Quote of the Day: “Phaedra”
Lee Hazlewood sings:
“Some velvet morning when I’m straight,
I’m gonna open up your gate,
And maybe tell you ’bout Phaedra,
and how she gave me life,
and how she made it in,
Some velvet morning when I’m straight.”
Nancy Sinatra sings:
“Flowers growing on the hill,
Dragonflies and daffodils,
Learn from us, very much,
Look at us, but do not touch,
Phaedra is my name.”
This is what’s been wowing me on my Nano recently.
(If clip doesn’t work, try this LINK.)
The video is a little hilarious, but then so’s the song, in all its epic pomp. Just GO WITH IT. Lee H. rides a very long horse with very short legs across Californian beachfront property out of PLANET OF THE APES and THE TERROR, while Nancy S. attempts to flatten the song’s soaring psychedelic poetry with her very presence, yet she’s evolved beyond the odd troll glimpsed in Corman’s THE WILD ANGELS and can now actually WORK IT, milking the camera until it begs for time out.
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Nancy’s moist cavern is the same one seen in THE USUAL SUSPECTS, I think, and probably about a thousand other movies.
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If anyone knows where I can get Jules Dassin’s FEDRA / PHAEDRA, I’m seriously keen to see it.
February 5, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Both Dassin’s Phaedra and Lee Hzelwood and nancy Sinatra’s “One Velvet Morning” are camp par excellence and would figure highly on Susan Sontag’s epic list were she alive to revise and update it.
February 5, 2008 at 6:52 pm
I think David Thomson suggested Phaedra and 10:30pm Summer as treatment for depression, he thinks they’re hilarious. I’ve only seen the latter and I think it’s stupendous: it kind of relates to what you were saying about Borzage’s Moonrise bringing silent movie storytelling into the sound era. It’s certainly easy to laugh at Mercouri’s melodramatics, just as it’s easy to laugh at Valentino or Swanson, but there’s something else there.
Have uploaded a couple bits of 10:30pm in hopes of blogging about it soon.