Words and Images 56

What Danny wouldn't do

Andrew Sarris in "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet": The American Talking Film / History and Memory 1927-1949 discusses actresses tested for the part of the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca. Margaret Sullavan was among them.

"Margaret Sullavan was too assured, too confident, for the part of a socially intimidated bride hopelessly out of her depth. She would have had Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers doing windows in no time flat."


Note: Sarris, in the same book, mentions a radio version of Rebecca in which Sullavan did play the second Mrs. de Winter.

Ten random thoughts on the tenth

--- I wish I was in Hammersmith.

--- I like the idea that Turner Classic Movies showed a baseball movie around the same time as The Super Bowl on February 6.

--- We're told that when William Wyler tired of watching excessive close-ups in others' films he would try to look around the subject's head to see what the other characters were doing.

--- When I was a boy, in a dark movie house, The Spiral Staircase scared me more than any of the Universal horror films.

--- My favorite mogul was (and still is) Louis B. Mayer (I know all the bad stuff).


--- I usually admire Lee Marvin, and Jane Fonda was a good comedienne and sexy then -- but the motor of Cat Ballou belongs to Nat Cole and Stubby Kaye.

--- Am I the only one who would have preferred Eli Wallach rather than Frank Sinatra as Maggio?

--- When I go on about being there, back during the Sarris-Kael dust-ups, I feel like one of those cantankerous old Civil War veterans in thirties westerns.

--- Watching it again on Turner Classic Movies in January, I had forgotten how good 99 River Street is.

--- My English friend, Nicholas, of High Barnet, whose family hails from the north, is fond of saying: “You can always tell a Yorkshireman -- but you can't tell him much.”



Note: “Random thoughts” pieces bring to mind the great Jimmy Cannon, whose “Nobody Asked Me, But” set the form. Any similarity stops there.

Source: Photograph of the young woman at the tube platform is from As I Travel

In search of a posting

This photograph enthralls and has for some time. When in need of a posting, I return to it again and again. Somewhere in my memory, perhaps folded into reverie, perhaps behind one of those storefronts, lies a tale that I might link to my past and then to the photo. But such can be elusive.

The location is the Midwest, the village probably Brooklyn, Michigan. The main or "high" street, as our English friends would call it, is quite ordinary. The movie theatre is the Star. I am told the year is 1941, a peaceful yet ominous time. The storefronts are not quite discernable from the camera's point of view. Might one of them initiate a reflection from my past? I could map out a probable store-by-store makeup based on memories of small towns, or from films or photographs from a similar time. And from that map I might locate a misplaced memory: something to take me back to that time, yet to a different place. But such is not likely.

So, I have been unable to find a personal connectivity. And, perhaps, that is as it should be. Seventy years have passed and each enthralling photograph does not a posting make. I will let it stand on its own, still more than six hundred miles away from the Bronx, to a region near Lake Erie, where it will always be 1941 -- before December came.

I will seek no further memories from the townsfolk shown, or their surroundings. I will leave them stranded in time in a long-ago yesterday -- with Fritz Lang’s Western Union playing over and over at the Star. And the photograph will remain in search of a posting.


.....

An afterword on the photograph. It is from l'art et l'automobile. A brief caption provided the state, the year and the name of the film. Cinema Treasures helped locate the village as Brooklyn (known better for its New York manifestation).

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Film Makers 7: Alfred Hitchcock

Against Mahdist forces: January 26, 1885

General Charles George "Chinese" Gordon (1833-1885), who was killed at Khartoum whilst defending that city against Mahdist forces.

The Onslow Ford statue when it was at Khartoum.

They tell a tale in Gordon circles of a time when the Empire was drawing to a close and the sun setting in places it had not set before. And as British garrisons closed their gates, and Retreat sounded for the last time, British officers, troops, and their families headed back to the homeland. Khartoum in the late 1950s was such a place.

One of those military families had been at Khartoum in those waning days. Father was a Colonel, mother was “the Colonel’s lady” and there were two sons, aged eleven and eight. And since their early times at Khartoum, they had maintained a family ritual.

On evenings when the Colonel was not on duty, he would take his two sons to visit the famous Onslow Ford statue of Gordon on a camel. Father had initially instructed the children that each evening they should bid goodnight to the statue until the next evening or visit. And they should carry forward the tradition thereafter until such time as the Khartoum sun set for the last time prior to their leaving for home. Each evening, the boys would dutifully salute and say “Goodnight Gordon” before trudging back to their quarters.

So came the day. Came the last evening, came the final farewell, came that moment of sadness as “Goodnight Gordon” murmered the elder, and “Goodnight Gordon” whispered the younger. The Colonel beckoned and they turned to leave, but the boys were in tears, and the father was close to that condition, yet holding back. It was then that the youngest boy turned to the Colonel and asked quietly: “Father ………… who is that man on Gordon’s back?”


The Onslow Ford statue at Woking:


The Onslow Ford statue was originally near Trafalgar Square, later moved to Khartoum, and finally to Gordon’s School at Woking. At the statue is the late David Dixon -- a friend, a scholar, a good fellow, and one the finest men my wife and I have ever met.