Stuff and Moonshine

Watched this on YouTube as part of my Albert Finney binge. Finney plays Alfie Byrne, bus-conductor and enthusiastic fan of Oscar Wilde, who is determined to stage Salome with a cast mainly assembled from the regulars in his route. When he casts pretty new passenger Adele (Tara Fitzgerald) as princess Salome, everyone assumes he’s got a crush on her; but it’s his driver Robbie he’s pining for (quite understandably— Robbie’s played by Rufus Sewell). Also, it’s 1963.

The actors all have the usual problem in a movie about amateur theatre, which is figuring out just how well or how badly their characters should deliver their lines in the scenes where they’re rehearsing. I did end up thinking that this church-hall production of Salome has some awfully good sets, given what they have to work with—but I’ve seen that happen in real life. There’s a gag midway through about the shop sending them the wrong costumes, but later we see the wardrobe mistress working at a sewing machine and I think we saw her running about earlier with a sequinned gown. Maybe we’re meant to assume hiring costumes was a stop-gap measure that didn’t work out.

The movie’s own wardrobe people did pretty well on the early-‘60s costumes—I think a few of the hairstyles were softened from what you see in photos of the time, but that usually happens. The extras in what you eventually realize is the local gay bar, where Alfie tries lurking nervously and later tries cruising with disastrous results, wear pretty standard menswear for the era and signal subtly. When Alfie swans in cosplaying Wilde, it does not go well. Our protagonist is almost more asexual/homoromantic than anything else, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is innate, and how much is the result of nothing all these years but his collection of Wilde to advise him. None of the other characters seem to suspect his homosexuality until the third act, but all of them comment on his naïveté.

”He’s a great sinner.”
”He’s a terrible director, but I’m stayin’.”

Curious as to how it would hit if you weren’t familiar with the life and works of Oscar Wilde, because some of the allusions were spelt out but some (Alfie referring to Robbie as “Bosie”, looking up at the stars after getting mugged, his defiant speech to the bus inspector that’s taken straight from the transcript of one of Wilde’s trials) weren’t. Not complaining, I think they work better if the script doesn’t hit you over the head (with this, anyway—the villains are not exactly written subtly, though they’re played with flair, especially by Michael Gambon).

Last night Andrew came across The Show (2020), a fantasy neo-noir scripted by Alan Moore (who also acts in the movie). Initially I was on the other side of the room and just listening to the dialogue, but I got pulled in around the time the protagonist consults a detective agency that turns out to be literally two kids in a trenchcoat (“we don’t do messy divorce cases—we have to be in bed by 9:30”).

It’s a classic noir set-up: a hit man arrives in town (Northampton) only to find the target he was sent after is already dead; and begins to suspect, as his client’s phone calls grow increasingly frantic and profanity-laden, that the old man is less interested in avenging his daughter than he is in retrieving the “family heirloom” gold cross pendant that was not found on the target’s body. But as the coincidences and weird dreams pile up, it also looks like something supernatural’s going on as well.

Being written by Moore, it’s as funny as it is horrifying, and it’s also at least 40% easter eggs and in-jokes by volume— I didn’t pay enough attention to all the graffiti in the background to check if any of it read WHO PUT BELLA IN THE WITCH-ELM, or the in-universe equivalent, but if I spot it on a repeat viewing I won’t be at all surprised.


It’s still not quite as weird as Rudyard Kipling’s “The Brushwood Boy,” which I reread this week for the first time since high school. This one sounds fairly straightforward when described. We follow the protagonist for the first quarter-century or so of his life, from early childhood to becoming the youngest Major in the British Army; and his waking career is intercut with his dreamscape.

George’s dreamscape is one of the most realistically dream-like I’ve ever seen written. There’s a bit where George is on a boat that passes a huge stone lily, floating on the water, which is labelled “Hong Kong,” and thinks to himself “So this is Hong Kong. I always knew it’d be like this.” The first part, before he goes to school, is also a really good depiction of a young child’s view of the world, where everything is huge and the first time hearing a grown man sing is an astonishing phenomenon.

Thing is, I think in most stories the dreams would be presented as some sort of coping mechanism for either the boredom or the violence (depending on the author’s attitudes and experiences) of military life. George Cottar, otoh, thrives in public-school and military environments— he’s the kind of idealized subaltern who never meets a discipline problem he can’t solve by teaching his men to box, and who reacts with embarrassed modesty when awarded the DSO for having carried two wounded soldiers to safety while under fire. But the dreams aren’t a febrile distraction from his Empire-building, either. Kipling appears to consider George’s whole situation an example of balance—a healthy mind in a healthy body.

Anyway I’m still trying to parse it; as I think a lot of readers have been, for decades.

Now that I know Moyna MacGill is Angela Lansbury’s mom I can’t unsee the resemblance.

Are we supposed to think the family dog’s death was not natural, and that Lettie used the poison on him? Or did she just buy it from the drugstore, but the dog died of old age before she got around to using it?

I like how, without directly spelling it out, the film shows how carefully and subtly Harry--once he finds the poison in the desk and starts thinking about using it to revenge himself on Lettie-- makes sure everyone else knows that she’s the one who bought it. He also lets Nona sees him handle it so that if his fingerprints are on it later there’ll be a legit explanation. I assume his original plan is to try and make it look like suicide, though I wonder if anyone in town would buy that. After all, they all know what Lettie’s like, and that she’s just driven a wedge between her brother and his fiancée, restoring the family status quo—why would she kill herself instead of enjoying her triumph? When the cocoa cups get mixed up, they’re certainly all very willing to believe she murdered Hester.

Thatt last scene before Hettie goes to the gallows in which she exults in the fact that while she’s going being executed, Harry’s going to go mad with guilt-- beautifully monstrous performance from Fitzgerald.

OK so it’s not exactly an “it was a dream” ending, it’s an “I fantasized about killing Lettie and realized how horribly it could go wrong” ending, which—I can maybe live with? Harry thought better of it, and Deborah, at the last minute, thought better of marrying that other guy.

Via conuly , a story about fact-checking a family legend. I figured from the start that the grandmother’s story would be true, or there wouldn’t be an article about it; and having encountered similar articles and short documentaries I guessed that there’s be one misleading detail somewhere that would throw off the search for a long time.

When you’re doing archival research, you have to figure out who the people you’re looking for were at the time, and this story demonstrated that in a manner that I’m saving to use as a plot point someday.

Gone to Tarleton. A post on tumblr sent me to look up Elizabethan performer Richard Tarleton, who died just around the time Shakespeare was starting his career and remained a comedy legend through the seventeenth century-- as in, people were practically writing RPF about him (there are sketches and dialogues in which his ghost shows up as a character). And he lived long before film or audio recording, so all we can do is hunt through plays and broadside ballads for clues as to what his performances were like. And the whole history of humanity is full of ephemeral artists like this. 

Meanwhile, a_t_rain has posted another lovely bit of sixteenth-century RPF: In 1580s London, apprentice grocer John Heminges decides to revive an ancient guild mystery play and ends up getting married, finding a new career, and meeting a friend who will change his life. 

Also via Tumblr:
I followed the link and the story turned out to be ‘The Dust-Cloud,’ by E.F. Benson. I keep forgetting just how good Benson’s writing is-- the phrase quoted on Tumblr isn’t even the best bit of it. (CW for mentioned animal and child death—off-stage and implied, but integral to the story)

Andrew and I watched The Blue Dahlia (1946) on the weekend. This is another one of those movies that sounds like noir when you describe it, but I’m not sure it is. I told Andrew that it didn’t feel quite twisty enough to be. Later, I thought about sovay ’s definition of noir, which tends to involve the falling-away of every bit of workaday reality the protagonist has previously taken for granted, to vertiginous, terrifying, but also sometimes liberating effect. There is a character in The Blue Dahlia whose life has come to feel like a dream or a nightmare, but he’s not the protagonist, Lt. Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd): he’s Buzz, the protagonist’s old bomber-crew gunner, and his life got like that before the start of the film, when he took a piece of shrapnel to the head. Also he’s played by William Bendix and he walks away with every scene he's in.

A couple of days ago I read a_t_rain’s lovely Will Shakespeare & Ben Jonson fic Bird-Song, and commented that I really loved the behind-the-scenes feel of Will and his fellow playwrights and actors (and their families) bouncing ideas off each other and arguing about what will work best in performance, like a 20th-century rock band. I assumed the last comparison was my imagination acting up, but it turns out that was part of the inspiration. Until two days ago I hadn’t heard of two-thirds of these people, and now I love all of them.

Anyway, I found out the following days there’s a whole series— so far I especially like Nameless, (helps if you’ve seen or at least heard of A Yorkshire Tragedy) and Stripped (in which the King’s Men feel a bit Led Zeppelin to me, what with the complicated grief and numinous stuff happening on a rainy trip to Wales).


In a slightly different genre: Couture and the Theater. Following the events of Top Hat (1935), Horace Hardwicke and Beddini find themselves in conversation. Madge figures it out (and approves) before they do.

Another one I was watching primarily for Newton, but being a classic airplane-disaster movie, this one’s an ensemble piece. The copy on the Robert Newton channel might not be the one I watched, which was fairly terrible— picture occasionally broke up, sound occasionally got out of synch, and the last minute or so was cut off.

It’s not-really-a-spoiler that the plane had safely landed by that point, but I was enjoying the scene of the passengers and crew disembarking, and would like to have seen the end of the movie. I tried checking the script on scripts.com, which presented its own difficulties — scripts.com gives you the dialogue and nothing else, not even which character is speaking; however I was pleased to confirm from  that the stewardess (Doe Avedon), the Korean lady (Joy Kim), and the older man with a terminal illness (Paul Fix) all went out on that dinner date they’d been discussing.

The online version of The Desert Rats will for some reason play when my tablet is using cellular, but not when it’s using wi-fi, so looks like I’m going to be watching it in increments during my lunch breaks at work. Thoughts so far:

That’s almost the kind of voiceover narration that Monty Python used to parody.

It's a good thing I like the tune 'Waltzing Matilda.' Got a feeling I'm going to be hearing it a few times on the soundtrack.

OK, I’m neither a military historian nor a military strategist, but I can’t help but notice that while the officers are pointing to the bottom of the map, there’s a whole bay sticking way into the top of the territory they’re trying to hold. Is there going to be some kind of amphibious assault later in this movie?

Got a feeling we’re going to be meeting Robert Newton’s character any second---

Now that is how you introduce a character. Wow. Also love Burton’s 😲 face. I imagine this feels sort of like if I were put in charge of a detachment of soldiers and suddenly one of them tuned out to be Mr. Hanomansing from Grade 8. Even if he were completely sober*, I’d definitely have questions (mostly "Aren't you too old to join the military?" "Does your son know about this?" and "Did they ever do any structural repairs on the old school building?")

*ETA-- Just realized that I've inadvertently implied that Mr. H. was not habitually sober -- he was, at least so far as I could tell as a twelve-year-old. I was referring to the state Newton's character is in.

— I always feel sort of guilty and embarrassed when they change, but I suppose no long-dead actor, or even any living one, is harmed by my brain being fickle in its interests.

Anyhow, Newton was the main reason I watched Androcles and the Lion (1952) yesterday, although the presence of Alan “voice of Scrooge McDuck” Young, Elsa Lanchester, Jean Simmons, and Victor Mature certainly didn’t hurt. ETA —I am curious as to how it would have played with the original casting of Harpo Marx as Androcles. I supposed he would have talked.

Still trying to put my thoughts in enough order to write about it— I don’t think I’ll go read Shaw’s introductory essay (I assume he wrote one) because my experience is that I enjoy GBS’ plays better than his explanations of what he meant by them. My other early opinion is that Androcles/Lavinia/Ferrovius make a lovely platonic OTP.

also ETA — Just looked at the YouTube comments and woah, Shaw would definitely get a kick out of how many people this play script from 1912 is still angering. Roughly half insist it’s an insult to Christians, while the other half consider it Christian propaganda and are calling it out on that count. (And then there are a couple of people complaining that it’s boring and asking why it isn’t in colour like The Robe or Ben Hur). 

Spent the past weekend with a migraine that segued mid-Sunday into the first cold I’ve had in two years, which was an improvement over the migraine but still knocked me flat enough that I wasn’t able to come in to work until today. Shoutout to the co-worker who covered my desk Monday and Tuesday, not only for doing so but for leaving me a box of tissues.

Andrew found and downloaded a bunch of high-quality files of old movies, so yesterday (I think—my sense of time is still a bit muddled) we watched The Testament of Doctor Mabuse, which for various reasons is scarier to me than it was a few years ago. It’s still beautifully textured, especially in the copy we saw, and wryly funny in many places. My German is not yet advanced enough to follow conversations (particularly rapid 1930s-era ones) without the support of subtitles, but every so often my brain was able to pick out a word and then OHNE or BLEIB or GANZEN would flash behind my eyes.

Attempting to learn another language as an adult has highlighted a few things about just how I perceive words—I’ve known for a long time that when I read, I tend to hear the text; and that when someone’s speaking, I see the words somewhere in my head like title cards or a teleprompter. But I’m beginning to suspect that I actually need to have a handle on both the sound and the spelling, or I don’t get that little click of recognition, and I can’t parse the word at all—which rather makes me wonder how I would have fared in a pre-literate society. Perhaps imagery would’ve served the same purpose.

Staying in this Canada Day for various reasons.

Still job-hunting. My only recent accomplishment I feel like talking about is to have improved a fairisle vest I knit a couple of years ago but almost never wore because I’d made it a little too short. This week I carefully snipped the ribbed waistband off, picked up all the stitches around the bottom of the torso and knit an additional two inches (because it was fairisle I could do this without having to worry about matching the yarn exactly) before grafting the waistband back on— I picked up the stitches around the top of the waistband, knit one round in off-white yarn to match the last round I’d done at the bottom of the torso, and then threaded a thin white elastic cord through the top stitches of the waistband and the bottom stitches of the torso (normally I’d have used yarn to do this, but I was worried the join wouldn’t have enough stretch).

The only tricky part was that this join was right where I’d originally made extra stitches as I began the torso part of the garment, so in reassembling it I every so often had to thread through two stitches above for one below in order to match everything up. I’ve no idea whether this description has been comprehensible without photos.



I also found David Byrne’s True Stories (1986) and watched it a couple of times. I’d say this movie falls into the mock-documentary genre, with the clarification that in this case it’s not “mock” as in “mockery,” it’s mock as in mock turtle soup or mock apple pie. And of course, it’s a musical.

Byrne plays an awkward but non-judgemental narrator who begins his history of Texas with the Devonian era before racing through more recent, often bloody, events, before stepping through the projection screen behind him and into the movie proper, where he meets the townsfolk of Virgil, TX, gearing up for their state’s sesquicentennial with a town-wide “Celebration of Specialness.”

“But this place is perfectly normal!” exclaims the Narrator, just before we go into the VeriCorp building (“It’s cool. It’s a multipurpose shape— a box”) and meet the sentimental Cute Woman (Alix Elias); Ramon (Tito Larriva), who claims to pick up other people’s emotions in the form of radio transmissions; the engineer (Matthew Posey) whose love for computers is as poetic as it is practical (suspect most of my STEM acquaintances will agree); and Louis Fyne (a young John Goodman), who is the closest thing this movie has to a protagonist. Lewis desperately wants to find a wife; he has a big light-up WIFE WANTED sign outside his house, and places an ad on local tv; he never comes off as an incel, though, mainly because he takes “no” for an answer, even when it’s not directly stated— there’s a heartbreaking scene where a date with the Cute Woman seems to be going well, until Louis sings her his heartfelt, half-finished song, and her face falls: the song is sad, and therefore Not Cute. “I’ll show myself out,” says Lewis. He bows and thanks her for having him over, before withdrawing.

The background extras for this movie included fifty pairs of twins; only one pair is ever directly pointed out. The local voodoo practitioner (Pop Staples) is as devout in his religion as the conspiracy-theorist preacher (John Ingle) or the town’s de facto mayor Earl Culver (Spalding Gray) who turns dinner at his house into a half-lecture half-ritual about the new start-up economy, but far more down-to-Earth and far less scary. A lot of the socio-economic stuff in this movie is uncomfortably prescient.

I forgot to mention the woman (Jo Harvey Allen) who constantly claims psychic powers or past love affairs with everyone from JFK to Burt Reynolds, and the woman (Swoosie Kurtz) who’s rich enough to stay in bed all the time. The least realistic thing about this movie, imo, is that the town parade contains no floats or horses (otherwise it’s basically the parade my town of origin held each year); and yet their talent show gets a live tv broadcast rather than being recorded with a single consumer-level video camera and shown on cable access a month later. It’s necessary to the story that it be so—maybe VeriCorp hooked the town up with some electronics.