photo of John Whiting
I’ve seen Carol Reed’s The Third Man many times – it’s one of my favourite films, after all. But after a recent viewing, I finally decided, as well, to read Graham Greene’s “Cold War classic novella,” in which the film’s Holly Martins is Rollo Martins, and the literary version is, for me, a rather different experience from the film. And then I was pleased to discover a number of dialogue segments on the CD Third Man Original Score which, of course, features a good helping of soundtrack composer Anton Karas aka “the first man of the zither.”
Of late, I tend to dip into writers I hadn’t much explored before, one being Georges Simenon, but more often the short stories and not always the Maigret volumes, since I’ve done repeated watchings on DVD and enjoyed Michael Gambon playing the part in English and Bruno Cremer doing likewise in French. Both actors are memorable, with unique nuances in their individual interpretations, and I’m so glad I got to see Gambon, recently deceased, on stage several times. As for Simenon, much praised as an author by masters like Andre Gide, I find myself something in awe of him, especially for one in his mastery of proportion in what needs to be said.
Another writer who inspires awe is Isak Dinesen, partly because I am each time consumed by her world after only a few of her perceptive and instantly gipping sentences. She is a masterly weaver of tales and I find myself instantly woven into her repeatedly surprising and unpredictable narratives, the latest for me being Babette’s Feast – first the humanly sensitive film and then the gently mind-expanding short story. Her characters live on several levels or within several simultaneous dimensions, as in The Immortal Story, written by Isak Dinesen and made into an equally haunting film by Orson Welles co-starring Jeanne Moreau, who also appears in his film of Kafka’s The Trial……and in the lively and heartbreaking Chimes at Midnight featuring Shakespeare’s Falstaff, played by guess who?
And talking about Orson Welles, you need to see Mark Cousins’ The Eyes of Orson Welles which turns out to be an exploration of Welles as a visual artist, and yes that means sketches and drawings too. I do hope you have had the pleasure of Mark Cousins fifteen-part series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, an extremely insightful, informative, and eye-opening account of the film medium.
When you think about heartbreaking film, try Wim Wenders quietly devastating film Paris, Texas which explores at an unyieldingly hypnotic pace the impossibility of people connecting. I don’t ever think I’ve sensed isolation as poignantly in film before, as in this work mostly penned by Sam Shepherd, although Wenders’ imagination-fueling film Wings of Desire makes many nuanced points on the experience of human solitude. So does the recently popular film Living, starring the incomparable Bill Nighy, which is based on Kurosawa’s film Ikiru, both of which pointedly dare the turf or pointless bureaucratic existence in memorable fashion.
As for Bill Nighy, I am hooked on his CD series titled A Charles Paris Mystery of which we now have seventeen, and what better companion on a long drive by car anywhere than these dramatizations of novels by Simon Brett here delivered by Nighy’s drily insinuating narrations.
I am hooked on a number of ballets I have recently seen by choreographer Roland Petit. Carmen features Nicholas Le Riche, a dancer of confident rightness who translates dramatic import into a musical but also assertive physicality, whether partnered by a ballerina or what seems the countless chairs Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. Petit’s sense of humour has a decidedly physical dimension to it and while watching we are constantly amazed at the quirky lightheartedness that Petit and his dancers can pull off. It’s the language of a master, one which I also enjoyed in his Notre Dame de Paris which featured ballerina Natalia Osipova, always magnificent in balletic flight and a favourite.
A year or so ago I made the happy discovery of Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang in the Stravinsky violin concerto on Mezzo television and immediately agreed with accompanying conductor Ivan Fischer, who said about her in his introduction, “This music is hellishly difficult for the violinist and I don’t know how Vilde Frang plays everything perfectly, everything with meaning.” One thing I later discovered in CDs of Frang playing Mozart Violin Concertos, Violin Concertos by Britten and Korngold, Beethoven and Stravinsky Violin Concertos, and Bartok, Grieg, R. Strauss: Violin Sonatas was the confidence, exquisite beauty of tone, unflinching bravery in rhythm, enchanting sense of implicit musical meaning in Frang’s playing, all without one ragged note but much – what is it? -mystical clarity.
The film Love, Cecil comprehensively explores Cecil Beaton’s always fascinating professional and personal lives, with helpful contributions from relevant friends, colleagues or informed experts. Beware that the tons of irresistible photos will compel you perhaps to purchase the oversize volume Love, Cecil: A Journey with Cecil Beaton and, no doubt, other related books like The Unexpurgated Beaton: The Cecil Beaton Diaries As They Were Written. It contains this: “Beaton wrote in his diary: “I have always loathed the Burtons for their vulgarity, commonness and crass bad taste, she combining the worst of US and English taste, he as butch and coarse as only a Welshman can be.”
The PBS blurb that once announced its program The Magic of Horowitz cannot say it all about this very special pianistic genius. Nor, in fact, can the CD Horowitz in Moscow, even with its detailed notes. But seeing parts of the recital on PBS and having pianist Daniil Trifonov declare, as we watch, that Horowitz never forces the keys, or having Martha Argerich declare that the Chopin mazurkas played by Horowitz are the “very best” provides tempting revelation.
When Argerich later declares that Horowitz is “the greatest lover the piano ever had” we watch the program again – well, over and over again, as I do – because something too special for words is going on between pianist, piano, music itself, and meaning, something it feels wondrous to experience. And I love the twinkle we get to experience in Horowitz, something I was lucky to take in first hand at a recital of his years ago at Massey Hall. He was playing his Carmen Variations and at one point hit a single note that vibrated with humour. I let out a large laugh from the ground floor seat surrounded by a reverential audience and was pleased to see in his smile that I was sharing my laugh with his twinkle, his humour.
If you weekly watch TCM’s guide to film noir, Eddie Muller, you might already be lucky to have the man’s books in your collection. Muller’s passion for film noir is thorough, his knowledge of the genre as complete as it gets, his enthusiasm for films from the dark side of the human coin infectious, and I’ve made many delicious discoveries through his hosting and programming.
In 1956 I became an usher at our neighbourhood cinema, for three years, at a time when Noir’s influence was still present as a natural force in film. As you may guess, I have a number of Muller’s books. The first, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, blew me away with the comfort and creativity of Muller’s voice in the Noir idiom. It indeed seemed a natural manner of speaking for him and I delighted next in Dark City: The Lost World of Fim Noir (Revised and expanded edition) which now, in larger format took on the presence of a religious tome.
Dark City Dames: The Wicked Women of Film Noir is another Muller gem but let some of the Amazon’s text speak and fill us in: “He profiles six extraordinary actresses — Jane Greer, Evelyn Keyes, Ann Savage, Coleen Gray, Audrey Totter, and Marie Windsor — as they balanced love and career, struggled against typecasting, and sought fulfillment in a ruthless business.” Dark City Dames is a priceless gem of first hand remembering of times when these ladies nudged our fantasies.
The Art of Noir: The Posters and Graphics from the Classic Era of Film Noir is another unique consideration of film noir. It addresses the visual impact of posters used to attract audiences, for one, but also includes comparisons, from culture to culture, of how a film was perceived in each. The comparisons of specific emphasis from culture to culture are always revelations into the nitty-gritty of each cultural bias, especially that of North Americans. The designers of these posters were speaking to many a subconsciousness, weren’t they?
In brief, a few more recommends: Prine on Prine: Interviews and Encounters with John Prine by Holly Gleason is an informative read at every turn, one that certainly takes the reader into the heartbeat of John Prine and makes him or her into an even more appreciative listener.
When I saw two performances of My Name is Rachel Corrie twice in London in 2005, I discovered that it was a play composed from Corrie’s journals and emails from Gaza and compiled by actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katharine Viner, later in a production directed by Rickman. Corrie, an American, had been crushed to death. by an Israeli bulldozer during her attempt to stop the demolitions of Palestinian homes by Israelis, and Rickman discusses Rachel Corrie and much else in Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman, page by page a humanly rewarding read by Alan Rickman, Rima Horton, et al.
Literary, you say? Of late I’ve been dipping into the poems of Paul Eluard in both French and English, Pablo Neruda, Rumi but not in all translations some of which seem intrusions in a New Age voice, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, and The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton.
Drama? Last summer I asked Tim Carroll, the artistic director of the Shaw Festival, if we would ever see a play by British playwright John Whiting on the festival stage and discovered that his favourite Whiting play is A Penny for a Song. I haven’t read Whiting since I studied him extensively while doing my M.A. in Drama in the early 1970’s, so here I am again reading A Penny for a Song and hoping it is on the Festival’s agenda for imminent production.
The play is gently “Empire” in tone, depiction and manner, and only an attuned director like Tim Carroll might bring it into unselfconscious, crisply moving, good-naturedly British, existence. I chuckled as I read the text and would very much like to see what the source of so much chuckle looks like on stage, in the original version of the play, and what both director and actors must do to keep an audience engaged and entertained. These characters all have their unending exits and their entrances, and how, I finally wonder, will Whiting and the production maintain connection with us, of another culture, in our own brand of dottiness.