? Fast ? Furious

Still in space, The ? Motorist (as I knew it back in the nineties when I was making my rounds of the Museum Of the Moving Image, where it used to play on a loop) is a film about a car made when both inventions were in their infancy, and has the narrative pace and logic of a toddler playing with a new toy, but one can still enjoy with clarity over a century later the surprising precision and ingenuity gone into realising something this stupid on film: Sixty seconds in and we've already run over a policeman, driven up the side of a building, and landed on a cloud. It's only when we reach Handover Court that the pace starts to drag. It's an odd lacuna, that court scene. You start trying to read lips. Who's on trial? Why are their eyebrows so big? I pondered these questions so intently I completely missed the transformation into a horse-and-carriage. 

 

 

 I met Gemma this evening, who's currently having to teach the Theatre of the Absurd. I realised she's one of the best teachers I know and among other things we talked about how, when playing someone simply doing a job, questions about motivation and even audibility don't actually have to apply. I suggested silent movies probably did us a favour by freeing drama from text, and showing how great an actor you could still be without an audience necessarily understanding what you were saying. The Handover Court scene in The ? Motorist is not a great an example of that. 

 Otherwise the film's a little masterpiece, and thanks to David Cairns for reminding me of it, and also for alerting me to its sequel which has a robot in it.

Tom and Jerry used to be Cops.

 Let's endure a mad old cartoon about skeletons for Hallowe'en proper, shall we? 

 Before the famous cat and mouse, before the male leads of The Good Life – but after Pierce Egan's 1821 box office hit that I've only just learnt about* – Tom and Jerry were apparently these two guys on the right, and after last week's dancing, and Saturday's march, I look upon their floating, supple forms now with envy.  

 

 I'm back rehearsing The Love Goddess this week, and the trick to dancing seems to be to get the top half of my body to hold up the bottom half, which after forty-eight years of having my bottom half hold up the top half is quite a revelation. There's a sexy dance in this too, although not on the same level as Tex Avery, or Jessica Rabbit, or Betty Boop, or actually any woman drawn outside of a toilet cubicle on a building site. I think the animators knew too that they weren't up to this task without any reference material, which is why they spent more time having their vamp just take incredibly deep breaths in a low cut top while standing still.

 

  Has David Cairns written about this cartoon? Of course he has. Do the skeletons all start playing each other's ribs like xylophones at any point? Well actually, not quite. We're literally a second into the action when either Tom or Jerry turns his hat into a telescope, so let's not expect too many set-ups and pay-offs. 

 

 Apart from that though, Magic Mummy is just your standard, run-of-the-mill , proudly-gay-police-force-hunting-down-a-necrophiliac-Svengali cartoon from the thirties. I don't think it was one of the ones Dad used to show us on his Super 8 projector, but the scratchy soprano of its wind machine still summons the dread of many he did. Skeletons were such a faff to draw, weren't they? Happy Hallowe'en, ol' unattendees!

 

 

"At last"?!

 

 *UPDATE: I have also just learnt that "Tom and Jerry" was a drink! Okay. I reckon the drink was named after the play, and the cops were named after the drink, and the animals were named after the cops (Joseph Barbera worked on both cartoons) and the neighbours were named after the animals.

I Just Watched The First Comedy Ever Made, and Laughed a Lot and Realised Things.

When Comedy Was Queen

 Beaneath this hilarious hat is Marie Dressler, star of stage, screen, and Tillie's Punctured Romance, the world's first feature-length comedy film (or "photoplay", as it was billed on the poster, this being a medium so young nobody had yet settled on a name for it.) Made in 1914 by Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios, I finally got round to watching this the day after Biden's inauguration, newly bouyed after a good night's sleep, and freshly in love with the promise of its place of origin. This was also where I'd got up to in David Cairns' invaluable run-down of the early works of Charlie Chaplin, as it was his first feature too. 

 

And here's the new favourite, joining hot acquisition Dressler, and Sennett's star fixture – and the woman who gave him more than one break – the brilliant Mabel Normand, for a lovely curtain call at the film's end.

 

 While not top billed, Chaplin is definitely one of the film's stars, and if you're normally turned off by him, you might still enjoy to a surprising degree his turn here as the gold-digging, Fairbanks-'tached louse – Bialystok in the body of Bloom – whose pursuit of Dressler makes him the butt of many jokes... literally, in fact, this being Keystone, and butt placement being key.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Chaplin played a lot of heels before he turned auteur, I'm learning, and it suited him. Here, he hopes to marry Dressler's Tillie Banks for her millions despite, simultaneously dating fellow grifter Mabel Normand, having met the heiress when, playing fetch with her dog, she accidentally threw a brick in his face. Bricks in faces are an early Keystone staple, I'm also learning, and knew no gender boundaries: Mabel Normand could take a brick to the face as well as anyone. Custard pies were a later refinement, but not I feel, necessarily an improvement. 

 

The third act.

 

 I laughed a lot at this film. It's full of excellent violence, but also, as with Tille squeezing behind her unnamed suitor to join in the eavesdropping above, the ticklish interplay of people who are just too close together. Here's another example: future comedy star Charlie Chase who, given essentially the role of an extra on Mabel Norman's right, seizes his moment with laudably shameless man-spreading.

 

 

Watching the film within a film (noticeably more realistic than the film which it's in – 

ARGH, WHAT DOES THIS REMIND ME OF? Answers below, please.)

 

 Everyone in these Keystone comedies is slightly in each other's way, I realised. It's how so many of the jokes happen – the patting of the wrong knee, the cane in the arse, the plank in the face – but it's also just a good way to maintain comic tension. I also realised I enjoy this as a comic device every bit as much as I enjoy someone being interrupted. 

 

 Side note: I'd already been thinking about the invasion of space when Blackadder III turned up on televison and I suddenly noticed how close Hugh Laurie was standing to Robbie Coltrane. Everyone in those middle two series of Blackadder stood weirdly close to each other, which might be why those two series were the funniest. Would Upstart Crow feel more like Blackadder, I wondered, if everyone just got up in each other's face more? (And might this be a part of the secret of the success of Ghosts? Of course, the modern aspect ratio requires a larger cast.)

 

Normand, unbothered.

 

 Anyway, the headline is: I laughed a lot at the first ever feature-length comedy, over a century after it was released. Maybe it's non-reputation is down to critics who didn't think it was Chaplinny enough. Too anarchic. I've no idea. The other headline, I guess, is that the first ever feature-length comedy starred two women. So maybe it's down to that.

 Here's the excellent, historic, pioneering Tillie's Punctured Romance. I love it.

 

Odysseys in Increasing Order of Snappiness

 "Tell me about a complicated man..." Okay then.

  The Jermyn Street Theatre and London Review of Books' online reading of Emily Wilson's superb translation of The Odyssey is tomorrow. (Today? Friday anyway.) Kicking off at nine in the morning, seventy-one actors - including me at around four in the afternoon - will have the impossible job of following Janet Suzman, but if twelve hours is too long an Odyssey for you don't worry, I've looked out some shorter ones. You can watch Hallmark's three-hour mini-series starring Armand "Rico Dredd" Assante, for example, HERE.

 Michael J. Pollard plays a Wind God, and ten minutes in Heathcote Williams is attacked by a giant eel so it's an odd watch, I won't lie, while Armand Assante... I mean I love him, but he's about as complicated as a tap. You haven't come to a film of The Odyssey for the complications though, so if you can't spare three hours why not instead check out THIS? Recommended by David Cairns (again), the almost completely unknown 1954 Italian adaptation stars Kirk Douglas and comes in at just under a hundred minutes.

  Still too long? That's alright, I haven't seen it yet either. Don't go anywhere. Last one: Shot on the original camera of the Brothers Lumières to celebrate a hundred years of cinema, Greek auteur Theodoros Angelopoulos' 1995 adaptation of Homer's Odyssey runs to just fifty-seven seconds...

Hungry Hungry Harpies

  

 

 "Gods, Men, and Monsters"... I'm still thinking about that title.

 Of all the monstered women of Greek Mythology the most referenced is probably the harpy. There are no drawings of harpies in my old Greek Mythology notebook however, so here instead is Raoul Servais's Harpya, a cracking interpretation, funny in a way that makes it hard to see how one could faithfully depict the myth of a lady with the body of a large bird who repeatedly steals food without being funny. Her gender here is a default rather than a dig though, and her modestly civilized Phineas an identifiably unsustainable sap. Originally recommended by David Cairns here, I came across it again looking through the same unposted, old drafts from 2015 in which I'd found my David Icke notes. The draft began: "I was thinking about monsters," - so, not as new an activity as I thought then - "and who to make the baddies. Binge-watching Buffy and thinking about how, growing up, the monsters don't actually appear to go away..." then there's some stuff about the House of Lords. No idea. Let's just watch the cartoon. They don't give out Palme D'Ors to any old rubbish, you know.

 

 

 (Having never drawn a harpy at school, my first attempt at depicting one must have been at University, sellotaping bamboo canes to my sister's fingers for a film of The Tempest that she'd come down to help with only to end up being cast as Ariel. She was excellent, and looked nothing the Harpy above. Tom Lyall's Caliban on the other hand...)

 

Snarlie Chaplin

 

 

 

 And sometimes this blog will just be a straight swipe from David Cairns'. 

 Mabel's Strange Predicament is not, as it sounds, the sequel to Lucy's Complex Dilemma (although lip-reader Cairns notes our heroine is also saying the plot out loud) but, in fact, the début of Charlie Chaplin's iconic "Little Tramp" costume. No "park" nor "policeman" in this film, though, and the "pretty girl" is director and star Mabel Normand – dressing for work in her pyjamas, a woman after my own heart – and unambigiously menaced by Chaplin's vagrant. Aided by distrurbingly haggard make-up, this is an astonishingly observed performance, employing little more than what a villain on the brink of passing out might do, teetering between slapstick and threat therefore, building genuine suspense. Chaplin's drunk act was infamous, but it's still a revelation to see his first appearance in this get-up not as a protagonist, but as a nightmare, repelling sympathy. And it feels a bit like the missing piece of a puzzle: That costume's nasty. 

 Thanks, Shadowplay, for drawing this to my attention.

TIMESPANNER BONUS MATERIAL: Trouser Bar Rabbit Hole

 The Dan In the High Castle was repeated today on Radio 4 Extra, so here's a fun game you can play that's vaguely related. I enjoyed playing it anyway. Above is the Radio Times review from when the show made Pick of the Day, and I'm fine with David McGillivray's reservations; it was only the second episode of anything I'd ever written, and there aren't that many ways to interpret the commissioning of a second pilot two years after the first. I'm very grateful though to those who stood up for it, including the fair Finnemore:

 But it was the following comment from David Cairns that set me on the path from which there could be no turning: "An indifferent review from the author of FRIGHTMARE. Praise from Caesar!" Now I hadn't heard of FRIGHTMARE but that wasn't too surprising; David C has a knowledge of film bordering on the Forbidden, having made it his mission to watch every single film illustrated in Denis Giffiord's Pictorial History of the Horror Movie. So here's the trailer...

 That's a hell of a font. I went and looked up McGillivray's wikipedia entry (which I'd like to think he had a hand in writing himself) and was instantly enamoured to find a stalwart who'd worked at the coalface of British smut. Living, breathing history: "House of Whipcord", "Satan's Slave", "I'm Not Feeling Myself Tonight", "The Hot Girls" (Not "Hot Girls", mind... "The Hot Girls".) These titles seemed almost specifically designed to wind up on a list. So I drew John's attention to the man's achievements, and John in turn drew my attention to this...

 It was not Kofi Annan. And I was not disappointed. But it was a surprisingly uneasy thing to google. So that's the game. Happy hunting!

Adolfo the Beautiful (NONBOND NIGHT 4: OK CONNERY)

What a stroke of luck. Just as it looks like the summer hours of the London Dungeon will make me miss tonight's Non-Bond deadline, David Cairns goes and digs up this, a vehicle for Sean Connery's actual brother.

"The reft is shouting" (and acting like a dick)

(originally posted on myspace here)

I woke at four. That was fine. I'd needed some sleep. The last two days I'd been trying to tackle the London Dungeons' new summer hours on the lowest reserves of rest, attention, patience, hope and vim that I'd seen since records began (ie this blog). Were there advantages to this physical state? Well, it wasn't all

no. The fact I'd been up at nights reading David Cairns' vividly illustrated missives from a week-long Hammer-Frankethon did lend my Ripper and Autopsy shows a new-found, straight-backed edge for example, as my faltering ability to discern Reality from Some Blog's Precis of Fantasy finally dissolved completely in the dry ice drifting off of Boghurst's bubbling jars. With an insomniac shudder of my shoulder blades, however, I also spent much of these days disproportionately haunted by Cairns' account of Peter Cushing's near-legendary grief, following his wife's less legendary death-bed confession that she had always thought he'd spent his life acting like a dick, in fact, and that he'd broken her heart and had made her life hell...

Look at that poor man. And look on this:

It's a design for Hamlet's conscience, Mr. Tommy Knockers. I scribbled it in the kitchen yesterday evening, while Bishop phoned round for puppets. It should be easy enough to fashion a conscience out of milk I would think, although it now looks more like we'll be going for something in a sock and some shades. The show's a week away (remember, we didn't do the publicity). But, good news: Stumbling back from work to my kitchen with a family Lasagne from Iceland and a heart of black ice I found that, once the boys had arrived and we actually stood up and started trying to perform what we'd written, I was having fun. I was having fun and I wasn't tired. And by half past eleven that evening we finally had something like a finished script to e-mail to our producer. Bishop was a little worried that he'd miss the last train back (to his fiancee, as of Friday! Tirree!) but of course, THE GREAT THING ABOUT WRITING HAMLET, as I learnt for myself and I'm sure you'll all learn for yourselves when you get round to writing Hamlet, is that if you do suddenly find you're five minutes away from the deadline with all your protagonists still standing, you can solve it with a simple stage direction - Hang on, I'll go and get the First Folio...

Omigod! Or, however you spell it. I've just made an immensely important literary find.

Right... The stage directions in the last scene of the Folio's Hamlet are certainly pretty brilliant (though not as good as in the Penguin version:
"In scuffling they change rapiers, and both are wounded with the poisoned weapon...
"The Queen falls...
"She dies...
"He wounds the King...
"He forces the King to drink...
"The King dies...
"He dies...
"He dies..."
And so Shakespeare finds out that, blimey, fighting is certainly a lot easier to write than speaking and in fact he was much nearer to the end than he had thought - There is a theory he spent over a decade working on "Hamlet", which given that he wrote thirty other plays in the space of twenty years is probably worth a mention, but anyway) no, the real find I've just made is Hamlet's ORIGINAL last words. Because, according to the First Folio, these are not, as has been handed down to us: "The rest is silence." They are in fact, as printed in the very first collection of Shakespeare's complete works back in 1623, (and thereafter one supposes consigned to the Naughty Step of Theatrical History):

"The rest is silence. O, o, o, o."

Well, at least it wasn't "The rest is silence. Oooo."

But actually, isn't that brilliant? Isn't it brilliant that Hamlet can't even get his own dying words right? He's a dick to the end... But a dick with dignity. He's OUR dick, and a plague and a pox and a dump upon those who'd try and paint him otherwise. Anyone can write a sympathetic villain, but try to write a sympathetic dick, that takes real heart - Ooh, bangs and barking outside. I wonder what that was. Let's see if there's sirens.

Well I didn't write what I'd intended to but I dare say that's fine. I'd found this teddibly interesting article on procrastination in the Observer in the Hop on Forest Hill. All the findings therein make perfect sense to me - See below: I am clearly a man of my time, this blog a vital social document - Speaking of which, here I am as Tony Blair in an earlier, serious version of Hamlet.

... Nope, no sirens. Clearly it was horseplay. Night then.

Just so we're agreed what's good...

My readership, apologies. 

Instead of knuckling down to a post mortem on Jonah, as promised, or gloating in print (or whatever medium this is) over Jonathan Ross directing a little of his boundless enthusiasm my way last Saturday (in an interview with Mitchell and Webb about the new TV series – listen to the last fifteen minutes if you must - he lightheatedly bemoaned the non-transfer of a radio sketch I wrote called "Asbo Zapruder". By me. And then he went on about "Padlockigami". Which I wrote. Which was nice. Bracket brackets: for the record, I don't see the logistical problem being Rob dressing up like a baby seal, so much as James Bachman having to pass himself off as a French heron. Also, once you've got over the initial visual gag, the sketch is basically just five minutes of watching a man text)... yeah so instead of gloating over that, which you'll see I haven't, I have, it appears, posted the following comment on David Cairns' fine movie blog "Shadowplay" still sat here in my coat (I meant to get some eggs). When not bigging up Fritz Lang's tedious, horribly acted Die Nibelungen, Mr. Cairns has been asking for people's personal moments of cinematic "euphoria", and then charmingly and intelligently broadcasting them. Mine's not a particularly remarkable choice, but I've made it now, and it's all I have to show. So here. Enjoy. (If you have broadband obviously. If you don't, here's an old flyer:)

 

"1. the opening credits of Do The Right Thing:

2. The escape by boat in Night of the Hunter.

To my mind another pretty-much-perfect movie. Suddenly, finally, here with the image of Mitchum stuck in the water, and the kids heading off into the top right hand corner, we're out of the spiky German shadows and into a children's story. Everything is made to look as simultaneously fake and as life-like as possible. I can't explain. I first saw this late at night when I was about seventeen, and it was as the boat set off that I went from loving this picture to being in love. I can think of many examples on film of a violent mood-jolt from peace to horror, but no other example of this, its opposite, a scream that lingers as a lullaby. It's unspoofable, which is pretty much the same thing as sacred.

Both these clips are completely unconcerned with any tradition that I'm aware of. They just go: Hey we can do whatever we like! And then they do it... To which should be added, now I think of it: 3. The pan over to Christina Ricci's tap-dance in Buffalo 66."

Of which I could find no clip. So here instead is Danny Kaye declaiming "Giacomo hides not behind drapes!" Happy Valentine's, you all.

Bissous x