy.

This is the only production from the BBC Television Shakespeare I've seen so far to have padding--a very long sequence where we watch Timon's dinner guests happily eating without audible dialogue helps to stretch this very short play to almost two hours. It's a very simple story, it feels rather like one aspect of King Lear stripped of all the others--Timon is a wealthy nobleman who gives away all his wealth and then, when no-one lends him money when he's exhausted his resources, he becomes a ragged hermit who spends his days bewailing the fundamental greed and cruelty of all humanity. Timon then becomes a less plausible figure than Lear and his circumstances lack the dimensions of family and character development for the potential betrayers.

But Timon's simplicity allows it to more comfortably support a diversity of interpretations. In the play's introduction to the Norton Shakespeare, Katharine Eisaman Maus points out that Timon's boundless generosity is a means of glorifying himself; "Timon's generosity is entangled with a desire for mastery. By always giving, never receiving, Timon attempts to force his beneficiaries into an endlessly grateful and therefore subordinate role." This seems to agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson's interpretation of the character--Wikipedia quotes from one of his essays; "This giving is flat usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons … I rather sympathize with the beneficiary, than with the anger of my lord Timon." Well, that's Emerson, for you.

Such an interpretation has to deal with Timon's expressed desire at the feast, "I have often wished myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you: we are born to do benefits. And what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends?" Of course, Timon has basically purchased the right to sermonise so--few, aside from the Cynic Apemantus (Norman Rodway), would dare argue with him at this point. Interpretations could be equally justified in choosing to portray Timon as aware or unaware of this fact even as he speaks.

Miller's production definitely seems to subscribe to the latter point of view, which I think is better, and Jonathan Pryce speaks of his love for his fellows with an almost frighting fervour. With his wide eyes, odd bashfulness, and suppressed nervous energy, he seems as though he's at a banquet where he's to be married to everyone else in the room.

This madness makes the first part of the play fit well with the scenes where Timon has lost everything and greets every human being with loud anger and suspicion. This guy has only two settings and it's Pryce's ability that prevents him from being merely a tedious joke--I felt bad for him even as his wailing hit absurd heights.

One of my favourite actresses, Diana Dors, turns up briefly as one of the prostitutes Timon meets. He delivers to her and her colleague his impressively malicious speech extolling venereal disease:

. . . down with the nose,
Down with it flat; take the bridge quite away
Of him that, his particular to foresee,
Smells from the general weal: make curl'd-pate
ruffians bald;
And let the unscarr'd braggarts of the war
Derive some pain from you: plague all . . .

It's too bad she never appeared in a larger role in one of the BBC Television Shakespeare productions. She would've been a good Mistress Quickly or even Lady Macbeth.

Twitter Sonnet #1142

A vetted new surprise emerged at last.
Confetti lives as colours worms're dyed.
For future vigour eat a great repast.
In truth to sleep we down have never 'lied.'
In pools of Listerine the teeth'll bathe.
The dentist kept away the apples killed.
Incomp'rable the orange emerged unscathed.
Brazil a brave and new Miranda willed.
Foreshadowed dirk dispersed at owl's call.
The only cooling spot won't win the day.
A fleet of embers flew to light the fall.
A cart of folded rugs'll pave the way.
In plenty, coin ennobles blazing sand.
The banks of grains reform a sun's demand.

The Return of Saul

Last night's première of Better Call Saul's fourth season was a lot like the third season première--not a lot of dialogue, not a lot of plot, just the feeling of a stage being set. Sometimes I like this deliberate slow down, sometimes it does feel stretched a bit too thin.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Once again I feel like the makers of the show overestimate how interesting Mike (Jonathan Banks) is. In this episode we see that Mike quits his job at a toll booth, plays with his granddaughter while she gardens, gets a cheque from Madrigal, then goes in and infiltrates their front company like he really is a security consultant. And that's it. I like the idea of a procedural and I like what it says about Mike's worth ethic that he just can't sit still with the ten grand--he's more comfortable doing the job. But I don't know that we needed to see Mike slowly leaving the toll booth for the last time, giving up his windbreaker--I don't know that we needed to spend so much time watching Mike prowling the offices with a clipboard.

Maybe I'm a hypocrite for loving all the slow burn stuff on the new season of Twin Peaks but it seemed like Lynch's silent spaces are so much fuller. Even the long sequence of the guy sweeping the floor at the Roadhouse. Oddly the fact that it was essentially pointless makes it seem like it had more of a point to it than Mike going through the trash in the warehouse.

The scenes with Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) were better. That opening sequence set in the present day did a great job playing with suspense, showing just how precarious his life is now. He may be wearing a big moustache but he used to be on TV--running into anyone from Albuquerque has a chance of blowing his cover. So that long stare from the cab driver was filled with tension.

I'm a little worried the show won't pick up the slack in the absence of Chuck, though. The drama between the McGill brothers was amazing and vastly overshadowed everything else in the previous seasons. They're almost going to have to start from scratch. But I did think the final scene was great where Howard (Patrick Fabian) revealed he does have a conscience and breaks down over what he did to Chuck. Jimmy, completely callous, letting him keep that guilt, is both completely nasty and completely understandable after all he's been through on top of his brother's death knocking him off balance. So I do think the writers could be on to something.

The Arrows that Misdirected a Thousand Ships

It's a little difficult to describe why I tend to hate Shakespeare productions directed by Jonathan Miller. I generally like Miller in interviews and find myself absorbed by his insight; I love his Alice in Wonderland from the 60s. I even like the adaptations of Shakespeare he produced but didn't direct. But something feels consistently off about the ones he directed for the BBC Television Shakespeare. The impression I often I have is that the actors all rehearsed another play and then transferred wholesale their interpretations to the particular Shakespeare play. A case in point is his 1981 production of Troilus and Cressida, a tragic romance set during the siege of Troy. Shakespeare expands on Homer's descriptions of actions with many conferences among the Greeks, among the Trojans, and between the two, presenting arguments and posturings that at turns reaffirm justifications for policies between the two parties and provide means of psyching one another up for battle. Miller seems like he saw both sides as groups of office workers chatting around a water cooler, an impression confirmed when I read this quote from Wikipedia:

it's ironic, it's farcical, it's satirical: I think it's an entertaining, rather frothily ironic play. It's got a bitter-sweet quality, rather like black chocolate. It has a wonderfully light ironic touch and I think it should be played ironically, not with heavy-handed agonising on the dreadful futility of it all.

I agree there is satire and irony in the play but I think it's a mistake to play it as light.

Hector seems to have the idea:

Though no man lesser fears the Greeks than I,
As far as toucheth my particular,
Yet, dread Priam,
There is no lady of more softer bowels,
More spongy to suck in the sense of fear,
More ready to cry out ‘Who knows what follows?’
Than Hector is. The wound of peace is surety,
Surety secure; but modest doubt is call’d
The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches
To th’ bottom of the worst. Let Helen go.
Since the first sword was drawn about this question,
Every tithe soul ’mongst many thousand dismes
Hath been as dear as Helen—I mean, of ours.
If we have lost so many tenths of ours
To guard a thing not ours, nor worth to us,
Had it our name, the value of one ten,
What merit’s in that reason which denies
The yielding of her up?

This quarrel over Helen is about to get deadly serious, this point of honour is going to lead to a lot of spilled blood. The chest beating that occurs around this plan to set up a fight between Hector and Achilles has the touch of panic about it, everyone trying to avoid the grim realities that are about to intrude. Miller's Cassandra (Elayne Sharling) interrupts the meeting with a startling screech:

CASSANDRA

Cry, Trojans, cry. Lend me ten thousand eyes,
And I will fill them with prophetic tears.

HECTOR

Peace, sister, peace.

CASSANDRA

Virgins and boys, mid-age and wrinkled eld,
Soft infancy, that nothing canst but cry,
Add to my clamours. Let us pay betimes
A moiety of that mass of moan to come.
Cry, Trojans, cry. Practise your eyes with tears.
Troy must not be, nor goodly Ilion stand;
Our firebrand brother, Paris, burns us all.
Cry, Trojans, cry, A Helen and a woe!
Cry, cry. Troy burns, or else let Helen go.

If Cassandra were so obviously crazy would Troilus (Anton Lesser) have to spend so much time explaining her away?

TROILUS

Why, brother Hector, We may not think the justness of each act
Such and no other than event doth form it;
Nor once deject the courage of our minds
Because Cassandra’s mad. Her brain-sick raptures
Cannot distaste the goodness of a quarrel
Which hath our several honours all engag’d
To make it gracious. For my private part,
I am no more touch’d than all Priam’s sons;
And Jove forbid there should be done amongst us
Such things as might offend the weakest spleen
To fight for and maintain.

The relationship between Troilus and the young woman Cressida (Suzanne Burden) referenced in the play's title is like an exaggerated reflection of the relationship between Paris (David Firth) and Helen (Ann Pennington) to highlight its faults. In the play's introduction in The Norton Shakespeare, Walter Cohen casually calls the play misogynistic several times though he notes there are productions with feminist interpretations. In Miller's production, Ulysses (Benjamin Whitrow) is presented as a man of wisdom and self possession, which gives more weight to his line, "What hath she done, Prince, that can soil our mothers?" when he hears Troilus railing against all womankind for what Cressida does.

There seems to be a school of thought that if any woman does anything wrong in a work of fiction then it's an indication of the author's misogyny, a generalisation that presents a weird echo of Troilus' about women. Cressida is certainly unusual in Shakespeare--there are other women who do bad things but generally when a woman pledges her love to a man she remains true to her word from beginning to end. There are indications earlier that Cressida may be a little worldlier than Juliet or Ophelia. When Troilus makes to leave their bed after the two have sex, she asks him to stay.

CRESSIDA

Prithee tarry.
You men will never tarry.
O foolish Cressid! I might have still held off,
And then you would have tarried.

Sounds like Troilus might not be her first and, what's more, she's spent some time thinking about how to deal with male psychology. She's not some simple minded young idealist, she's pragmatic, so of course she breaks her word and makes nice with the Greeks when she's in their custody. The strange scene where they all take turns kissing her reminds me of Dracula's brides kissing Harker, a sort of polite, politic variant of assault. Cressida may be trying to mitigate harm but, then again, since her father's chosen the Greek side, maybe she's really getting comfortable with them. Either way, Troilus seems odd for getting so hung up on a woman's sense of honour when her life's on the line.

Actress Suzanne Burden seems as though she was directed to play Cressida just like Juliet and she wails with heartbreak when she's to be separated from Troilus. In her performance there's no sense of the irony or satire or lightness Miller talked about which makes her abrupt switch completely inexplicable. It's as though Miller thought her character was a complete mess and didn't want to bother with her. Certainly she seems committed to Troilus and Troy:

I know no touch of consanguinity,
No kin, no love, no blood, no soul so near me
As the sweet Troilus. O you gods divine,
Make Cressid’s name the very crown of falsehood,
If ever she leave Troilus! Time, force, and death,
Do to this body what extremes you can,
But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very centre of the earth,
Drawing all things to it. I’ll go in and weep—

But she seems to grow quickly weary of Troilus constantly demanding that she be true when among the Greeks which, if you think about it, as much as she might like to, is a pretty selfish and unreasonable demand on his part.

TROILUS

But ‘Be thou true’ say I to fashion in
My sequent protestation: be thou true,
And I will see thee.

CRESSIDA

O! you shall be expos’d, my lord, to dangers
As infinite as imminent! But I’ll be true.

TROILUS

And I’ll grow friend with danger. Wear this sleeve.

CRESSIDA

And you this glove. When shall I see you?

TROILUS

I will corrupt the Grecian sentinels
To give thee nightly visitation.
But yet be true.

CRESSIDA

O heavens! ‘Be true’ again!

TROILUS

Hear why I speak it, love.
The Grecian youths are full of quality;
They’re loving, well compos’d, with gifts of nature,
Flowing and swelling o’er with arts and exercise.
How novelty may move, and parts with person,
Alas, a kind of godly jealousy,
Which, I beseech you, call a virtuous sin,
Makes me afear’d.

CRESSIDA

O heavens! you love me not!

There are a couple things I like in the production. Charles Gray plays Pandarus as flamboyant and gay, which is a little distracting but kind of fun. Even more fun is The Incredible Orlando as Thersites, a performance that's pitch perfect in its grim cattiness.

Hiding Brigitte

Keeping a gangster's beautiful daughter hidden while her father is on the lam can be trickier and involve more slapstick and songs than you might imagine. In 1956's Naughty Girl (Cette sacrée gamine) a suave nightclub singer has just such a task which makes for a delightful screwball comedy that is overshadowed slightly by the loveliness of its star, Brigitte Bardot.

Jean Clery (Jean Bretonniere) is kind of a low rent Dean Martin who sings at a cabaret club. He's engaged to a fussy psychotherapist named Lili (Francoise Fabian) before his life is upended after a gang boss he's indebted to (Bernard Lancret) tasks him with caring for his young daughter. Jean not only has to hide young Brigitte (Bardot) from the authorities, who'd want to question her in connection to her father's crimes, he also has to keep hidden from her the fact that her father is a gangster, something the old man's kept her ignorant of so far.

It's a good set up for screwball and it starts paying off immediately when Jean goes to retrieve Brigitte from a dance school where she's being taught some kind of group Grecian ode to spring dance in a tiny white dress. He's much more panicked than she as the two run from the cops through the showers and then out onto the lawn and into a car. She reminds him with only mild perturbation that she's almost naked.

Bardot easily outshines Bretonniere. Director Michel Boisrond contrives several creative teases for the audience with her. The first time we see her, greeting her father outside their mansion, she seems to be fixing some dirty machine while wearing only a shirt and panties.

Then she takes the shirt off to reveal a perfectly innocent (well, really scandalously two piece) swimsuit before diving into a pool that was nearby all the time.

Hiding in Jean's home Bardot is great in plenty of the inevitable suspense comedy as she manages to stay just out of the eyeline of a visiting police inspector and hilariously tries to give a parrot to a gang courier who assumes she's speaking in code. The film also has a few nice musical numbers--Bretonniere's singing underwhelms but Bardot is great in the dance numbers, particularly in a series of Jean's fantasies. According to Wikipedia, this movie was more successful at the box office than the contemporaneous And God Created Woman, and I think I do like this film better.

Twitter Sonnet #1141

A fluttered page retracts a progress out.
A system cut from scattered eyes appears.
The telling steam is whispered through the spout.
A rolling heat expands for sick arrears.
The neon stars displaced a cup of dice.
Familiar streets of film support the train.
A starving king absconds with sacred rice.
A brilliant queen converts her scotch to rain.
Reports reflected false and true combine.
The thorn's decisions planed to steady hum.
Collected leaves import the weird divine.
Discussion ceased for grim reporting drum.
In bouncing off the cave a hail collapsed.
The atmosphere in silence sure relapsed.

Doctor of the Parliament

1963 continues to be a busy year for the Doctor in the 2013 Doctor Who audio play 1963: The Assassination Games. The Seventh Doctor proves a natural fit for this entertaining conspiracy espionage thriller.

Neither the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) or Ace (Sophie Aldred) show up for some time, the beginning of the serial featuring a press conference, an assassination, and some government men deciding what to do about it. John F. Kennedy's assassination is constantly referenced but Kennedy's name is never mentioned for some reason. In Britain dealing with this assassination are people from the UNIT predecessor Counter-Measures. The Assassination Games was one of several audios released for Doctor Who's 50th anniversary so it's fitting that it features an organisation introduced in the 25th anniversary television story, Remembrance of the Daleks, and Simon Williams reprises his role as Group Captain Gilmore from that serial.

There's a lot of misdirection and subterfuge which the story carries off well. Ace turns up as a housemaid and the Doctor seems to have become a Member of Parliament. As is so often the case with Seven, it's never completely clear how much he knows about what's going on. Less characteristic of him is some of the grandstanding he does in this story, giving a couple speeches about adventure and his blue police box that would've sounded much more at home coming from Eleven than the typically more mild mannered Seven. But maybe it was part of his politician role.

Mostly this is a good story. It features a direct reference to the inevitable fact that many years must have multiple Doctors visiting at once and there's an amusing moment where Ace nearly has a motorcycle accident.

The Armour Becomes the Prince

Seventeen years after he played the definitive merry rebel, Errol Flynn found himself in the opposite role in 1955's The Dark Avenger. A high adventure take on Edward the Black Prince, son of England's Edward III, the film finds Flynn in charge of England's occupation of Aquitaine. Lacking the energy and fun of Flynn's great swashbucklers, it does have wonderful visuals thanks to amazing costumes and great locations.

Obviously one of the film's first tasks is to make it seem like a really good thing that Prince Edward (Flynn) is occupying Aquitaine. It gets to work showing how he's a benevolent leader who steps outside his castle to meet personally on foot with peasants who approach him with grievances. Taxes were a big issue in Robin Hood and this Edward is adamant the peasants will not be taxed unfairly.

Unfortunately the villainous Comte de Ville, played by a simmering Peter Finch, has other ideas. For reasons that aren't made quite clear, the English King (Michael Hordern) hadn't punished or deposed De Ville when he refused to swear fealty after being conquered. So De Ville goes right ahead imposing taxes to raise an army against the Prince, the army routes the Prince's forces, and the Prince and his right hand man are forced into hiding. They stay at a tavern where they run into an uncreditted Christopher Lee.

And Lee and Flynn have a sword fight. But despite the fact that Flynn accidentally nearly severed Lee's finger it's a fight lacking greatly in ferocity. The two slowly and deliberately swing their blades at each other as though they'd rehearsed the fight only once or twice. Producer Walter Mirisch is quoted by Wikipedia as saying of Flynn, "Before we started to shoot, I asked him to diet and hopefully lose some weight, which he didn't do. There were only traces left of the face, physique and charm that he had brought to The Adventures of Robin Hood, Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk and all those other great adventure films of his youth." But, the swordfight notwithstanding, I didn't have a problem with Flynn's performance or the fact that he seemed older and slightly fatter. He just seems like he's lived a lot more and the world has made him a little sad and circumspect. He seems wiser than the fiery young upstart he was.

The historical Prince Edward was called the Black Prince though likely not for the reason the film invents. Most of the plot involves Edward posing as a Black Knight who poses as an ally of De Ville, insisting on anonymity until the English are defeated. Joanne Dru, the tough dame who took an arrow to the shoulder in Red River, is surprisingly flat as Flynn's love interest and the two never have chemistry. But the film's parade of costumes is certainly a marvel.

Shapes of Villainy

How very different Richard III is with Queen Margaret around. When Jane Howell's production aired in 1982 it was as a conclusion to a series, the first three parts of which were made up by Shakespeare's three Henry VI plays. This gave Howell the rare opportunity to produce Richard III without trimming or removing scenes involving Queen Margaret, a major character in the Henry VI plays but considered superfluous to productions that present Richard III as a standalone story. The difference in seeing Richard III with its intended connecting tissue is enormous, presenting a more complex world for Richard to inhabit and introducing greater nuance and complexity to Richard himself. The performances continue to be good and the linked casting wonderful.

Played by Ron Cook, Richard comes off as both more and less strange than usual. He's a relatively new player on this stage that has already seen plenty of ruthless ambition and bloody betrayal, he having not appeared until the end of Henry VI Part 2. Wikipedia quotes Jane Howell as saying of Richard in this production, "you've seen why he is created, you know how such a man can be created: he was brought up in war, he saw and knew nothing else from his father but the struggle for the crown, and if you've been brought up to fight, if you've got a great deal of energy, and physical handicaps, what do you do? You take to intrigue and plotting." At the same time, though, Richard is much cleverer and much readier to discard bonds of loyalty and family than anyone else who came before. He's a fourth generation blackguard, more streamlined than his predecessors.

Both in Henry VI Part 3 and Richard III Richard talks repeatedly about how his physical appearance has determined his fate. As he says in his famous opening soliloquy:

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain

This reflects a perspective on reality that had currency in Shakespeare's time, that beauty in some way really did represent virtue and ugliness the opposite. It's key to the scene where Richard seduces Anne Neville, here played by Zoe Wanamaker (familiar to Doctor Who fans as the ever in need of hydrating Lady Cassandra). A lot of productions and commentaries miss this, that Richard telling Anne that her beauty forced him to commit murder doesn't sway her merely as a point of flattery. The power of appearances was very real.

So the interpretation of the scene is a tricky challenge for directors and actors. We have to believe Richard really seduces her or the scene is simply grotesque and absurd. In his introduction to the play in The Norton Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt says the scene is more about "Richard's restless aggression transformed during the rapidfire exchange" but he also characterises Anne as, "shallow, corruptible, naively ambitious, and, above all, frightened." No matter how effective Richard is, it takes two to tango, seems to be Greenblatt's idea. But I think it's worth considering Anne's situation a little deeper. Is it mere naive ambition that forms part of her decision to marry Richard? She's a surviving member of the defeated faction of bloody wars--marriage promises not merely power but the possibility of some security for her and hers. This might be accounted for in the "frightened" part but whether she's shallow or corruptible is by no means certain.

Wanamaker plays her with quick eyes, ferocity, and intelligence and when Richard's rhetoric starts to make headway she seems shaken. She looks like a woman who's suddenly unsure of everything she thought she knew, which is just about right.

Greenblatt writes a lot about Richard's erotic power--and cites an amusing incident from the diary of a law student named John Manningham from Shakespeare's time about a woman who fell for the actor Richard Burbage for his portrayal of Richard III. Though I would suggest the attraction Richard holds for the audience is less in his aggression and more in the brashness of his self-confidence, the vulnerability of his repressed self-loathing, and the interplay between these qualities.

Richard's perception of his own ugliness is part of his worldview reiterated from Henry VI Part 3, a decision to own the world's perception of him and use it to his advantage. Of course, it proves a component of his downfall and is essential to what makes the play a tragedy instead of just a beautiful bonfire. When he tries to convince his brother's widow, Elizabeth (Rowena Cooper), to urge her daughter to marry him, he implicitly admits to the crimes Elizabeth accuses him of. When she asks what he can promise to make this an attractive match for her daughter, Richard can only say, "The time to come," meaning as he consolidates power he'll be able to reshape reality to his will, as previous rulers have done.

As I intend to prosper and repent,
So thrive I in my dangerous attempt
Of hostile arms! myself myself confound!

He's climbed this far, at this point he's king, on the belief that he was formed at birth as something by nature wicked. But this requires his brain to operate in two realities at once, he can't be wicked without having some nature that recognises wickedness and this leads to the extraordinary misery of the dream sequence.

Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!
I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,

Margaret (Julia Foster) never goes to war with herself like that. As a murderer she has more focus which gives her curses almost the quality of a natural disaster. The appearances of the ghosts seem natural when the play is filled with references to her curses. Margaret becomes a personification of warfare's bloody legacy.

The restoration of Margaret to the play helps emphasise all the women. She has a conference with Elizabeth and Richard's mother (Annette Crosby) where she first enumerates the crimes against her the other two women have been complicit in. Yet Elizabeth pleads, "O thou well skill'd in curses, stay awhile, And teach me how to curse mine enemies!" And Margaret seems amenable to this. It's as though at this point she has become a free floating force of malevolence. Curses are always so much eerier when they come from the damned.

I really like this production. My only complaint is that Howell reuses actors in different roles a lot. An actor who played a character who died will show up later playing someone else. Sometimes Howell seems to be making a point with this, as when the actors who played Richard's brother and father turn up on Richmond's side at the end of the play. And likely in Shakespeare's time the same actors were playing multiple roles (I've always loved the theory that Cordelia and the Fool in King Lear were played by the same actor). But it dilutes some of the power from the linked casting a bit and gets confusing at times. Otherwise, this is a really nice production.

Twitter Sonnet #1140

A knowing face above a shirt was worn.
Above the trees the atmosphere condensed.
From metal wombs the submarines were born.
Propellers trace where water hunts commenced.
A wall of rock requites an egg for time.
Between the fingers thread is moved a foot.
The pitted tweed began a sodden climb.
On windy top the house became but soot.
A scavenged club bespoke forsaken arms.
A time to come delivered bugs to space.
A ballast floats for hollow wooden harms.
A waterbug proceeds with stickly grace.
A drinking weed began to walk the pond.
But frogs and pads create a sitting bond.

The Stones of a Lost Home

Logically, a safer and more efficient way of life is preferable to a dangerous and difficult one. Yet few viewers would be unaffected by the evacuation of the remote, forbidding island in Michael Powell's 1937 film The Edge of the World. Based loosely on the evacuation of St. Kilda in the Scottish archipelago a few years earlier, Powell's film has a plot dealing with the deterioration of a small culture that had existed for centuries but primarily the great filmmaker makes his point with an incredible series of breathtaking compositions. Shot on the island of Foula, the images are spellbinding.

The film begins with an unnamed English yachtsman (Powell himself) piloting his craft along with a companion and a guide (Niall MacGinnis) past the imposing and strange cliff sides that will dominate the film. They go ashore to find deserted buildings and in a beautifully eerie sequence the guide stands by while ghostly images of the former villagers walk past and look at him in double exposed footage. I love that the ghosts seem able to see the guide but he can't seem to see them.

We meet these ghosts in flashback and witness a drama about a young woman named Ruth (Belle Chrystall), her father, Peter (John Laurie), her brother, Robbie (Eric Berry), and her boyfriend, Andrew, who turns out to be the guide we met at the beginning. Robbie wants to leave the island where eking out a living has become harder now that trawlers regularly come by and take vast quantities of the fish the inhabitants once depended on. Andrew would prefer to stay, marry Ruth, and maintain his ancestors' way of life.

There's very little dialogue as the story unfolds with shots of people climbing up treacherous, vertical rock face or perched precariously on the edges of the cliffs looking quite at ease. When Robbie and Andrew compete in climbing a difficult cliff side, the women watch from this presumably safer vantage point.

Even more impressive are the shots from above where distant, sparkling sea is visible beyond the shaded figures of three of the women.

Tiny figures are also frequently juxtaposed with expanses of rocky, sparsely vegetated landscape.

How and why would anyone live here? The answer is in the impact of the visuals which is deeper than beauty for the seduction of their gloom and maybe inexpressible in words.