Monthly Archives: January 2009

30′s movies marathon – part 12

She (1935, USA) – The Indiana Jones of the 1930′s. Fantastic effects and an intelligent story – and now available in a fine colorized version. This is better than the well-known fantasy movies of that time. Why haven’t I heard of it before? The only thing wrong with She is the title, and maybe that’s the answer.

Top Hat (1935, USA) – Enter Fred Astaire (somewhat younger than I’m used to), and Ginger Rogers, dance on air. Lovely farce. This is the old Hollywood I love. Also featuring a funny offensive Italian stereotype, (yay!)

The Call of the Wild (1935, USA) – I like how we know who’s the villain here: He’s the one who carries a portable bathtub when he’s prospecting in Alaska. That, and he’s mean to dogs and Clark Gable. Fine movie, though the ending feels like they just ran out of story. (Not Jack London’s story, though – they ran out of that after the title.)

The Thin Man (1934, USA) – Retired from police work to focus on his drinking, Nick Charles tries his best not to have to solve a series of murders, but that’s difficult when everybody insists on dropping clues in his lap. Works well as both comedy and crime. Favourite scene: A room full of drunken people singing christmas songs.

The Black Room (1935, USA) – Prophecies of doom, hidden rooms with terrible secrets, and Boris Karloff as the evil twin, the good twin, and the evil twin pretending to be the good twin. Unexpectedly unpredictable.

30′s movies marathon – part 11

Les Miserables (1935, USA) – Coherent and well paced, this is how to film a big novel. Watched it all. IMDB reviewers warn that some details from the 1000+ page book are missing, as well as entire characters such as Tom Bombadil.

Mark of the Vampire (1935, USA) – Spends too much time on convincing the characters that they’re actually dealing with vampires. Yes yes, those mysterious marks on the neck are unexplainable by modern medicine – get on with it! The actual vampire scenes are enjoyable, but clichéd, with the usual wailing, spiders and mist. Or perhaps they hadn’t become cliches yet at this point? Watched: 20 minutes.

The Last Days of Pompeii (1935, USA) – To-ga, to-ga, to-ga! Featuring matte paintings and Romans who are inexplicably opposed to slavery. Watched: 11 minutes.

The Raven (1935, USA) – No, judge, I don’t think the doctor with the Hungarian accent who says his cellar full of Poe-inspired torture instruments is “more than a hobby” should be trusted near your daughter. Watched: 23 minutes.

Captain Blood (1935, USA) – I hate Errol Flynn and his movies. Perfect, smirking heroes fighting for Freedom and The Girl. Always the same plot, regardless of the “historical” setting. But, god damn it, this isn’t too bad. Flynn smirks less than usual. If I had to see one Flynn movie, I suppose this would be it. Watched: 42 minutes.

And in her great eyes, secrets swam

I’ve tried to read Theodore Sturgeon’s 1953 short story collection E Pluribus Unicorn several times since I bought it in 1998. I didn’t get further than a quarter of the way. This may be because some of the stories are unpleasant, but more likely I just got distracted.

I’ve gotten better at organizing my reading: One book at a time, from the top of the stack, with new books going to the bottom. I finish the top book or put it away, but I only read one at a time. Multiple open books is a leading cause of bibliophilic stress disorder. With one book, I can focus.

Focus is necessary to appreciate a finely crafted short story. Earlier, I missed the details, and didn’t quite get the point. Now I do.

The stories in E Pluribus Unicorn aren’t all good, and there are some awkward twists. But most of them are memorable. Many take place in the crossroads between romanticism and horror, and succeed in being truly disturbing. Others deal with themes of love and loneliness, the best of which is A Saucer of Loneliness. Some are realistic, including my overall favourite Die, Maestro, Die! – where the only magic is the magic of jazz. A Way of Thinking also stands out.

These are the kinds of stories that give you a sense of what SF can accomplish. It was other authors like Ray Bradbury who perfected this genre-bending approach to SF, but they were walking in Sturgeon’s footsteps.

30′s movies marathon – part 10

This is what Russians looked like in the 18th centuryThe Scarlet Empress (1934, USA) – Sent to Russia to marry Peter III, Marlene Dietrich is a lone, wide-eyed innocent among the half-wits and brutes at the Russian court, a place of barbarism and confrontational architecture. She emerges from the perverse nightmare as Catherine II, cool and cruel tsarina of a cool and cruel country. Watched it all.

Change of Heart (1934, USA) – Vapid college graduates are released into the world, with only the Depression and their stupid parents standing in the way of happiness. Love and hilarity presumably ensues. Watched: 8 minutes.

L’Atalante (1934, France) – I really want to give these French comedy-dramas a chance, but they’re too strange. Maybe they will grow on me. Watched: 12 minutes. IMDB reviewers say this is the best French film of all time. I hope not.

Waltzes from Vienna (1934, UK) – Alfred Hitchcock tries his hand at slapstick, and FAILS. Fails, fails, fails. Hitchcock himself thought this was the worst film he ever made, and even that’s being too nice. Watched: 9 minutes.

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935, USA) – “Raise the men and lock the women indoors” – the monster is back, and he doesn’t take himself quite as seriously as before. The scene with the tiny people is very silly. Watched: 31 minutes.

The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935, UK) – Sound technology was apparently still an unfamiliar art in Britain in 1935. So was acting. (*ba-dum-dum-ching*). Watched: 6 minutes.

Naughty etymology (3)

Last batch from the Dictionary of Obscenity and Taboo, I promise:

BULL [..] The term is one of many names for male animals applied to men which carry connotations of sexual ability. [..] In nineteenth-century America these words were considered positively indecent, and were avoided by those with pretensions to good breeding. Amazing as it now seems, bulls were then known by names such as cow creature and gentleman cow.

CONDOM [..] Certainly the idea of using a sheath for contraception predates the introduction of suitable rubber. Giacomo Casanova, for one, tested animal intestines for this purpose.

FILTH [..] In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries prostitutes were referred to as filth, but since then the epithet has been inexplicably transferred to policemen.

ARSE [..] In the reign of Queen Anne there was a fashionable game at court which involved one person deceiving another into asking a question to which the first could answer “my arse”. For example, a lady might enter a room in apparent distress crying “It is white, and it follows me!” When asked what “it” was she would reply in triumph “my arse!”

KISS MY ARSE [..] For reasons which are, unfortunately, lost to history there are a number of place names in Cheshire which make reference to arse-kissing. Examples are Kiss Arse Hill at Rainow, and Kiss Arse Wood at Wincle.

PRICK [..] Prudery has been responsible for the omission of many ancient proverbs from supposedly comprehensive reference works. One such is the sagacious observation that “a standing prick has no conscience”.

30′s movies marathon – part 9

The Count of Monte Cristo (1934, USA) – A straightforward, somewhat unfocused adaptation, with an entirely wrong Robert Donat as Edmond Dantes. (Don’t hire a boy to play a middle-aged man’s role.) There must be better versions, but the underlying story is strong enough to carry the movie anyway. My favourite Cristo will of course always be Alfred Bester’s.

Of Human Bondage (1934, USA) – I remember this novel. This isn’t it. But it does remind me I should revisit W. Somerset Maugham. Watched: 9 minutes.

Cleopatra (1934, USA) – What Would Jerry Bruckheimer Do? He would open his Cleopatra with the kidnapped queen being carried by chariots at high speed into the desert, and so does Cecil B. deMille. But I think Bruckheimer would find a Caesar who looked less like Graham Chapman pretending to be serious. Watched: 10 minutes.

Bright Eyes (1934, USA) – Shirley Temple plays Shirley, the world’s cutest orphan – who has a disturbingly close relationship with all the men at the local airbase. Watched: 6 minutes, then skipped forward to her singing for and being groped by a passenger plane full of men. What?!!! (Graham Greene thought it was fishy too. Shirley Temple had him sued.)

The Lost Patrol (1934, USA) – Arabs hunt British soldiers in the desert. Starring Boris Karloff as the world’s ugliest Christian. Watched: 9 minutes.

Naughty etymology (2)

More words from the Dictionary of Obscenity and Taboo:

UNMENTIONABLES [..] Between 1790 and the middle of the nineteenth century, by which time they had become established as acceptable, trousers were given a succession of silly and evasive names. As well as unmentionables, they were called inexpressibles, indescribables, unspeakables, ineffables, unexplicables, unwhisperables, innomonables, unutterables and unthinkables.

NUNNERY. A brothel. The term is not as popular now as it was in Elizabethan times when nuns had more dubious reputations than they do now. When Hamlet says to Ophelia “Get thee to a nunnery” it is clear from the context that he is using the word in this sense.

RIDE [..] Riding St. George is an old term for sexual intercourse with the woman sitting on top of the man. It was commonly believed in earlier centuries that a boy conceived in such circumstances was likely to grow up to become a bishop.

BITCH [..] There is a long history in English of words for women being devalued and becoming offensive. This systematic denigration of women is reflected, for example, in the history of words such as hussy, nymph, mistress, tart and whore. Why this should happen is something of a mystery, but whatever the reason the language is already littered by dozens, even hundreds, of such devalued words.

ONANISM [..] Knowing the above passage [Genesis 38: 8-10], a number of parrot owners (including Dorothy Parker) called their birds Onan because, like their Biblical namesake, they are given to spilling their seed on the ground.