A. Hall
“8 DEC. A HALL. RM.”
Not the Albert Hall who plays the Chief in APOCALYPSE NOW, whose name always makes me chuckle inwardly (but a round of a applause for Albert’s exit-line: “A spear.”) The building.
Is this a reference to the cryptic note in THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH? Like Frank Vosper as Ramon the assassin, Rory McBride, the offscreen but much-discussed love machine in Richard Lester’s THE KNACK… AND HOW TO GET IT, has an assignation arranged in the Hall, although he’s entertaining his girlfriends rather than perforating a foreign dignitary.
While we’re on the subject, I always wondered if the scenes of white-clad women queueing outside that edifice were an influence on John Lennon’s lyrics for A Day in the Life. After all, the lines “I saw a film today,” and “The English army had just won the war,” were inspired by Lennon’s experience acting in Lester’s HOW I WON THE WAR. “Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall,” could conceivably have been sparked by THE KNACK, which Lester made between his two Beatles assignments. And the obnoxious rude joke, referring to woman as holes, seems quite Lennonesque.
My late friend Lawrie filmed in the Albert Hall once, helping out as a third AD on David Lean’s THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS. “It was hard work because, you see, the Albert Hall has no interior stairs, so any time you had to get a message from the camera up above to the extras down below, you had to leave the building, go in another door, and all the way down and then back up again for the next message.” This was in the days before walkie-talkies, of course.
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS, which only recently became available on DVD, is a very good Lean, closing out his British period and inaugurating the international one, with some modest location filming in Switzerland. Hmm, Switzerland to the Albert Hall, I wonder if Lean was under the influence of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH as well?
The Lean-Lester connection is quite interesting. Lean, a former editor, was blown away by Lester’s “image-mixing” in PETULIA and sent him a wildly congratulatory telegram, which he treasures to this day. Lester subsequently visited Lean, a tax exile in Rome, and thereby hangs another weird conjunction. Lester was struck by how the millionaire lived, accepting unnecessary discomfort with a rather Calvinist resignation — Lean lived in a hotel overlooking Rome’s zoo, and would be awoken at the crack of dawn by the roars of big cats getting their meaty breakfast. Which brings to mind the plot twist in Dario Argento’s THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, where a phone call is traced via the sound of an exotic bird overheard in the background, meaning that the call came from a hotel near the zoo… at last, with Argento we find a filmmaker we KNOW was influenced by Hitchcock, even down to his casting of Reggie Nalder from the 1956 MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH.
April 24, 2009 at 5:44 pm
A. Hall could be Arsenio Hall. He was in COMING TO AMERICA and Richard Lester came FROM America
have i solved anything?
April 24, 2009 at 7:03 pm
I’m… not sure.
April 24, 2009 at 9:22 pm
The inscription reads “wait till the end to see A. Hall”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6154MlwEoM&feature=related
It’s the performer Adelaide Hall, and she appears in this 1940 London footage at approx “2:35″. A fine singer, whose time in England was later than the first “MAn Who Knew Too Much. Since Hall was performing in the late ’20s, though, it’s not impossible that Hitchcock and Charles Bennett were aware of her.
Anyone who can is recommended to seek out Hall’s performance, with the Ellington band, of the Dorothy Fields/Jimmy McHugh song “I Must Have That Man!”
(It’s probably a generational thing, but … when I saw “A. Hall” my first thought was of “Annie Hall.”)
April 24, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Excellent. And a relief after the “impressionist” guy!
April 25, 2009 at 2:22 am
The Knack is in many ways as pivotal a British film as <i.The Seravnt. While the latter was awash in Profumo zeitgeist and homoerotic razzmatazz, the former is chock-a-block with Beyond Gorgeous Dollybirds. Charlotte Rampling, Jackie Bissett (who I saw last night at local French Film Fest opening) and (drumroll please) Jane Birkin mkae their motion picture sdebuts in it.
While Michael Crawford and Tush supply most of the easy charm, it’s the girls one remembers most.
Birks made her mark here riding a motorcycle — and running off with composer John Barry for a First Husband.
April 25, 2009 at 11:31 am
She likes the composers, it would seem. I finally watched Je T’Aime Mois Non Plus, which is deceptively slight, considering it has awe-inspiring evocations of desire in it. Must try to find something more to say about it, and must try and get a decent clip up on VousTube, there’s nothing of good quality there.
Another enthusiast of the terpsichorean muse, Pattie Boyd, is in The Knack too — she’s the one who left George Harrison (she plays a schoolie in A Hard Day’s Night) for Eric Clapton, who wrote Layla for her.
April 25, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Well that does it. The Knack is BABE CENTRAL! David Watkins exquisite B&W cinematography bathes the ladies in the most delicate configurations of light and shade.
April 25, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Faye Dunaway felt that Watkin’s use of reflected light, as evinced in The Three Musketeers, was unflattering. She needn’t have worried. While I guess such an approach shows up little flaws in the complexion, the standard of beauty Watkin was lighting in these films had no chance of looking bad, and the approach creates an overall beauty in the frame which the women shine out of.
On Robin and Marian, when a nervous Audrey Hepburn inquired how he was going to light her (she’d been out of movies for a few years), Watkin smiled and said, “You’ll just have to take your chances with the rest of them, luv!”
Lester identified Watkin’s unique edge in that he’d gone straight from documentary to lighting cameraman, without learning the trade from the ground up. So while Roeg could tackle any style required of him, Watkin could only do his own distinctive thing, like a marvelous primitive.