The Man Who Watched Trains Go By | Harold French | 1952

Claude Rains, Märta Torén

Dirk Bogarde-Hobor Blackman "Cuarteto" (Quartet) 1948, de Ken Annakin, Arthur Crabtree, Harold French, Ralph Smart.

A handful of interesting films used the formula's special possibilities... In the (dimly filmed) Maugham films a little of the author's sharp-eyed disillusionment lingers. Trio (1950) peeks into the social aspirations and placings of a shabby genteel verger; notes, ambivalently, the outwitting of a flashy Oriental businessman by the equally devious English; and sketches the apathetic, interfering or autodestructive denizens of a sanatorium, living out their lives in petty loathings and hating the consumptive couple who choose a short sweet life together rather than a lingering and lonely postponement of death. Not until the angry young men is that quiet spitefulness, muffled, seething, restrained, but polluting every relationship, again marked as a characteristic British tone.

Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England

Harold Chapman, Self-Portrait in room of the Beat Hotel, Paris, late 1950s

People are always like: WOAH CHARLIE, I can't believe you were born in 2007, I was having teenage crushes and learning trigonometry in class back then like HOW TF DO YOU THINK I FEEL ABOUT KIDS BORN IN 2016, I WAS HUFFING BLO-PENS AND WATCHING SHITTY GULLI CARTOONS BACK THEN

SUBLIME CINEMA #620 - BREATHLESS

Godard just passed away. I was never the biggest fan, but I was absolutely an admirer of his sense of anarchy, his film criticism, his place in history and the new wave that he helped usher in. He was a living legend. He existed entirely on his own terms; the work was without compromise, and he was so stubborn about his aesthetic that his movies at some point became unwatchable. 

Still, he made some gems. Vivre Sa Vie, Breathless, Weekend, Le Petit Soldat, Contempt.. I even have a soft spot for Goodbye to Language in 3D. But it was Breathless in particular which helped to change film language - this is easily one of the most influential and radical films ever made.

RIP, adieu 

Lord Byron on the death of Napoleon

Elba and Waterloo called forth poems from Byron; the death at St. Helena could not. The news reached Byron at Ravenna, and seemed to him another token of the ebb of his energies. He wrote to his friend, the poet Thomas Moore, suggesting Napoleon as a theme that he himself could no longer approach: “I have no spirits nor estro to do so. His overthrow, from the beginning, was a blow on the head to me. Since that period, we have been the slaves of fools.”

Source: Harold Bloom, Napoleon and Prometheus: The Romantic Myth of Organic Energy

[The quotation is from Leslie Marchand’s Byron: A Biography, p. 917]

Happy Birthday Bill Murray!

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL AND IM SUPPORTING A CAUSE!! (Episode 13 Sucks)

(WIP) ummm lets just say that theoretically

I mucked around with some genders

because it would be interesting if these two were inspired by different things while creating their version of Cap

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By | Harold French | 1952

Claude Rains, Ferdy Mayne

Claire Bloom-Michael Dennison "The blind goddess" 1948, de Harold French.

The Man Who Loved Redheads is a Viscount whose foible for redheads (all played by Moira Shearer) is his sweet torment from puberty to senility. All the women prove shallow or bitchy and the moral is that man should stay in the club with the other bachelors, drinking. It's a bit sad but less painful and you'll end there anyway. Wolfenstein and Leites contrast the American attitude of their period ('the missed opportunity is comic') with the French ('the missed opportunity is tragic'). In middle-class English films, the missed opportunity is melancholy but inevitable. In this colour-conscious age, it would be interesting to transpose the theme into The Man Who Loved Negresses, and give the moral a different flick.

Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England

Stealing Fries?

HIS NAME'S HAROLD THUMBERNILSON HE INVITED ME OVER TO HIS PLACE FROM THE HOSPITAL WHERE I WAS GETTING MY BROKEN HIP REALIGNED HE LIVES IN HOUSTON TEXAS AND HATES THE FRENCH WITH HIS WIFE AND THREE KIDS THANK YOU HERALD

Young Minerva McGonagall