News from Nowhere

The BBC has been holding a Powell & Pressburger season. We started off ten days ago with I Know Where I'm Going!, which, inexplicably, I had never previously seen. Since then I have going round in circles with this post, with the not-exactly-help of a charming half hour of I Know Where I'm Going: 50 years on (making it in turn 30 years old); Made in England, a More recent documentary in which Martin Scorsese holds forth for over two hours (with plenty of film clips); and a random article in the Guardian, by Pamela Hutchinson of I Know Where I'm Going! as the first in a series about 'my feelgood movie'.

I begin to think that I must have a heart of stone: I always find Archers films interesting, and visually ravishing, but I would never describe them as 'feelgood': there's always something a bit unsettling about them. In the case of I Know Where I'm Going!, this starts with the title. That exclamation mark comes and goes: but it appears in the opening credits of the film itself, and it completely undermines the title. "I know where I'm going!" says Joan. That emphasis just invites contradiction, and the film supplies it, demonstrating that she doesn't know where she''s going, and she doesn't know who's going with her, either.

( More of this stuff under the cut... )

I don't have a tisy conclusion. Just one more link, a very good summary from Screen Argyll.

I have not posted very much in the last few weeks. This isn't because I have nothing to say (as if!) but because I have been too busy doing things to write about them. Which is a good problem to have, but manages to feel like a problem nonetheless. This is not the missing post, but a statement of intent, a promise that I would at least like to write a bout -

- But that's just an aide mémoire for my benefit, which is pretty dull for anyone else. To brighten it up, one photo from the last weekend:



The closing procession of the family strand of the Hartlepool Folk Festival almost - but not quite - ready to lead off. Other subjects ( under the cut. )

Will I ever write them? Or will I be distracted by other plans, not to mention domestic trivia? Certainly, we have other plans, and no shortage of domestic trivia. But oh, I would like to write those posts -

A week ago I posted that I was virtually ready for Christmas, barring one or two small tasks which should not present any problem: well, I think we can all guess how that went, can't we?

The last of the packages were in the post the day before the deadline, but at least one of them has not yet arrived (in London, admittedly, which is where services are most likely to be interrupted). Food shopping went to plan. Glasses frames were tried on, and a pair chosen: I am not in love with them, but they are fine - the hardest thing was deciding whether to have the pair that I liked better with a mask, or the ones that I liked better without. And, talking of shopping, we have bought a car - or rather, we have signed a contract on an electric car, when it becomes available in the spring (they are not currently building them fast enough to meet the demand). All durham_rambler wants for Christmas Easter...

We have sung a small but beautifully curated selection of carols from the Bears' repertoire; and more carols with the Melrose Quartet, not to mention a dozen 'name that tune' challenges from their ongoing 'one song to the tune of another' project (but in their case the one song is always Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. This wasn't one they did at the concert, but it's a good indication of how it works:



An entire day went on visiting and being visited and virtually visiting (a Zoom call with S. who had cancelled her long-anticipated Christmas trip to Greece, and was remarkable philosophical about it). And I have cooked and washed up and cooked and washed up again, and done a little actual work in amidst it all. Reading the round-ups of the year's best television, we have watched all the wrong things: the Countdown finals, the University Challenge Christmas specials - oh, and I enjoyed re-watching Desperately Seeking Susan.

Any of these things could have been a post of its own: it's all good, but I don't know where the time goes. The point at which I thought yes, this is authentic Christmas was last night, on the sofa with a mug of instant coffee, watching Morecambe and Wise... This afternoon we hung up the Christmas cards, which is our token piece of Christmas decorating. And now it's time to do battle with the leftovers.

When the BBC followed Mark Kermode's programme about British film comedy with a screening of Whisky Galore I jumped at the chance to see a classic Ealing comedy I had somehow not already seen. Nor had I read Compton Mackenzie's novel on which the film is based; but (I am pretty sure, although I can find no record of it) I have drunk in the Politician pub on Eriskay.

I knew the story, in outline at least, and I had certain expectations of an Ealing comedy: that I probably wouldn't find it all that funny, but I was unlikely to find it particularly offensive, either. Your mileage may vary, but that pretty much worked out for me. The characterisation was, inevitably, very broad: I was not entirely comfortable with Mrs Campbell, the Calvinist battle-axe of a mother of the schoolmaster (played by a young Gordon Jackson) but Jean Cadell is clearly having a whale of a time, and she does finally get to unbend without anyone giving her a hard time about it, so fair enough.

I braced myself for some national stereotyping, too, but reckoned that if I can handle the Wee Free Men then I could handle this. In fact the most lampooned character in the film is the Englishman, the spoilsport authority figure, Captain Waggett as played by Basil Radford, who apparently built a career on playing 'the Eternal Englishman'. I was delighted, but not entirely convinced, to learn from IMDB that director Alexander Mackendrick (who was raised in Glasgow), later claimed that "I began to realise that the most Scottish character in Whisky Galore! is Waggett the Englishman. He is the only Calvinist, puritan figure - and all the other characters aren't Scots at all: they're Irish!" He isn't, in fact, the island's only puritan (how could you forget Mrs Campbell?) and the Western Isles are surely a staging point between Scotland and Ireland, but it's a welcome rejection of stereotype.

Despite which, it's a surprisingly Scottish film. It was filmed on Barra, about as close to the actual site as you could ask (we drove across a road link to Eriskay, but I don't think it existed in the 1940s). Ernest Irving's score incorporates folk music motifs, which made a pleasant background, but then came the celebration scene:



This was a total surprise (though part of it is long familiar to me from the singing of Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor). Later there's an entirely convincing engagement party, too. IMDB talks about the participation of locals alongside cast in these scenes, which may help create the party atmosphere; the sense of community runs all through the film, which makes it a very cheering thing to watch in a bleak January.

Also, it's short (82 minutes).

... same as the old year, as the Who didn't quite say.

Like everyone else, I am hoping that 2021 will be better than 2020 in any number of ways, but maintaining any sort of belief in that hope depends on not expecting too much too soon. These are not the bright sunlit uplands Boris promised us, and insisting they are makes me expect the worst. (Except, of course, in the sense that we have reclaimed sovereignty and cast off the shackles of the EU, and I don't want to talk about that.)

I didn't sit up to see the New Year in. Most years D. and valydiarosada are with us for New Year, and we stay awake until midnight - or wake up, saying Are we nealy there yet?, but no chance of that this year. A neighbour proposed, a few weeks ago, that we could go out into the street to toast the New Year and each other each in our own choice of festive cup, and at the time I thought it sounded like a pleasant thing to do, but that I would have preferred not to doit oi at midnight... And then the new variant virus came along, and the new régime (it's not a national lockdown, it's just a new tier which covers most of the country, but in separate local rulings), and the suggestion was withdrawn.

So the calendar flipped over while I was asleep, and today has slipped past: I spent all morning watching Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin and sewing a button onto one of durham_rambler's shirts. A silly movie and a small but long overdue task, not a bad beginning.

I don't make New Year resolutions: but here are Woody Guthrie's New Year's Rulin's for 1943: Read lots good books... Wake up and fight.

There seem to be more 'classic' movies on my (Freeview) television these days: I don't know if it's a result of filling the space left by the difficulty of making new programmes in these restricted days, but any silver lining is welcome. And so we watched A Star is Born on BBC4's Thursday Night Film Club - the 1954 Judy Garland and James Mason version. I've seen it before, but not recently: I was taken by surprise at the announcement that we were being shown the restored version - but the restoration dates to 1983. I don't know how far that accounts for my feeling at times that I had never seen this before, while some scenes were vividly familiar; perhaps it's just an artefact of my erratic memory.

I assume we all know the story: fading star Norman Main discovers, nurtures, falls in love with talented Esther Blodgett: as she achieves stardom, he falls from it. What I remembered, in addition to this outline, are three scenes: one early in the relationship, in which he eavesdrops as she sings with the band in a late night session; one midpoint when she returns from a day at the studio and attempts to divert hom by performing the big production number she has been working on - and of course, the final shot, the moment when she returns to the stage and claims the name of 'Mrs Norman Main', the moment when she is born as a star.

That selection encapsulates the film pretty well, I think: I had remembered above all the trajectory of the relationship between two people, but I had retained - most clearly of all, in fact - the scene of domestic domestic life which is also a (not unkind) mockery of Hollywood pretensions. I had completely forgotten all the film's big production numbers (I remembered the song Born in a Trunk, but not the routine that accompanied it) but this scene which ridicules them had stayed with me. I can't claim too much credit, though, because I had remembered it for what it says about the couple, not as part of a critique of Hollywood: one this second viewing, that is the aspect of the film which really stood out for me, but it struck me as something new, something which I had previously either not noticed or not remembered.

For whatever reason, what really stood out for me this time round was the extent to which this is a film about Hollywood - and I kept seeing resemblances to another film about Hollywood, made a couple of years earlier, and which could also have been titled A Star is Born: one in which the girl we see coming to stardom is Kathy Selden. Granted, seeing patterns is something I am prone to, but even so...

( So am I imagining this, or is something going on here? )

I want to love Norman Main. I'm pretty sure I did first time round, and James Mason continues to be wonderful. But the rôle hasn't aged well. Yes, alcoholism is a disease, and the man can't help it; he doesn't get any pleasure out of behaving badly, his pain is tangible. But, but, but. He hits down: he disrupts the charity show by a band who are less successful than he is, he insults the publicist assigned to him (and yes, eventually the man justifies his disklike, but which is chicken and which egg?); he finds it unbearable that his wife is more successful than he is (a success he has brought into being, but I do see that that doesn't help), that she is working and he isn't; he can't even make an eatable sandwich...

Of course, this is Vicki Lester's tragedy as much as it is Norman Main's. I may have been slow coming to this conclusion: I've resisted allowing awareness of Judy Garland's own story to colour my reaction to the fiction. And what really cristalises this may just be a question of my personal musical taste. But Esther Blodgett's high point as a creative artist, as far as I'm concerned, is that first scene I remembered, the one in which she and the band and relaxing after a performance, trying something new, and Esther - no, dammit, Judy Garland - sings The Man That Got Away. It's stunning, and I say that as someone who is not usually a fan of the torch song.



The process of becoming a star removes this intense, personal art, and substitutes the anodyne, pleasantly wistful It's a New World. It isn't enough for Esther Blodgett to be eclipsed by Vicki Lester, to become a star Vicki Lester must be remade as Mrs Norman Main. There is no way this is going to end well.

ETA:* Unless I am confusing this with a sequence in On the Town in which the characters go 'on the town', from night club to night club, and we catch the end of a succession of chorus acts, identical except for costume ...

A phone call summoned us to the doctor's surgery for our flu jabs: we were a bit surprised, we'd expected to be kept waiting a while yet, but the call came and we answered. No crowds, the place was deserted: no use standing on the 'stand on this spot' under the porch, because the receptionist behind her screen can't see you, so we called out, walked in, and waited for the doctor to emerge from his room (yes, an actual doctor was doing the injections). My arm was a bit sore for a day or so, but that has passed.

Another Friday night, another pop star birthday, another movie: it doesn't seem right that Cliff Richard is younger than John Lennon, even by a matter of days. Summer Holiday (1963) certainly shows its age in a way that A Hard Day's Night (1964) doesn't, and not just because it isn't as good a film. Cliff and his companions drive their London bus south through Europe encountering national stereotypes at each stage: the French mime artist (Ron Moody), the picturesque inn in Austria where everyone breaks into a waltz (I'm sure I heard a reference to 'White Horse Inn'), the colourful peasants in Yugoslavia where Cliff inadvertently finds himself the centre of wedding festivities ... Even the Americans (not Cliff's love interest, but her scheming mother and her agent, less scheming only because he isn't as bright) are stereotypes, and treated with hostility rather than the condescension meted out to the comedy foreigners, though all is, of course, forgiven for the sake of the happy ending. But what left me speechless was the final shot; the Shadows in the uniform of evzones, the Presidential guard, playing a bouzouki arrangement of the theme tune. I'd have been happy to hear more of that music, and actually there's something rather neat about converting the distinctive march of the evzones into the Shadows' choreographed onstage moves (you couldn't call it a dance). I'm sure it wasn't intended as mockery ...

It may be evident from the above that a) I can forgive a lot in a musical and b) I am not a Cliff fan, I am a Shadows fan. On previous viewings, I've been frustrated by how little use Summer Holiday makes of the Shadows. There's a scene in a nightclub in Paris - the sort of cellar bar where Audrey Hepburn went looking for existentialist philosophers in Funny Face (1957), but now dancing to the music of the Shadows - and fragments where they appear as cyclists, and picnic around the bus.

Which is as much as you could expect, if not more - they aren't actors, they don't have acting parts in the film. On previous watching, I've been frustrated by this, but this time, knowing what to expect, I could accept Cliff's three fellow-mechanics, his gang of mates, in their own right, comedy duo Cyril (Melvyn Hayes) and Edwin (Jeremy Bulloch). For the first time I noticed that Steve, played by Teddy Green, whom I have hitherto thought of only as 'the other one' dances rings around everyone else, and I enjoyed watching him. Well, not quite everyone: he leaves Cliff looking as if he is standing still, and his dancing stands out from the ensemble in its jazzy style as well as its quality, but he isn't the only dancer in the cast. It seems a waste that when the three lads pair off with the three girls (nominally a singing group, though I don't think we ever hear them sing), Una Stubbs is allocated to Melvyn Hayes.

There is so much wrong with this film, but on an evening when the highlight of my day has been having a qualified professional stick a needle into me, as an accompaniment to a glass of wine, it can still make me smile. And this year more than every, everybody needs a summer holiday...

Last night's TV was Goodbye Christopher Robin. I went into it with a vague sense that it had not been well reviewed, and so without great expectations: on that basis I was not disappointed, it was fine. In fact, Mark Kermode seems to have liked it, but I'm glad I didn't know that ahead of time. But then, my enjoyment of narrative based on a true story is always tempered by the itch to know exactly how much is true. Screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce paints a childhood of what amounts to parental neglect, and he names the book on which the film is based; Christopher Milne paints a gentler picture in his memoir The Enchanted Places - and while yes, he would, wouldn't he? I'm inclined to accept at least a degree of nuance from his account. My view of the film's truthfulness may be coloured by its opening, a scene in 1941 in which Christopher's parents receive a telegram from the front containing bad news. This is not untrue, but it invites a false perspective on the entire film.

We have also watched three of the six episodes of Staged in which David Tennant and Michael Sheen pay versions of themselves as actors cast in Six Characters in Search of an Author thwarted by lockdown and going through the motions of rehearsing from home (as recommended by Lucy Mangan). It's funny, and meta, and comes in handy bite-sized chunks. I am happy to be entertained by stuff that was produced before the pandemic: I read people who now flinch away from scenes of crowds, or dancing, or social embraces, but no, that doesn't bother me. That was then, this is now. What I am disproportionately grateful for is the recognition that we don't have to wait for the promised new dawn, the 'on the other side' to be creative, that we can still make entertainment, drama or comedy with what resources lockdown allows us. Hey kids, why don't we do the show right here in the barn?

Even in normal circumstances, we tend not to schedule excursions for bank holidays: anywhere we might want to go will be busier than usual, we can take our days off whenever suits us. If there's anything I think of as a traditional bank holiday entertainment, it's a classic movie on the television. The television hasn't always agreed with me about this, but today the BBC obligingly screened Top Hat, and I was more than happy to watch it.

No need to dwell on its gay subtext (other than: Subtext? nothing sub about it!): Edward Everett Horton in his traditional rôle as Astaire's best friend, with Helen Broderick as his absentee wife and Eric Blore as his very present valet (a pure Jeeves and Wooster relationship) tells you all you need to know. I had no recollection of the balancing presence of Erik Rhodes as Alberto Beddini, the designer who employs Ginger Rogers as his model, so damaging her reputation in a way that has no impact whatsoever on the plot. "For the woman the kiss, for the man the sword!" he declares (more than once).

He clings to his 'comedy Italian' persona through all challenges, including the Italian-speaking staff of an Italian hotel. Speaking of which: this is a film about Americans in Europe. Ginger Rogers amuses herself in London by going riding and getting caught in - well, not just the rain but a spectacular thunderstorm. I worried about the horses left to face the lightning while she and Astaire were bonding in the (metal) bandstand. There is much discussion about the forthcoming trip to Italy (does the script ever specify that the destination is Venice, or does that have to wait for the lyrics of The Piccolino?); but when we see a number from the stage show in which Astaire is appearing in London, the backdrop is the Eiffel Tower. This, incidentally, is a classic example of we are going to pretend that the song-and-dance number makes sense within the story by inserting it in a stage show whose story is not revealed in enough detail for you to know any better. All the more arbitrary, then, that this is the titular Top Hat, White Tie and Tails. The emotional centre of the film is Cheek to cheek (there's a reason why this is the sequence animated for Yellow Submarine): once that's over, we know how the two characters feel about each other, and that everything will work out. The rest of the film is just tidying up, and the sheer fun of The Piccolino.

And then I arrived blinking into the rose garden, where Dominic Cummings was giving his press conference. But that's another post.

Today is a day durham_rambler and I observe as a significant anniversary.

For a short sentence, that one carries a number of footnotes. For one thing, it's not a wedding anniversary, since we never did the wedding, so we aren't limited to a single day in each year, but yeah, an anniversary of significance to us (also in the sense that it's - actually, I couldn't quite believe this when I first worked it out, but it is a 50th anniversary. Good grief!) For another, when I say we observe it, we are not punctilious about having celebrations on the actual date, and in fact durham_rambler has gone into Newcastle for the evening, to attend a meeting about (I think) WordPress plug-ins - which is why I am here and posting. But we did go out to lunch, at the Garden House: pub food with pretensions, but very pleasant (top tip: it is worth paying 50p extra for the triple-cooked chips).

Yesterday we went to see A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, curious to see how see how something as essentially undramatic as a profile of Mr Rogers could support a feature film, anf encouraged by the Guardian's glowing review. We both emerged saying, well, that was interesting, but what I'd really like is to read the article it's based on. Thanks to Eaquire magazine, it's right here: and while I enjoyed the visual charm of the film, particularly in the use of the miniature town- (and city-) scapes, the article wins in its richness and nuance as a portrait. The film is handicapped by its rather saccharine plot (there is both hugging and learning) in which the fictionalised journalist is healed by Mr Rogers' intervention.