My Howard Hawks viewing continues its run of hits with the classic THE BIG SLEEP (1946), which I find makes even less sense as a mystery than the last time I watched it. It’s still awesome.
Bogart plays Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled PI, Philip Marlowe, hired by an aging rich man who suspects someone’s blackmailing one of his daughters, and that his vanished protege/surrogate son might be involved (which worries him more than blackmail per se). Marlowe finds himself surrounded by colorful, though not always likable characters including his client’s too-young, too-seductive daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers) quietly calculating Elisha Cook Jr. as a would-be tough guy and Lauren Bacall as his client’s older daughter, with whom he’s soon trading snappy banter (“I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners — I don’t like them myself.”).
Typically a mystery film slowly builds up evidence and answer as we move from scene to scene. Here Bogart runs into gamblers, gang bosses, bad girls, blackmailers and others and none of the scenes seems to move us closer to making sense of things. It’s well-known the film doesn’t make sense due to changing who’s unmasked as the killer but even without that it’s less interested in putting the pieces together than sharp dialogue, tense encounters, flirtatious glances and generally cool scenes (it meets Hal Wallis’s standard of three good scenes, no bad ones). If it doesn’t make sense I certainly don’t care. “She sat in my lap while I was still standing up.”
Someone at Ret-Con recommended CREEP (2014) which led to me taking 90 minutes of my time to watch this found-footage story about a terminally ill man who invites a videographer to record his dying days for his son — but before long it becomes increasingly obvious he’s not telling the truth about his cancer, or about a great many other things. Here the reveal is no shock but the journey to get there has a dearth of cool scenes. “I was going to pour you a whisky.”
LA VIDA BREVE is a short Spanish opera TYG took me too for our date last weekend. The story of a Roma woman’s tragic romance with a faithless aristocrat is beautifully sungbut has almost nothing in the way of plot and minimally staged — no blocking, simply people standing and singing — which didn’t improve it (TYG, who’s considerably more opera-savvy than me, had similar thoughts). The flamenco dancing was an exception, and cool to see/ “Cursed is he who is born the anvil, instead of being born the hammer!”
It’s been several years but I finally returned to the world of UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS in its third season and quite an eventful one it was. Lady Bellamy drown on the Titanic which makes her feckless son James (Simon Williams) the new head of the household with her husband Richard (David Langton) now a poor relation living with him. There’s James’ new bride Hazel (Meg Wynn Owen) who proves a terrible match (not her fault), a new young relative (a young Lesley Anne Downe) and in the final episode, an assassination in the Balkans sparks a war — fortunately it can’t possibly last more than six months, right? Plus assorted romantic tangles and conflicts among the cast. Always a pleasure. “If that’s the way you feel, maybe it’s best our baby died before it was born!”
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