Some quadrupeds from Prosper Alpini's Prosperi Alpini Marosticensis, philosophi, medici, in celeberrimo Lyceo Patavino pharmaciae professoris ordinarii, hortique medici praefecti, Historiæ Ægypti naturalis (1735).

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On my WordPress site I’ve posted the first installment of a new graphic novella called After the Fire. I’ll be serializing it there as time goes on. The text is complete and all the principal drawings have been finished, so it’s a matter of polishing artwork and assembling the final pages.

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This first page and five more are online at https://notalisonblog.com/after-the-fire-chapters-1-2/. I hope to do weekly updates for as long as I can.

This is by:

(a) Someone who’d never seen an ostrich and relied on a verbal description

or

(b) someone who had seen an ostrich but believed using reference was “cheating.”

An "alleged Ostrich" from Berthold Laufer's Chinese clay figures (1914).

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Charade (1963)

You’ll hear it called “the greatest Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made,” which sounds about right except it isn’t really fair to the actual director, Stanley Donen.

I love the theme music by Henry Mancini and find myself clicking it out with my tongue probably once a week or more (TOK-tok-tok t’tok-tok-t’tok-tok).

Audrey Hepburn is a delight as always. Cary Grant is wonderful as usual (even if he needs to be twenty/thirty years younger for this role).

Mystery, suspense, humor, one-liners, danger, lies, double-crosses, a missing fortune, Hepburn playing a character stretched and strained until she doesn’t know which end is up, and naturally that infectious theme: it gets almost everything right.

In some bonus feature somewhere I heard Audrey Hepburn complain that one of the funniest lines in the movie—one of hers—is stepped on by the instrumentation at the very, very, very end, and I have to agree with her. If only they’d waited two more seconds and let her words come through cleanly!

Roman Holiday (1953)

Audrey Hepburn, ah. A timeless tale—meaning you’ve seen the premise elsewhere—but timelessly charming and moving.

She thinks she’s fooling them, playing normal young woman, but she isn’t, although she is winning them over.

Some things can’t be, and she has to sacrifice and they choose to sacrifice, and without saying all the words they all understand.

Audrey was perfect for the role—European but of undefinable nationality; looking young enough to try something stupid but old enough she’s been weighted with responsibility; luminously beautiful as a princess “should” be, yet not so glamorous or stately she couldn’t walk through Rome unidentified; innocent and sophisticated at the same time, believable in welcoming dignitaries and in eating gelato on the street.

And I can’t forget to note the glories of having this filmed on location: real Rome, tall and ancient all around the actors, nearly tangible as you watch.

Singin in the Rain (1952)

This film is so, so, so, much fun. Singing! Dancing! Laughing! Hijinks! Satire of the movie business! Romance! Charm! Charisma! Toeses! Everything about it is just about perfect, except—forgive me, Gene Kelly fans—the long, long, long dance sequence of Kelly’s character-within-a-character-outside-a-character looking for a job in New York. Yes, yes, I know it’s a Gene Kelly movie so people wanted to see him dance, but this is still a movie and it has a plot and a story which skids to a complete and jarring halt when this sequence intrudes with a premise that makes no sense. (This saves The Duelling Cavalier how exactly? Really?) I love this movie dearly, yet when I watch it I fast-forward through the whole nine(?) minutes of the hoofer doing “Gotta Dance” at cardboard talent agencies.

But oh the rest of it makes me happy.

All About Eve comes from a time when a columnist had the power to create or end careers.

Addison DeWitt is a truly awful person. He appears calm, cool, and sophisticated throughout—until someone looks down on him, and his violent reaction shows how insecure and fragile he really is. He’s a bully who exercises power over people to prove to himself he’s important. Of course he writes about ~~The Stage~~ and not the Screen, but I’ve always associated the character with gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who could ruin a Hollywood career with a few paragraphs, in addition to Walter Winchell. (The movie was released in 1950, so McCarthyism was barely getting underway and wasn’t the issue here.)

All About Eve gives us Bette Davis willing to play an actress unwilling to admit she can no longer play young women.

The plot of All About Eve is driven by the fact that Margo is too old to play twenty-year-olds, and yet the story is largely about Margo growing up and becoming an adult. She has to find her maturity in order to relate to herself, her career, and her would-be husband.

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

At a glance, this movie might be seen as “well-to-do white families having wholesome fun,” but the parts about the younger daughters are based on a real person’s autobiography and add a certain layer of complexity around children’s lives. Traffic-accident injuries, morbid games with dolls, kids running loose on the streets Halloween night playing pranks—still nothing shocking, but showing more rough edges to childhood than Hollywood musicals would usually acknowledge.

The film’s origin in an autobiography is also why you seem to have two main characters—Tootie comes from the book and lives out those adventures, while Esther was created to pull in audiences and let Judy Garland do what she could do so well.

Curse of the Cat People (1944)

This film refuses to be distracted by the pull of the title monster. It is definitely a sequel to Cat People but has nothing to do with people turning into cats. Curse knows what it means to do and it does it, no matter what the studio executives undoubtedly wanted it to do. I’m glad the original had a touch of cat monster in it, and also glad the filmmakers didn’t allow anyone to force monsters into the sequel. (Yes, there is the question of a ghost, but it isn’t here to threaten or frighten, and there are no human-feline transformations.)

Cat People (1942)

Apparently the director, Jacques Tourneur, did not want this film to have a visible monster at all, but the higher-ups (studio or producers) insisted on having a cat onscreen in the office-room attack scene, and would’ve preferred a lot more of the same. In this case I don’t think the movie is harmed by that profit-conscious interference. For me Cat People has exactly the right balance: plenty of suspense, lots left to the imagination, a focus on the psychological effects of thinking you might be a killer whether you really are or not, and a higher standard of storytelling than repeatedly having people scream while a costume-creature attacks them; and it does all this without sitting on the fence of “Is she or isn’t she, make your own interpretation!” To me there is just the right amount of monster, taking a position but showing enormous restraint.

(That can’t be said of the 1982 remake, but let’s not talk about that one.)

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

“Shall we flip a coin?”

“Why didn’t you sell tickets?!?”

In addition to smart, sharp one-liners, three Hollywood greats colliding, a plot richer than you’d think a “screwball comedy” would have, a sassy younger sister eager to see trouble, and overall fun expertly dancing with overall drama, it always strikes me that in an era when drunkenness was often a source of cheap humor, or the mark of an irredeemable character, this film treats Dex’s alcoholism quite seriously. He himself delivers the occasional remark about his “glorious thirst,” but it’s unmistakably sarcasm from a place of his own hard experience. Other characters might be treated lightly when they indulge too much, but Dex’s drinking is a problem and he knows it and he explicitly turns down every bit of alcohol offered to him, because it’s essential to his future that he stays sober, no exceptions.

Also, demonstrated from multiple angles, the film tells us that two wrongs don’t make a right, and being partly right doesn’t make you wholly right.

In the Hitchcock film Rebecca, Maxim is kind of a jerk. The man of the estate is not going to have a lot of in-depth interaction with the housekeeper, and as a product of his class he will take it for granted that you simply give orders to servants and they carry them out. But he can’t be this oblivious to what’s happening or this unaware of his housekeeper’s personal character. Surely on some level he knows his new wife—the young woman he chose precisely because she was the opposite of the powerful, imposing Rebecca—is being bullied. At the very least he should be aware she’s unprepared for her new position. Is Maxim enjoying the situation, perhaps amused by his inept wife’s childish insecurity? Does he like seeing her flounder? It’s hard to think ill of anyone played by Laurence Olivier, but still.

Rebecca (1940)

As I hear it, Hitchcock didn’t want to follow the Daphne du Maurier novel faithfully, but the producers forced him to—except in one critical point which the morals office would not have tolerated (but Hitchcock probably would have preferred). I think the constraints on Hitchcock in this case resulted in a much better film than he would’ve given us if left to his own devices.

The female lead of the story is hard to cast and play. If she’s too mousy we won’t believe she would catch Maxim’s notice or dare to go around with him at the resort, but if she’s too lively we won’t believe she could be so thoroughly intimidated by Mrs. Danvers.

Metropolis (1927)

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was originally quite long. It got trimmed considerably for wider distribution, and the cut scenes were long believed to be lost, but much of the discarded material has been rediscovered in some degree of watchability. The film is a milestone not only in special effects but also in the history of film preservation, one of the early occasions when people realized there was a need to preserve.

Since about 2012 we’ve had a most-scenes-restored-sorta version. The material (re-)added in this version makes the story much more coherent, notably providing a reason for the scientist to make his robot look like that particular woman. I’d have to watch it again to recall whether any specific restored bits slow things down too much, but my recollection is that the plot is greatly improved.

The movie in any of the available cuts has an obvious socialist message of “it’s bad for callous rich people to exploit the working class,” but the solution given is not “revolt and take over” (we see how a careless revolution can endanger workers’ own families), the answer is “you need understanding and feeling between the classes.” Still it’s mainly the upper class that needs to do the work of looking and listening and adapting.

The film is German, but the scenes of rich people partying while the world is more or less ending remind me of what I know of the U.S. during the Roaring Twenties and the Stock Market Crash. (Note the date: the Great Crash had not yet occurred when this film was released.)

By today’s standards Metropolis can seem simplistic or naive—or, let’s say, unsubtle—but it was a thundering groundbreaker of science fiction and cultural commentary in the movies. There’s little you can compare it to that came before it.

The Gold Rush (1925/1942)

A decent DVD/blu-ray of The Gold Rush will include both the original silent version and the later rerelease with voiceover. Both are legitimate versions of the film; Charlie Chaplin not only supplied the voice narrating the rerelease, he also carefully decided on and placed all the music used (maybe wrote some of the score himself? I can’t fully recall what those bonus features said).

But for me the original is the one to turn to. I for one am much more entertained by a silent movie left silent than a silent movie with narration laid on top of it where it wasn’t meant to have any.

The voiceover version is still a pleasure, though, because the essence of the original is still there. Chaplin updated the silent film without ruining it, because he knew the film and what made it wonderful, and in any case the 1940s release kept the movie (and Chaplin’s renown) in the public imagination, and without it the original might not have been saved at all.

The Studio Ghibli film Only Yesterday includes no spaceships, explosions, yokai, sword fights, or named attacks, and a common reaction is that there’s not a lot here that couldn’t be done in live action (maybe a couple of minor special-effects shots, or just do those parts with more realism).

And yet without anything dynamic or flashy, the animation helps us navigate the constant shifting back and forth of the timelines—this shot is back then; this shot is now. What’s more, the animation makes it seem okay that those are children from back then scurrying around in the event happening now, in a way I don’t think live action could manage very well. And the brief flashes of a pose (like Taeko strutting with a childish purse) or a sudden visual metaphor (like the baseball hitting the glove) are definitely the language of anime.

The film deserves a wider audience. It has tenderness between a person and her younger self. It has someone talking about memories and hearing that maybe she misunderstood a person seventeen years ago. It shows adults bonding over a TV show they loved as kids. It underscores the distinction between loving a place and knowing it, between working at something on vacation and making it part of your life: are you play-acting or treating this the way the local people treat it?

From lovingly depicted saffron fields to a wild shriek over a younger sister’s math score to swimming briefly in air to a gentle, slowly developing relationship, Only Yesterday has a lot to offer anyone not in a hurry and willing to appreciate the less explosive events that shape us.