“I am the Antichrist, will you deny me?”

The stupifyingly grotesque and wonderful Patrick Magee delivers the line he was born to say in the bloggling strangefest that is SIR HENRY AT RAWLINSON END, which you can read about in this week’s edition of The Forgotten, over at The Otter’s Noshbag.

Kind of strange that he never got to say the line in any of the eggy British horror films that were his bread and butter during the seventies. He must have been on a converging path with that sentence since he first came into the world.

Anyway, now that I’m thinking of eggs, bread and butter, I think I’ll go have some French toast.

8a

Since I don’t think anybody managed to answer Question (8)a in the March film quiz —

“What connects CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA, THE RED SHOES and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA?”

The Ondes Martenot! If you wanted electronica back in the forties, you had a choice between this and the erotic teasings of the theremin. Olivier Messiaen’s Oraison was composed especially for this plug-in wonder instrument. And my late friend Lawrie reported the excitement at the studio when the O.M. was brought in for use on CAESAR AND CLEO, the first film he’d worked on. I guess the alien sounds were considered appropriate for Ancient Egypt. In THE RED SHOES the sound evokes psychological dissonance and mesmeric compulsion, much as the theremin did for Ray Milland in THE LOST WEEKEND — Moira Shearer needs those shoes like a bottle of rye — and in LAWRENCE it stands for the pitiless desert sun, which incidentally is the only matte painting in the movie (you simply didn’t point your camera at the sun in those days).

CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA.