Birthday Cakes for Jami

Jami is a known carrot cake fiend, so I got her one when I visited Whole Foods last week.  And then I thought, what the hell - why not make her one?  So she got two (the homemade one is GF - see if you can guess which one it is):

 

Film review: The Belles of St. Trinian's (1954)

If you're going to do an Alastair Sim binge, you can't really not watch a St. Trinian's film, but they aren't streaming anywhere, so I ordered the set to give Jami for her birthday.  And this is the first, where Sim plays the dual role of Millicent Fritton, headmistress of St. Trinian's, and her ne'er-do-well brother Clarence.  He doesn't have much to do as the latter, so it is as the former that he dominates this film.  He cannot help but be outsize in his performance (that face!) 

but he invest Millicent with an inner dignity that is rather endearing.  She is not a cartoon - not a Terry Jones-style performance.  However, the film itself is of dubious quality.  Perhaps because we'd just watched an Alexander Mackendrick film, this one seemed distinctly workmanlike.  It's not that there weren't excellent performances - besides Millicent there's George Cole (of course) 

as young spiv Flash Harry (was that where the name originated?) and Joyce Grenfell 

(who does rather go over the edge into cartoon character, but then you know what you're getting with Joyce Grenfell), Beryl Reid, 

and even Sid James in an early (although you wouldn't know it - did he come into the world looking like that?) small role (oh, and Joan Sims too 

- the Carry On films were in embryonic form in the British film industry of the 50s).  Oh, and this guy, last seen as the doctor in The Green Man.

Of course, it's hard to avoid being cartoonish when you're a live action adaptation of literal cartoons.  And it would be hard to capture the sheer seedy, macabre violence of the Ronald Searle originals, although the younger actors are very good.  

The plot is pretty much beside the point: an Arab Sheik (regrettable use of brownface on him and the girl playing his daughter Fatima) is happy to install his daughter in an English boarding school (clearly unaware, unlike the townspeople, local constabulary and indeed Ministry of Education, of its fearsome reputation) because his kingdom, as we see in a prologue, is being overrun by lusty American servicemen (not to mention nubile American reporters working on stories about life in a harem), particularly one that is so convenient for where his has his prize racehorse "Arab Boy" stabled.  Well, St. Trinian's is teetering on the edge of foreclosure before Millicent is convinced to put down the £400 she has at 10-1 on Arab Boy.  But Clarence needs his horse to win, so gets his daughter, 

whom he has re-installed (she was expelled for burning down an un-insured building) at St. Trinian's to get info about Arab Boy to attempt to nobble the horse.  Meanwhile the younger girls are also betting on Arab Boy so rival groups of schoolgirls compete to get the horse.  He ends up staying overnight in one of their dorms, 

and then barricaded in by the daughter and her pals, and Clarence shows up with his posse of undesirables (including Sid James) as reinforcements, coincidentally on Parents' Day at the school.  Will Arab Boy make it to the Gold Cup and save the school?  

Film review: The Man in the White Suit (1951)

Another classic Ealing re-watch.  It's a jolt to see the (not much, but seeming so) younger Alec Guinness playing a completely different character from the sinister professor of Ladykillers.  He manages to be completely convincing at both while at the same time being a bit alien.  Some actors wear their hearts on their sleeves or are the same in every film and he's the complete opposite - I feel I wouldn't know him at all if I met him.  Here he's Sidney Stratton, who has in common with the professor a kind of obsessive focus, but for Sidney it's on creating a super-molecule fibre that will be both indestructible (because to break it would require breaking a molecule) and never need cleaning (because of its static-electric properties).  As nobody will willingly give him the equipment and (expensive) chemicals he needs for his experiments, he has resorted to taking odd jobs at various textile mills (all oop North, naturally) and inserting himself into the R&D department, relying on his fellow scientists' absent-minded assumptions that that equipment belongs to one of their fellows.  

He is eventually found out by Daphne Birnley 

(not quite the "Birling" of An Inspector Calls) - played by the delightfully-voiced Joan Greenwood (think Glynis Johns), the daughter of one of the mills' owners, whose fiancé (Michael "Celestial Toymaker" Gough) 

is a bigwig at a rival mill, who convinces her father to give him a chance.  After much explosive destruction he succeeds, to the horror of every Birling rival in the textile industry and Sidney's former friends (including the loyal Bertha, who is even more loyal to the Union) among the workers, who immediately realize that indestructible clothes are the everlasting gobstoppers of the garment industry and will put them all out of business/work.  Sidney doesn't see it that way, thinking that this advance will be good for humanity, right up until the point at which his former landlady finally drives the point home, at which point he has been chased all over town be everyone in his glowing white suit.  

This is probably my third favorite Ealing (after Ladykillers and Kind Hearts), with Greenwood rivaling Guinness as the main reason to watch.  

It's another Alexander Mackendrick production, which means it's a comedy shot like a film noir, which is a good combination.  

It is also almost too bracingly cynical, which means no happy ending for Sidney and either woman who seems drawn to him.  

And also a hint of disaster to come.  Oh, another standout is the little girl who helps Sidney escape after Bertha has briefly imprisoned him, who went on to record a song that I know mainly because of the Toy Dolls.

RIP (Lavender) Martha (2002-2025)

Alas, our ancient cat Martha had to be euthanized yesterday, because she had declined precipitously in the last couple of weeks.  She had stopped taking care of herself a while ago, so that her hair gathered in little dreads (not helped by the fact that she spent approximately 23 9/10 hours out of every day curled up on a little heating pad tucked inside a little cardboard box), and she bit me if I tried to comb it (although not hard enough to hurt), but in the past week she didn't even yell for soft food when I came down in the morning, which was a real red flag.  She was also struggling to get out of the little box and stumbled and fell a couple of times, so it was time.  But for a while there we were convinced she would outlive us all - it was only a few months ago that she was still able to scamper and jump up on to things.  As these comparatively recent pictures show, she was cute as a button well into her dotage:

(As you can see, she was always photogenic.)  She certainly outlived her twin sister Pumpkin (Prudence), who bullied her (a job that Sylvester, the cat we acquired to replace her took over, although never as nastily as Pumpkin did).  Perhaps the secret to Martha's longevity was her extreme smallness - she was perfectly formed but she always seemed to be a juvenile.  I don't think she ever reached 3lbs in weight (which made her occasional battles with the almost-20lbs Sylvester a real David and Goliath affair, although I must say Sylvester always seemed to come off worse).  I can't say she had an amazing personality - her best quality as far as I was concerned was as a lap-warmer, but I will always feel gratitude to the way she helped the young Thomas deal with bedtime anxieties.  When she was but a kitten, she was given the job of staying with him (clutched in his arms) until he fell asleep.  At first she resisted this, so that bedtime for Thomas was also a scour-the-house-for-that-bloody-cat affair (usually to be found up in the ceiling joists of the basement), but after a while she got used to it, and used to seek him out at bedtime long after he ceased to need the comfort.  And indeed, she was Thomas's Cat, something that is evident in the third post ever on this very blog.  Jami was the one who took on the task of taking her to her final repose and reports that they were very kind and had a sombre little ceremony for her.  It's already strange not having her around - I keep looking into the little corner where she spent all her time the past couple of years and not finding her.  It's a good thing we're not adopting her now - she would last us until we made it to 80. 

 

Film review: How to Murder a Rich Uncle (1957)

We were inspired to watch this one (in a rather poor print on YouTube) because it was Katie Johnson's follow up (and last film) to The Ladykillers.  It was...okay.  It has the droll attitude to serial murder that Kind Hearts and Coronets does but far less of the charm.  That's not to say that it doesn't have its virtues: everyone in it acquits themselves well, and it's competently directed, but once they start bumping off characters who seem perfectly harmless, and rather young, it leaves a little sour taste in the mouth.  The basic premise is that a family living in a crumbling stately home, on which a huge tax bill is due in a month, welcome a rich uncle who grew up in that house but left to find his fortune in America, and try to bump him off to get his money.  But they (well, the head of the family, played by Nigel Patrick) 

just manage to kill of successive members of the family, starting with his own sister, then his mother, and then his own son, at which point I started to wonder what the point of saving the house was.  The sang froid that follows each successive funeral is, I suppose, meant humorously to evoke the English stiff upper lip (even thought the screenplay is based on a French play) but it comes across as almost psychopathic.  Katie Johnson is the most sympathetic figure, as she plays an aunt who also grew up in the house, and turns out to be the only one who knows about a secret system of passageways that allow her to overhear the father's plans and help to protect the uncle (also sympathetic, and played by the ever-reliable Charles Coburn).  

Unfortunately this contributes to the deaths of family members, as, for example, it is the family matriarch (played by a seriously underused Wendy Hiller) 

who falls to her death because of a sabotaged stair.  At least the daughter of the family survives, perhaps because, unlike the son, she was not let in on the plot.  Her wet boyfriend (whom she accuses of being "virginal" because he rebuffs her advances), 

however, who fancies himself a criminologist, thinks he has worked out that it is the uncle bumping off the family so that he can gain the prestige that all his dollars cannot buy.  Will Katie Johnson's Alice be able to clear Uncle George?  You can probably guess.  Oh, and Michael Caine is in it, playing a hulking gardener, whose only word seems to be "aye," a fact mocked in a strange coda, where the dead family members appear as ghosts and are introduced by the actors' real names.

Views from the 11th floor after dark

Film review: The Ladykillers (1955)

This is, of course, a re-watch, so I won't go into as much detail on the events but give more of a commentary.  The first thing that's obvious, given our recent viewing, is how blatantly Alec Guinness (Professor Marcus) is "doing" an Alastair Sim performance.  And it's a (deliciously) cartoonish one, too - Sim wouldn't have needed the props (ghoulish false teeth) that Guinness uses.  

As Jami said, the one area where it's not obvious that Sim would have at least been his equal is when he turns crazy (because Herbert Lom calls him that), but in a parallel universe this is another beloved Sim character.  Professor Marcus's introduction is also delightfully ghoulish, as you just see his silhouette out through various windows as Mrs. Wilberforce potters around inside her lopsided house-at-the-end-of-the-street.  And in general, this is not a film you would necessarily want your young child to watch, not just because of the casual attitude towards death (and corpse disposal) but because there are genuinely sinister moments.  The director, Alexander Mackendrick, would go on to direct the definite non-comedy Sweet Smell of Success where he would make Burt Lancaster similarly sinister.  

Another thing I notice on a re-watch is that Frankie Howerd was basically fully-formed as a character in 1955.  He's the owner of a fruit cart whose business Mrs. Wilberforce manages to destroy (as Peter Sellers' Harry notes bitterly later in the film when the boys are trying to justify bumping her off).  He is driven to such distraction that by the end he is ripping off the headlights of the taxi Mrs. Wilberforce showed up in (which is holding the trunk with all the stolen money in it, so the boys are watching this aghast from another car down the street), which is driven by his fellow Carry On stalwart Kenneth Connor.  Neither of them look particularly young, either.

One wonders where they filmed this.  If it was a set then it's very impressive, otherwise I absolutely adore Mrs. Wilberforce's house-at-the-end-of-the-street, even if it's lopsided "from the bombing".  And her daily walk up the street, which is teeming with local characters, and up and down which horses are still clip clopping is from another age.  (There is one moment that suggests fakery: in one of my favorite moments in the film, when Mrs Wilberforce (who is not as oblivious as she appears) has twigged that the boys are bank robbers, 

but they have convinced her that she'll go down with them as an accessory, has to answer the door to a policeman, who has actually just come to check up on her after the excitement of the fruit-barrow incident.  She is given all kinds of talking points by the boys, such as "you can't come in without a warrant" and "buzz off!" which she dutifully repeats, but there's one moment when the policeman is silhouetted against the backdrop of the street and it looks incredibly green-screened.  However, the scenes of the boys clambering around on the roof (where The Major meets his end) are obviously actually happening on SOMEthing, which leads me to think that maybe the house is a set.

The other main takeaway from the film is that, for all the presence of Guinness, Lom, Peter Sellers, et al., the film belongs to Mrs. Wilberforce and the marvelous Katie Johnson, whose performance had to be pitch perfect for the film to succeed.  

She is so natural that you never once question that this is a real little old lady, who is a little bit dreamy and forgetful and an innocent relic of a bygone age.  Her constant wittering is just done perfectly and she never once winks at the camera, as that would bring the whole edifice crashing down.  Perhaps my favorite scene of the whole film is when she goes ahead with her party of little-old-ladies despite the fact that she has just worked out that the boys are ruthless criminals and sternly insists that they take part, thrusting a cup of tea and a slice of cake into Sellers's hands as he returns from some errand, mystified as to what has become of his gang.  Where they found such an array of tiny, frail, bird-like little old lady actresses I have no idea.

Final summary [SPOILERS]: Louis kills the Major because he's trying to escape with "the lolly" after pretending to kill Mrs. Wilberforce.  "One Round" kills Harry (with a plank of wood) because thinks he has killed Mrs. Wilberforce (of course he hasn't - as Professor Marcus says at the end, nothing can kill Mrs. Wilberforce, she'll be with us forever), Louis kills One Round because he left the safety catch on, Professor Marcus kills Louis (by prizing his ladder off the wall) and Louis shoots Professor Marcus, who is then clonked on the head by the railway signal.  And of course, when Mrs' Wilberforce goes to the police to confess, she has to admit that all of the gang have disappeared (like the flying saucer she'd reported a few days ago).  So she gets to keep the lolly.  And buy a new brolly.

Squeezing in a lake walk before the big defrost

Last year it didn't get cold enough to trust the lake ice, but all previous years it's been one of my favorite things to walk across the lake ice.  You can get to "hidden areas" otherwise inaccessible, and the very fact you're out on the ice means your walk is taking a route you won't take at other times of the year, so it's a nice change of pace.  Frederick used to be a lot more keen, but he's not enjoying walks much at the moment and he also showed marked reluctance to step out on to the ice the couple of times we've tried it, so yesterday I woke up early and thought, sod it, I'll go solo.  And I did, and I don't regret it.  This was at Holly Rec.

The fact that somebody had been driving some kind of vehicle out on the ice made me feel a lot more secure.

Something feathery met its end here...

In one of those inaccessible areas, out of breath from hiking up a steep hill.

Today it's supposed to get up into the 40s and stay that way all week (in the day, at least) with strong chances of rain, so I'm glad I got this in when I did.