Nature is Wet

A little Snow before the coming storm. We've been getting a lot of rain around here lately--to-day there were lots of dark clouds and bright sunlight, my favourite conditions for taking photographs, but I didn't have a lot of time to-day for that because of all the homework I have. I already did my math homework--holy shit, I hate math. I still suck at it, too, I can tell in class by how often I get wrong problems the teacher puts on the board for us. It's not so much I don't know how to do them as that I can't stop my brain from checking out at crucial points where I forget to switch a negative number to a positive number when distributing to sides of equations and blah blah blah--I'm zoning out just talking about it. Oof, I'll be doing math most of the year, too, since I have another math class to do after this one. I try to take comfort in the fact that after this year I'll probably never need to take a math class again and this is already the second month of the year.

At least this semester I also have British Literature II, though the homework I have for that is only slightly more interesting to-night--it's William Wordsworth, a metric tonne of William fucking Wordsworth and it turns out I kind of hate Wordsworth. I like him less than Walt Whitman. He seems to be one of those people who harshly criticise sentimentality in others before wallowing in it himself. And it's funny how much he attacks metre in his critical writing since his ability to put words together in effective mechanics of rhythm and rhyme has so far been the best quality of his work. I guess I do dig his love for nature.

Anyway, here are some more pictures I've taken lately;

Twitter Sonnet #476

Hydrangea jungles hide old ink stamps.
Malted pages awaken word sugar.
Whale blood answers a school's call for new lamps.
Bricks collapse behind a cardboard mugger.
Worthless wool's meaningless on a blank page.
Applause from beer cans yields little echo.
Coelacanth cobblers get minimum wage.
Vanzetti's moustache paid him and Sacco.
Vital lizard ladies reclaim harvest.
Upside down donations upload plasma.
Inverse vampires in victims invest
More blood than a Valentine miasma.
Marshmallow sign posts direct the rain cloud.
Little angels distribute a pink shroud.

Her Crime was Magnificent Sex Appeal with a Shameless Libido

There seems to be a fine tradition of movies about men falling in love with women in portraits--Laura, Vertigo, and also Fritz Lang's 1944 film noir The Woman in the Window. Joan Bennett as Alice Reed is so intensely luscious in this movie, one can't blame Edward G. Robinson, as a meek psychology professor named Richard Wanley, for falling for her. It's a noir, so despite an awkward "it was all a dream" happy ending Lang was obliged to tack on, this is a movie where a sequence of devastating catastrophes are initiated by what seems by comparison a small transgression. In fact, I don't think I've seen a noir where I've felt the protagonists were more innocent. It's a wonderfully bitter film about the treacherous loopholes hidden in one's moral conception of the world.

Wikipedia identifies Alice as a femme fatale, and while I guess she's seductive and at one point even tries to seduce a guy in order to kill him, she's only trying to kill the guy because he's threatening her and her friend. Several times in the movie she goes out of her way in an attempt to do the right thing. It seems like the real crime of hers the movie is concerned with is that she's more sexually aggressive than any of the men in the film. She lures Richard back to her place, sure, but she doesn't know he's married and she doesn't seem to want anything from him but sex. I can't begin to see anything wrong with it, and I see even less wrong with it the more I look.

The film opens with Richard teaching his class about the difference between murder and killing in self defence, how the law naturally is more likely to forgive the latter than the former. Little does he know he's about to find himself in a situation that proves the issue is much thornier than what he's laid out in his lecture.

His wife and kids are on vacation, so he spends most of his time at his club, which is next door to the place exhibiting the portrait of Alice. He leaves late one night and runs into the woman herself, who, after awkward introductions between the two where she's obviously deeply flattered by his admiration of her portrait, she asks him to buy her a drink. One thing leads to another, and they're enjoying more drinks at her apartment when an ex-lover shows up and in a fit of jealousy attacks Richard who somehow manages to kill the bigger man by stabbing him in the back with a pair of scissors while Richard is underneath him.

Reasoning he didn't really do anything wrong--it was a clear case of self defence--but that if the story got out about him in the home of a woman who's not his wife, having drinks late at night, it would ruin his reputation and probably his marriage, he decides to dispose of the body.

Richard is a gentle and unassuming fellow. His friends, one of whom is district attorney, had earlier made fun of how poorly he's cut out for adventure, and unfortunately he proves them right as in this circumstance he proceeds to do just about everything wrong, leaving a massive trail of evidence and falling into every conversational pitfall imaginable, including the standard "Just because a man's missing doesn't mean he's been murdered." "Wait, I didn't say he'd been murdered."

A large section of the film is given over to Alice trying to negotiate with Dan Duryea's character--he's the dead man's bodyguard and he tries to blackmail Alice and Richard. So Alice actually turns her fatale powers on the villain of the film. The two actors generate a lot of delicious tension between them in their subtle power play under which Richard is eventually crushed. But Alice does everything she can to save him and herself. With fatales like this, who needs good girls?

Animal Pelts and Toupees

This is the best I've seen Bill Maher in a while. It was particularly satisfying after hearing Trump on The Howard Stern Show trying to massage the story into an insult by Maher against Trump's parents. Because, of course, there's nothing puerile or racist about repeatedly asking the President for his birth certificate like it's a pertinent issue.

I started playing the new Skyrim DLC yesterday, Dragonborn. So far I like it. It's set in Solsteim, the same island where Bloodmoon, the add-on for Morrowind, took place and it's interesting seeing how the hundreds of years that that have passed between the two games have altered the location. Control of the ebony mining town of Raven Rock has changed hands several times--there was a subplot in Bloodmoon where you aided in the construction of Raven Rock for the Empire, so there's a nice sense of participating in the town's history. Since then, control of the town has passed to the refugee House Redoran from Morrowind, who settled in the region after being driven from their home by an invading army. And there's been a volcanic eruption in Morrowind, which is visible from most places in Solsteim.

This eruption also blasted and coated with ash much of the south eastern portion of Solsteim but there are quite a few recognisable landmarks elsewhere in, of course, much better detail now. And the old Skaal village has survived in the hands of descendents of people met in Bloodmoon.

It would be a lot more fun exploring Solsteim if the game didn't crash every few minutes when one is outdoors. This is a puzzling glitch since Skyrim itself was much larger and more stable than its predecessors in the Elder Scrolls series.

The big draw for Bloodmoon, of course, was werewolves. Since Skyrim already has werewolves, I guess they figured they needed something new for Solsteim and I've already run into three werebears, who first appeared as almost naked men running at me before they transformed. It's actually a pretty good, rather literal interpretation of berserkers ("ber" is Old Norse for bear and "serkr" referred to a garment).

Men and the Inconvenient Human

One wonders what Shakespeare's intent was in creating Falstaff. Was he meant simply to be an agent of Prince Hal's indiscretions, to add tension to the Henry IV plays as to whether or not Hal would prove a worthy heir to the crown? Or did Shakespeare quite intend Falstaff to be as he is, a counter current of genuine human insight in the polarised sequence of larger than life figures, beginning with the villainous Richard II to the honourable two King Henrys? Which is not to say, of course, that those kings are weakly conceived characters. They're men devoted to hard ideals while Falstaff is not, paradoxically drawing our admiration more, or at least our respect. When he thinks he sees Falstaff has died (though the big knight is of course only effecting a "counterfeit" of death), Hal says, "I could have better spar'd a better man." This is perhaps more clearly true in Orson Welles' 1966 film Chimes at Midnight than in any other adaptaion. In this film, Welles brilliantly blends five of Shakespeare's plays to tell the story of Falstaff and his relationship with Prince Hal. This is by no means the definitive take on Falstaff, which is just as well, as it forms only a part of a universe of adaptations and takes on the character. What Welles presents here is a tightly focused tale of a man choosing between two fathers, in so doing choosing between two conceptions of human existence.

Just before the Battle of Shrewsbury, when Hal and his father, the king, have gathered forces for the conflict--among whom is Falstaff with a motley retinue--there is this famous exchange between the Prince and Falstaff;

PRINCE: Why, thou owest God a death.

FALSTAFF: 'Tis not due yet. I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth be bear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon- and so ends my catechism.

Reading the play, it's difficult to get a feel for the horrors of the battlefield. Mostly it becomes a comic scene with Falstaff's dialogue, though it's as though Shakespeare had in mind a production that could adequately convey the monstrousness of battle because Falstaff's humorous lines have in them the resonance of a real insight into the hopelessness of human conflict. Welles brings this contrast into brilliant life with the most famous scene in Chimes of Midnight, one of the best conceived medieval battle sequences, one of the best battle sequences, in the history of cinema.

He only had 180 extras but Welles made it look like thousands with composition and editing. He gets a few crane shots of knights with lances galloping towards one another but mostly the camera is low amongst the confusion of men and horses frantically slaughtering one another in the mud. Every time we see maces coming down on men, swords being driven through chests, the camera rarely focuses on it, they zip by in the camera's dizzy journey about the field, or we get caught on men relentlessly bludgeoning a helpless man or horse into the mud. Welles gets a lot of traction in the span of about four seconds from this white horse;

We first see it falling to the ground in the direction of the camera's violent swish to the right, then we see it struggling back up before Welles cuts away, then comes back to the horse as it's walking backwards in terror.

Somehow Welles finds a rhythm in these shots that pieces together the right sense of quick snatches of points of view from people and animals. Meanwhile we see Falstaff wandering on the outskirts in a massive suit of armour like an astronaut on the moon.

And suddenly he looks like the only sane man around and the king represents a player in a sick, mutually agreed upon delusion.

John Gielgud plays the king with an appropriate gravity; "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" indeed. Consumed with the implications of his actions in terms of honour and morality, here is a man tragically pricked. Welles himself plays Falstaff, the opposite of the king.

It's hard to imagine anyone better suited for the role, as many have said. In addition to suiting the character physically, Welles gives the character the right amount of animalistic majesty without ever being maudlin. He sets the newly crowned Henry V's rejection of Falstaff in a silent, echoing chamber filled with people bearing witness to the coronation. Welles' face is heartbreaking as the new king tells him that their friendship essentially meant nothing as it is the same as essentially saying the humanity Falstaff represents meant nothing. Hal becomes one of the "better men".

Twitter Sonnet #475

The green hat forgotten spikes memory.
Flat arms in fours bring luck to white meadow.
Dandelion hair plugs, spring's usury;
Sundials wilt in five o'clock shadow.
Invisible diapers hold the wise poop.
Charcoal fur makes Chia diamonds in space.
Ethereal hirsute stars spoil soup.
The luck of black holes makes all hands an ace.
Quantum mechanics won't help you lose weight.
Haystacks frighten scarecrows with torture porn.
Peppermint is the leg's striped gastric bait.
Close-ups show mugs of barmy bristles shorn.
Pop-O-Matic Agincourt bloodshed crashed
Software withered by agéd green hearts dashed.

Blake Day

In its introduction to William Blake, my copy of the Norton Anthology says, "To read a Blake poem without the pictures is to miss something important: Blake places words and images in a relationship that is sometimes mutually enlightening and sometimes turbulent, and that relationship is an aspect of the poet's argument." The Norton Anthology then proceeds to present the poems without their pictures. This is in spite of the fact that it's quite true, often there is something crucial in the illustration, for example the fact that Blake portrayed the worm in The Book of Thel as an infant with no arms;

Yesterday I read Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Book of Thel, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The only one I'd read before was Songs of Innocence and of Experience and, as much pleasure as I had in reading it for the first time in such a long time, it was actually my least favourite. The transgressive points of view on religion, government, and sexuality in the other three books are put together with such incredible wit and charm. Songs seems a little more dated by comparison, particularly poems like "The Little Black Boy". But I don't mean to give the idea I think Songs of Innocence and of Experience is bad. It's very far from that.

I was particularly impressed by the two chimney sweeper poems after my teacher to-day reminded us that children were employed in the occupation and suffered from sometimes fatal and often permanent afflictions from the soot. The illustration accompanying the version in the Songs of Experience section is appropriately nightmarish, looking almost like something from Goya.

I used to have a copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience with images of Blake's original engraved illustrations, but I couldn't find it when I turned my room upside down for it. Fortunately, Wikipedia has links to online digital facsimiles of the editions Blake crafted by hand himself. Here's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Book of Thel, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. If you haven't read them, and even if you have, they're well worth your time. They're not unlike web comics.

The Structure in the Environment

It seems like irony is becoming the new sincerity, or at least sincerity can't be taken without the comforting reminder that the story is in fact a commentary on other stories. In other words, don't worry about what's going on behind the scenes because you're behind the scenes too. Which is a little depressing, a sign perhaps of the diminishing imaginations of even intelligent movie goers, but that doesn't mean 2012's The Cabin in the Woods is a bad film. In fact, it's pretty good, though it almost seems like it succeeds in spite of itself.

I've been reading William Blake all day and this quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, about Milton's Paradise Lost, seems oddly appropriate; "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."

The Cabin in the Woods was co-written and produced by Joss Whedon, who is quoted in Wikipedia as talking about how the movie was intended as a "loving hate letter" to horror movies and meant to be critical of "the devolution of the horror movie into torture porn and into a long series of sadistic comeuppances." On the subject of torture porn, of films supposedly belonging to the genre I've only seen the first two Hostel movies and the first Saw film, but I suspect that's a great deal more than most people who routinely criticise it. At any rate, The Cabin in the Woods doesn't seem to contain any specific reference to those films, unless it is in the existence of an institution which manipulates attractive young people into meeting their deaths by brutal torture for the viewing pleasure of a sadistic audience. Which as a concept, hardly in itself confronts what is supposedly distinct about torture porn, since such a concept is at least as old as Edgar Allan Poe.

The plot of The Cabin in the Woods involves a group of young people who, by reason of drugs and chemicals covertly introduced to their systems in shampoo and presumably beverages and invisible gases, are turned into the stock characters of a horror film--Chris Hemsworth plays a leader jock, Anna Hutchinson plays his girlfriend whose blonde hair dye turns her into the sexually promiscuous one who must be punished according to the implicit rules of a horror film, Kristen Connolly plays Dana, the "virgin" who it is implied is not a virgin but close enough. Jesse Williams plays a banal good guy to fill out the group, and Fran Kranz gets the best role as "the fool" whose pot habit has made him immune to the lobotomising drugs. As a consequence, he's the only character among the group who gets any real development, as we're left to wonder what the others were like before treatment, most crucially Dana. She has closest to the lead role and her lack of personality unmoors the film somewhat, since it fails to develop much actual horror to compensate.

The film works best when it seems like an episode of Angel, as it becomes a sincere fantasy tale using the trappings of an irony commentary. There's a wonderful sequence near the end where the heroes let loose a number of movie monsters, and Whedon and director Drew Goddard, to perhaps their shame, indulge in some satisfying violent mayhem.

The film's insights aren't always especially new--like the hierarchy of kills, which are relatively well known to anyone with a passing familiarity with tropes. An early scene where Whedon and Goddard seek to show the drugged kids behaving in a typically stupid way contrasted with Fran Kranz comparatively realistic state falls flat because the actions of the supposedly stupid kids are only stupid if they're aware of the existence of zombies, and Kranz's telling them it's a bad idea to investigate the items in the cellar of the old cabin are only smart if he also has foreknowledge. In fact, in real life, the stupidity would be on precisely the other foot. Why wouldn't one want to explore the strange relics in an old cabin?

One is reminded that Angel is a superior work since in that format the makers of this film were able to craft characters over a period of time that were more interesting to pit against strange violence than the mostly rather dull types here. The irony, I guess, is that in attempting to create an ironic portrait of stock types to show their uselessness in good story telling, Whedon and Goddard have here given us insubstantial blank canvases.

The Time that Can't be Missed

It's strange that Alfred Hitchcock appears to have had nothing to do with 1948's The Big Clock. It even has costumes by Edith Head. And, more significantly, it's a thriller built around a more or less ordinary man, played by Ray Milland (of Dial M for Murder), who spends the film narrowly evading implication in a murder he didn't commit. It's a film effective in the tension it creates and quite funny as well.

The film has Charles Laughton, star of Hitchcock's adaptation of Jamaica Inn, in charge of a large publishing company, held in a building where the crime magazine that Milland's character is editor in chief of is produced. Milland has a knack for tracking down criminals even the police have trouble with.

Laughton exerts his presence all over his fiefdom with his obsession with clocks all throughout the building, linked to the central "Big Clock." Milland has a five year old son with his wife, played by Maureen O'Sullivan--they had the kid after they were married but Laughton keeps his employees working so persistently that the couple have not yet had a honeymoon. Finally, Milland has had it, the last straw apparently being when Laughton demands at the last minute, before Milland's long awaited vacation, that he put off the vacation, fly personally out of state to investigate a story, oh, and, could he have the typesetter change the lettering on the cover from green to red?

So Milland finally quits, but instead of meeting up with his wife at the train station as planned, he apparently feels so happy in his recklessness he spends the night bar hopping with Laughton's mistress, the woman who falls victim to murder.

There is a sense of heaven's vengeance in Milland being implicated in a murder when all he's really guilty of is infidelity, but it's a relatively minor point, not big enough to make The Big Clock a full fledged film noir. As one review I read says, it's closer to a screwball comedy, especially when circumstances fall out to put Milland in charge of investigating the murder when for most of the film the presumed name of the culprit is a name Laughton's mistress made up to enrage his jealousy. As the investigation proceeds, there is effective suspense as steadily accumulating clues begin to point to Milland as the perpetrator.

Another thing curbing the comedic quality is Laughton, who plays his character with cold, lethargic psychosis, like a big reptile.

Of course, though, I watched the movie for his real life wife, Elsa Lanchester, who plays a painter who saw Milland with the murder victim, but who decides not to turn him in, since he's a fan of her work and she has "few enough collectors." She refrains from pressing him on the nature of his crime but notes the number of people working in the building on the case and says, with barely restrained glee, that whatever he'd done, "with all that hue and cry downstairs it must be something terribly lurid."

Twitter Sonnet #474

Pizza eyes knock about like dominos.
Huttesian hula devolves into slime.
Fate caught the thighs too big for your manos.
Repetition's a groundhog's song of time.
Men for animal heads beat number men.
Rubber bands break with the older light bulb.
Purple wings stretch much larger than a wren.
Destiny gives for great thighs and the bold.
Innumerable clamps hold the New Year.
Burning mice tremble before the corn flu.
Thin polygons scarcely cover an ear.
Psychic cards can see what drawings may do.
Old nations sold to new ones educate
No pockets that cannot reciprocate.

Games and Hate

Looks like the page numbers in the syllabus for my British Literature II class are for the older edition of the book so I guess I'll just read everything my book has on Robert Burns and William Blake to prepare for to-morrow's quiz. I could think of worse ways to spend the evening. It's only too bad I have to do math homework too.

Yesterday I again got caught up in the Superbowl in spite of myself. I almost arbitrarily rooted for the Ravens. Partly I was turned against the 49ers because of an interview with Artie Lange where Chris Culliver of the 49ers made some very casually hateful comments about homosexuality. Though, as Lange noted, "that's the NFL", and I assume the players for the Ravens are likely just as homophobic. At least it hasn't been publicised. I mean, it seemed as good a reason as any to root for the Ravens. Plus, I prefer the team that uses an animal head as its insignia.

Lange noted on his show Friday that the NFL needs "a gay Jackie Robinson." I heard a player who came out after retirement some months ago on Lange's show, but I guess there haven't been any openly gay players.

Anyway, how 'bout that game? People were running and sometimes carrying a ball. I mean, did you see that?

Okay, I have to admit even I was impressed when that guy ran across the entire field to make a touchdown. Not as impressed as I was by Beyonce's thighs, though.

Handing It to the Shadow

My avatar won a costume contest at an M.C. Escher party last night. I got the outfit from Vita's Boudoir, as usual, though I added a hand to the crotch in honour of the one David Bowie couldn't wear for this performance;

This web site quotes Bowie from a 2002 interview talking about the outfit;

I did one particular song, can't remember what it was now but I had a strange kind of string knitted costume made with three hands on. Two of them on my chest, looking like I was being gripped from the back...And a third one on my crotch. I nearly started a riot with the Americans. They said: "Oh we can't show that, that's subversive." We went through hell, so I had to take the hand off my crotch. And then of course they didn't like the black pouch piece that was down there, that the hand was stitched to...so I had to change all that. So, like the 'Diamond Dogs' thing that they airbrushed the dick off, I was having more erasure problems. It followed me all through the Seventies. It's funny that I can remember the costume and not the song, totally indicative of what the time was like.

Bowie has a new song, by the way. Or it was new a couple weeks ago, anyway;

Howard Stern complained he preferred it when Bowie "rocks". I don't consider this one of Bowie's stronger works, but I do like it. It reminds me somewhat of "Thursday's Child", though it's more of a rumination of a state than the sort of revelation quality "Thursday's Child" has. "Thursday's Child" seemed to be, at least in part, about someone discovering who and what he is, sort of suddenly, having to do with his age. I remember hearing Bowie talking about how it was more about the relationships of people he knew that were falling apart rather than his own relationship with Iman. But I can see how he might have identified with the subject matter as part of his preoccupation with aging. This new song reminds me of some Morrissey's newer stuff, which also tends to focus on sort of aimlessly wandering about continental European cities, notably not the countries where either artist grew up, yet countries where both have spent a lot of time in their adult life. It seems sort of like reflections on what this strange world is they've built for themselves, projects that began with the independent striking out from the people or places of their youths or familiar cliques, but have grown into a permanent sense of place. "Where Are We Now", the title of the song, emphasises that there's a sense that sooner or later one gets to the point where one realises moving house or reinventing oneself will never satisfy the need that prompted those actions in the first place and there's an insubstantial, alien reality we're always stuck with.

I'm behind now on four movies I want to talk about. I also watched Groundhog Day again on Friday, for Groundhog Day, of course, like I guess a lot of people do. That movie never seems to get old. I see on the Wikipedia entry that it's ranked among the greatest screenplays ever written, and it is a remarkably perfect bit of writing and acting. Though credit goes to Harold Ramis as well because I recall from the commentary he actually made a lot of big changes to the screenplay.

Last night was the best night's sleep I got in about week yet I feel more tired to-day. Hopefully coffee will fix that . . .

Remember Him, He was One of Us, in Fact He was Our Clone

Question: What's worse than Jar Jar Binks? Answer: Jar Jar Binks with bagpipes. Yes, for some reason in the Star Wars: Clone Wars series, it was apparently decided that Jar Jar's astonishingly consistently flat slapstick would be accompanied by vigorously played bagpipe music in the background. I discovered this last night when I got to the eighth episode of the first season, which is actually centred on Jar Jar. However, I'd found myself really digging the episodes preceding it.

Tim had been recommending the show to me for a while but it wasn't until a couple weeks ago I really started to get into it. I'd watched the pilot movie and the first episode--a stand-alone story about Yoda--years ago and had neglected the rest. Then I compulsively watched three episodes in one night. These were connected episodes, and the show plays delightfully like a serial.

But the writing is engaging for other reasons, too. I really liked a more or less stand alone episode about some rookie clones guarding a small base from Separatist droids. The characters are broadly constructed with a blatant appeal to emotions as one of the clones sacrifices himself for the good of his fellows. It feels so much like propaganda--not unlike Battleship Potemkin--it adds a wonderful nuance to the fact that the clones eventually turn on the Jedi they protect with such noble gestures. It becomes almost a commentary on propaganda itself by acknowledging the validity of sympathies from the audience for characters in propaganda. It makes me hope to see that post-Episode III series get off the ground. I'd love to see stories about how these same clones act and feel after they've turned.

My favourite episode so far, though, was one where Anakin leads a fighter attack on General Grievous' ship in order to protect a medical station. It reminded me so much of playing X-Wing and TIE Fighter. I really need to get another joy stick.

Twitter Sonnet #473

Elephantine phones know too much about
Townhouses where stoic marble reflects
Twists of blue whale crayons arming the rout
Of the double Hallmark cardboard insects.
Cavernous notions slide feathers of wit
Through the thimble drain in separate stinking
Streams of yellow hue and by red flame lit
As they were oil through a sieve sinking.
Drum rolls of the daydreamed camel stairway
Retract rare coats from high school reunion
Fog machines which glimmer with a risqué
Sheath of a restitched pink Ringwald bullion.
Weather unchosen chastised wilful shade
Scratching calendars in plastic glade.

Pugilists, Pearls, Paupers, Prostitutes, Princesses, and Plunder

Now here's a movie with an impressive cast comprised of individuals fascinating for very different reasons. 1942's Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake lists seven familiar names up top in its closing credits; Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, George Sanders, Frances Farmer, Roddy McDowell, John Carradine, and Elsa Lanchester. The movie's a typical enough Tyrone Power post-Mark of Zorro swashbuckler, though sadly lacking entirely in sword fights, substituting far less interesting fist fight sequences. But the story of a young man of noble birth trying to reclaim his birthright from his sinister uncle George Sanders is told well enough.

Sanders also played the villain to Power in The Black Swan--a far more satisfying swashbuckler (it had sword fights). But here he works well as an accomplished pugilist since he was a big man, with much broader shoulders than Basil Rathbone.

Roddy McDowell plays the young Benjamin Blake, working as an apprentice to his grandfather on his mother's side, a gunsmith, before he's plucked up by Sanders to work in the stables, where Sanders can hush up the boy's heritage and claim the baronetcy for himself. Before I realised who the young actor was, I was already thinking McDowell was giving a good performance for a child actor, sounding like he was genuinely mulling matters over when he decides to stay in the stables instead of escaping to live on the road, always hunted, with his grandfather.

For some reason, growing up in the stables of an English manor house caused McDowell to gain an American accent and turn into Tyrone Power, who plays the role with his usual very default charm and without his truly impressive fencing abilities on display.

Frances Farmer plays Isabel Blake, daughter of Sanders' Arthur Blake character, making her and Benjamin first cousins, but this doesn't in any way make them hesitate in having an affair.

This is Farmer's last role before her arrest and years of brutal and dubiously motivated mental health treatment, and perhaps that she's a fairly cutthroat and villainous character here is a reflection of the fact that Hollywood considered her to be on the way down while Gene Tierney, a tadpole of a star the studio was just releasing into the stream after the usual careful grooming, plays an innocent Caribbean Island princess.

She doesn't speak English, she's just there to smile and look devastatingly cute and show Benjamin how much better life could be if he ditched all the promises of worldly riches. Though he came to the island with John Carradine who tells Benjamin of a rumour he'd heard from Spanish sailors about a fortune in pearls to be found on this island.

Farmer, of course, gives a much better performance than Tierney, and her scenes with Sanders have the delightful energy of two wicked people engaged in a subtle shuffling of fortune's deck.

One feels bad for Farmer that her career was so horribly and unjustly cut short here. Though in a decade's time, Tierney would be receiving dubious mental health treatment, too. I happen to have her autobiography in paperback and, opening to a random page, I see;

For months I had lived in dread of returning to a sanatorium. I had been locked in rooms no larger than a cell, with bars on the window. I had tried to escape and was chased and pounced upon like a loose dog. I had been subjected to electric shock treatments that deadened my brain, stole chunks of time from my memory, and left me feeling brutalised.

It's funny you never hear about male stars getting electric shock treatment.

Anyway, this movie has three great female stars, the third being the one I actually sought the film out for, Elsa Lanchester, who plays a prostitute who helps smuggle Benjamin out of London.

She doesn't want any money in return, she just wants the gentleman to hold her arm in his in public to make her friends jealous. She's pretty adorable as she affects a slight swoon while an indignant competitor prostitute looks on.

It's a small part but she invests in it a sense of even tempered street wisdom and sweet credulity.