A Weblog of Curious Things.
Media referred to by suffix as follows:
Tuesday, 1st August, am
239.D: Chaplin in His New Job, Essenay, 1915, 20'38"
091.D: F. W. Murnau: Sunrise, version with modern score, 1927, b & w, 90'40"
Hard to think of any other picture which has the same trajectory as Sunrise. It starts as a species of vampire movie, moves toward a horrible crime then shrinks away from evil so that a marriage can be happily renewed and the sinful city redeemed. Just when we have accepted the happiness, the heavens open, as if to defy the pathetic fallacy, unless God is seen as a poor timekeeper. Tragedy appears to have been wrested from the jaws of bliss. Though rightly acclaimed as one of the Greats, it is not a picture I would press on anyone doubtful about old movies. Aspects have dated: I'm thinking especially of the leaden Metropolis-walk, supposedly performed by O'Brien with real lead in his boots. Yet later it is miraculously transformed into a wonderful peasant-dance. Usually I loathe dancing in films but such is the happiness of the couple here that they banish the cynics in the audience as they do the observers onscreen. The scene where the wicked Woman from the City performs her flapper-dance among the reeds of the marsh is however slightly mad in the wrong way entirely. Yet this is poetic cinema at its peak. The scenes of jealousy at a hairdresser's salon seem to have inspired Asquith's A Cottage on Dartmoor, which came a year or two later. That film also deals with a woman whose lover becomes a heavily-threatening presence. I gather that Eureka are now selling a single-disc version with a new transfer, which some have preferred. This old double-disc edition is still quite pleasing to my eyes, for a picture nearly eighty years old.
Tuesday, 8th August, am
3153.DS: Beethoven: Wind Sextet, Op.71 & Unfinished Wind Quintet, completed Zeller, COE Wind Soloists, ASV, 1987, 19'41" + 14'43"
3154.DS: Mozart: Oboe Concerto, K.314, D. Boyd, COE, P. Berglund, 1987, ASV, 19'27"
3159.S: 12 Dances from Susato's Danserie, 1551, Early Music Consort of London, D. Munrow, 1971, HMV, 24'50"
3158.S: 6 Preludes from Rachmaninov's Opp.23 & 32 sets, S.Richter, 1959, DGG-Polskie-Nagrania, 17'59"
3162.S: Ravel: La Valse & Rapsodie Espagnole, Orchestre de Paris, H.von Karajan, 1971, Electrola, 13'55" + 15'38"
The Beethoven wind music is well played by the COE Soloists. The attention to dynamics, intonation & blend are skillfully judged and the gestures of these modest works are not inflated, even where they seem to foretell more famous works. The Quintet is a curious fragment. Planned for three horns with oboe, clarinet & bassoon, the clarinet part was never written then this unfortunate manuscript lost its outer pages so what survived was the headless torso of the First Movement, a complete Slow Movement and a fragment of Minuet. One Zeller wrote a beginning for it and rounded off the Minuet in the 1860s, though it waited for publication till Willy Hess found it in 1954. Three horns in Eb with a trio of other wind. All very Masonic. I think the sonorities of this could do with a more expansive acoustic.
Douglas Boyd is a first rate player of the Mozart Concerto. Some could find his details finicky but I liked the outer movements very much. The multi-coloured Susato dances were a Munrow special, tempering scholarship with a brazen sense of audience-pleasing. Truth to tell, this sort of music always sounds like it should be accompanying something: a play, an exhibition of paintings or a banquet perhaps. You could always dance. Some peak-distortion did spoil my full enjoyment of this copy of the disc. Reviewing the Richter Rachmaninov in January 1960, Trevor Harvey thought it was the kind of record which justified record reviewing as a profession. Maybe today, with so many versions of Richter's art to choose from, we may forget the impact of these Polish-made DGGs, which were probably the first chance to hear the great man in good sound. These Preludes are gorgeous. As for the composer, I can take these brief encounters with great pleasure: decadent bagatelles, filled with loot from Chopin, Grieg and even Wagner. Richter orchestrates them at the keyboard. This tulips-label early-issue stereo DGG isn't bad but I doubt if the reputation of these early issues is entirely justified sound-wise.
The Karajan-Ravel disc was not the HMV ASD issue but an German-pressed gold label Electrola. It bears the 1972 date but may have been a later issue there. The sound - Salle Wagram? - is quite beefy and there is a slight lack of top. Karajan's way with La Valse is morbidly intense with excellent playing. All in all a somewhat bitty night's listening but the Mozart, Rachmaninov and Ravel discs were all first rate. So was the Beethoven, though it is not the kind of music which stays with you for long after the notes have faded away.
Wednesday, 9th August, 2006, am
227.V: Nigel Kneale Documentary, 2003, from BBC4, r. c September, 2003, 39'29"
Saturday, 12th August, 2006, am
227.V: P. Sasdy: The Stone Tape, BBC Production, 1972, from BBC4, r. c September, 2003, 89'20"
I never saw The Stone Tape when it was new but - as many of the talking-heads in the documentary acknowledge - Nigel Kneale's ideas have a way of seeping into the public consciousness anyway. The Stone Tape was often name-checked by people who had seen it in their youth and claimed it was the scariest piece of drama they had seen. Books on the occult did not always acknowledge the play as a source when advancing theories about hauntings. Elsewhere on television you could see local news or Nationwide features which recounted as true tales of houses or pubs where the walls had recorded voices from the past. Kneale was certainly not the first person to suggest that buildings could hold memories of traumatic past events, which certain conditions could unlock but he popularized the concept, gave it a catchy name and built an unforgettable drama around it.
I finally got to see this famous piece when the BBC archives were beginning to be mined on BBC4 back in 2003. Frankly, I was bitterly disappointed, having expected a moody, atmospheric piece along the lines of the celebrated M. R. James stories. The Stone Tape was populated by a team of loud and brash males, led by Michael Bryant in what seemed a career-worst performance: every line was shouted out, as if to reach the back seats of the stalls. A screaming ghost competed with the raised voices of the living and, when the chaos was at its height, materialized. It was certainly turning the conventions of the genre on their head by insisting on the material basis of the phenomenon. Bryant is leading a team of electronic researchers who hope a breakthrough in stone-recording will lead to a new recording medium and give British industry a powerful new product to turn back the tide of the all-conquering Japanese.
The building holds memories of its wartime occupation by the American military. For the local village people, its association with rats conceals a deeper fear. The eccentric local vicar uncovers records of exorcisms. Driven, the team use invasive methods to try to control the phenomenon. Instead, they seem to have erased it.
Set against the aggressive male world, we have Jane Asher as a vulnerable computer-expert, though her quiet interludes of communing with the spirits of the place do her no good. This second viewing left me more baffled than disappointed. Jill, the Jane Asher character, begins the play with the fear of being crushed. As Peter's mistress, she seems to have no space of her own. He even seems to want to offload her on his site-manager, Collie, well-played by Cuthbertson. The seventies sexism is clearly being exaggerated and criticized though how seriously is drawn into question when Peter's competition arrives in the shape of a shaggy washing-machine boffin, whose own hands-on style is graphically illustrated by his appearance with blue and red hands. The scene of baskets of bright-coloured clothing arriving for his experiments gives a surreal cast to the tone of the play. The testosterone-fuelled competition between these company men seems to be a dig at the ignoble arenas available for male energies in times of peace. Or is Kneale observing that war is the natural state of the male-governed world? Purer knowledge, oddly represented here by computer analysis of data as a form of divination, ends up being shredded.
There is an unrelenting claustrophobia in this piece and in the end it feels as if we have a swirling pool of ideas but some very thin characterizations. Less like seeing a stone tape than being tumbled about in a washing-machine for an hour and a half. Still, the time passes quickly and it is never dull, though a few quieter moments would have been no bad thing.
Monday, 14th August, 2006, am
138.V: Wm. Cameron Menzies: Things to Come, 1936, from BBC2, September 1997, standard short version, 88'48"
I grew up with Things to Come. Not the movie but the LP and not the original RCA issue of that but a 1970 Decca Ace of Diamonds reissue which had an imaginative sleeve. Several soldiers were depicted metamorphosing gradually from one in rich regimental uniform on the left of the page to a Cyberman on the right. The main attraction on the disc was, I suppose, the Pomp & Circumstance side but the twenty-minute suite from Bliss's score to Things to Come used to get played at least as often. In fact some of the more ominous moments in Elgar's Third march are not far off the sinister marches which erupt in the film music. By the later seventies, I learned that film music expert Christopher Palmer had scored some extra sections of the score from the film soundtrack so we were able to hear such delights as Building the New World and Attack on the Moon Gun, when conductors such as Charles Groves and Bernard Herrmann set down their different selections from the score. Ten years on, in 1986, Jonathon Dobson broadcast a Radio Three documentary in which the whole, complex history of the score was set out. The composer was involved from the start as the music was seen as a crucial component of the film: Wells, Korda, Menzies and Bliss worked closely together on the development of this most expensive project. Unusually, the score was recorded on discs at separate sessions before the principle photography was even begun. The documentary also added to our knowledge of the score by broadcasting for the first time sections from those initial disc recordings, which had then recently been rediscovered. It turned out that for the grand finale, in which the camera gazes awestruck into space, Bliss had originally written a short choral cantata-movement; only the final bars of which are heard in the finished versions of the movie.
I first saw the film itself in the eighties and was delighted to find that the futuristic art-deco-influenced visuals were far better than I'd expected from some disparaging commentators. As to the story, oh dear! Practically all the dialogue is in an oratorical style which seems to have affected space-operas ever since. Luckily there is just about enough camp amusement to be had from Ralph Richardson's warlord and his proto-punk consort to keep my finger from the Fast Forward button. It may, therefore, seem ironic that my main complaint is that there should be more of the picture. In his Movie Guide, Lionel Maltin gives the running-time as 92 minutes and that is the print which has been broadcast in Great Britain for as long as anyone can remember. Under PAL, it runs just 89 minutes. Maltin reassures us that some prints of the "original" 113 minute version still exist and descriptions of the differences can be found online. What Maltin does not say is that the picture originally premièred in the UK at the then-staggering length of 132 minutes. I understand there was a restored DVD on region-2 but it was not restored lengthwise even to the 113 minute version. It may well be that the missing sections are mainly dull and windy rhetoric but this amazing film does deserve to be presented in a form which reflects the original conception, warts and all.
Both this picture and Hitchcock's Sabotage appeared at opposite ends of 1936, when the shadows of war hung over Europe. The impact of Menzies' air-raid in which a ritzy cinema is blown up may well have inspired Hitch to set his version of Conrad's Secret Agent in a flea-pit and to dare to depict the detonation of a bomb on an iconic London double-decker. For a borrowing the other way, I wonder if Bliss's aspirational little cantata-movement wasn't influenced by the one Arthur Benjamin wrote for Hitchcock's 1934 picture, The Man Who Knew Too Much? As for the rhythms of the most impressive visuals in Things To Come, they seem to have been inspired by the industrial documentaries of the time which celebrated steel works, factories, generators and mining. I love those phallic art-deco machines and the acres of light spaces and glass far more than I do the gothic horrors of Metropolis and though special-effects have moved on somewhat, I find a terrible poetry in those vast swarms of sky-darkening planes on a destructive mission.
Tuesday, 15th August, 2006, am
185.V: A. Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1955, from ITV1, Digital, October 2002, w/s, 114'24"
185.V: Channel 4 Documentary: Queen Elizabeth's Magician, John Dee, 2001, from Ch4, Digital, November 2002, w/s, stereo, 48'33"
185.V: V. Harwood: Preserve, 1999, from Ch4, Digital, November 2002, w/s, stereo, 11'13"
The documentary came from a series called Masters of Darkness and was a terrible thing to behold. A cookie-cutter affair, it settled mainly for ambient visuals, unmagical location footage and an assortment of hairy talking-heads of the alternative kind. Low points included a fuckwit character who demonstrated the stomach-talking method of producing the Enochian Language. This was built-up as a language with its own syntax and alphabet that would have been hard for Kelly to have invented. Sadly, the case is not made by "stomach-talking". While the story told had some useful things to say about the political background against which Dee's strange career has to be viewed, it was oddly reticent about the central Dee-Kelly relationship. To choose the partner-swapping as the climax of the tale may have been justifiable but the only female on show was the angelic floozy in the glass. We had, until then, not even been told that the two men had brought their wives to Bohemia and not a single mention was made of the commonly-held belief that Kelly and Dee were lovers. While fifty minutes is a small space, a better introduction to this subject could have been attempted, though it might have been better to have concentrated on the Angelic Conversations and examined the Enochian Language in greater depth. As things were, the show seemed to be aimed at Black Magic enthusiasts: the sight of two dubious experts peering at an old Bohemian scroll and declaring it to be a spell was awesome! Not!
A film-school short, Victoria Harwood's Preserve is visually striking and the story well told, mainly without words. The lives of a geeky undertaker's assistant and a glamourous hairdresser are intertwined in a story of unrequited obsession and the ancient belief that the eyes of the dead record the last thing they see. The geek envies the man who was drowned as the beautiful woman dragged him from the sea. He seeks his own extinction at her hands, beside a swimming-pool. All the play with eyes and razors may remind us more shocking scenes from cinema's past. This neat little dream-world seemed locked in a hermetic film-school bottle. The subterranean gloom of the autopsy-room and the cluttered life of the salon seemed to be conceived generically: a more imaginative director might have had the courage to place the geek in a brightly-lit operating-theatre and the glamour-puss in a seedy, basement room. Here, the glamour and the geekdom are as unquestioned as in any commercial teen-movie, so the aspirations to surrealism resolve themselves all too easily into a perverse sexual reverie.
Implausible as a thriller, Hitchcock's 1955 'remake' of The Man Who Knew Too Much lacks the urgent political sense of the 1934 original. Hitchcock here seems to prefer travelogue to analysis but is he being cunning? The Americans abroad are locked in a tourist bubble but the veil ripped off in the opening scene is emblematic. From confident customers they become pawns in someone else's game and the fall will involve them in back-entrances, evacuated kitchens, gloomy chapels and the private rooms of public buildings where police and security-men impart bad news. It is not a tight construction: the sprawl is not quite like Topaz but lacks the energy of North by North-West, which thematically it resembles. The musical elements have also been questioned. Doris Day's famous number seems to have been a concession to her fame as a singer. Added to a climax which has already featured a sizeable cantata, the movie is in danger of being a variety-show.
Yet the tune is woven into the climax as Brenda de Banzie in a sudden, late upsurge of quasi-motherly feeling, encourages the boy to whistle a response to his real mother's song. At that same moment Stewart breaks down the door and rescues his son from the grip of death. For this is only a thriller on the surface. Like Don't Look Now, it is the tale of a holiday in which a couple are contacted in a restaurant, "You must think us awfully rude . . . " The language difficulties with hotel staff and local police as well as the telephone-call which dangles the possibility of reconnection also recall Roeg's later picture. The boy falls into the hands of bad step-parents who whisk him away to a tomb-like church. As a policeman says, banging on the door of the chapel, "No sign of life!" He is quickly discouraged and seems there just to colour the scene black. As a doctor, Stewart may previously have rescued patients from death's door but we gather the full meaning of his work has shrunk to his itemized accounts which pay the bills. It is the search for meaning as well as the search for his son which drives the film along. The wrong meaning leads to a comedy of mistaken identities - father and son - at the taxidermists as well as a misunderstanding which leads to a melee. The fight itself is surely the one that he has been spoiling for since the restaurant scene. Meanwhile the stuffed animals are a pointed reminder than an Orpheus is meant to tame the beasts.
Marrakesh may seem an odd choice for a family holiday, especially with the tensions of the Algerian War close at hand. It is rather inadequately explained as a nostalgia-trip for Stewart, following his wartime posting to North Africa. It is the appendix to a European tour - an appendix paid for it - but the boy obstinately relates the parched landscape to deserts nearer home. This appropriation of the landscape will be replaced by a seeping loss of control. There are so many repeated references to back entrances, respectability, back ways and servants' entrances that the reputation of North Africa as a buggers' paradise seems to be hinted at. In a cellar at the Embassy, the horrid pair, false priest Bernard Miles and corridor-creeper Reggie Nalder rehearse the strangulation of the boy in a scene reminiscent of Rope. Putting the boy to sleep may suggest an animal but the dark step-parents seem to parody the whole business of parenting.
If it is Doris Day's ditty which reawakens the boy from the vale of death, it has been echoed in advance by the harsh cries of Stewart in the chapel. He is answered but overcome by the forces of darkness himself. His escape from the chapel via the belltower is a Vertigo correspondence but much of the sunlit London section anticipates that film, Herrmann's score is already beginning to pulse and hover tantalizingly as the actor circles around a central enigma, wishing to penetrate the mysteries of the grave.
The gaggle of rather tiresome showbiz friends who gather in the hotel room while the couple try to resolve their little problem have always seemed one of the films least convincing aspects. Maybe they were conceived as a species of Greek chorus for this very mythic picture. The final scene is strikingly concise as Stewart with reunited family enters the room and the sleeping guests begin to stir. It is so tiny that it seems the Director was shy of underlining its implications: for a second or two, however, we may be glimpsing the resurrection of the dead.
Friday, 18th August, am
145.V: Kurosawa: Rashomon, 1950, 83'14"
151.V: The Wolf Man, FilmFour, 67'
Sunday, 20th August
Beethoven: 6th Symphony, BBCSO, Toscanini, digital file from HMV DB , 38'03"
Monday, 21st August, am
297.D :A. Margheriti: L'Ultimo Cacciatore, The Last Hunter, 1980, 92'27"
Wednesday, 23rd August, am
3153.DS: Beethoven: Rondino, & Wind Octet, Op.105, COE Wind Soloists, ASV, 1987, 5'45" + 20'43"
3154.DS: R. Strauss: Oboe Concerto, D. Boyd, COE, P. Berglund, 1987, ASV, 24'24"
3158.S: Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No.2, S.Richter, Warsaw National PO, Wislocki, 1959, DGG-Polskie-Nagrania, 34'19"
3162.S: Ravel: Alborada del Gracioso & Le Tombeau de Couperin, Orchestre de Paris, H.von Karajan, 1971, Electrola, 8'22" + 18'33"
The wind music was pleasingly played but the slow movement seemed a little hurried. Recording was basically good but I noted some roughness as the side progressed - possibly just dust on the needle. The Strauss Concerto seemed to suit Douglas Boyd rather less well than the Mozart. Or was Berglund at fault? It is not a piece that allows the soloist much rest but the audience needs a little more air. A noisy surface did not help. I am no fan of Rachmaniov's Concertos, their well-upholstered melancholia seems tailored for plush American concert-subscribers. In terms of chronology that may be unfair and the composer complained that he was only valued as a performer. This Richter record sounded well enough buit while his version of the First made me listen to it with more respect, I cannot get on with the Second at all. The Karajan Ravel record seriously lacks top but it is very distinctive: his eight-and-a-half minute version of Alborada finds some dark shadows I had not properly registered before. The Couperin piece is the composer's most pastoral creation and this slow performance brought out its tangy relations to Lennox Berkeley as well as a few reminders that Vaughan-Williams absorbed something from his oddly-chosen mentor.
Tuesday, 27th August, am
1491.Z: Recordings of miscellaneous 78rpm discs, 47'24"
Tuesday, 28th August, am
197.V: J. Whale: The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935, FilmFour, 71'30"
Friday, 31st August, am
109.V: A. Corneau: Les Enfants de Lumière, compiled 1995, 98'01"