Ealing Rarities Vol 14
17 Jun 2018 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisbluespiritI have been watching various things that I probably should mention but I seem to be getting worse at posting even halfway serious thoughts on things (and I have a post on the BBC 1980 Borgias from January still unposted), but I'm going to start with the Ealing Rarities I got for my birthday, mainly because I was moved to gif things.
(The Ealing Studios Rarities are a series of DVDs released by Network DVD containing lesser known films from Ealing & Associated Talking Pictures from the 1930s-1950s. I try to get mainly 1930s ones because me and the 1950s don't always get on so well. (I blame Meet Mr Lucifer.))
Vol 14 contained Lonely Road (1936) with Victoria Hopper and Clive Brook, The Water Gipsies (1932), The Sign of Four (1932), and Feather Your Nest (1937) with George Formby.
I don't know quite what to say about Lonely Road. It's sort of a mild thriller-y thing with Clive Brook (who is usually pretty good fun) and Victoria Hopper (she of the hatchet-job obit in The Stage*) and was quite interesting and thoughtful - it has a dodgy romance, but it navigates it reasonably well for the most part (mostly due to their initial intentions not exactly being strictly romantic) - and then at the end, it turned out the underlying plot was pure crack, and it all finished off with a line that was something like, "Now you've found yourself a wife who will do what she's told!"
Which instantly earned it -1000 points, unfairly, really, since it was just some random sexist doctor's idea of a joke. THANKS, 1930s. Also I was a bit put out, because if your plot is pure crack and you have Clive Brook in your film, we could all have had way more fun with everything. (I have seen The Ware Case! I know this for a fact!)
Nevertheless, it's definitely the one out of the set that I'm most likely to watch again. I am worryingly curious about the book by Neville Shute, because I want to know who to blame and praise for which bits. Particularly whether or not he came up with the 100% crack plot lurking behind the vaguely serious thriller. Or that stinker of a last line!
I don't know what to say about The Water Gipsies (1932), either. (This is probably why I don't review stuff very much.) It was about Jane (Ann Todd), who lives on a standing barge with her gambling father and her sister. She's going out with unromantic boatman Fred (Ian Hunter), but has a crush on the artist she chars for, Gordon Bryan (Peter Bannen). So it charts her crush and emotional journey, which takes in breaking up with Fred, getting engaged to a terrible lemonade-drinking socialist who she winds up pushing into the river after he loses it when she poses nude for Mr Bryan. ("I should be sorry," she says, "but I'm not. He frightened me!" He drowns, and presumably the six-months gap covers her otherwise unmentioned trial for manslaughter.) Anyway, she winds up back with Fred on the boat, since Fred is the only one who's not awful. Also he has a boat, and it's now completely free of any embarrassing parents, which it wasn't before. The thing about this, really, is the direction and Ann Todd's expressiveness over said crush - some of the scenes are visually v lovely, and this is what makes it. I don't think I'd be in any hurry to rewatch it, but those parts will stick in my memory. SO I GIFFED THEM FOR YOU.
(Leaving Fred to pursue her fantasy of Mr Bryan)
(She faints while posing in just a shawl. Mr Bryan presumably thinks it's the moment for mouth to mouth resusitation.)
Her sister (Sari Maritsa) has a one night stand with her fancy man, in a posh hotel with a wonderful bathroom and Jane thinks, well, why couldn't she at least have that much with Mr Bryan?
It doesn't go well:
But Fred still wants her:
Then I watched The Sign of Four (also 1932), which was pretty dire, really. This isn't so much a reflection on Arthur Wontner as Sherlock (although I have fairly recently watched Douglas Wilmer and Basil Rathbone and he is not going to be displacing either of those any time soon), but it spent so much tedious time on the villains and had large helpings of turn of the century racism and sexism not helped out by 1930s editions of the same.
The most annoying thing was, every time Sherlock, Watson (Ian Hunter) and Mary Morstan (Isla Bevan) had a scene together in which she wasn't fainting off, there was something about them that worked together more than apart and I would have been very happy to watch a whole film about their adventures. A whole series, maybe. Except they couldn't even manage the whole film part. (I would say it's put me off the rest of the series, but then again,aralias was pointing out the other day that actually The Sign of Four is just pretty awful anyway, so probably I should reserve judgement for a different installment.)
Sherlock was shorter than Watson, though, which I think might possibly be illegal.
Have some OT3 gifs to save you ever having to watch the rest of it:
I also liked the bit where Sherlock and Inspector Jones randomly got accidentally flirty, but the best bit was undoubtedly this:
I don't know what Sherlock and Watson had been up to before we met them, but Watson had failed to put his moustache back on straight afterwards.
(This film also had an old Brit telly level of fluffing and similar things. You'd think it'd have made me feel right at home, but it only made me feel marginally meaner for being so bored with the whole thing.)
After that, I felt it really wasn't the moment to face George Formby and I returned to the 21st Century for a while.
(Incidentally, I realised in the making of this post that Ian Hunter played both Watson and Fred the boatman and I watched them back to back and had no idea. In my defense, he had a cap on in one and a dodgy moustache in the other.)
* I mean, maybe the writer was correct - it's not as if I would know - but they derided her for being deluded about her own talent and then I realised that their actual evidence amounted to: "she still kept a scrapbook of cuttings in her 80s and had the temerity to answer fan letters" and I'm forced to conclude it was written by a Basil Dean stan or something (they were claiming she married him solely to further her career which wasn't worth furthering), but it was then copied by every single newspaper in the land, since no one knew enough about her to contradict anything. Maybe it was deserved, but I'd like to see something from a different source, thanks.
(The Ealing Studios Rarities are a series of DVDs released by Network DVD containing lesser known films from Ealing & Associated Talking Pictures from the 1930s-1950s. I try to get mainly 1930s ones because me and the 1950s don't always get on so well. (I blame Meet Mr Lucifer.))
Vol 14 contained Lonely Road (1936) with Victoria Hopper and Clive Brook, The Water Gipsies (1932), The Sign of Four (1932), and Feather Your Nest (1937) with George Formby.
I don't know quite what to say about Lonely Road. It's sort of a mild thriller-y thing with Clive Brook (who is usually pretty good fun) and Victoria Hopper (she of the hatchet-job obit in The Stage*) and was quite interesting and thoughtful - it has a dodgy romance, but it navigates it reasonably well for the most part (mostly due to their initial intentions not exactly being strictly romantic) - and then at the end, it turned out the underlying plot was pure crack, and it all finished off with a line that was something like, "Now you've found yourself a wife who will do what she's told!"
Which instantly earned it -1000 points, unfairly, really, since it was just some random sexist doctor's idea of a joke. THANKS, 1930s. Also I was a bit put out, because if your plot is pure crack and you have Clive Brook in your film, we could all have had way more fun with everything. (I have seen The Ware Case! I know this for a fact!)
Nevertheless, it's definitely the one out of the set that I'm most likely to watch again. I am worryingly curious about the book by Neville Shute, because I want to know who to blame and praise for which bits. Particularly whether or not he came up with the 100% crack plot lurking behind the vaguely serious thriller. Or that stinker of a last line!
I don't know what to say about The Water Gipsies (1932), either. (This is probably why I don't review stuff very much.) It was about Jane (Ann Todd), who lives on a standing barge with her gambling father and her sister. She's going out with unromantic boatman Fred (Ian Hunter), but has a crush on the artist she chars for, Gordon Bryan (Peter Bannen). So it charts her crush and emotional journey, which takes in breaking up with Fred, getting engaged to a terrible lemonade-drinking socialist who she winds up pushing into the river after he loses it when she poses nude for Mr Bryan. ("I should be sorry," she says, "but I'm not. He frightened me!" He drowns, and presumably the six-months gap covers her otherwise unmentioned trial for manslaughter.) Anyway, she winds up back with Fred on the boat, since Fred is the only one who's not awful. Also he has a boat, and it's now completely free of any embarrassing parents, which it wasn't before. The thing about this, really, is the direction and Ann Todd's expressiveness over said crush - some of the scenes are visually v lovely, and this is what makes it. I don't think I'd be in any hurry to rewatch it, but those parts will stick in my memory. SO I GIFFED THEM FOR YOU.
(Leaving Fred to pursue her fantasy of Mr Bryan)
(She faints while posing in just a shawl. Mr Bryan presumably thinks it's the moment for mouth to mouth resusitation.)
Her sister (Sari Maritsa) has a one night stand with her fancy man, in a posh hotel with a wonderful bathroom and Jane thinks, well, why couldn't she at least have that much with Mr Bryan?
It doesn't go well:
But Fred still wants her:
Then I watched The Sign of Four (also 1932), which was pretty dire, really. This isn't so much a reflection on Arthur Wontner as Sherlock (although I have fairly recently watched Douglas Wilmer and Basil Rathbone and he is not going to be displacing either of those any time soon), but it spent so much tedious time on the villains and had large helpings of turn of the century racism and sexism not helped out by 1930s editions of the same.
The most annoying thing was, every time Sherlock, Watson (Ian Hunter) and Mary Morstan (Isla Bevan) had a scene together in which she wasn't fainting off, there was something about them that worked together more than apart and I would have been very happy to watch a whole film about their adventures. A whole series, maybe. Except they couldn't even manage the whole film part. (I would say it's put me off the rest of the series, but then again,
aralias was pointing out the other day that actually The Sign of Four is just pretty awful anyway, so probably I should reserve judgement for a different installment.)Sherlock was shorter than Watson, though, which I think might possibly be illegal.
Have some OT3 gifs to save you ever having to watch the rest of it:
I also liked the bit where Sherlock and Inspector Jones randomly got accidentally flirty, but the best bit was undoubtedly this:
I don't know what Sherlock and Watson had been up to before we met them, but Watson had failed to put his moustache back on straight afterwards.
(This film also had an old Brit telly level of fluffing and similar things. You'd think it'd have made me feel right at home, but it only made me feel marginally meaner for being so bored with the whole thing.)
After that, I felt it really wasn't the moment to face George Formby and I returned to the 21st Century for a while.
(Incidentally, I realised in the making of this post that Ian Hunter played both Watson and Fred the boatman and I watched them back to back and had no idea. In my defense, he had a cap on in one and a dodgy moustache in the other.)
* I mean, maybe the writer was correct - it's not as if I would know - but they derided her for being deluded about her own talent and then I realised that their actual evidence amounted to: "she still kept a scrapbook of cuttings in her 80s and had the temerity to answer fan letters" and I'm forced to conclude it was written by a Basil Dean stan or something (they were claiming she married him solely to further her career which wasn't worth furthering), but it was then copied by every single newspaper in the land, since no one knew enough about her to contradict anything. Maybe it was deserved, but I'd like to see something from a different source, thanks.
no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 08:34 am (UTC)HOORAY.
I am very fond of Ian Hunter, but he was not designed for facial hair and I'm glad even the costume department knew it.
Thanks for the gifs!
no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 09:12 am (UTC)Ha! Costume departments don't care; they slap endless moustaches and beards on everyone in reach without mercy. /bitterness
I think this particular Watson may be a member of the Lethbridge-Stewart family on the distaff side, which would explain everything. (The Brig's moustaches look like this quite often, and he's a very Watson type, really.)
:-)
no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 10:26 pm (UTC)Maybe it's the same mustache. A family heirloom.
no subject
Date: 18 Jun 2018 07:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 11:42 am (UTC)To which the logical response is that someone who gets fan letters must have had genuine appeal (particularly if she was still getting said fan letters in her 80s — I can’t tell if that’s what you’re saying), or no one would have bothered writing them. So it was a hatchet job on her AND on her fans, I guess.
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Date: 17 Jun 2018 11:57 am (UTC)My thoughts exactly! I was reading the Obit and then had to go back and read it again and scratch my head a lot. I'd like to find some other source of info, but everything on the net seems to come back to the same obit from The Stage. (I am guessing that the author of it was a Basil Dean expert and thus knew a lot about Victoria Hopper, but was clearly biased on the subject. What is completely impossible to tell from that, is whether any of it was justified. The quotes from her in it and that ridiculous comment about the scrapbook and the fan letters inclined me to think it couldn't be, not entirely!)
no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 11:49 am (UTC)Wait, if she’s into Mr. Bryant, why bring the lemonade-drinking socialist into things at all?
I have just formulated a cynical rule-of-thumb that in a RomCom, the boring fiancé exists to be dumped, and in a Drama, he’s there for the chastened heroine to settle for after all the people she’s really attracted to either die or turn out to be cads. I don’t know whether this means it’s actually preferable, if one happens to be a decent-but-boring type, to exist in a Drama.
no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 11:59 am (UTC)To be honest, I don't know where he came from, apart from maybe the author just wanted to push a rotten socialist in the river. She knew all along that Mr Bryan would never have her, because Class, but Fred was illiterate and had embarrassing parents who shared the boat with him and she wanted something a bit more than washing up in her life.
(ETA: I keep trying to call him Mr Bryant; I think I've caught the last error now...)
I don’t know whether this means it’s actually preferable, if one happens to be a decent-but-boring type, to exist in a Drama.
Well, Fred comes out of it okay in this one, and I don't think any of the other men do (Mr Bryan winds up vaguely ashamed of himself and marrying a bitchy rich woman), but it's not really a scientific survey over just one film. Poor decent-but-boring types, though!
no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 11:57 am (UTC)Of that series, I’ve seen The Sleeping Cardinal and an adaptation of The Valley of Fear. Neither is a classic, but The Sleeping Cardinal does do a reasonably good job of conveying that Moriarty’s reach is sufficiently extensive and organized that he’s capable of staging five simultaneous distractions in a radius around the particular city block he needs to have police-free for ten minutes. I might have more good things to report about it if I saw a decent print of the movie that didn’t make me struggle to hear the dialogue.
no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 12:04 pm (UTC)The perils of watching ancient things! If only we could find a non-blurry print/something that wasn't recorded off the telly in 1972/only survives in a film copy etc. etc.
:-(
I thought he was all right, and, as I said, the Mary-Watson-Sherlock interaction was v nice when it happened, but I was tired and it didn't make much effort to catch my interest. (It's nearly 20 minutes before Sherlock even appears!)
no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 12:37 pm (UTC)It’s the ones I like anyway that really benefit from being seen in a clear print. I’ve spent my life seeing progressively better and more complete reconstructions of Metropolis (1927)*, but the really revelatory one was about a dozen years back when I got to see that the actors’ makeup and facial expressions were way less stylized than I’d always thought from the blurred, grainy copies.
*A friend of mine at university found an English translation of the novelization, so we at least found out where Josephat disappeared to for the whole second and third acts, and various other subplots that were missing from the film as it existed at that time — but it’s nice to actually see them on screen.
no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 01:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 01:51 pm (UTC)The obit writer deserves to be shoved into the canal!
no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 04:02 pm (UTC)I suspect you made the right choice!
The obit writer may be perfectly correct, but they didn't really give me much to go on and I can't help being suspicious now.
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Date: 17 Jun 2018 07:33 pm (UTC)Argh, George Formby! I have such a powerful Formby allergy, but I keep being reminded by various reading materials about just what a great person he actually was (and his wife too). Their tour of South Africa, and utter contempt for apartheid, was glorious. So I keep trying to like him, but then he plays the banjo at me, and does rubbish films. :/
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Date: 17 Jun 2018 07:42 pm (UTC)I haven't even tried to watch him yet and I also feel this. Which does seem a bit unfair.
And thank you, glad you enjoyed the gifs! Maybe I was tired and unfair to the Sherlock film, but it definitely wasn't anywhere near as good as the BBC Douglas Wilmer - and I've seen one of your Basil Rathbone installments now and that was also a lot of fun. (They are now my two fave Holmeses, but obv. Mr Wilmer takes precedence.)
no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 08:07 pm (UTC)Wilmer seems to have impressed everybody though. I could never get into the Jeremy Brett series for some reason. (But then I think Robert Downey Jr is very good in the role, so probably I'm not to be trusted.)
no subject
Date: 17 Jun 2018 08:21 pm (UTC)My preferring Wilmer is no slight - if I'd got to them the other way around, I don't know what would have happened. The love was instant in both cases. Although, I have to say, Nigel Stock's Watson might have swung things to the BBC's favour anyway, because he may very well be the best Watson.
Wilmer seems to have impressed everybody though. I could never get into the Jeremy Brett series for some reason. (But then I think Robert Downey Jr is very good in the role, so probably I'm not to be trusted.)
I think maybe it's just his iconic profile, because nobody but me actually watches it and the US pretends that only the Peter Cushing episodes survive, even though they were inferior. My problem with Jeremy Brett seems to be that I must have seen something of the Granada series when I was too small to appreciate it and decided it was the most boring thing ever and whenever I see pics or whatever, I feel a wave of boredom come over me. But I probably should give them a proper chance sometime!
And you're hardly alone in liking the Downey films. With Holmes there are a lot of options, and nothing wrong in picking whichever ones you get something out of!
no subject
Date: 19 Jun 2018 12:25 pm (UTC)That is completely brilliant. I would have been ROFL.
Holmes being shorter than Watson is also very strange. Ae you sure he wasn't an imposter?
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Date: 19 Jun 2018 04:25 pm (UTC)He was definitely Sherlock, I'll give him that, but all the casting since has been the other way around, so it was quite weird!
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Date: 20 Jun 2018 04:43 am (UTC)If nothing else, they seemed the same height.
no subject
Date: 20 Jun 2018 07:28 am (UTC)