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: 20 Jun 2018 07:28 am (UTC)