In passing, 2011

When you write predominantly about the films and personalities of decades past, your motivation for writing an appraisal of any one individual is all too often the need to mark their passing.
Looking at my labels index I see that I have written 33 obituaries on this site since I started in 2007. There are a further 17 at Carfax Abbey, and still more at Hammer and Beyond. Last year, between those sites, I noted the loss of nine irreplaceable figures from the world of vintage cinema.
But there were several I did not get round to mentioning, to whom I must now belatedly and collectively doff my cap.
They are not all big stars, and some may be unknown to you, but all have made an impression on me, and all left me with that strange feeling of abstract loss that comes of hearing of the death of someone you never met or knew, yet who was also a regular presence in your life, and guest in your home.

Imagine trying to get Cate Blanchett to pose for a publicity photo bursting out of a giant egg.
All very different in Barbara Kent's day, which was, incredibly, long enough ago to make her 103 when she passed away last October, breaking another of our last few living links with the great age of silent cinema. Almost all the obituaries used the adjectives 'petite' (under five foot, it was said) and 'baby-faced'. Kent played opposite Garbo and Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil, and Swanson in one of my favourite pre-Codes, the ill-fated Indiscreet, but may be best recalled for her appearances alongside Harold Lloyd in two of his early talkies, Welcome Danger and Feet First. She retired in the early thirties and, apparently, rarely spoke of her career thereafter.

If it seemed remarkable that a silent star might still have been around at the age of 103, how much more so that one of the era's screenwriters, Frederica Sagor, was also still with us, and officially California's third oldest woman, until her death this January at the age of 111. Her screen work between 1926 and 1928 confirms her centrality to the Hollywood flapper boom: Dance Madness, That Model From Paris, Rolled Stockings , Silk Legs ("a thrilling, fascinating story of hearts and legs!") and Red Hair. You're already having a great time at the movies just reading the titles. The red hair, of course, belonged to Clara Bow, for whom Sagor also co-wrote Hula and The Plastic Age.

Marilyn Nash only made two movies in her life. One was a fun bit of fifties sci-fi called Unknown World (1951), the other was Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947; that's her with Chaplin in that superb candid at the head of this post). The latter may or may not be a truly great film - even now I think it's fair to say the jury is still out - but it is unquestionably an important, fascinating and endlessly watchable and ponderable one. And Nash's scenes are, for me, the highlight of the movie.
In another of the film's subtle self-references (such as when Chaplin evokes the Tramp's shuffling walk away from camera into the distance at the end, as Verdoux is led not to who knows where but rather to the guillotine) our introduction to Nash's character subtly evokes those moments in earlier films in which the Tramp first encounters his love-object, notably the blind flower girl in City Lights. The difference this time is that Verdoux is prowling the streets for a disposable test subject for the poison with which he hopes to eliminate another of his wives. He alights on Nash standing in the street - she's a prostitute, and after endless to-and-fro battles with the Breen office it is, I think, still just about obvious that she's a prostitute - and selects her to be his victim. In perhaps the only truly surprising moment in the movie, however, he finds himself overcome by her sweetness, innocence and honesty and is unable to do the deed. Later they meet again, she has now become wealthy, thanks to a marriage to an arms manufacturer, while he has become down and out. She remembers him and offers him the selfless charity she believes he once showed to her.
It's a wonderful pair of sequences, full of bittersweet ironies (and some great stilted, Woody Allenish dialogue about Schopenhauer), and Nash is perfectly cast and entirely memorable. She's not exactly beautiful, but projects exactly the qualities that endear her character to Verdoux in the script. Incidentally, while controversy still rages as to how much Orson Welles justifies that 'based on an idea by' credit (which Chaplin insists in his autobiography was put there just to shut him up), it is interesting to note the visual and structural similarities between Chaplin and Nash's first encounter in the film and Kane and Susan's in Citizen Kane.


Dolores Fuller was the carefree favoured star of mad maverick hero Ed Wood, with major roles in two of his best-known works: Jail Bait and of course Glen or Glenda, in which she famously provides the film's surging dramatic climax by rising from her chair, removing her angora sweater and handing it to her anguished transvestite lover. All know that Wood, also playing Glen under a pseudonym, wrote the film as an act of autobiographical exorcism, and he really did want to marry Fuller, but in life as (almost) on screen, the angora got in the way.

She should have taken the lead in Bride of the Monster too: Wood wrote the role for her, but the promise of budget assistance shoehorned Loretta King into the part and relegated Fuller to a bit.
It is, thankfully, no longer as fashionable as it was to mercilessly trash Wood's obviously cheap, obviously eccentric but singularly hypnotic and unquestionably unique films. Before their collaboration, Fuller can be glimpsed as an 11-year old extra in It Happened One Night (in the motel scene, where she and her family happened to be staying when Capra showed up to shoot); after it she wrote songs for Elvis Presley and others. She is played, very badly, by Sarah Jessica Parker in that depressingly praised travesty Ed Wood, perhaps the only film in history too ironic to see how ironic it is. Parker cheerfully called Fuller the worst actress of all time in promotional interviews, which may come as news to anyone who has seen Sex and the City 2.

The wild card is Cheetah, supposedly the original chimp star of Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and Tarzan and His Mate (1934), who passed away from kidney failure after a long and contented TV-watching, finger-painting and cigar-smoking retirement. Cheetah would have been eighty years old, far older than chimps ordinarily get, and speculation has been rife that maybe the old guy wasn't the original Cheetah after all. I'd love it if he was, but I don't much care if he wasn't: the death of any chimp is sad, and the opportunities to record such a passing in a list of showbiz obituaries does not come around too often. So he more than deserves a mention.

Sue Lloyd was a British actress, one of many who seemed so ideally suited to the 1960s that she found only piecemeal work thereafter. I think her face made her tricky to cast, too, in that it was obviously attractive but problematically so; she could look gorgeous easily enough, but there was a hardness and a hint of cruelty that made her best suited to duplicitous or cold-hearted roles. A prominent beauty spot on her right cheek added to the effect. She was always a favourite of my father's on account of her appearance in The Ipcress File, but I best remember as Peter Cushing's savagely amoral and selfish girlfriend in that masterpiece of incontinent British horror Corruption. As a London fashion model, dating Cushing's older high society surgeon for the prestige, she first urges, then cajoles and finally threatens him into killing woman after woman to provide the glands necessary to restore her once beautiful features, hideously burned by a falling arc lamp. Just as the whole film is long overdue rediscovery of the sort that eventually bumped The Wicker Man and Get Carter from cult to mainstream classic status, so is Lloyd's mesmerisingly horrid performance awaiting acknowledgement as one of the supreme evil female turns in horror, the more chilling for being so believable and almost understandable in its motives. Her slow, convincing transition from touching desperation to almost sadistic murder-lust is like little else in British cinema.
In the seventies she slowed down, turning up in the oddest though not necessarily unpleasing places, like the serial 'Done to Death' from the second series of The Two Ronnies, in which she was still statuesque and sexy, and also got a chance to show she could be funny. Mainly TV from then on, including Crossroads, but she did get to reunite with Michael Caine's Harry Palmer in one of Harry Alan Towers's quickie sequels, Bullet to Beijing, in 1995. Most of the rest of her film work is bewildering: a recurring role in The Stud and The Bitch, lots of sex comedy, including the non-trailblazing penis transplant farce Percy, a female impersonator in Revenge of the Pink Panther, and some films in which her character doesn't even have a name ('Model' in Penny Gold, 'The Blonde' in The Ups and Downs of a Handyman.) She was often blonde in later appearances; a pity, since if ever there was a brunette it was Sue Lloyd.


Lastly, three names associated primarily with British television.

Bob Block was a comedy scriptwriter with an impressive list of credits who found his niche when he began to specialise in writing sitcoms for children, which must surely have been just about the greatest job in the world. An easy one to do badly, though, which Block most assuredly did not. He penned several successful programmes, but two in particular dominated my childhood. Grandad was a vehicle for the great Clive Dunn, no less, which gave the actor probably his best post-Dad's Army role and still provides gentle amusement of the sort that delights kids and doesn't bore adults. Most of all, though, there was the much-adored Rentaghost, an anarchic supernatural farce with one of the strangest premises of any comedy series ever, a peerless cast and enough invention and fun to last several series and a number of changes to the main cast and set-up.

Trevor Bannister was an actor with an agreeable comic touch, seen to best effect as Mr Lucas, nominal star of the early series of Are You Being Served?, until he bowed out when it was obvious that the supporting characters were now able to carry the programme on their own. For some reason, this was my favourite non-children's programme in my first few years of life - long before I understood any of the jokes. So when its stars die I feel it especially keenly. More recently Bannister joined the final cast of Last of the Summer Wine, a programme that had become a kind of retirement home for the great comic actors that a debased culture has no other use for. Also very funny in the Steptoe and Son episode 'A Star is Born'.
"He was a good lad, we were all very fond of him," his brother recalled.

I hate the kind of Hollywood Babylon obituary that wallows in the sad circumstances of a celebrity's death, but there's no point ignoring the fact that Angela Scoular's was shocking even by Kenneth Anger standards, and the tragedy that an actress with so light and effervescent a screen presence could have willed her end so horrifically is not easily borne. (The details, should you wish to know more, are here.)
The obituaries tended to describe her principally as a Bond girl (thanks to small parts in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and the original, non-canonical Casino Royale), but it is in British comedy that she left what I can only hope will be her lasting mark. God knows why she wasn't the massive star she deserved to be, on the evidence of her delicious comic performances in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (as the gorgeous, maddeningly sloaney Caroline), Doctor In Trouble (with future husband Leslie Phillips) and, most of all, the sitcom You Rang M'Lord? As the vampish Lady Agatha Shawcross she enlivened every scene in which she appeared of Perry and Croft's magnificent and absurdly overlooked creation, which combines sitcom and drama with a dexterity never matched or perhaps even attempted elsewhere. She also turned up in The Avengers and Chaplin's A Countess From Hong Kong, played Cathy in a BBC adaptation of Wuthering Heights and appeared in both of Stanley Long's Adventures films. She had absolutely her own way with a funny line and a vivid kind of joyfulness on screen, and a unique prettiness, with incredibly expressive eyes and a Kay Kendall nose. Sadly, her death seems to have been the awful end of a frustrating life, and a marvellous talent left unfulfilled.

Angela's postcard from Atlanta

As mentioned in my previous post, my wife spent last week in America, and what follows is pictorial demonstration of what happens when a Gone With the Wind fanatic is left unsupervised in Atlanta for a day.
The Margaret Mitchell House sadly did not allow photography inside, but the nearby Gone With the Wind Museum, even more sadly, did.
This is, believe me, only the tiniest selection of the photos she took. Before they dragged her out of the place screaming, on the preposterous grounds that the staff needed to go home, she had exposed more frames of film than Selznick himself during the production of the actual movie. Luckily, tomorrow wasn't another day.

I love the mismatched dolls, and what looks like ice-cream tub lids with the cast's faces on them. I was also much amused by the exchange of memos between Cukor and Selznick on the casting of Ashley Wilkes. (Cukor: What are your feelings about Vincent Price? Selznick: I think we can do better.)

All very Ghost World

Angela outside the Margaret Mitchell House

She's here now and she's not moving

Italian version of the novel. Francamente mia cara, io non me ne frega niente... Giocherellare-dee-dee!... It just doesn't sound the same.

A teeny tiny Tara

Scarlett with English Accent! Which got me thinking...
I've always clung to the belief that Selznick should have stuck to casting Paulette Goddard as Scarlett rather than Vivien Leigh... I'm now inclined to shunt Viv down to third place.



Original costumes coming up? She's lost to us now. Go off and make a cup of tea or something. I'll meet you at the novelty tie-in chocolate wrappers.

At last! Photographic proof that the famous Rhett Beartler is not mythical but a genuine animal, albeit rarely glimpsed in the wild. It earned its unusual name on account of its penchant for wearing plum-coloured waistcoats and cravats.

This bizarre assortment of dolls (Rhett will have his hands full with the one on the right) brings our tour of the Gone With the Wind Museum to a close. But if you'd like to see approximately three thousand more images of the same kinds of things, just give Angela a call and she'll turn up at your place that evening with her slide projector.
She should just think herself lucky there's no Jaws Museum.

My own private golden age

My wife's been away for the week, in America of all places (she went to the Gone With the Wind Museum and Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta - advance warning: there will probably be photos to follow) and since I always find that isolation breeds nostalgia, I pulled out my old big box VHS of How To Beat The High Cost of Living (1980), a treasured possession that I haven't actually watched - just packed and unpacked as I moved from flat to flat - in about twenty-five years.

I can top that, I'll bet you're saying to yourself - I've never seen it at all.There's a good chance you haven't even heard of it either. And I'm not even saying you should. It's a film that never gets mentioned anwhere for any reason, and the film encyclopaedias all have not a single good word to say for it (unless Maltin's observation that it features Dabney Coleman in a rare romantic lead qualifies as a recommendation).
Halliwell even goes so far as to call it reprehensible, which is harsh indeed, even by the guvnor's own standards.
I savoured again, as I often do, the wonderful smell of its padded plastic box, and the superb cover art, featuring a painting of the three leads, seemingly naked but for their shoes, but with their modesty well covered by a big wooden barrel strapped to their shoulders, on which is written the title of the film.
But this time, I went a stage further than usual - the devil making work for idle hands, or at least unupervised ones - and actually took it out of the box and popped it in the machine.
The following 105 minutes were sheer pleasure, and I suppose the time has come, in fact is probably long overdue, to explain why.

See, there's a particular species of American comedy. It was made between, say, 1975 and 1983. (After that, and it's modern; before that, it's vintage.) It takes me back to a pivotal point in my life: when I was old enough to feel part of the zeitgeist, and yet too young to actually be catered for by it. Although I took a keen interest in new films, they were more often an affair of posters and trailers than things I actually got to sample firsthand.
And they've never seemed quite so adorable since.
I recently saw the Dudley Moore film 10 for the first time. Until then, it was a mythical film, that my parents went to see, and talked about afterwards. In fact, it still is. Because while I quite enjoyed it, the idea that it could have been that same film my parents went to see in 1979... well, I don't believe it.
(They were quite hard to please, my folks. They didn't go to the cinema often by the time I was around, and every time they did - 10, Airplane, Close Encounters - they came back disappointed. Every film was quite good but not as good as it was cracked up to be.)

Stir Crazy, Scavenger Hunt, Private Benjamin, Stripes, How To Beat The High Cost of Living... these are the comedies of the Video Age.
Oh! to be there again, in the golden age of video rental, the dawn of home entertainment: that sublime innovation that took Hollywood so much by surprise that as late as 1982 they still thought they could get away with filling Airplane II with several big, long clips from Airplane disguised as flashbacks, on the grounds that people wouldn't have seen them in two years and will enjoy laughing at them all over again. (How weird does that look now when you buy both films in a two-for-one set, and the only time anyone ever watches Airplane II anyway is after they've watched Airplane at least a hundred times.)

Partly because I've always made a fetish of ownership, and partly because I used to fantasise I ran my own tv station that programmed its schedules to suit the extreme idiosyncrasy of my own tastes, the video revolution was my revolution. Every subsequent technological innovation passed me by, incurring my profoundest apathy if not actual resentment. Video, though, was like growing a new sense. I was obsessed by its potential, and the new world it opened up for me.
My parents' reluctance to embrace it only made it seem the more magical. We got our first player later than anyone else I knew, and the agony of visiting friends' houses, and seeing their neat row of indescribably sexy black tapes, is one I can still evoke at will, so potent are its emotional echoes. I still love handling VHS tapes - proper ones, I mean, from the early eighties, that weigh something like twice as much as the wishy-washy ones they started making in the 90s.
The video rental shop was, for me, a temple, akin to what a golden age picture palace must have been for those lucky enough to enjoyed thirties movies on their first run. Going to the cinema was a passion, but pound for pound it never gave me the sense of excitiement that walking into a video shop did.
This - be in no doubt, whippersnappers - was nothing like going into Blockbuster video. There was nothing slick or soulless about these places, and each shop was a private business: there were no chains. They were everywhere, and the choice varied from a shelf or two in a newsagents, to a dedicated rental shop that had a couple of rooms, lined with rack upon rack of these enchanting, face-out boxes, films I'd never seen or heard of, but each one calling to me by name, in a voice like Marilyn Monroe's.
The first thing that struck you, and the first thing that comes back to me as I do the old a la recherche routine, was the smell. It was a combination of dust, plastic baked in sunlight, fag smoke, and, if the store was also a cafe (like the John O'Peg video library in Crowlas, Cornwall), cooking fat. (When the John O'Peg closed in the 1990s, I bought some of its old display cases so as to wallow in their intoxicating scent. I still have them but, sadly, the aroma fades more and more each year, corrupted, like the rest of us, by the scents of modernity.)

Crownhill Video - another early 80s favourite: long gone now, but the sign, last I checked, was still proudly hanging.

There was something incredibly physical about a VHS tape: they smelled great, they felt great in your hand, they looked great, with their paper label between two windows showing the tape on big reels, deliciously evoking the look of a spool of film but in what seemed the most space age of new forms. (Beta, the format we plumped for at first, only had one window, and looked lopsided.) DVD never seduced me this way, though I fell for its obvious benefits in terms of increased storage potential. I doubt the day will ever come when people rhapsodise about the golden age of Netflix either.
Simply put, if your life was movies, the early 1980s were the best times to be alive. And yes, I am including the thirties here: in the thirties you were lucky if you saw any of the great movies more than once, and you had to wait a whole year between Marx Brothers movies, and four years between Frankenstein movies. In the video age, with a rental library in almost every street and BBC-2 to fill up your blank tapes for you, you could go on movie tours the like of which no previous generation (and, sad to say, for various reasons no subsequent one either) could even have imagined.
But while tv schooled you in the classics, the range in the video shop was more eclectic, and there was a lot of whatever happened to be around at the time, which meant a lot of comedies from roughly '75-'83. And while the great films are films for all time, these, because they have no meaning to me other than the circumstances in which I encountered them, have become all the more evocative for having no higher, or at least further reason to commend themselves to me now.

And I still haven't explained about How To Beat The High Cost of Living.
Well, as I was saying, it's part of that generation of American comedies that I discovered in the first years of video. They had something in common about the look of them, but they also had a certain jokelessness in common too.
This is not to say I didn't like them - far from it - but I felt like I was undergoing some sort of adult initiation, when each box said that the film was the most hysterical romp ever, and in fact it would turn to be sedately-paced, with what few jokes there were very well spaced out, but in their place a certain hipness, an understanding of which I felt sure I would grow into, but was happy to feign for now. They seemed sophisticated to me, on this basis. I was sure that when I hit adulthood it would all click into place, and I would see what I was missing.
In fact, they seem exactly as unconcerned with my reaction towards them now as they did then.

I suppose I must have rented How To Beat the High Cost of Living (a title I will ensure I don't have to type out in full again in this post) because of the cover, which seemed to promise a sartorially compromised Jessica Lange. Lange, of course, was sensationally gorgeous at this time, with only King Kong behind her, and Postman Always Rings Twice around the corner. Though her features hardened as she aged, at this point she was beautiful to a degree few could boast since Veronica Lake. (The promised nude-in-a-barrel scene never materialised, though.)
An incidental reward would have been the re-teaming of Richard Benjamin - then my favourite comic actor, mainly on account of Love at First Bite - and his co-star from that magnificent movie, Susan St James, who has a nice husky voice, a good way with a one-liner and, this time round, dark hair. (What I didn't realise until recently is that the film is also written by the same screenwriter, Robert Kaufman.) I wasn't then and am not now quite so enamoured of Jane Curtin, but it's nice to see the two stars of Kate and Allie teamed before they were Kate and Allie (if anyone remembers Kate and Allie, that is).



But you still haven't told us anything about it, Matthew.
Okay, okay. Don't rush me.
It's a caper comedy, with Curtin, St James and Lange as three old school friends who are desperately in need of money and decide to stage a robbery. Their local mall is doing a promotional competition the centrepiece of which is a giant 'money ball', a glass sphere stuffed with thousands of dollars in notes. The mall is next to a river, and the gals plan to canoe into an underground tunnel, come up underneath the ball and steal the money. Needless to say, it doesn't all go to plan.
There. Happy now?

There are a few laughs, lots of smiles, more plot and characterisation than you'd get today if you stacked twenty comparable movies end to end, and a friendly cast of players, a bit like in Cheers.
I have to say I enjoyed it as much as ever, if not more.
Do I urge you to seek it out? Not really. There's too much in my appreciation of it that's accidental and purely personal, and even I don't know how much is objective and how much sheer familiarity, and while it's far from inconceivable that you'll enjoy it, I'd be surprised if you were driven to own and cherish it as I do.
But I expect that a lot of people reading this will know what I am talking about, and will have a film or group of films that they love and react to in the same way, because of some accident of historical circumstances unique to them.
So I suppose what I'm really recommending you watch is whatever those films happen to be for you.

What are they, by the way? Let me know.

Sickert in Bath and Bathampton

This weekend we decided to explore the links between Bath and one of my favourite painters, Walter Sickert.

Sickert lived until 1942, but is indelibly associated with images of late-Victorian London. (He's probably most widely known today, alas, as perhaps the most stupid of all suggested Jack the Ripper suspects, a demonstrably false suggestion, started in the 1970's by a fantasist called Joseph Gormley who claimed to be Sickert's son and the great-grandson of Queen Victoria, and repeated more recently by the absurd novelist Patricia Cornwell).

I especially love his paintings of the popular entertainments of his day, which are given an additional dash of socio-historic interest by the fact that his work spans the transition between Edwardian and Jazz Age popular culture: he painted some endlessly atmospheric scenes of London's Victorian music halls in rich, gloomy, glowing colours, but one of my favourites of all his paintings is one strangely (presumably randomly) titled Jack and Jill, which is in fact based on a newspaper photograph Of Edward G. Robinson and Joan Blondell in Bullets or Ballots.
Lit from below, Robinson looks like a squat, malevolent Punch, his protruding cigar seemingly made of the same material as his face. It's just wonderful.


But despite his close association with London, Sickert loved Bath.
He first came for the first of several prolonged visits in 1917, and wrote to the painter and patron Ethel Sands:
"Bath is it. There never was such a place for rest and comfort and leisurely work. Such country, and such town. And the mellifluous amiability of the west-country gaffers and maidens, all speaking the dialect which became the American we know and love."

During these initial working visits to the city, Sickert roomed at The Lodge, a small but impressively stylish house, tucked away on Entry Hill, a not inconsiderable uphill walk from the city itself.


He worked at studios located at number 10 Bladud Buildings, in the heart of town (and just opposite the street where we live!)


Four years before he died, however, he decided to move to the area permanently.
With his third wife Thérèse he settled on the lovely village of Bathampton, just outside the city. The first flurries of snow were just beginning to settle as we set off on Saturday morning to pay him a call.


They bought a spacious, rambling property, St George's Hill House - difficult to photograph, unfortunately, because it's at the end of a long and tree-shrouded driveway. This is the best we could do:


Sickert settled happily into his new surroundings, and enjoyed being a local celebrity. He would invite villagers and children in for tea and to talk about paintings, and agreed to judge a local fancy dress competition, and paint a portrait of the winner.
He also joined the local art society - as an ordinary member, turning down the offer of a vice-presidency - and lectured once a week to the students at the city's art college. (His keen eye for the beauty of the everyday had not deserted him: on observing the tenants of a dowdy nearby apartment block drying their washing on the iron balconies, he said to the students: "Look how these people with their few poor things are writing poetry for us.")

Here's Walter, with his superb beard, and his wife Thérèse in the garden of Hill House:


And here, some time before the beard had reached the above stage of enviable perfection, he is lecturing at Bath's Victoria Art Gallery:


Oddly, despite the profusion of plaques all over Bath celebrating its many famous residents and visitors, neither The Lodge, the studios at Bladud Buildings nor Hill House bear any visible indication of their connection with the great man.

Sickert died in Bathampton in 1942, and is buried in the local churchyard:


The reason that such a notable resident received so dowdy a headstone is that he died during World War II, and so was given a wartime utility gravestone.
This one, in fact, is a 1980s replica: the original had fallen to pieces.

Two other local celebrities also rest here: Arthur Phillip, first Governor of Australia and founder of the settlement that is now Sydney...


... and William Harbutt, the inventor of plasticine!


Apropos of nothing much, here's a stone pig we saw under a Bathampton tree:


And here's Snowy, Bath's famous Art Deco listed polar bear, who we passed on the way to Sickert's lodgings on Entry Hill:


Lastly, here are a few of Sickert's paintings of scenes in and around Bath, matched up with their real locations as they were this weekend. Damn those cars!