A Weblog of Curious Things.
Media referred to by suffix as follows:
Tuesday, 5th September, am
239.D: Chaplin in A Night Out & The Champion, 1915, 25'13" + 19'35"
070.D: E. Nugent: My Favorite Brunette, 1947, 87'09"
Wednesday, 6th September, am
267.D: W. Herzog: Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night, 1979, German Language version with English subtitles, with trailers & featurette, 102'28" etc.
Thursday, 7th September, am
3155.M: Grieg: Piano Concerto, Übendorff, Munich SO, K. Winter, 1960, 28'19"
3155.M: Smetana: Vltava, Munich SO, K. Winter, 1960, 13'32"
3183.M: Robert Radford Recital, r. 1909 - 19, 25'41"
Thursday, 7th September into Friday, 8th September, am
298.D: Enzo G. Castellari: The Marseilles Contract, 1980, 96'39"
Friday, 8th September, pm into Saturday, 9th September, am
FilmFour: S. Kubrick: A Clockwork Orange, widescreen, stereo, 1971, c 130'
Saturday, 9th September, am
FilmFour: From Margin to Mainstream, documentary on 70s US film-makers, 110' c
Sunday, 10th September, am
267.D: W. Herzog: Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night, 1979, German Language version with commentary, 102'28"
Monday, 11th September, am
182.V: A. Hitchcock: The Birds, 1963, 1.66:1, from Granada, December, 2001, 114'15"
This old video was preserved because it was listed as a widescreen broadcast, while the region 2 DVD is full screen. I dug it out to compare the image and was initially puzzled by the fact that the slightly-matted tv print appeared to cover the same picture as the full-screen DVD on the computer. The faces gave a clue to what was going on: everyone weighed a little heavier on the television. An adjustment to the screen geometry on the computer confirmed that the picture content of the DVD and video were more or less the same! America has a wide-screen version of The Birds on DVD and from screen-shots it seems to contain greater width than anything I have seen. Earlier broadcasts of The Birds in the UK had been from a faded full-screen print.
The movie has been a favourite subject for commentators in recent years and it seems unlikely we shall uncover any radically new angles. It might however be worth noting the extent to which the script seems to be built around an encyclopaedic survey of bird-related idioms as themes. The title had previously been used by Aristophanes for a comedy. The story has little relevance to the film, except for the pattern in which the birds appear: first one, then two or three more; at the play's climax, a chorus of birds appear dramatically en masse. Opening Brewer, we are first faced with the familiar use of bird to designate a woman, next the phrase "birds of ill-omen", "bird of passage", "a jail-bird", "talking bird", "old birds are not to be caught with chaff" and of course, "bird's-eye view". Later references are to the legal eagle and national bird of America, the stork and its associations, and the phoenix, whose association with fire is at least hinted at in the Bodega Bay Apocalypse. That natural predator of birds, the cat, does not appear in the film at all and other animals are scarcely glimpsed, apart from the pair of dogs which tow Hitch out of the pet-shop in the opening scene. The horse-drawn cart which charges into the fire seems more a literary and biblical symbol which intrudes startlingly into the scene.
According to the Book of Euphemism, the range of bird-related sex-words was once greater than the number still in use. Hen and chick are slightly dated words for a woman. A virgin was said to be saving her charms for the worms. Nesting produces such idioms as fleeing the nest and the empty-nest which Lydia fears so acutely. But a chicken is also gay slang for a young boy. The same thing was also described as birdies and bird-takers. Americans knew of a bird-circuit of gay bars. We all learn of the Birds & Bees. We give or get the bird while some stories are strictly for the birds.
Lydia was the cruel Princess of Lydia who set the love-sick Alcestes a series of tasks to prove his love. The last task was to slaughter his allies. When this was done, she mocked him mercilessly and was for this condemned to Hell.
Hitchcock's vision of birds turning on mankind was attributed to the story by Daphne du Maurier and famously he took the central notion and had a script buit to his own specification. Another novel of the forties has been found to contain similar ideas but was never acknowledged as a source. It seems such an archetypal subject now that we may expect to find precedents in the classics. Certainly those evil flying things the harpies are put in our minds from childhood. Then there are all those flying evil spirits which emerge from Pandora's box, when she raises the lid. Ancient legends speak of the massive Roc while film-goers - at least since King Kong and Gertie the Dinosaur had learned about predators with wings. Birds, however, tend to have a good press in literary history and were respected by both the Jewish and Greek religions, being permitted to nest in temples. Associated with the spirit, their were many ways of divining, some of which survive in our rhymes about magpies and other birds. Elsewhere, men yearn to learn the language of the birds; heroes, most notably Wagner's Siegfried gain valuable knowledge from this understanding.
However, though the rhythms of Hitchcock's movie seem related to the cowboy picture where barricaded families fought off the predations of native Americans bedecked with feathers and to the mysterious progress of a disease, as in Camus's La Peste, its theme of nature rising up against Mankind was not an ancient one. His immediate inspiration had been drawn, however, from a newspaper story of a flock of gulls which had become disoriented and dashed themselves into buildings. Birds of prey have a baleful reputation, from their association with carrion and Poe had famously recorded the association of the raven with doom. It was treated with suspicion by those who kept livestock; it had a reputation for picking on sickly members of the flock and pecking out their eyes. Yet it was generally accorded a certain respect as an intelligent creature which could imitate the human voice as well as any parrot.
The legal eagle, Mitch Brenner, the diminutive is significant, spends the first two thirds of the film asking questions. In some scenes, almost every line he utters is interogatory. At the climax of the film, he is himself bombarded with panic-stricken questions but he can give no proper answer. Yet he aquits himself decently in the American arena of action, having sat directly beneath the portrait of his father. His mother has taunted him by implying that her husband would have understood what to do. Melanie Daniels is another talkative bird and a trickster-figure. We do not see her family: her hated mother had abandoned her but she clearly adores the Daddy she habitually telephones. She too is associated with the word, being a newspaper heiress who features in the gossip columns. She too is associated with the eagle as the emblem of Rome, where she has dabbled in a fountain, like a bird-bath.
Mitch is a migratory bird, his queer habitat in San Francisco is surrendered each weekend for the cosy family nest out at Bodega Bay. Melanie's impulsive trip up the coast is made before she even knows if her prey is married, though she seems relieved to learn at the General Store that Mrs Brenner is his mother. The diversion to the schoolhouse is made to find out the name of Mitch's sister. The ease with which all these characters give out personal information to a stalking stranger may date the film but the seeming openness of this small-town society is quickly broken down. In the face of the escalating attacks, some townspeople will turn on the stranger and accuse her of bringing the plague upon them. The house that was so easy to enter will have its windows nailed over with planks. Mention is made several times of a neighbouring town of Santa Rosa, which twenty years before had been the chosen location for an earlier dissection of small-town America.
Monday, 11th September, into Tuesday, 12th September, am
136.V & 133.V: J. Rivette: La Belle Noiseuse, 1991, full screen version, from Channel4, January, 1997, 226'16"
Through virtue of its long availability, no pun intended, on Artificial Eye video in both complete and Divertimento forms, La Belle Noiseuse is probably the most widely seen Rivette film in the UK during the last decade. The fat double-pack of VHS tapes used to sit like a monument on the shelves of many a video-rental store; only Kieslowski's Dekalog was a more forbidding proposition. I recall the unsolicited recommendation of the lad in the store: it was foreign and rubbish but there was some fanny in it. I think this was wishful thinking on his part, as the front-bottom of Emmanuel Beart is obscured by her dark little nest; her arse, on the other hand, is quite astonishingly huge and bare.
The quintessential study of an exhausted artist and the revival of his inspiration by a new model, and his cruel over-painting of his previous muse, who witnesses her own eclipse. Jane Birkin is excellent in the passive rôle of the discarded muse. The Beautiful Nuisance of the title arrives as the mistress of a younger artist. The film alternates between scenes describing the toll of all this art on the artists, their muses, as well as the jealous sister of the younger man. The only other characters who populate Michel Piccoli's Palace of Art are a servant and her young daughter. Hovering over the scene is an art-dealer. The rest of the film records the sessions of artist and model as his inspiration flares up. Wisely if somewhat romantically, the finished maasterpiece is hidden from our gaze and walled up, like a bad nun. In its place, the artist produces a more saleable vision.
Most of the movie is set in Piccoli's rambling chateau and a loose but essentially chaste bohemianism characterizes the film. The overt subject is an elevated discourse on Art in terms as remote from the workaday world as anything in late Henry James. The style is expansive with the actors discouraged from anything so studied as routine projection. The camera cohabits their space but does not dictate its usual terms. The rhythms of the film are gentle, fluid and fresh. The four hours are quiet but we adjust quickly and the strident intensity of ordinary cinema is absent: the film is not dull since the scenes don't attempt to rouse us by dramatic tricks. The rise and fall of the story is a form of breathing.
Piccoli declares himself to be Hornswoggled by his new muse but the erotic fire is diverted onto the canvas. The arrival, late in the picture, of the younger artist's sister leads to some nebulous confrontations, which tend to detract rather from the main matter. Her acting is more conventional, giving a slightly lumpy feel to the final stages of the movie. The closed and undemonstrative faces of young artist and dealer disturb me less. Yet maybe the eruption of the sister with her more worldly concerns is meant to lead us gently back into the workaday world.
The muses in the film make their claims to an independent life. Birkin applies herself to still-lives and taxidermy, her efforts coldly dismissed by the art-dealer. Her work seems to be intended as an activity in the shade of her lover, a craft of borrowed plumage and she refers to the making of images as essentially voodoo. Beart uses the older artist as a lever to place herself out of the reach of her young lover; she has dreamed of writing children's books but seems to find herself during the life-sessions. There are at least a couple of key moments: her response to Piccoli's, "I want what is inside you!" is to assume a chilly, classical pose. When the project seems doomed, she returns one morning to arrange the new session as she wishes, finally giving herself an integrity to set against the frustrated artist's cry that he wants to pull her to pieces.
Wednesday, 13th September, into Thursday, 14th September, am
3156.S: Rossini: William Tell Overture, Philharmonia, Giulini, 1964, Columbia, 12'13"
3161.S: Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony, Cleveland, Szell, 1964, US Columbia, reissued 1970, 41'23"
3157.S: Schubert: 9th Symphony, BPO, Böhm, 1963, DGG, 50'30"
3159.S: Morley Consort Music, Early Music Consort of London, Munrow, 1971, HMV, 25'21"
3183.M: Robert Radford Compilation, side two, recorded 1914 - 27, HMV, from 78s, compilation 1974, 26'02"
The Giulini disc was highly praised by Trevor Harvey on its first issue but I thought the cor anglais intonation was poor and the later synchronisation with the flute haphazard. Szell's Pastoral makes me wonder if the conductor had hay-fever. It seems rushed and though the Merrymaking isn't very merry, it was at least powerful. Böhm I had heard in the Great C major in a live recording from Vienna some half dozen years after this DGG studio performance with the BPO. Full of character, especially in the magical way it opens. Quite flexible but not mannered. Sadly, the disc sounded a little hoarse at times. The Munrow disc was a lot better sounding on side two than side one. Only a dance La Volta had some distortion on a loud flute. Some quite extended divisions on these stately themes made me wonder how much of these elaborate pieces was notated. The Radford records are generally good but he lacked the sort of character which really reaches across the shellac to us. Comparison with Chaliapin would be unfair but, though this repetoire was slightly more weighty, comparison with Peter Dawson finds Radford pleasing but a little faceless. Some of this material is quite rare but I'm unsure of the value of Hungarian folksongs in English. I think it was English but not all the words came over.
Friday, 15th September, am
304.D: P. Almodóvar: Bad Education, 2003, 101'03"
What I'd seen of Almodóvar in passing was not promising: the fantasies of drag-queens are too conventional to hurt anyone. Apart from the shape of the screen and the necessary subtitles, the unreal world of his pictures completely failed to involve me at any level. Bad Education has complexity but no subtlety or reach. Indulgently reflexive, it circles around the emotive issue of child-abuse but we are in a value-free zone so it manages not to matter very much. The implication that a catastrophic estrangement of the self results from such a trauma is allowed to lead us a merry dance into a labyrinth of mirrors. Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell have played such games with us many times but games with identity can be dizzying to no expressive purpose beyond the narcissism of drag. When two killers here wish to kill a couple of hours, they take refuge in a cinema: naturally it is showing films noirs. Even the scenes of two boys falling for each other seem to be conspicuously lacking freshness. There are one or two oblique moments which effectively suggest a hidden and camp culture among the priests: the presentation of a boy as a virtual gift to a colleague is creepily done. Yet there are no sympathetic adults in the picture. The cinematography is showy but lacks point while the script fails to illuminate the mechanics with any depth of thought. I see this box of five Almodóvars is priced at fifty pounds in HMV. The three pounds fifty I paid in a charity-shop seems more appropriate. One to swap methinks,
Saturday, 16th September, am
173.V: R. Walsh: High Sierra, 1941, from Channel 4 broadcast, 14.12.2000, 94'39"
173.V: Bouzereau: Reconstructing Evil, the making & restoration of A Touch of Evil, 1999, from BBC2, 17.12.2000, 52'39"
The documentary is a real rarity: made in 1999 by Laurence Bouzereau for Universal Studios, it was intended for the DVD issue of A Touch of Evil. In the event, legal issues arose and the DVD did not include it. This BBC broadcast had however gone out and was caught in at least household on VHS tape. It is hard to see what could have created the difficulties, as there is little material that would be thought controversial. I would guess it might be copyright clearance for the use of Mancini's score. It is notable that the restored version omits a number of expositional scenes which were added to the picture when Welles lost artistic control. Though visually striking and innovative, especially in its grand opening shot, the showy bravura of Welles's style can be exhausting and grotesque.
At the time, Variety dismissed High Sierra as "simply an action picture, a throwback". Though it was an early starring rôle for Bogart, he plays an ageing gangster and there is a chilly sunset feel to it. The theme of sickness runs through it: Bogart is weakening and greying, he takes an interest in a crippled girl, his own fence is now bed-ridden and drinking himself to death. Is it a sentimental picture or an indictment of sentiment? On the surface, the lame girl and fatally faithful doggie suggest a family-style dilution of the crime genre. Touches of The Grapes of Wrath, a huge success the year before, are not followed through and the migrant family seem to find their feet rather quickly here. Yet, restored to health, the girl is adamant she does not love Bogart and shows every sign of making a bad marriage. Meanwhile, Bogart is initially uninterested in Ida Lupino, who more or less offers herself to him on a plate. With its quack-doctor, dying boss, unreliable young gunsels, catastrophic job with an unplanned killing, the elegaic tone foreshadows the bitter revisiionist Westerns of Pekinpah. All the worst things come from the best intentions in this picture. We expect Bogart to be double-crosseed by his new fence: this does not happen: instead he is undone by Ida Lupino and the faithful doggie. What was it about the name Pard and Raoul Walsh? The stray mutt who dogs Bogart here has nearly the same name as the informer-cellmate who proves to be Cagney's undoing in White Heat some eight years later. Both pictures have fishing interludes and in both it is the emotional vulnerability of the anti-hero which brings him down.
Monday, 18th September, am
300.D: P. Almodóvar: Tie me up, Tie me down, 1989, 96'32" + Interview, 26'10"
Flirting with bondage and masochism, yet fatally sweetened and sickly, this is another reflexive Almodóvar sleaze-fest in primary colours. Banderas is the dumb but cute kidnapper who penetrates the surprisingly lax security of a schlocky movie to gain access to the junkie-actress who represents all he desires. There is nothing to suggest that Almodóvar's aspirations are any higher than those of his wheelchair-bound director. Interesting to note that both Almodóvar and Werner Herzog have relations as producers but a season of the Spanish director's work send me back gratefully to the German's!
Wednesday, 20th September, am
3156.S: Rossini: Semiramide, Cenerentola,, Tancredi,, &, Gazza, Ladra, Overtures, Philharmonia, Giulini, 1964, Columbia, 12'41", 8'24", 6'20", 10'24"
3160.S: Beethoven: Eroica Symphony, BPO, Cluytens, 1960, Electrola, reissued on CFP, c 1975, 47'42"
3170.S: Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, Miller, Häfliger, NYPO, Walter, US Columbia, 1960, Odyssey reissue, US, 1970s, 63'09"
I can't see the Giulini Rossini Overtures on the list of Legge's productions. Nothing on these examples startled me as the William Tell did above. The beefy recording lets rip at times with some gutsy trombone moments. Elsewhere, there are some uneasy woodwind blends, especially in Semiramide. A semi-circle Columbia, probably the first label for this 1965 issue. Two minor glitches: jump-groove in Tancredi and sticking moment in Gazza Ladra have probably cured themselves. Charles Reid's sleeve-note is mainly a puff for the conductor, the comments on the overtures are confined to a neat sidebar. As ever with Rossini, we have to remind ourselves that these are not all comedies!
Cluyten's Eroica was the first I owned. That was its first CFP issue in 1972, probably also its first domestic issue, though produced by Electrola as far back as the late fifties. This second pressing from a year or two later looks identical but the number was changed and the Funeral March is now complete on side one. Dignified and satisfying, it plays very well and the Berlin horn section make an impressive roar in the Trio of the Scherzo and elsewhere. The sound seemed a little hollow at first and side one here runs over half an hour. Levels improve on the reverse and the disc was in good order, though displaying some warp which could not be tamed by using the collett over the spindle.
I had not previously heard Walter's last recording of Das Lied von der Erde. Häfliger was a skilled exponent of the tenor part, recording it three times in close succession, the other two being under van Beinum and Jochum in Amsterdam for Philips and DGG. Mildred Miller was an American mezzo who turned up on other records from Walter's Indian Summer period. Most of his late discs were made with the specially-assembled Columbia Symphony Orchestra on the West Coast but for this valedictory Mahler recording, he was reunited with the New York Philharmonic. They play very well for him, though time after time they fail to observe pianissimo markings. The recording is close at times - perpective does vary - but the sound is generally clean and focussed. Neither singer is an outsized personality though it could be argued that the relatively cool temperature is appropriate for this late score. About three minutes longer than the famous Decca version with Ferrier and Patzak, there is sometimes a lack of forward movement here. The recording is skilfully fitted on the two sides, the last two songs on the second side lasting nearly thirty-four minutes. The sleeve to this 1970s Odyssey reissue is rubbed and tired-looking but these thin American pressings usually sound better than they look. For once the Columbia name was not covered up with ugly stickers on sleeve and label.
Thursday, 21st September, am
303.D: P. Almódovar: Talk to Her, 2002, 108'25"
Friday, 22nd September, am
171.V: J. L Lewis: The Big Combo, 1955, from May 2000 broadcast, LP Tape speed, 83'37"
Saturday, 23rd September, am
130.V: Stravinsky: The Nightingale, opera in 3 acts, RFH Concert Performance, Boulez, recorded live 16th February 1997, BBC2/Radio3, 45'50"
130.V: Stravinsky: The King of the Stars, cantata, words Balmont, Boulez, as above, 6'06"
131.V: Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring,, BBCSO, Boulez, as above, 33'14"
156.V: J. Birkett: Wm. Blake, dramatised-documentary, BBC Omnibus production, from November 2000 broadcast, 49'22"
Monday, 25th September, am
131.V: A. Hitchcock: Torn Curtain, 1966, widescreen print, FilmFour, 122'00"
Torn Curtain could be renamed Beyond the Veil. It is Hitchcock's grandest version of the penetrating-the-grave myth. Again there is a feeling that the surface layers of the story are unsatisfactory and there is a serious loss of focus as the film fails to achieve a proper climax. This version of the Orpheus story is twisted by the fact that Paul Newman must rescue a symbol from the underworld. Here, summed up as the Greek letter ¹, we have the key to Western ascendancy in the Cold War*. It represents an early imaginary version of the Reaganite Star-Wars project - a system to blast nuclear missiles out of the sky. We are not meant to dwell on the nature of such an apocalypse: for the purposes of the story, the East represents Death. Certainly the film becomes horribly inert at the point where Newman and the pursuing Andrews touch down on the Other Side. This waiting-room bureaucracy of Hell had been magnificently and daringly managed by Powell in A Matter of Life and Death but he had the suspense element of the co-pilot awaiting the friend he knew had also died. Hitchcock's Dead Zone dispenses with such traditional anchors and annoys us by its emptiness; the blankness of Julie Andrews is dwelt on, as if the camera was hoping by long gazing to prompt it into life.
Though Eurydice has accompanied Orpheus on this journey, he is divided from her from the moment the radiogram arrives to disturb their initial coupling. They are united in an unlikely edenic garden in the underworld: it is a mending of the original sin and the cold-blooded ones can only watch at a distance. Like the flower-shop sequence in Topaz, this is a dumb show as the principles recap plot-points to each other which the audience do not need to hear again. In Torn Curtain, the artifice is so striking that the mythic sense spills onto the surface of the picture.
In this Dead Zone, Newman has to establish contact with a pair of bad parents. He recognizes his need for the teaching of a father-figure and is annoyed and frustrated by that figure's regression to drunken evasions and adolescent dreaming. Correctly, he surmises that by daring to expose his own ignorance, the vanity of the older man will make him render up his secrets. He is altogether less understanding of the foolish, child-like mother who seems to block their path towards the exit: Andrews accepts her as a sponsor, a reflexive act in this inverted world. The father must be tricked intellectually and the mother accidentally sacrificed as the betrothed couple make their royal passage towards a fertile union.
We may be reminded of the dotty old psychiatrist who steals the later scenes of Spellbound: it is tempting to see these old figures as parental surrogates who assist the central pair on their way to a rebirth through the narrow doorway. Their subsequent confinement in a basket borne on the waters is Moses-like but unlike the OT figure, they make it to the promised land. They end wrapped in another blanket, like a caul, confirming Hitchcock's aversion to social inclusivity as resolution. The privacy which was transgressional at the start of the movie has been earned.
A more deliberate sacrifice is also demanded: Newman's shadow, Gromek. His clumsy attempts to ingratiate himself with the American are crushed as he will be physically. His attachment to the West may explain his stubborn attachment to life for he is one of those Eastern-European sons of the night who resists even the traditional stake through the heart and there may well be garlic in the pan of broth which is hurled at him. That shovel is another vampire-movie touch. His obstinate life is ironic in a picture where the weapons of mass destruction are reduced to formulae; it is as if Newman needs to understand the reality of death at close quarters. In a rejected but more telling ending, he would have torn up the formula at the end of the picture.
Some may think the Underworld interpretation of this cold-war thriller is fanciful but it seems to be supported by Hitchcock's choice of subject for the ghastly ballet. The stressful music, which adds to our discomfort as Newman and Andrews are trapped in the auditorium with KGB men appearing at every exit, is Tchaikovsky's tone poem Francesca da Rimini. This tone poem after Dante tells of a couple who are sentenced to a restless variety of the Inferno-experience for daring to succumb to temptation after reading salacious literature. The stage-setting with its hideous paper streamers in an upward draught looks a very cut-price version of Dante's whirlwind of lovers but it is widely believed that Hitch was poking fun at The Red Shoes. By this point, Michael Powell was surely not worth satirizing, his career as director having ended effectively some half dozen years before with his own version of Hell.
*Strictly speaking, ¹ is the symbol of the underground resistance movement. It stands for an ideal of Freedom for which people will sacrifice their lives. Upon this kind of instinctive understanding, a symbol etched in the sand, as were the propositions of Euclid, all higher knowledge rests. The picture has a sentimental attachment to the notion that thought yearns to be free. As a picture, it's pretty much a diagram.
Wednesday, 27th September, am
3179.S: Chabrier: Orchestral Works, Champs Elysées Theatre Orchestra, P. Bonneau, WRC, from Erato? 1963? 33'27"
3184.E: Heifetz Encores, Volume One, 1946 -54, RCA, compilation, processed for stereo, 1972 issue, side one: 23'31"
Wednesday, 27th September, pm
3164 - 69.S: Mahler: Symphony No.5, NYPO, L. Bernstein, US Columbia, CBS, 1963, 69'12"
3164 - 69.M: Gustav Mahler Remembered, documentary feature, CBS, 1967? full version, 47'38"
3164 - 69.M: Mahler: Finale, 4th Symphony, composer's pianola roll, Welte Mignon, 1907, CBS, 7'55"
Thursday, 28th September, am
146.D: A. Hitchcock: Secret Agent, 1936, 85'59"
The murky nature of the Public Domain dupes in circulation on DVD have not helped this picture which remains among the less popular of the thirties Hitchcocks. I know that in some quarters all the British-made Hitchcocks are regarded as primitive. It is at that point I usually stop reading. In reality, the constraints of budget and censorship seem to have made the director highly sophisticated in these works of the thirties. The perversities of the upper-class set in this movie and in the 1934 The Man who Knew Too Much are slightly codified but Hitchcock's appalled fascination is obvious. The script of Secret Agent is littered with queer double-talk which at times becomes explicit in the drama, most notably the playful male kisses on the telephone. The polymorphous perversity of Lorre's character marks him out as the shadow of Ashenden, performing the acts which the chilly Gielgud cannot face.
It is a rum old movie in which fizzy screwball comedy is served with plenty of ice and bitters. An imperfect mix to be sure: Lorre's antics go with Gielgud's froideur the way an unspayed pup goes with a well-tailored trouser-leg. But the dialogue rattles along in virtuoso style and the first-rate playing of Madeleine Carroll and Robert Young raises the ensemble-work to some high peaks in the first half of the picture. It all goes off the rails in every sense with the protracted railway finale: too many people fill the screen and distract us from the essential chamber-music and the mechanical resolution is unsatisfying.
Elsewhere, however, we see some play with powerful mythic material: Ashenden is a post-mortem character. The early scene with the one-armed old-soldier-servant is dark and his dual-nature seems thematic. But what is he doing with that coffin? We might expect the master to rise from his casket but his spirit has already flown. Later, we see him enter Death's Door. The chapel scene echoes on in TMWKTM, 55 and Vertigo much like the unresolved discord on the organ. All three pictures take us up to the bell-tower and the swing of the bell here is nearly as lethal as the tocsin in Vertigo.
In a famous review at the time of the film's first issue, Graham Greene acknowledged Hitchcock's talent but deplored his lack of continuity and grasp of reality. As a spook himself, he could not get his head around scenes where the central characters discuss secret issues loudly in public. Yet Hitchcock understood from early on that the cinema was a kind of dreaming and the only continuity which ultimately mattered was the continuity of the gaze of the audience. Seventy years on, Secret Agent still holds the promise of mysteries we can never fully penetrate. We must hope that it will soon be available in a form which does justice to it: there is one tracking shot in the Casino which is among his most impressive. The table-top miniatures will remain quaint but a fresher print might reveal hidden beauties in the notoriously opaque opening scenes and elsewhere. It has been announced as part of a box coming from Optimum in January 2007.
Friday, 29th September, am
166.V: The Reopening of Covent Garden, recorded 1.12.1999, BBC2, Nicam, 153'50"
Throughout the broadcast the BBC announcers tried to reassure the audience that the new Covent Garden, refurbished with lotttery dosh was going to be open, accessible to all and less formal than before. Several references were made to the exceptional circumstancecs of this ritual reopening, the royal presence - not just the Queen but Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother, for this was 1999 - calling for black tie formality. It was a horrid show that I had mercifully forgotten but the tape had survived untouched. The first half was devoted to German opera. Weber's Oberon Overture, carefully and soberly played followed by the incestuous love duet which ends the First Act of Die Walküre and the Final Scene of Fidelio, which represents the overthrow of a corrupt régime and its replacement by Heavenly Justice. Concert performances all and each signally failing to rise from the grave. Just three quarters of an hour of opera. If the first half did not range widely the second half, devoted to the Royal Ballet made up for it by presenting an interminable assortment of highlights from 1946 onwards. Presented in chronological order, the effect was dramatically null and void. Whoever conceived such a show should be hanged. Some of the interval material was mercifully missed out of the tape: children's opera anyone? I really cannot think of a more dispiriting evening from any opera-house or one worse designed to give the general public a taste for high art.