The Earl Grey Limited
Well, my re-entry to work is going well and relatively pain-free. I still have a bit of a limp, but that is only really to be expected.
Reading wise, i polished off Spike Milligan's memoir "Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall" and toyed around with a few other books, mostly short story collections from various ranges from the British Library re-issue series, E M Forrester's " The Machine Stops", before finally settling down on "Trouble is my Business" by Raymond Chandler. This is a collection of four novellas he wrote in the 1940s for various magazines prior to writing his first full-length novel, "The Big Sleep," which debuted the character of the Private Investigator Philip Marlowe whom would go on to be one of the defining characters of the hard-boiled noir detective genre, and a key influence upon a whole generation of novelists and screenwriters. Now, here is the curious thing: for this collection of novellas, the Publishers have amended the text to change the name of the detective featured in the story to Philip Marlowe and consequently ret-conned the characters history. As originally published, the detective went by the name of John Dalmas- or was simply unnamed, so I am slightly bemused by this action. Not that it really makes a huge difference as there isn't a huge amount of difference in the characterisations, but it strikes me as an odd choice, and likely only having been done to tie in with their range of republished Marlowe novels.
Film wise, I haven't ventured to the cinema as nothing has either grabbed me or been on at the time I wanted to go, so I have been watching films at home. These have included a couple of films (very) loosely based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, starring Universal Horror legends Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. The first of these was "The Black Cat," which unusually has Lugosi in the protagonist role as opposed to the antagonist, though he does remain something of the anti-hero. He plays a soldier who was captured in the Great War and was tortured, and upon escape, he learned that his wife and child died while he was imprisoned. Upon his return home, he finds his old friend (Karloff) has been running his household in his absence. It soon transpires that Karloff is not all he seems and is, in fact, a muderer, satanist, and necrophiliac who is planning on giving the devil human form.
The second was "The Raven," which for 1936 is fairly meta. Rather than being a loose adaption of Poe's famous poem, it revolves around a Poe enthusiast, played by Lugosi, who has indulged in his hobby and made his home a homage to the writer. Lugosi is once again in the bad guy role, and his setup is to try to expel his madness through toture via various Poe set pieces from such stories as "The Pit and the Pendulum". Boris Karloff appears as a pseudosympathetic character who is deformed by Lugosi and forced to do his bidding in exchange for a cure.
What these films highlight is how much better an actor Karloff was over Lugosi. Even taking in the changes of acting style over the decades, Lugosi is overly dramatic and arched in his roles, while Karloff is far more adaptable.
Outside of what the ever-so-tactful-Sian would describe as "old man movies," I recently watched a film by one of my favoured modern directors, Wes Anderson. The film was "the Darjeeling Limited," and it features Adrian Brodie, Owen Wilson, and Jack Schwarzwald as a trio of estranged brothers who are attempting to reconnect a year after their father's funeral by going on a pilgrimage on train to visit their mother. This is one of those films which is hard to describe as... not a lot, actually happens in it. It is a good little character piece of a film with the void between the brothers explored both in the visuals and the storyline.
Also, I watched an interview on the Doctor Who season 2 blu-ray with William Russell, who at time of writing, is the oldest living member of Doctor Who's regular cast. It was recorded back in 2018, and while he offers some interesting and articulate stories about his life in the 1940s, for a lot of the interview, he does seem a little lost and confused. I wonder if it was about then when he was diagnosed with dementia. A friend of mine who is heavily involved with the Fandom expressed surprise that they were able to get William Russell to be able to deliver a line of dialogue in his recent appearance in Jodie Whitaker's swansong. Certainly, a certain gobby Aussie actress who shall remain unnamed was telling stories at a recent convention about William Russell's day on set, which implied that something happened on set and John Bishop ended up helping calm him down. I am not sure if it is up to her to be spilling the beans on the old timer's health issues.