Opening Gala

Hippfest got officially up and running with Maurice Tourneur’s THE BLUE BIRD, accompanied by the weird and charming burbling, tooting and mumbling of ensemble Sonic Bothy, who, as Fiona noted, seemed to be scoring the film damage as well as the film, a cheeky approach which could have been distracting but was delightful.

The film really shone, in all its tattered glory — I’ve always found it gorgeous, but Maeterlinck’s allegory, like a lot of allegory, seemed heavy. What became clearer on the big screen, with a crowd and an artful soundtrack, was that every damn thing in that movie is both beautiful and creepy. Maeterlinck’s fantasy world is most disturbing when it’s trying to be sweet — the ancient dead grandparents waking from afterlife coma because their descendants have thought of them (for the first time in months); the parade of happy dead children descending the stairs; the disgusting palace of luxuries; the zone of unborn children waiting around in veiled heaps for a boat to take them to their respective wombs (apparently they just SIT — for YEARS — and as in the sequels, mysteriously they’re all white). The spooky Palace of Night is actually less unsettling than the purportedly sweet bits. This makes it sound like we didn’t enjoy the film but we LOVED it. For its peculiarity rather than its moral depth or its story.

We learned that the platonic ideal of a cat is a dude dressed in a cat costume, and is STILL an asshole.

Fiona has written the programme notes for Hippfest’s screening of THE MAN WHO LAUGHS and you can read them here. Do!

My talk with Chris Heppell on the mighty stage of the Hippodrome seemed to go well. Unfortunately I didn’t flag up here the fact that you have to book in advance to see the thing online. It’s up for 48 hours, but for reasons I don’t understand you won’t be able to access it unless you already booked. Also I’m not sure WHERE it is. But I’m going to ask if it can be made more widely available in future…

Misread Adair?

The IMDb credits for A GIRL’S FOLLY are questionable — I don’t see any evidence for Maurice Tourneur appearing in the film in the role of the film-within-a-film director, or Josef Von Sternberg playing the cameraman (although the actor in AGF *is* short).

But could it be that “Jane Adair,” who plays the heroine’s mom, and who has no other film credits, is the same person as Jean Adair, famed for her murderous maiden aunt role in ARSENIC AND OLD LACE?

I think there’s a faint resemblance, and since Adair was a New York-based vaudevillian, she could have been close enough to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to get cast. She would have been just forty-four, but character players seem to have aged faster in them days, and “Jane” is obviously wearing a peculiar makeup to add the illusion of years to her countenance.

Apparently Jean was also known as Jennet and was born Violet McNaughton, so there’s a history of her name varying. The mother gets her own title card in the film, where it does indeed say “Miss Jane Adair,” so if it’s a mistake, it’s one that has its origins with the film itself.

Both actors seem to have strong nasolabial folds, short, blunt nose or noses, round, dark eyes, short earlobes, slightly squarish chin or chins, thin lips. And I think they both have a slight chip in one front tooth, which tends to almost convince me. The Youtube version is too low-res to be much help in analysing the features, but there are aspects of posture and mannerism which seem to me to be similar. Try the scene at 48.37 if you want to see for yourself.

Jean, circa 1900, and in 1942 filming ARSENIC AND OLD LACE for its eventual 1944 release.

The woman in A GIRL’S FOLLY looks more like the actress in ARSENIC AND OLD LACE etc than her own youthful portraits do, although to be fair, all three of them are pretty distinct from one another.

I have a sad history of misidentifying show people, though. Go ahead, tell me I’m crazy!