Pimpernelegance

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 26, 2024 by dcairns

I’ve seen Michael Powell’s THE ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL and a bit of the BBC Scarlet Pimpernel with Richard E. Grant and now I’ve seen ‘PIMPERNEL’ SMITH. What I’m missing, to get the full picture, is mainly reading the novel, which I’m unlikely to do, and seeing the 1930s movie with Leslie Howard which PS riffs off of.

The BBC one was just deadly dull, and Powell & Pressburger’s version, despite a couple of beautiful bits early on, is disappointingly dull too, until right at the end when the hero realises he loves his wife and the stakes are suddenly raised and it gets exciting — but too late to save things. (It does have Cyril Cusack as a great baddie though.)

SIDENOTE: Powell wrote that when he saw Lester’s THE THREE MUSKETEERS in 1973 he suddenly saw how he should have tackled the material. But I’m not convinced that approach was open to him. Lester views all his characters apart from Richelieu as idiots (“I didn’t like him much in The Three Musketeers,” says future Pimpernel David Niven in P&P’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.) The Pimpernel seems to be a man of supreme competence masquerading as a feckless fop. I don’t think you could add another layer to that onion by having him be a different kind of oaf underneath.

So now I’m wondering if this is something inherent in the Baroness Orczy’s tale, because ‘PIMPERNEL’ SMITH has a knock-out ending but the stuff before that is a bit lacklustre.

I did not admire, for instance, the swastika wipes.

I was perplexed by the Howard character’s misogyny — I guess this is an attempt to borrow a bit of his Henry Higgins from PYGMALION to shore up his Percy Blakeney from TSP. And it’s meant to enhance his arc when he gets all romantic later. Also, he’s in love with a Greek statue, just like the original Pygmalion.

Howard gives his mistress, Suzanne Clair (right) a role — a former secretary to Korda, she’s very good, and could probably have pulled off the role of the female lead if they’d risked it. But Mary Morris (left) is fine in that role.

I did admire Francis L. Sullivan’s desk — but I doubt very much a Nazi would have that kind of unconventional furniture — smacks of degenerate art. And besides, look at Francis — think he wants to have to stoop down to floor level to retrieve his well-thumbed copy of Mein Kampf? Of course not.

It’s curious to hear Nazi characters with British accents. Even Raymond Huntley is on hand. Sometimes Hollywood Nazis have American accents (eg in THE MORTAL STORM, which makes a feature of its all-German dramatis personae being filled with all-American actors), but not often: I get the impression America had more Jewish refugee actors than we did, hence a bigger talent pool of people with broadly German accents to use.

I was watching this, by the way, because I greatly admired Howard’s THE GENTLE SEX and I realised I hadn’t followed up.

The gag where the Smith impersonates a scarecrow is nice and uncanny, and they got VERY lucky — the clouds are fairly scudding by behind the effigy, and this imparts the shot with a sinister animation that somehow makes the creepy head turn seem inevitable (although, of course, simply holding on the scarecrow for an unnatural length of time also does this).

I also realised that this film seems to have set the pattern for a couple of Will Hay’s wartime schoolmaster romps.

The ending is magnificent — the whimsical, sub-serious tone of the preceding scenes — an opening title defines the film as “a fantasy” — is dropped, and Howard tells Sullivan exactly what he thinks of his Reich, while the camera prowls ever closer, enhancing his authority. And then he pulls off one of the Pimpernel’s famous disappearances, this one seeming almost supernatural. And “I’ll be back” is whispered from the shadows.

The voice out of darkness is, probably, a swipe from I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (where the studio lights were prematurely turned off during the shot, accidentally enhancing the drama), but it’s nifty because the effect is triumphal rather than defeated.

The more I see of Howard’s directing (PYGMALION, co-helmed with Anthony Asquith and with help from Lean on montages, is nifty too) the more I realise what a great loss to the British cinema he was.

‘PIMPERNEL’ SMITH stars Ashley Wilkes – John’s son; General Faversham; Mr. Bumble; Halima; H.M. Stanley; Nathaniel Beenstock; Charles II; Dick Turpin; Mr. Banks; Duke of Frognal; Capt. Waverley – Naval Intelligence; Kommandant Bernsdorff (The U-Boat Crew); Mrs. Hudson; Klaatu; and Adolf Hitler as himself.

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Yellow Fever

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , , , , on July 25, 2024 by dcairns

Lucio Fulci may have a CAT IN THE BRAIN, but Sergio Sollima has a DEVIL IN THE BRAIN. Much more powerful, though arguably quieter and less destructive.

This is a really neat giallo/DIABOLIQUES type film, and one wishes the director had made more in this genre. In fact, I wish there were more gialli about something other than maniacs in black leather gloves cutting up women. Firstly, because that’s not my particular fetish, secondly because it ignores so many other things that could be suspenseful and shocking. It feels like a failure of imagination to me that, in SUSPIRIA, Argento has this crazy witchcraft and irrationality storyline going on, but he feels the need for regular knifings in case we lose interest. Obviously he may feel commercial pressure to include them, and obviously he’s really good at them and they ARE his particular fetish. But it’s a field with definitely exhaustible possibilities, as his subsequent career proves.

There are NO killings of this kind in Sollima’s film. Lots of mystery, though. Gorehounds may find it anemic, but it’s MUCH more interesting than the run-of-the-mill anonymous abattoir. Sollimo has equipped himself with so many red herrings and he’s so adept at forcing them on the audience, like a stage magician with a deck of cards only imagine that with herrings… A key part of his success is the excellent casting, all of these actors are easy to imagine being unmasked as the killer and pulling it off. Having Micheline Presle in there keeps us guessing. Is it going to be an evil child movie? A double killer movie? Some combination?

The rights to this seem to be lost in limbo, so no Blu-ray is forthcoming, a real shame. You can tell it’s a handsome film behind all the digital murk, but you have to have seen other Sollimas, like VIOLENT CITY, to guess how incredible-looking it probably is.

DEVIL IN THE BRAIN stars Dave Bowman; Giulia Clerici; Élisabeth Rousset dite ‘Boule de Suif’; Nero Wolfe; Leonardo da Vinci Age 6; and Philippe Greenleaf.

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More About Me Books

Posted in FILM with tags , , , , , , , , , on July 24, 2024 by dcairns

Slightly to my own surprise, I finished another book today, or anyway the first draft. It’s the fourth volume of the Whitsuntide Science Adventures and I presently have no ideas formulated a fifth. It also manages at last to sort out the plot fankle I’ve been huddling about with since Vol. 2.

This isn’t a case of miraculous Phildickian speed on my part, it’s just that Vol. 3 took a long time to get published, and while it was being proofread and cover-illustrated I started on the fourth. And then summer arrived and I had lots of time.

And now I discover a post I’d ended to use to big up, or large up, that previous volume. Well, it can still serve that purpose:

It was with some pleasure that I noted that the title Kill Baby Hitler! had somehow not been used by anyone else, so far as I could see. The phrase is kind of a meme, kind of a bit of free-floating mental real estate, so I cheerfully appropriated it.

I didn’t, I’m ashamed to say, notice that I was in a sense also appropriating some of the plot structure of THE TERMINATOR. I hope the shade of Harlan Ellison doesn’t sue me. I’m fairly certain nobody else will bother. But the idea of travelling back in time to kill a future leader, and of a rival party also travelling back to stop you, is sort of inescapable if you follow this idea to its dramatic (and hopefully in this case comic) conclusion.

To make things funnier and more convoluted, instead of team 2 heading for the same destination as team 1, to intercept them, I send them to a whole different time so they can eliminate team 1 in its own infancy. And from both BACK TO THE FUTURE and TENET I steal the idea of time-travelling automobiles, but with my own twist on the notion.

TIME AFTER TIME, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL, and Michael Moorcock’s magnificent (and funny) trilogy The Dancers at the End of Time are also somewhere in the mix.

It’s funny how I’m only just now decoding my influences. A key work in the kill-baby-Hitler literature is Elem Klimov’s COME AND SEE, which has its hero discovering the impossibility of killing a baby Hitler in one of its final scenes. I feel the same way — the time to have killed Hitler was in adulthood, before he took power, but it’s too late now and forever will be too late. The time to kill our current crop of would-be-dictators is also in adulthood, and it’s right now. Or render them ineffectual in more humane ways, by all means, if you can manage it.

I think my novel is designed to frustrate the reader’s understandable desire to see Hitler written out of history: I don’t trust that revisionist impulse (as seen in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD). It feels… immature. What should we do with our unresolved feelings about historical injustices? Put them into our work for a more just future, rather than soothing them away. Fassbinder’s suggestion that a revolutionary film should make a revolution break out in the audience rather than showing it on the screen seems relevant. The complacent fist-bump of Tarantino’s counterfactuals doesn’t sit right with me.

That’s probably why I give my time-traipsing would-be assassins such a hard time. But then, I always give my characters a hard time.

My first book is here. It’s a science fiction horror comedy WWII whodunnit.

I’ve reduced the price of the Kindle edition of volume two, which turns into more of an (un)heroic fantasy, parodying E.R. Burroughs (with a dash of William), Jules Verne, Robert E. Howard, Tolkein, Moorcock etc.

Kill Baby Hitler! is here. It has its own whodunnit embedded within, but is on the whole more of an espionage tale — Day of the Jackal, Eagle Has Landed, but with time travel and a cosy apocalypse thrown in.

The forthcoming fourth, Keep Calm and Carry On Screaming, is ALL ACTION — but might also just about qualify as satire in spots. It’s about the Nazi conquest of Britain, “which no one today remembers.” Fiona says, “I think you’re getting weirder.”

Pick one according to taste. Though there are recurring characters and developing (or unravelling) situations across the series, they should each be easy to follow on their own, or at least, it won’t be any harder. Hopefully after reading one, you’ll want more. Which I have thoughtfully provided.

One more thing — if you have read any of my books and would care to write a short, wildly enthusiastic Amazon review, I will love you forever, unless you would prefer I don’t.

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