A 1930s Film Bestiary
The Believer magazine has put its back issues online, which means a few of my old articles are now available to read without you having to go to the trouble and expense of buying back issues. This one is co-written with B. Kite, but I won’t tell you who wrote what. Weirdly, the site doesn’t mention my co-author at all, which needs fixing.
The illustration above is Eugene Pallette, drawn by Seth. My favourite of his illos for this piece.
I’ll link to the other articles of mine shortly.
shadowplay 
July 30, 2018 at 6:20 pm
Ernest Thesiger’s “military exhortations in Caesar and Cleopatra” may have “provoked hilarity among the extras”, but he went through the Battle of the Somme, accompanied by his embroidery (a hobby he shared with Lord Kitchener), and summed it up as “Dreadful, my dear. Absolutely dreadful. The noise! And the people!”
July 30, 2018 at 8:28 pm
To Boomer kids over here, Edward Everett Horton was first known as the avuncular but faintly sarcastic narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales on “Rocky and Bullwinkle”. He always got an onscreen credit at the beginning of each tale.
The Carol Burnett Show — Around the 27 minute mark, there’s a Fred & Ginger parody with Roddy MacDowell as Horton:
July 31, 2018 at 11:22 am
Damn, I keep forgetting to use Thesiger’s Somme summary. Unforgiveable that I didn’t feature it in my recent Old Dark House piece.