moon_custafer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer) wrote2024-01-27 01:17 pm
moon_custafer) wrote2024-01-27 01:17 pm
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Random Shavian Semi-Review
Still working through a watching of Major Barbara (1941, thanks for the link sovay ) because I get overwhelmed* life keeps interrupting.
Also stopped to find out Robert Morley’s age at the time of filming (thirty-two or -three), because he’s blatantly younger than Andrew Undershaft, like, high-school-play teenager-in-a-fake-moustache younger. Works for the character, though.
O HAI Emlyn Williams, we meet again! *checks rest of cast* OK, I did not recognize Stanley Holloway in the opening scene, I think I’m used to seeing him at least a decade older.
I wonder if Newton’s casting as Ferrovius in Androcles and the Lion (1952) had anything to do with his role in the earlier movie — there’s a scene where Newton (as Bill Walker) spits in Todger Fairmile’s eye and Todger refrains from striking him, and the framing and expressions are strongly reminiscent of the scene between Ferrovius and Metellus, though with a different vibe and a (somewhat) different outcome. Google says Androcles and the Lion the play was written five years after Major Barbara, so it’s probably deliberate. You could give a worse description of Ferrovius than “he’s Bill Walker, but he’s trying to be Todger Fairmile.”
As Walker— yeah I nodded when Prof. Adolphus “Dolly” Cusins excitedly said of him “that’s exactly what an Ancient Greek would have done,” although thinking it over I’m not sure if Walker really is like an Ancient Greek, or even a pagan, so much as he is a Victorian idea of one, if that makes sense?
*I may never finish Starmaker (Live on Grenada TV, 1974), which I’ve also been watching intermittently. It’s like Harold Pinter: The Musical, and I’ve reached the part where the bleakness is definitely winning out.
sovay ) becauseAlso stopped to find out Robert Morley’s age at the time of filming (thirty-two or -three), because he’s blatantly younger than Andrew Undershaft, like, high-school-play teenager-in-a-fake-moustache younger. Works for the character, though.
O HAI Emlyn Williams, we meet again! *checks rest of cast* OK, I did not recognize Stanley Holloway in the opening scene, I think I’m used to seeing him at least a decade older.
I wonder if Newton’s casting as Ferrovius in Androcles and the Lion (1952) had anything to do with his role in the earlier movie — there’s a scene where Newton (as Bill Walker) spits in Todger Fairmile’s eye and Todger refrains from striking him, and the framing and expressions are strongly reminiscent of the scene between Ferrovius and Metellus, though with a different vibe and a (somewhat) different outcome. Google says Androcles and the Lion the play was written five years after Major Barbara, so it’s probably deliberate. You could give a worse description of Ferrovius than “he’s Bill Walker, but he’s trying to be Todger Fairmile.”
As Walker— yeah I nodded when Prof. Adolphus “Dolly” Cusins excitedly said of him “that’s exactly what an Ancient Greek would have done,” although thinking it over I’m not sure if Walker really is like an Ancient Greek, or even a pagan, so much as he is a Victorian idea of one, if that makes sense?
*I may never finish Starmaker (Live on Grenada TV, 1974), which I’ve also been watching intermittently. It’s like Harold Pinter: The Musical, and I’ve reached the part where the bleakness is definitely winning out.
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Major Barbara is not the first movie in which I saw Robert Morley, but it is the first movie in which I saw Robert Morley to know him, which in retrospect is just funny.
(I like Robert Morley; he's an ornament to anything he turns up in, including his five minutes as an impenetrably dense MP in The Small Back Room (1949) and his five minutes as a full bore Gothic George III in Beau Brummell (1954) and his rather more than five minutes as an under-the-table Q in Topkapi (1964). I've never seen him play anything resembling a normal human being and am intensely curious about his Oscar Wilde.)
O HAI Emlyn Williams, we meet again!
He probably would have been a hell of a Caligula in the 1937 I, Claudius. I keep meaning to watch the surviving footage, but I literally just lent my box set of the 1976 BBC series to
OK, I did not recognize Stanley Holloway in the opening scene, I think I’m used to seeing him at least a decade older.
It's also existentially confusing when he's not singing. I have now seen him in multiple movies where he doesn't sing and it remains confusing! If you watch This Happy Breed (1944), which I would recommend for its highly unusual Technicolor alone, you get him as the next-door neighbor and old army buddy of Robert Newton.
there’s a scene where Newton (as Bill Walker) spits in Todger Fairmile’s eye and Todger refrains from striking him, and the framing and expressions are strongly reminiscent of the scene between Ferrovius and Metellus, though with a different vibe and a (somewhat) different outcome.
I've never gotten around to Androcles and the Lion because it's supposed to be the least as well as the last of the Pascal–Shaws—not helped by interference from Howard Hughes—but you make a compelling case for it.
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I once saw someone describe his character in Beat the Devil as “a criminal mastermind defeated by his total inability to hide what he’s thinking.”
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Aw.
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I don’t mean to oversell it, but it has its charm: https://mooncustafer.tumblr.com/post/740447617935376384/three-way-handshake-goes-wrong-but-i-still-think
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That is very cute. Please keep me posted if it produces fic.
[edit] Off-topic except in the sense of old Hollywood actors, I thought I should send you this post for the tags.
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Forgot to mention that years ago I saw The Epic That Never Was, which I think is included on the box set you lent out. There’s a clip of 1930s Williams as Caligula, camp as two tents and about to introduce a newly-appointed senator—then we cut to Williams thirty years later telling an interviewer: “I feel so sorry for that horse. All that build-up and he never got to make his grand entrance.”
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It is! I've just never watched it! And the box set remains out of my possession for the moment.
Emlyn Williams seems to have been exactly like himself, which is honestly pretty great.
(Has your life permitted you to finish Major Barbara?)
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Will try to get on to The Desert Rats. Did I say anything about The Beachcomber? I can’t remember and don’t feel like haunting my posts from last month.
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Bill does not turn up again in the original play! Shaw objected strenuously to his reprise in the film version. Gabriel Pascal seems to have OT3'd Bill/Barbara/Dolly just that hard and since I am not George Bernard Shaw, I am charmed by it.
Did I say anything about The Beachcomber? I can’t remember and don’t feel like haunting my posts from last month.
Not to me. You should tell me about it; I've only seen Vessel of Wrath (1938), in which Robert Newton does not play the beachcomber.
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People were always shopping Shaw’s characters and he hated it so much— I think it shows they work as characters, despite his best attempts to make them chess-pieces.
I've only seen Vessel of Wrath (1938), in which Robert Newton does not play the beachcomber.
I might have to go back to watch him as the Controller in the 1938 movie. As the lead, he’s been renamed “The Hon. Ted” instead of “Ginger Ted,” which I suspect was due to somebody looking at Hatter’s Castle and deciding not to put Newton in a red wig again, and if not, well some of the audience might consider an alternate explanation for the character’s nickname.
They might anyway, but public drunkenness and a general disregard of The Rules were probably enough on their own to get Ted shipped off to one of the smaller colonies. Both short-story and movie adaptations make much of Ted carrying on with the native women, but I can’t help but think that what we actually see looks less like active pursuit on his part and more… I’m not sure what, exactly.
In The Beachcomber, Ted and Miss Jones’ one onscreen kiss comes when she’s suffering burnout after losing her latest epidemic-patient and he’s trying to console her— it’s sort of automatic on his part, and he almost immediately steps back and apologizes. She looks at him curiously and confides that she’d sometimes wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a man: “I didn’t think I’d like it at all. But this was something quite different.”
Ted promises not to do it again, and Miss Jones stands tiptoe and kisses him on the forehead. They’re interrupted before there can be any further discussion; but whatever the two of them have going on after that, it might not be quite the comp-het movie ending that it looks like.
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And that thinking of them as chess-pieces, he didn't always understand what made them tick. Bill Walker and Barbara have the best chemistry in Major Barbara because they have the best argument—the others are Socratic dialogues with better feed lines, but the two of them are really wrestling with the questions. I saw a stage production of Major Barbara about eight years before I discovered the film and the only part of it that I can remember are their scenes (The actor playing Peter Shirley watched their first round seated comfortable with his bread and scrape and sky-blue and heckled Bill from the peanut gallery: "He'll convert your head into a mashed potato!") I should like the original ending of Pygmalion better because it eschews romance, but I prefer the revised ending because it underscores how all the time Higgins has been sculpting his duchess out of a squashed cabbage leaf, he's failed to notice the equivalent process knocking him into something approaching a human being. (The 1938 Pygmalion actually ruined me for My Fair Lady, because Leslie Howard is a far more credible disaster weirdo than Rex Harrison, who could do charismatically rude, but not ferally unsocialized, which turns out to be what makes the difference in sympathy between the two versions for me. Howard's Higgins is capable of being a colossal dick, but he also visibly maxed out his social skills while still in school and has been making up for it by being the smartest person in the room ever since. He is not the smartest person in the room when Eliza is also in it.) Shaw's writing on his own plays is like reading criticism from Mars.
I suspect was due to somebody looking at Hatter’s Castle and deciding not to put Newton in a red wig again
I don't think I've ever seen him with anyone's hair but his own. It's quite good hair. It works for him!
she’s suffering burnout after losing her latest epidemic-patient and he’s trying to console her— it’s sort of automatic on his part, and he almost immediately steps back and apologizes. She looks at him curiously and confides that she’d sometimes wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a man: “I didn’t think I’d like it at all. But this was something quite different.”
That sounds unexpectedly lovely.
. . . If this link works for you, I'm just going to leave this channel here. It is not a complete filmography, and it has a terrible-quality version of something I need to be able to link a good version of, but I've been looking for They Flew Alone (1942) for years.
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It really is! He’s one of those people who unknowingly contributed to my development (such as it is) by demonstrating that a person could be highly intelligent and also extremely wrong about some things, and that I was therefore allowed to disagree with the printed page.
Thank you for the link! I’ve seen some clips of They Flew Alone on YouTube.
ETA: The 1938 Pygmalion actually ruined me for My Fair Lady
I’ve seen the movie of My Fair Lady, and I saw it onstage years ago in a production that was pretty clearly influenced by the movie. Higgins was played by John Noble, who iirc leant more towards the charismatically-rude interpretation. I mostly woke up for the five-minute cameo by Eric Donkin as Zoltan Karpathy — I’d imprinted on Donkin as a child watching the filmed-for-tv version of the Stratford Festival’s Mikado (he was Ko-Ko).
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That's extremely valuable. T. S. Eliot functioned like that for me with poetry. (Not, actually, because of his politics, but because so much of his early poetry is certifiably bad.)
Thank you for the link! I’ve seen some clips of They Flew Alone on YouTube.
Same—probably the same clips, even. I've just never been able to track down a full copy before.
The actual holy grail of movies I have been chasing thanks to clips on YouTube is Border Flight (1936), which plotwise seems to have been one of those what-price-glory military love triangles, but the salient point is Roscoe Karns as a snarky mechanic. I will watch pretty much anything with Roscoe Karns in it. And I will watch pretty much any aviation movie from the '30's, which has produced mostly good results and occasionally dirigibles.
I mostly woke up for the five-minute cameo by Eric Donkin as Zoltan Karpathy — I’d imprinted on Donkin as a child watching the filmed-for-tv version of the Stratford Festival’s Mikado (he was Ko-Ko).
I imprinted on Richard McMillan's Pooh-Bah, but I understand the impulse. I should hope he was a good Karpathy.
(I have never seen a production of My Fair Lady, but I grew up on the movie and the original Broadway cast recording in the way where without putting in any effort I can probably still sing almost all of the score. I really love the 1938 Pygmalion. When I discovered it in 2008, it had just gotten a Criterion DVD which I promptly fell upon; it remains a favorite for multiple reasons, including my introduction to Leslie Howard's near-unique star niche as a romantic nerd. Two years later I got to feel undeservedly smug because I had written to them about Major Barbara.)
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Went looking for that clip from Stand-In that someone posted on Tumblr and which drew so many comments of “Who are these people?! What is this movie?! I need to see it!” but so far I’m just falling down a rabbit hole of Leslie Howard gif sets.
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Please enjoy Leslie Howard eating a banana.
(Stand-In is great and you should totally, if you have not done so already, see it. I should also warn you that I am probably not sensible on the subject of Leslie Howard. He is both an actor I enjoy and something of a touchstone. [edit] The important part: I can actually leave you alone about him.)
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The important part: I can actually leave you alone about him.
Is there somebody who can’t leave people alone about Leslie Howard?
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Okay!
Is there somebody who can’t leave people alone about Leslie Howard?
Not to my knowledge, but I am under the impression it can be damping to the enthusiasm to be discovering something new and then have someone else sail in with a list of long-time opinions, so I try not to inflict that dynamic on people.
(I really love Pimpernel Smith (1941).)
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(I did resist the urge to add the five-minute clip of the end scene alone)
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Excellent!
(I did resist the urge to add the five-minute clip of the end scene alone)
You can always give it its own post. It deserves it.
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Have started watching Dead Men Are Dangerous and at just over ten minutes in, there’s an *actual*, non-TARDIS police box!
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I don't know if I've ever seen one of those in the wild!
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ETA (March 13th): The movie’s just over 65 minutes long, so around 50:30, Newton’s character suddenly jumps a couple of levels in competence as the plot ramps up to breakneck speed.
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Would he have survived the climax otherwise?
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That was seriously interesting because just a couple of years later Aylmer would have been in a film noir for pulling a stunt like the dead man's clothes swap (wanted for your own murder: a classic), but in 1939 the genre hasn't quite crystallized and therefore even as circumstances become complicated, infuriating, frightening, and dumb as an entire bag of rocks (attending your own inquest: not recommended), it stays on the right side of nightmare; there's the doppelgänger thread and some intermittent jags into atmosphere (I was especially fond of the early shot of Aylmer looking through the fourth wall of the fire), but it is basically a crime thriller and it works out fine, even if it ends like so many B-pictures as though the film literally ran out. You did not mention the protagonist's Leslie Howard-grade horn-rims. I guess Robert Newton was not all that often cast in roles where he had to look believably like a dork.
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He is a protagonist who can actually change his appearance by parting his hair differently and putting on glasses!
Did a speed run through Henry V, still thinking about it.
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It's very effective! I wasn't saying he shouldn't have done it more often!
Did a speed run through Henry V, still thinking about it.
I really like the way it telescopes in and out of reality. Plus its cast, which is lacking only Ralph Richardson.
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I‘d seen part of it a long time ago; but then when I began watching, we stayed in the Globe for thirty minutes, and I began to doubt my memory of moving out into a landscape that looked like an illuminated manuscript.
Nearly gave up on it, but I went back after a while, and was rewarded by getting to see the changes to the costumes and hair – it’s beautifully done, the costumes are so stylized and brightly-coloured right from the beginning and they keep to the same scheme, so it takes a while to notice the changes in the styles of the sleeves and that the breeches and hose have become just hose, the smaller hats have turned into chaperons etc. Henry’s haircut is a little harder to miss. Was trying to figure out if there was a commensurate change in the acting style, but I think it varies among the cast.