The Dizzy Reality of the Screen

Last night I went to see the greatest movie of all time, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, in a movie theatre. Well, it's the most current number one in Sight and Sound's poll of critics worldwide. It's certainly my favourite movie though I've always felt weirdly uncertain that it deserves that top spot more than Citizen Kane, partly because I know very few people who like Vertigo that much. Generally the reaction I see is people think it's okay but don't quite understand what the fuss about.

I was hoping to get some impression of the audience's reaction last night though, as it turned out, it was a blessedly quiet crowd of about twenty five people, nearly all women, ranging in age from mid twenties to mid forties, from what I could tell. Whether or not they liked the movie, they were good movie-goers who kept quiet for the most part and I was able to thoroughly enjoy the experience of the film. I wish it'd been louder, I was hoping for Bernard Herrmann's score to really blast in the opening credits but otherwise I have no complaints about how it was shown.

Fathom Events is screening Vertigo in cinemas for its sixtieth anniversary. It also happens to be the ten year anniversary of the week I spent obsessively watching it over and over before I wrote this analysis in 2008. I stand by all my opinions in that analysis and I think it's one of the best things I've written. But one of the great things about Vertigo is my perspective is different every time. Like the protagonist in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, who watches Vertigo in one scene and explains the movie is different now because he, the viewer, is different now, I find myself responding to different things.

I'm more interested in religious symbolism now than I was ten years ago and I found myself thinking about how Hellish Elster's office looks. That desk looks like it was carved from the bloody flesh of tortured souls. A lot of people talk about how green is used in the film but there's a lot to be said about its use of red, too. There's the black cherry wood in the McKittrick hotel and the intense, almost magenta wallpaper at Ernie's, the restaurant where Scottie first sees Madeleine.

When I wrote my analysis in 2008 I spent a lot of time reading what other people had written about the film and tried not to repeat anything but I'm not doing that to-day. So maybe it's already been pointed out but it occurred to me last night that Judy's fate at the end being caused by the sudden appearance of a nun may be seen as an act of God. Scottie's finally broken free of all the illusions and the manipulations to reach the moment of clarity that cures his vertigo. One could say that a benevolent God watching this said, okay, he's done enough, now I'll take Judy off the table so he won't be tempted to go back into that cycle. But there doesn't seem to be anything good in Judy's death--a repeat of her apparent death earlier in the film, it seems mainly to be confirmation that Scottie's trapped in a cycle instead of breaking free of one.

It's a deliberately frustrating and uncertain ending, not unlike the ending of the new season of Twin Peaks. In both cases, we have a detective character traversing hazards of dream and illusion in an effort to save a woman who may or may not be real, a journey that questions the criteria for what we regard as reality. Having recently watched Mississippi Mermaid, I was compelled to think of how important Vertigo was to the French New Wave filmmakers. Like Godard continually thwarting audience expectations by abrupt changes to the score in Pierrot le Fou, Hitchcock continually plays with what audiences expect from a movie and uses those expectations to make the audience a part of the story. He sets up Scottie as a hero and thus makes us complicit in his deviance, he sets up a spirit possession plot and then dashes it aside because, after all, that's a bit fantastical, right? What were we thinking?

But is Carlotta's ghost really a hoax or is its reality simply in a different and deeper form than we're conditioned to expect? The effect of Carlotta's haunting is there, the paradigm of freedom defined by the control of others is set up by her story, and the pattern of dominated people trying to dominate others has an echo in the idea of Carlotta, victim to the whims of a man in life, controlling the fates of men and women after her death. The lack of any explicit proof of her haunting, aside from possibly Scottie's attention being drawn to the necklace in his dream, is in a weird way integral to the power she asserts. Just as "Madeleine" holds so much influence for not truly existing.

Last night I was struck by this pair of shots as Judy and Scottie discuss her dream that leads them to San Juan Bautista:

Hitchcock keeps cutting back and forth between the two. Judy and Scottie are in two different places but their faces are placed in almost exactly the same relationship with the lamp. Like Scottie's dream where he falls into Carlotta's grave or when he falls onto the roof the shot seems to suggest he and Madeleine are the same person. One could say that Madeleine is the joint creation of Elster, Elster's unseen wife, Judy, and Scottie but primarily Judy and Scottie. It's like a masque written by Elster about his wife in which Judy is the actress and Scottie is the audience/participant. Or maybe more accurately, it's like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign written by Elster, Judy is the Dungeon Master, and Scottie is a player. Scottie isn't a passive audience and Judy isn't simply a performer of written lines, they're both creating the story. The lamp is a little clearer next to Judy's face but it's closer and blurrier next to Scottie's--she gives him the dream, raw material, he interprets the dream and comes up with a plan of action based on it.

Yes, I guess this movie will always be fresh for me. It was an incredible pleasure seeing it on a big screen. The incredible visuals, apart from any interpretations of them, are wonderful to experience in themselves. I love these two consecutive shots as we watch Judy and Scottie leave the forest and then we see Judy at the beach by that twisted tree:

The Man Who Would be Gaucho

Whether it be the knight, the samurai, or the cowboy, most cultures have a class to which mythic, heroic figures frequently belong. In South America, there's the gaucho, which inspired Hollywood in 1952 to make Way of a Gaucho, for the most part self-consciously modelled on U.S. Westerns, swapping out the cowboy for the gaucho. Shot entirely in Argentina and subject to intense scrutiny and modification from the government of Juan Peron, among whose followers the gaucho was a celebrated symbol, it's difficult to say how much of the movie represents the intentions of 20th Century Fox or of director Jacques Tourneur. Tourneur, with his great talent for visuals, makes wonderful use of the locations but the story itself feels like a watered down combination of Robin Hood and Les Miserables, centred on a dull protagonist.

Supposedly the film's based partly on a late 19th century epic poem called Martin Fierro but the story only has a few details in common with Wikipedia's synopsis for the poem. Both stories are about a gaucho named Martin, played by Rory Calhoun in the film, who deserts from the army, but otherwise there's not much similarity.

Martin in Way of a Gaucho is son of a recently deceased gaucho and he now finds himself in the service of the son of his father's employer, a politician for the new government regime named Don Miguel Aleondo (Hugh Marlowe). The fundamental thematic conflict of the film is between the old, independent spirit of personal honour represented by the gaucho, fast disappearing in a country increasingly dominated by the civilising influence of modern government. The last act of the film, though, is mostly concerned with Martin's attempts to marry a wealthy woman named Teresa played by Gene Tierney.

Tierney's autobiography, which talks about her struggles with manic depression, has this to say about her experience with this production:

My personal life was in disarray . . . I was desperately unhappy the entire time the cast was on location and frequently sick . . .

The picture was the first starring part for a handsome young actor named Rory Calhoun. But for me the days passed in a haze.

Not all of it was mental. I had caught cold and was on the verge of pneumonia when I got there. The movie company had taken over a hotel in the pampas, where the peasants assembled in the summer to work under the Peronista regime. I had to report there immediately, miles from nowhere, the sun a living flame and the wind always blowing. I was too ill to work the first week and had to have shots every few hours from the company doctor.

For the first time in my memory, I was snappish and rude on set . . .

. . . I felt like an emotional misfit, and Argentina was not a good place to get one out of a depression. Juan Peron was at the height of his power. The cast was shown much of what his dictatorship had accomplished in the way of public housing and orphanages during tours arranged by the minister of propaganda. We were also invited, ordered, to be at the government mansion at seven o'clock one morning to be received by the Perons. Evita was not well enough to see us and the visit was cancelled, no disappointment to me. I had not recovered from what had now settled into a bad case of bronchitis and was spending whatever time I could in bed.

When I felt strong enough to attend a few parties, I met people who had been treated to other forms of Peron's hospitality--his prisons. They had been political prisoners jailed for the crime of disagreeing with the regime. They were mostly of the moneyed classes who felt that Peron was exploiting the poor and was a menace to the country's few remaining democratic reforms.

You could find no-one who openly criticised Peron, out of fear of being reported to the secret police. The atmosphere was grim and the situation a touchy one for the cast. Twentieth Century-Fox was using up frozen assets of theirs to make the picture [Profits from films made during World War II not permitted to be spent outside the country], with the consent of the government. We were asked not to be discourteous, whatever our opinions might be.

She gives a decent performance in the film in essentially a Maid Marian role. One of the primary differences between the film's story and that of Robin Hood is that there's no friendly Friar Tuck among the outlaws and religion is squarely on the side of law and order, frustrating Martin and Teresa's attempts to marry in the last part of the film as he repeatedly tries to appeal to his childhood priest, Father Fernandez (Enrique Chaico). Tourneur gets some great shots of Tierney trying to dodge troops searching for her in a church.

Fernandez acts as a moral centre for the film, unable to approve of Martin's illegal lifestyle but also reluctant to allow him to be captured. Ultimately the point the film seems to be making is that going your on way makes it hard to settle down and have a family, which ought to be your primary goal in life. Rory Calhoun, who may be fine in other pictures, lacks the sparkle of an Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power and is a bit overshadowed by his cool costumes. Far from being the celebration of an independent hero, it mostly seems to be about a life of endless trouble for this guy, reminding the audience it's best just to keep your head down and go along with the prevailing opinions.

Was Gallifrey in Ireland?

I've written more than once about the scarcity of Irish actors or characters on Doctor Who but this year Saint Patrick's Day has fallen on Saturday, the day I usually write about Doctor Who, so I listened to the first Dark Eyes audio anthology from 2012. A collection of Eighth Doctor stories, it features the Doctor's only Irish companion in any medium, Molly O'Sullivan, portrayed by Irish actress Ruth Bradley. And I was glad to find Dark Eyes is a good series, especially surprising since it was written by Nicholas Briggs, whose scripts I've generally not enjoyed in the past. He loads up a few too many Irish-isms in Molly's dialogue but mostly she's a good character in a good set of stories. I like how she mockingly insists on calling the Doctor "The Doctor."

Comprised of four stories, each just under an hour, the first, "The Great War", finds the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) arriving on Earth in the midst of a mustard gas attack during World War I. The Seventh Doctor had a few World War I adventures, too, and with the recent Christmas special featuring the Twelfth Doctor in a World War I setting, I wonder how many Doctors are roaming about No Man's Land.

Molly is a Voluntary Aid Detachment nursing assistant--not a nurse, she continually reminds everyone. The medical staff angle is another thing that makes this reminiscent of the Seventh Doctor story, No Man's Land. But "The Great War" does a better job establishing the lives of the average participants, with Molly being a wiser, more experienced hand hastily advising another woman on how to treat and behave around men brought in from the battlefield.

The second story, "Fugitives", gets more into the underlying story that bridges the four, and features more heavily two guest characters played by Peter Egan and Toby Jones. Whether or not they're villains isn't quite clear but in the concluding chapter, "X and the Daleks", Briggs makes good use of them, coming up with a really cool way to use Time Lord regeneration I can't remember seeing or hearing in another story.

The third story, "Tangled Web", features the Doctor and Molly coming across a community of peaceful Daleks. It's a story that plays with the Doctor's acquired hatred for the species in much the way the new television series has done from time to time; giving us the innocence of his companion's eyes, wanting to give a whole species the benefit of the doubt, confounded by the normally open minded Doctor unable to accept the possibility of peaceful Daleks. This one has some interesting moments, I particularly liked how in the climax it gets to the point where the Doctor feels like he's going mad for being the only one who holds what he can't help feeling is a perfectly reasonable point of view.

Briggs, as he does on the new show, also voices the Daleks and is good at creating an impression of several individuals. McGann is good as always and has good chemistry with Bradley. She's effective in the role though I don't like how she calls the TARDIS a "Tardy box".

Twitter Sonnet #1094

The water turned above to different roofs.
The circuitry of scuba scars appeared.
A warning dripped from restless, turquoise hoofs.
The worried land observed the endless weird.
The face beside the ears divulged a sound.
As pieces ranged a board became a day.
A cushion took the seconds from the ground.
As grasses pass the ivy shows the way.
Surprising kings beneath the hills were hid.
A dot was glowing green before the snakes.
A clover star would burst to quadrant grid.
Remembered drinks were debts beneath the lakes.
The ling'ring wolf returned to save the slain.
A wailing shade perplexed the sullen train.

For Honour or Liberty

Stanley Kubrick's films spend a lot of time contemplating the worth in unspoken social customs and rules, and in the value and danger of abandoning them. The two extremes of the argument can be seen when comparing his 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange, with his next film, 1975's Barry Lyndon. The two protagonists are polar opposites of each other--Alex DeLarge is intelligent and sadistic, charming and ugly, and without any apparent sense of honour or respect for the social contract. Barry Lyndon is stupid and sensitive, dull and handsome, and thoroughly committed to honour. Both characters step outside their worldviews--Alex when he's forced through conditioning to behave himself and Barry when he becomes a thief--but both return to their original states by the ends of their respective films. The worlds in which the two films are set are similarly in opposition; Alex's futuristic dystopia is the ultimate realisation of post-modernism, where every symbol's association with meaning is commonly disregarded by everyone, while Barry exists in meticulously rendered 18th century Europe at a time when aesthetic beauty was considered to be reflective of truth and virtue in a very real way.

One of the weird things about Alex (Malcom McDowell) is that I tend never to feel bad for him even as I hate the methods people use on him. Possibly it's because most of the people who oppose Alex do so in ways that resemble his worst qualities--through a motivation for personal satisfaction and a disregard of any real sense of honour. But why should anyone have a belief in anything but their own impulses? Art and philosophy are no more than window dressing. Patrick Magee's character espouses a political position that condemns the treatment used on Alex but at the same time he exploits the effects of that treatment to take revenge on the young man. Alex beat him and violently raped his wife right in front of him, an act he believes eventually led to her death, but, as ugly and repellent as Alex's crime, I feel no vicarious thrill in Magee's revenge.

I really like Patrick Magee. I've seen him in several horror films and watching him in Francis Ford Coppola's first film, Dementia 13, set and shot in Ireland, would be a good choice for Saint Patrick's Day to-morrow. So it's not that I don't like the actor. In A Clockwork Orange he seems a decent enough fellow, he's got a nice library, and he's pals with David Prowse. His wife is beautiful and Alex was being particularly cruel in hurting her when she was trying to help him. But try as I might, I just can't take pleasure in Magee using Beethoven as an instrument of torture on Alex. The two best reasons I can think of for this is that Kubrick had the blessed coldness of vision to portray revenge as realistically devoid of glamour and part of the argument of the film is that the music of Beethoven does have intrinsic value for its beauty.

You wouldn't need to convince anyone of that in Barry Lyndon, though it's set long before Beethoven's time (the movie ends a few years after Beethoven's birth). When Barry (Ryan O'Neal) is taken under the wing of another character played by Patrick Magee, the Chevalier de Balibari, all the two of them need is a beautiful wardrobe and good manners to be taken as gentlemen, despite Barry's low birth. This follows after several costume changes for Barry that allowed him passage in different countries, posing as officers in different armies, a stark contrast to the bowlers and makeup worn by Alex and his droogs where the absence of any socially agreed upon significance in them is the whole point. Alex's crew, like modern Internet trolls, flaunt the loss of meaning in symbols to an extreme degree but the milk bar, crowded with mannequins of nude women in sexual poses, is just as acceptable a meeting place to some businessmen and an opera singer as it is for the group of delinquents.

It's easy to forget that not everything Alex does is horrible. When he picks up two young women at the record store, the three have a completely consensual and mutually enjoyable menage a trois, apparently liberated from any restrictive mores.

In this case, Barry could've benefited Alex's perspective in one of the funniest scenes from Barry Lyndon where early on, no matter how much she tries to make it clear she wants him to, Barry can not bring himself to voluntarily fondle the woman he loves. His sense of propriety and conception of feminine purity will not allow him to believe she would want him to have sex with her outside of a marriage bed, even when she tells him in an increasingly irritable tone to search her entire body with his hands. This moment is mirrored by a disastrous one at the end of the film where Barry faces off in a duel against Bullingdon, played by Leon Vitali, an actor who bears more than a passing resemblance to Malcolm McDowell, playing a similarly ruthless character. Barry's unhesitating observance of fair play has truly tragic consequences, the worst of which being, by not allowing himself to shrink to the level of an Alex or a Bullingdon in any way, Barry allows them to win.

The Precarious Noise

Saying just the right thing at just the right time can be dangerous. This is likely why Jean Renoir's 1939 masterpiece, The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu), was met with disgust at the time of its release despite on the surface being a relatively harmless drawing room comedy. But there are ways in which the film is definitely more like a nightmare about a comedy than a straightforward comedy, despite Renoir's expressed intention only to make the latter. The delirium of comedy becomes a foundation layer for a truly disturbing portrait of Europe at the beginning of World War II.

The film begins with a pilot, Andre (Roland Toutain), landing his plane in France after an historic flight that one of the reporters present compares to Charles Lindbergh. All Andre seems concerned with, though, is that the woman he loves, Christine (Nora Gregor), isn't there to meet him. Continually the film presents its ensemble of aristocratic characters ignoring or barely noticing vitally important, even dangerous things, focusing instead on their own romances--affairs which seem quite capricious despite the passion characters express for them.

Most of the film is set at the enormous country house belonging to Robert (Marcel Dalio), Christine's husband. It seems like a long, unbroken party sequence. Much of the dialogue was apparently improvised and characters chat endlessly about their relationships and consider the pros and cons of starting an affair with this person or breaking off an affair with that person. Octave, a character played by Renoir himself, has some slightly more profound things to say, including one really impressive, ominous line; "in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons." But this is tossed off as something barely less trivial than everything else that's going on.

Because of the high turnover rate in romance, grand sentiments become commonplace, so maybe that's why extraordinary things don't seem to make much of an impression. One scene that is truly nightmarish in its comic energy has the German gamekeeper, Schumacher (Gaston Madot), running rampant through the party firing a gun, trying to hit the poacher, Marceau (Julien Carette), he'd caught with his wife. Everyone seems frightened and shocked but also delighted and amused in equal measure. The recorded music playing from a machine gets stuck and the discordant sound alters the tone of the slapstick considerably.

Schumacher might be taken as representing Hitler--he has something of the self-importance and resentment for the people around him one associates with Hitler. Marceau might be interpreted as a Jew, especially when he tries to blend into a crowd of partygoers as Schumacher fires at him. This interpretation doesn't quite hold when he and Schumacher are commiserating later when it seems to them Lisette (Paulette Dubost), Schumacher's wife, has transferred her affections to Octave. On the other hand, this speaks to the ultimate shallowness of the anti-Semitism which operated as a convenient outlet for anger and resentment. The terrifying absurdity is in how thin and insubstantial are the philosophies used to justify terrible destruction.

One should also note that Marceau making out with another man's wife is exactly what everyone else is doing. Andre and Robert finally come to blows over Christine; Christine finally realises she's always been in love with one man before finally realising she's always been in love with another. Revelations that one couple is cheating seem to have significance only in how passionate one can reasonably be about it, or charmingly dispassionate. When one woman finally admits to loving the man who'd pursued her, he checks her ardour by reminding her "There are rules, after all." And one does get that impression, that everyone, however chaotic their outward behaviour, is still operating within unseen boundaries. They're so strong that when one man commits murder, everyone instinctively considers it the appropriate response when he's allowed to help clean up some of the wreckage and resume his position in society.

The Uncommon Dream and the Less Common Dreamer

Here's a deceptively simple and incredibly beautiful film, Alexandr Ptushko's 1961 romantic fantasy, Scarlet Sails (Алые паруса). It says something about the interpretive skills of Soviet authorities that something so frivolous as fantasy films were allowed to flourish under their noses, and Scarlet Sails is a startlingly subversive example. But the film's story of two people who fall in love through a shared passion for stories and dreams has greater and lovelier resonance than simply subversion.

In the early 19th century a man named Longren (Ivan Pereverzev) returns from sea to find his wife has died and his infant daughter is being cared for by a neighbour. Forced to stay at home to care for the girl, he uses his knowledge of sailing vessels to make toy ships he sells in town. But he has a hard time finding anyone who will place much value in such things as children's toys, as much as his daughter loves them. So he has a hard time making ends meet.

Meanwhile, the son of a wealthy count continually disappoints his stern father. The boy continually dodges his governess to waste time pretending to be a sea captain with a servant in the attic. A parallel is already drawn between the boy and girl as people who value fantasy over pragmatism.

In one moment with a particularly striking anti-Communist subtext, the girl is sleeping in her father's lap when a homeless man approaches and asks Longren for some tobacco. Longren says his tobacco is in his other vest and doesn't want to wake his daughter to fetch it--significantly, he won't interrupt her dream for the needs of the common man. Considering the symbolism of the common people in Soviet Propaganda films like Eisenstein's it's hard to see how this scene wasn't considered outright dangerous.

Playing with a little red sail boat in a creek one day, the girl runs across a mysterious man (Nikolay Volkov) who, charmed by her, decides to give her a prophecy--one sunny day she will marry a prince who will come for her in a ship with red sails. Years later, the now teenage girl (Anastasiya Vertinskaya) still contentedly believes she will see red sails one day, despite having to endure mockery from all the common people of the town.

The boy (Vasily Lanovoy) has grown up too and decides to leave his father's expensive home to live the life at sea he always dreamed of. You don't need to be Nostradamus to guess the trajectory of the plot from here but the crucial thing is how the characters make decisions in an effort to reach the happy ending. Both characters, particularly the boy, need extraordinary sensitivity, imagination, and restraint--and the ability to ignore the mockery of the common townspeople in order to utilise these qualities.

As always, Ptushko crafts a visually stunning film with wonderful sets lit in a powerful chiaroscuro. Longren's face at the beginning of the film when he realises his wife is dead is so quiet and stunningly effective. The whole film is available on YouTube with English subtitles here.

Twitter Sonnet #1093
for Stephen Hawking

Confirming numbers launched a blurry shot.
Arriving lifts the sails from off the mast.
A world developed from a glowing dot.
The lunar porcupines assembled fast.
Attempts to find the disk refract the line.
A useless trail of dust concludes the flight.
Within the picture depths restructured time.
A skillet claimed a rapid eggy right.
Designing grids have dipped in distant black.
Behind a fan the hands of clocks increased.
The motion carried took the minutes back.
A fractured cup returns in single piece.
A paper folded fields a larger plane.
The oceans wait in stars like drops of rain.

Don't Cheat the Water Tsar

Look carefully--even though all these doves have her face only one of them is the real Barbara the Fair with the Silken Hair (Варвара-краса, длинная коса). Alexander Rowe's 1969 film is among the many wonderful Soviet films that present the viewer with such delightfully unrestrained fantasy, relentlessly providing one bizarre image or idea after another as though they were the most natural things in the world. Barbara the Fair with the Silken Hair is a particularly manic and faintly sadistic example but this makes it seem even more like something that sprang directly from the 18th century.

Based on a fairy tale by Vasily Zhukovsky, the story concerns a hairy red-headed Tsar named Yeremei (Mikhail Pugovkin) who tries to weasel out of accidentally promising his firstborn son to Chudo-Yudo (Georgy Millyar), an underwater Tsar who almost strangles the land Tsar to death.

Like a good Enlightenment thinker, Yeremei has decided to organise and categorise everything in his kingdom so when Chudo-Yudo asks for everything in the kingdom Yeremei doesn't know about he figures he's got the upper hand on the water monster. Unfortunately, life doesn't comply with Yeremei's carefully compiled lists and, unbeknownst to him, his wife has given birth to a son, Andrey (Sergei Nikolaev). So Yeremei switches the infant with a fisherman's son, conveniently also named Andrey (Aleksei Katyshev), another subtle dig at categorisation. But maybe he wouldn't have done this if he'd known Chudo-Yudo would want the prince as husband for his daughter, the beautiful Barbara (Tatiana Klyueva).

Everyone seems to be a sorcerer underwater, except for a gang of French pirates (credited as "Most real pirates") that serve Chudo-Yudo. But Barbara dreams of living among humans and begs her nanny (Varvara Popova) to teach her to knit even though Barbara can instantly weave an elaborate tapestry with her telekinetic powers. These are usually accompanied by a groovy snap zoom to her lovely eyes flashing red and blue.

In addition to a dove, she can also turn into a mouse and a squirrel--she uses the latter form to scope out the fisherman's son when it looks like he might be a suitor. There's a lot of stuff with real animals in this film that I hope didn't involve traumatising them too much but I can't help finding really charming. Somehow in the underwater kingdom there are two bear cubs working as ferrymen who demand honey for payment; the fisherman's son has a whole bucketful but slurps it all up himself right in front them.

Barbara has several suitors who disappoint her. I really love how everyone can't seem to understand why she's not turned on by the guy whose belly is a bowl of fish.

This movie really never lets up on the weird. It's great. The whole thing's on YouTube with English subtitles here:

Invocations of Rule 42

It's hard to believe Disney's 1951 version of Alice in Wonderland is only an hour and fifteen minutes long. Not merely because it had more songs written for it than any other Disney film to date--over thirty songs!--but because it doesn't feel like a single film but like a series of short films. This is part of what's generally considered its greatest flaw, by its critics and by Walt Disney himself, that there were too many cooks in the kitchen so the film lacks a cohesive narrative. Yet it remains perhaps the most influential adaptation of Alice in Wonderland ever made and easily overshadows Tim Burton's big budget adaptation from a few years ago (and its swiftly forgotten sequel). Both Burton's and the 1951 version miss crucial aspects of Lewis Carroll's books but Burton's film goes a step further to carry a message of empowerment in direct opposition to the attitude of the original work. Frequently considered a parody of Oxford scholars and faculty of his time, Carroll's Alice books lampoon the self-seriousness and absurdity of the adult world while Burton's film ends with Alice taking a place of prominence firmly within that world. The 1951 film, for presenting a series of effective shorts, falls closer to Carroll's work by default except in scenes where an attempt is made to force some kind of arc on Alice. The "Very Good Advice" sequence, with a song that expands on a line from the book, is very good and sweet in isolation, but in the context of the film as a whole comes off as somewhat bizarre. Nothing in the Dee and Dum sequence or the Made Tea Party sequence had led us to believe that Alice was on the kind of devastating track of tragic hubris that would seem to justify a bitterly self-reflective song like that.

Alice growing in the Queen's court later on seems to have been changed in the 1951 film for a similar purpose. She eats the mushroom to grow large in an effort to escape her absurd persecutors but once she finds herself in a position of dominance she can't help but heap petty insults on the Queen: "And as for you, 'Your Majesty'--Your Majesty indeed! Why, you're not a Queen! You're just a fat, pompous, bad tempered old tyrant!" With each invective, Alice shrinks until she finishes up smaller than everyone else in the court. It's an amusing moment that clearly says something about the importance of remaining gracious when one is in a position of power but the book's version of the scene comes from a more effective idea.

Just at this moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a good deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to grow larger again, and she thought at first she would get up and leave the court; but on second thoughts she decided to remain where she was as long as there was room for her.

‘I wish you wouldn’t squeeze so.’ said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to her. ‘I can hardly breathe.’

‘I can’t help it,’ said Alice very meekly: ‘I’m growing.’

‘You’ve no right to grow here,’ said the Dormouse.

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said Alice more boldly: ‘you know you’re growing too.’

‘Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace,’ said the Dormouse: ‘not in that ridiculous fashion.’ And he got up very sulkily and crossed over to the other side of the court.

Alice becomes more confident in how she speaks to the court but she remains essentially polite. The transition is more subtle and the effect resolves into Alice finding herself at her natural size in relation to a pack of cards at the moment she wakes up, the impression being similar to the nonsense of a dream slowly resolving itself into reality. At the same time, though, the idea that Alice can't help but naturally be larger than a court contrived of abstract rules and senseless rhetorical manoeuvres has a very effective subtext. It's not that Alice is trying to make herself bigger, she simply can't help it--and, of course, the idea that a young girl might be more reasonable than a card Queen obsessed with who stole the tarts directly in front of her seems inevitable.

I've written about the Alice books a lot in my blog over the years and I've sought as many film adaptations as I could. None of them really get it totally right--my favourites are the Jonathan Miller version and the Jan Svankmajer version, the former because of how much dialogue it directly imports from the books to be delivered by great actors, and the latter because of how Svankmajor digests the themes of the books to create something very much his own. But I'll always love the 1951 Disney version, mainly as an example of what a great animation studio Disney used to be. It's a kind of 2D animated storytelling you don't see anymore and watching it makes Disney's recent Forces of Destiny shorts even more depressing.

This is all kind of on my mind to-day because of the Wrinkle in Time movie which I don't plan on seeing. The trailers look like Skittles commercials and many of the reviews remind me of exactly the problem I had with Burton's Alice in Wonderland--a lot of people are saying the film has almost the opposite message to the books. I read the Wrinkle in Time books when I was a kid, but not since then, so I only dimly remember them. What I mainly remember is that, compared to other books I read at the time, they had a remarkably cold quality, and I remember a lot of impressions of the lead character alone in some kind of dark and hostile realm. Nothing like the unremarkable candy riot trailers I've seen.

Intolerance can Swim

The question was always there but few have dared to ask it: what if Nazis could breathe underwater? This is the nightmare realised by 1977's Shock Waves. It's elevated from simple, entertaining schlock by cool locations and very good performances, particularly from John Carradine and Peter Cushing.

Carradine plays the captain of a small boat taking tourists sight seeing in the Caribbean. I love his character--the way he scoffs at the beliefs of the ship's cook (Don Stout) in paranormal phenomena at sea is so strident that you get the impression he knows all the stories are true but he's wise enough to know people are better off not believing. Carradine is just the right actor for this part, his aged face reflecting his depth of experience along with the tone of flawed authority that made him perfect as Aaron in The Ten Commandments and as preachers in John Ford movies.

Among the tourists, Brooke Adams as Rose is presented as the protagonist but mainly she's relegated to following along as the men make all the decisions or running in terror. A natural enough reaction when encountering water breathing Nazi zombies--as they do when they shipwreck on an island. Also in residence is Peter Cushing, sole occupant of a great abandoned luxury hotel.

He has top billing but not a lot of screen time. Playing a former Nazi commander about whom we learn little he's around long enough to make a monologue on genetically engineered, aquatic Nazi super soldiers sound gravely serious.

They're pretty menacing though the tourists' worst enemy, as is often the case movies like this, is their own foolishness, particular a couple of them who do really stupid things when they panic. But the best death in the film comes courtesy of sea urchins. This movie was a real pleasure to watch.

Twitter Sonnet #1092

A poacher's plate advanced along the Rhein.
Announcements fell beneath the azure cloud.
A pair of pumpkin eyes betrayed the mine.
It's thought the written note was something loud.
Entire bottles face a plot returned.
Away to office lunch a cable's sent.
A lesson stacked in woods was swiftly learned.
Occasion told antennae too were bent.
The alternating green accepts.
A face ingests the proffered wine alone.
Detect the taste of brain on clean forceps?
The vinegar and lemon *can* atone.
A citrus shoe delivers feet to C.
An hour shaved delivers time to sea.

A Travel Society

The Sixth Doctor and his companion, Mel, get trapped in an ancient spaceport in the 2013 audio play Spaceport Fear, a decent story with a fun concept. The two encounter a culture that sounds like it was descended from modern day air travel commuters--tribes are separated into "Business" and "Economy" classes; their guide is a young woman who describes her childhood as a time when she was "carry-on".

There's a generally tongue-in-cheek quality to the story but it's not a total parody like the 2001 Six/Mel audio The One Doctor. Mostly it's a fairly straight-forward story about the Doctor (Colin Baker) and Mel (Bonnie Langford) trying to help Economy Class in their struggles against Business, a concept with a broad allegorical quality that thankfully never takes itself too seriously. On seeing the Sixth Doctor's infamous patchwork coat one character from Economy sympathetically says that her people often have to make clothes in the dark, too. Later in the story there's a segment set in total darkness, always a handy device for audio plays because characters are forced to describe everything to each other.

There's also some nice business in this one about the Sixth Doctor having awareness of computer technology from the 21st century, referring to Wi-Fi, smart phones, and tablets, while Mel, a computer expert from the 80s, talks about her knowledge of FORTRAN. An amusing bit involves the Doctor and Mel sending messages to each other via high scores in a Tetris-like video game.