Ealing

Linking two strands here at The Trees, today's Guardian Cryptic had Ealing Comedies as its theme, including Kind Hearts...

A nice puzzle - some tricky clues, took about the 90 mins...

On the Back of Redux Kind Hearts: Great Voice Overs

By coincidence, the day after I wittered about KH&C, the Guardian published a very good piece about Dennis Price's performance in the film, by Terence Davies.  He also claims it is one of the four great voice overs in cinema.  Full stop.

Read and enjoy...

Kind Hearts Redux

Now, about two and a half years ago I wrote about the strange experience I'd had when watching (rewatching) Kind Hearts and Coronets on the TV.  About an incredibly intense feeling of recognition.  I picked up on this in a few other posts.  And now Kind Hearts and Coronets has been rereleased, and you can see it at (a few) cinemas.

So I had to go and see what it was like on the big screen, to see if the same effect was there, and off we toddled to the BFI on the South Bank.  I hadn't been there since they'd remodelled it (after the demise of the Museum of the Moving Image) and I was quite impressed.  And we got there with enough time to nose around the restaurants and look in at the bookshop.  But I digress.

The experience wasn't the same as before - this was the first time I'd seen it on a large screen - every other time I'd seen the film, I realised rather belatedly, it had been on the telly.  So this was something of a new experience from the start.  So although I still remembered huge amounts of it, many details of word and image,  the feeling of intensity I'd had before was missing.

But it was still funny - and there were many great lines I seemed to be hearing for the first time. 

And I had forgotten how brilliant Dennis Price was as the murdering Louis Mazzini.  And that in addition to Alec Guiness's multiple disguises, Price also dresses up as the bicycling Bishop of Matabeleland (to kill The Parson).  Wonderfully entertaining, and that sequence of the film also includes:

"I always say my West window has all the exuberance of Chaucer without, happily, any of the concomitant crudities of his period". (Guinness)

But if I start quoting I could go on all night, so I'll stop there.

Oh, and I spotted Richard Wattis (by voice alone! his face isn't shown) in some of the House of Lords scenes...

Farewell Tony Curtis

The press and media have been full of the death of Tony Curtis.  A late film of his that I enjoyed enormously, but which was little mentioned, was Nic Roeg's Insignificance, which I must write about sometime.  However, most commentators wanted to remember Some Like It Hot, and ITV pulled off something of a coup by showing the film after the news on Friday.

So we watched it.  It is, of course, astonishingly good, and still funny.  The script sparkles, Wilder's direction is fine, and all three leads - despite the stories of difficulties with Marilyn on set - sparkle on the film.  And the supporting cast, including George Raft ('Spats' Colombo) and Joe E Brown (Osgood Fielding III - he gets the film's punchline) are also wonderful to watch.   But in a way - despite how terrific Curtis and Jack Lemmon etc are (and the improvised Tony Curtis impersonation of Cary Grant is still achingly funny) - the real star is the script.

So we settled down to see at least part of it, and I realised I knew it - almost but not quite scene-by-scene. Rather like Kind Hearts and Coronets, School for Scoundrels and The Mouse that Roared which I wrote about a year or so ago, but less intensely.  In any case, Some Like It Hot is faster, and doesn't really allow for that kind of reflection.

Anyway, it was late and we were tired and we had a busy day the next day, and although it was good we knew we would have to switch it off before the end...

So we watched it all the way through. No choice at all really.

But Not in the South

So, Ian Carmichael has died, aged 89. I stopped to think of all the films I'd seen him in: a lot were comedies (Boulting Brothers) from the late 50s and early 60s. He was in one acknowledged masterpiece, I'm Alright Jack, with Peter Sellars, Terry-Thomas, Denis Price, Richard Attenborough, Margaret Rutherford... crikey! ...and the list goes on.

But although he had the lead in that film, it is successfully stolen away from him by - well almost everyone around him, but particularly Sellers. He was also in Lucky Jim, but miscast, I thought.

So I'd like instead to remember him in School for Scoundrels - the film based on Stephen Potter's One-Upmanship books.

So I've just had an enjoyable afternoon looking at excerpts of the film on YouTube. And yes, it is another one of those movies - a little like Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Mouse That Roared - that I can remember almost every scene and line from, although I have no specific memory of ever watching the whole thing through from beginning to end.

These two clips bookend Henry's ownership of the appalling 'Swiftmobile' - in the second he has had his Yeovil training.


Which lead me to look at the original books - dated and class-ridden, but still very entertaining.

A word of warning: There is a 2006 remake, which looks absolutely awful from the clips.

Upon Rewatching Kind Hearts and Coronets

The other day I was at home in the afternoon and caught "Kind Hearts and Coronets" on TV. Probably the first time I'd seen it in twenty or thirty years, and even then I missed the beginning. It was a strange, quite extreme experience. I have a half-memory of seeing the film many times when I was younger - say from the age of seven to fifteen - on TVs at home or at my Nan's. I found I not only remembered a great deal of the dialogue over that seeming gulf of time (which is perhaps not so surprising, given that it is highly arch and mannered, with carefully constructed well-turned phrases and balanced sentences), but that I also recalled almost every feature of set, costume, walk and gesture. I found, and still find a few days later, this a strange and and excessive experience. The cool, tempered, black-and-white film playing out at its own pace, unfurling its narrative, which I found I knew fully in advance. I felt somehow gripped by it, unable to look away.

I still can't fully explain this, except by reference to the lenght of time since I used to watch it a lot, and hence the degree to which it managed to catch me by surprise. Also, it has a very beguiling developing storyline, with few repeated or recuperated scenes. Indeed, those settings which do recur (eg those associated with Louis's office life) tend to blur together, and I don't recall them well at all. But the great single scenes (the murders, Sibella's attempt to blackmail Louis, the hangman's poetry reading for example) clearly stay in the mind for a considerable period.

Is this also related also to the mannered, Edwardian style? Hard to say. Other films I watched at the same time (eg "The Lavender Hill Mob", "633 Squadron", "Zulu" and "The Titfield Thunderbolt" come to mind) seem, when I think of them, to have left no similar effect. But now I think about it one other film from that period in my life has remained: "A Matter of Life and Death". I remember seeing that after some time, and again the scenes were instantly familiar to me, the infinite staircase, the frozen table tennis match and the American jury for example. Yet even that great film doesn't have quite the sense of being fully recalled, when I think about it, that "Kind Hearts..." does.