waving on the silver screen
Watching: still with the Dirk. Last night was I Could Go On Singing which totally devastated me to the point of rewriting the end in my head and having to watch clips of The Pirate on YouTube to make myself feel better. Damn you, Dirk, why must you always hurt me?! Why can't you ever make a love story that DOESN'T hurt?!
Also, it made me realise I don't own any Judy Garland music at all. Why is that? In time.
Mind you, I'm also steadily making my way through my David Lean collection and my Powell and Pressburger collection. So far: Madeleine was bloody awesome, especially that last fantastically ambiguous shot; Oliver Twist was marvellously shot and oddly cast; The Passionate Friends was supremely irritating and has given me a slight distaste for Ann Todd, despite her excellent turn in Madeleine. Also I am beginning to suspect David Lean is somewhat obsessed with unfaithful wives. Gee, I wonder why.
Powell and Pressburger-wise, I was very happy to find they overlapped with Dirk in Ill Met By Moonlight which unfortunately had nothing whatsoever to do with A Midsummer Night's Dream but which was rather charming and heartwarming rather than the angst I had braced myself for. *gulp* Also, it took me about a week after to realise that was a young Christopher Lee next to Dirk. No wonder I didn't recognise him! *lol*
I love their politics, Powell and Pressburger. Ostensibly they make these grand epics that smack of Allied propaganda but nearly every film I've seen so far --- The 49th Parallel, One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing, The Battle Of River Plate, Ill Met --- somehow neatly play the German side with just enough sympathy to be quietly and sometimes deliciously subversive. It's like they make them with just enough jingoism for the paranoid Allied asses in power and enough humanism for those of us who don't actually buy into the propaganda.
And lord, their colours ... how gorgeous their palettes always are, how every colour movie looks like a sort of painting and has its own spectrum. Black Narcissus has all that lush oppressive green and stark grey; River Plate was all soaked in blues and soft greys; The Red Shoes is super-glowy and decadent oversaturated jewel tones, hyper-real and theatrical. Fuck me, they are so clever. Michael and Emeric. Powell and Pressburger.
... like Douglas Fairbanks, waving his walking stick ...
Still amassing the Dirk films. Still balking at The Night Porter and added Darling to that since I discovered he plays an adulterer. Ack. But I adore Julie Christie so that will happen eventually. I really want to get Providence just to see him reacting to Gielgud and vice versa.
The High Bright Sun was quite silly and tedious but he was quite yummy and tanned and sexy and had on this broad leather cuff which served no narrative purpose at all but entertained me vastly with lewd thoughts. And so there was screencapping at Tumblr. *cough*
Really, no static picture ever does Dirk justice. It's all in the subtlety of his expression and the grace of his movements and the elegant precision and stillness of his pauses. God, he's so delicious. I just want to lick him and then possibly beat him a little for the horrible things he said and did offscreen. Arian men. They always rub me up the wrong way. Even if they died when I was nineteen and barely twitched a lid at the news. "Oh yeah, him."
Ooh, and I watched HMS Defiant the other day which was all kinds of delicious, and Dirk was genuinely scary for the first time ever. Of course that's as much the mechanics of the script as well as his quiet menace but dear god, there was a moment where all he did was turn and look and I nearly felt ill with terror. Mind you, I did think they gave him a rather ignominious end, even if his character totally deserved it. I still wailed a little inside for him.
I'm reading his letters at the moment, a little bit every few nights just to remind myself of his writing voice. He is rather hilariously bitchy, so very much the old queen calling everyone dear and darling and slagging people off as faggots and queers. Which makes me laugh sort of nervously and shamefacedly about how that was then and this is now and how unimpressed he would be with all of us now. Privately, he's colouring my inner landscape in a whole new way which I should probably detail in some form somewhere.
And I'm waiting on the last batch of his books. Actually they may be waiting for me at the post office, to be picked up tomorrow. I've held off on reading any further until I have them all and can read them in the proper order ... or at least what order there is. Obfuscator that he is. I haven't tried his novels yet. Slightly apprehensive of his plots and yet intrigued by the apparent sexual antics that go on there. From what I've seen so far, he rather likes to describe men being raped by women. *blinks*
Yes, that man.
He does have the most delicious voice. At first I was a little dismayed at how I couldn't really distinguish it. Now I think I could pick it out from a whole range. Last night in I Could Go On Singing, you almost hear him before you see him. And lord, the beautiful tones of his voice, the way it richens as he gets older, the way he subtly shifts the timbre of it from film to film, depending on the roughness of his character and well, his developing skill, I suppose. His voice in The High Bright Sun has a quite different inflection to his voice in I Could Go On Singing. And of course he sounds completely unlike again in something as young as The Boys In Brown.
That was a totally weird Irish(?) accent he did in that but I did rather love the risk he took with that role so early in his career. No shining goodness there, he's got some rather snide moments and then one utterly repulsive moment which even made me recoil a little. How skilfully they evaporated any bit of liking or respect I could have had for his character just with that one moment of hysterical pleading. But then I haven't really seen much of that era of his career, the angry young hoodlum phase. I'm so hanging out for The Blue Lamp and, to a lesser extent, Hunted.
The Spanish Gardener was utterly silly and he pretty much sleepwalked his way through that except for one rather homoerotic moment towards the end where I swear he gave the father a rather come-hither look through his lashes. Apparently, the book is far more about the sexual jealousy between the two. Heh.
Victim lived up to every bit of the hype. My god, what a powerful and dangerously brave film. And it made me want to stand up and cheer madly and applaud and then hug him and hug him and hug him for being so fucking brave to make that film about homosexuality, playing a homosexual man at a time when it wasn't quite the thing, and so flagrantly risk his own closeted reputation. I can't quite remember now from the Coldstream bio if it did hurt his career, I seem to recall a sentence like "He couldn't even get arrested" but I could be misunderstanding that.
And then I watched The Mind Benders. The actress who played his wife, Mary Ure, impressed me so so sooo much. The strength and dignity of her performance, the utter stillness of it that was so much like Dirk in his other films. I was a little disappointed with the film in the end. Somehow I thought it would go for much longer and the drama would be played out on a much grander more destructive more drawn out scale. It was oddly streamlined, almost too much so, almost thin in fact. And yet there were some absolutely wonderful moments, particularly at the start before the major plot point, when they're still setting up their dynamic.
There's the tiniest snippet of a scene where they're in bed together and he clearly turns to her in desperation and need and then we cut to post-coital stillness and she's got tears dropping from her lashes, and there are these few lines they say to each other that are just so heartbreaking and so potent and so chilling, so full of meaning to be unpacked.
He says, sort of tender and regretful and shameful and apologetic: "Love can be violent, too." And she says in this sort of desolate way, "That was fear."
God. So much in just that. *convulses*
It's really not surprising that I get quite a lot of delight from seeing him in bed with women, is it? And it's so completely unsurprising and horribly ironic that the best screen kissers I've seen so far, Dirk Bogarde and Alec McCowen, are both gay, isn't it?
Over the weekend, I made sheba_finesse and her Aquarian Boy watch Private Lives to some rather gratifying and shocked laughter from both. And it reminded me just how much I like the way Alec McCowen opens his mouth before he fits it precisely over Penelope Keith's. I could almost believe he's properly kissing her. And Dirk always does the intense shoulder twist as he clutches the girl and angles hard. I can't wait to see Appointment In London --- for the brief scene with Tony, too --- and Campbell's Kingdom. Apparently there's a lot of kissing in both. Mmm.
What? These are important things in an actor's craft. Yis.
I have Simba to watch next. I suspect it will be quite crap but I hope to be proven wrong. And if not, I can watch The Servant for the fourth time. My god, I love it so much. It's turned my opinion of Pinter almost completely around. But then I was probably a little unfair to base said opinion on one play reading that was prolly more flawed than the original material. Okay, I can eat humble-ish pie. :p