The Chills #3: “Look out!”

Some scenes make you feel like your brain has been extracted, and carved into a crude trumpet, and some Jazz Angel is blowing the most beautiful celestial music through its neural passages. It is then that we speak of The Chills.

Roger Livesey goes to heaven.

Regular Shadowplayer Alex Livingstone nominates this classic sequence from Powell & Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (AMOLAD for short), which ably shows off Pressburger’s superb story construction (one thing Powell definitely needed help with), Roger Livesey’s authoritative-but-loveable performance, Jack Cardiff;s cinematography (with Christopher Challis shooting second unit on the bike crash) and oh, many many other things. Alex wrote:

i nominate the bit in a matter of life and death where roger livesey crashes his motorcycle and dies, only to turn up in heaven and save the day. i can’t watch it without my breathing getting disrupted - i always wind up gasping and a bit wet-eyed, as if i’ve stuck my head into a supermarket freezer and inhaled really hard

on a more puerile note, when marius goring meets roger livesey for the first time he makes a little noise of agreement like someone honking a clown’s nose

Into each film some rain must fall, and I would regretfully note that Bob Arden’s scene in the ambulance with Kim Hunter is maybe one of only two ropey performances in P&P’s oeuvre — but hey, he’s in good company, the other is Laurence Olivier in FORTY-NINTH PARALLEL as a French-Canadian trapper with what sounds like a Pakistani accent. It’s a cameo that makes P&P fan David Mamet thank God that Olivier was prevented from starring in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (because Winston Churchill didn’t approve of the script).

Arden was later thrilled to be cast in MR ARKADIN by no less than Orson Welles (according to my friend Lawrie Knight, a drinking buddy of Arden’s), then less than thrilled when the film took years to open in the UK, and even less than less than thrilled when his own performance in it was singled out for unflattering comment. But Arden is arguably effective in that role: for whatever reason, Welles seemes to have aimed to make Arden’s character as unappealing as possible, and he exploits all Arden’s worst qualities, both physical and performaive, to do it.

Arden never became a star, but he earned a regular living playing Americans in British films for the rest of his days.

Roger Livesey is terrific in THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN, but really he owes Powell his place in cinema. Nobody else would cast him at first — extraordinarily, they didn’t like his voice.

Lawrie didn’t really have warm memories of Livesey. When they met, Lawrie was a junior assistant on AMOLAD and Livesey asked him what he’d done in the war. When Lawrie said he was in the air force, Livesey ’sort of made a face, and said “That explains it.”‘

Lawrie never knew what was behind this hostility, but I just found out. Good old Wikipedia:

At the outbreak of World War II, Livesey and Jeans were among the first volunteers to entertain the troops before he volunteered for flying duties in the R.A.F. He was turned down as too old, so he went to work in an aircraft factory at Desford aerodrome near Leicester to “do his bit for the war effort”.

The rejection must have rankled! Poor Roger. But that failure to attain active service is what made him available to star in COLONEL BLIMP, and thence to IKWIG and AMOLAD. And thence to immortality.

More suggestions for pulse-pounding, spine-tingling moments of cinematic greatness will be cheerfully received.

Does Anybody Know #2

 

…if there’s any way to get a copy of Preston Sturges’ last film, THE DIARIES OF MAJOR THOMPSON, also known as THE FRENCH THEY ARE A FUNNY RACE?

Described as “almost defiantly unfunny” by one critic, this seems to have been a somewhat blighted project. Sturges, with what Rene Clair identified as “turn-of-the-century schoolboy French,” had to direct this film in two languages. His supposedly bilingual stars, Jack Buchanan (Scottish musical comedian, best known today for THE BANDWAGON) and Martine Carol, were in reality so incompetent in their respective second languages that they couldn’t understand one another and would miss their cues. Buchanan was also in the early stages of the spinal cancer that would kill him, which might well have cut down on his propensity for being adorably hilarious.

Come to think of it, why the hell do I want to see this film? Because it’s Sturges, and I love him. Also because all the other late-period Sturges films with shaky reputations have turned out to be well worth seeing. On first viewing, UNFAITHFULLY YOURS struck me as two-thirds masterpiece and one-third turkey. Now I’m convinced it’s a truly great comedy, and even the “bad” bits seem more like some unusual kind of brilliance. The hideously protracted, repetitious, agonizingly unfunny slapstick finale perfectly captures the experience of jealousy at work in the human mind. And THE BEAUTIFUL BLONDE FROM BASHFUL BEND, whose own co-scenarist thought it the worst film ever made, actually has plenty of funny stuff in it. So I have to give this one a chance.

If I get the chance.

Blue Sky Casting: Preston Sturges’ MATRIX

 

There’s an unproduced Preston Sturges script, first written in the thirties, later floated in the forties as a possible Gene Tierney vehicle, called MATRIX. I once contacted the Sturges family via their website, asking if there were any plans to publish the document. It would be more useful to have out there than all the scripts of the Sturges films that WERE made, excellent though they are.

Alas, the Sturgeses (Sturgi?) replied that they preferred to keep MATRIX to themselves, which struck me as slightly selfish, but it’s their right I suppose.

So we must use our imaginations as to what Preston Sturges’ MATRIX might have been…

The Cast:

Eddie Bracken … Neo (Let’s be honest, how many computer geeks look like Keanu Reeves?)

William Demarest … Morpheus (I want to see him do that pratfall [above] in “bullet time”)

Ella Raines … Trinity (my octogenarian friend Lawrie said, “I was always very interested in Ella Raines, because I’d heard she was a lesbian, and of course… I had no idea what that meant.”)

Al Bridge … Agent Smith (he’s got the DRAWL)

Jimmy Conlin … Oracle

Franklin Pangborn … The Architect 

Veronica Lake … Persephone

Akim Tamiroff … Twin #2

Lionel Stander … Twin #1

Eric Blore … the Merovingian (and why not?)

I feel a little guilty about casting a white guy in Larry Fishburn’s role, but I would feel more guilty about casting Sturges’ favourite black actor, “Snowflake”… although he’s a very funny guy.

Sturges had the best stock company of supporting players of any filmmaker. I bet you could cast any movie with that troupe. As Easter approaches, I’m thinking about doing KING OF KINGS.