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madupont
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« Reply #99 on: June 29, 2007, 05:01:15 AM » |
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" I suppose I shouldn't admit to recalling them, but at least I saw them on old late night tv in my night owl period, not when they first came out! " nytempsperdu
"Dirk Bogarde for every little thing you'd like to know. His film, "The Servant" is one of the creepiest films in my video library." donotremove
Oh,yeah,well I stayed up late only when my parents weren't home and I watched him when he first came out.
Sometime I also watched him in the afternoon when I stayed in purposefully to watch what he was up to now
and if you think The Servant was one of the creepiest, I'll give you Creepy!
It starts out like this. Quartet is the title of a 1948 film based on stories by W. Somerset Maugham. I am just starting high-school and sometimes if I get to stay home when I don't feel so well, I also get to watch tv although the Golden Age of television is not quite yet arrived. Otherwise there are the Late night theaters of television, similar to the Turner Classic Movies, especially on weekends.
One of the four stories in Quartet was,"The Alien Corn" and Bogarde gets the part. He is not quite thirty years old.
So Long at the Fair is a mystery-/suspense-thriller directed by Terence Fisher and Anthony Darnborough in 1950. It stars Dirk Bogarde and Jean Simmons. In its plot elements and style the film is reminiscent of many of the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
That is more an afternoon flick, after all, for this, Jean Simmons is wearing white socks and one of those "New Look" skirts although everyone knows that when the emphasis is not placed on her button-nose --she could be an exotic creature. She is 21. Two years earlier she has played Ophelia to Olivier's Hamlet, and sometimes people mention that she looks astonishingly like his wife Vivien Leigh.Have they met? Let's see, the year before that she has played Kanchi in --Black Narcissus; and two years prior to that, when she was sixteen, she had been cast in Caesar and Cleopatra with Claude Raines and Vivien Leigh, to play the harp. Flora Robson was Ftatateeta.
Oh, and what does Mr. Bogarde do, with this so experienced ingenue who is now the ripe old age of 21? Why, he plays "the detective". When he isn't that he is,"the barrister" or "the servant", oh, that's right, creepy. Well, let's see...
Try this out at an art house movie back then, or on a rainy afternoon now--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libel_%28film%29 or, maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_%28film%29 1961
By now I am a grown up. Just the same, I have begun to suspect that the British have a peculiar sex life which may be all very sophisticated but nonetheless "peculiar". If the first of these two films was risky ( I did not say,"risque"), then the second was the breakthrough that could not have happened if Bogarde had not insisted on doing the first risky film to make the second possible. Together, what they broke through was the Wolfendon Laws of the UK.
Now, we can go into the prelude of Creepy, by jumping ahead fifteen years to: Mr.Klein, a Harold Pinter story directed by Joseph Losey. He's the same age as Bogarde and I keep wondering if they met in Germany . Bogarde went in the service and came back a changed man; we will get to that change in a moment. Losey, who was born in La Crosse and might have someday directed at a place like the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre across the river in Minnesota, instead goes to Germany to study with Bertoldt Brecht. For that he is persecuted by Senator McCarthy, his fellow Wisconsinite, and no one in Lalalande will risk working with him. I wish, I could say that Bogarde and Losey met because of this film which bears the production hallmarks for which Bogarde's creepiest movies will be known. Instead we are introduced for the first time, to Jeanne Moreau.
Five years earlier, Dirk has already played Aschenbach for Visconti, in--Death in Venice, because Visconti had seen him work two years previously in --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Damned_%28film%29. To understand what follows, I hope that you will look more closely at what Visconti has in mind at
this time; it is all there in the link. This film also known in German as: Die Verdammten or die Gotterdamerung will lead suddenly to another break-through film for Bogarde that astounds people who are either revolted by it or understand it and accept it. It is by another Italian director, a woman, Lila Cavani.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Porter
Didn't I tell you that I'd give you creepy. People of all sexes are astonished at what takes place in this movie. We are no longer among the British. Dirk Bogarde was now free to immerse himself freely in the Germanic world that VISCONTI insisted on examining. And here's the Aschenbach connection. What is a characters name in THOMAS MANN, is such a familiar common name in Germany that Visconti can reference it to a Nazi party official. I have a few notes and papers for those who care to pursue, DEATH IN VENICE
"fall of 1997, an alternative vision of Berlin cast its metaphysical and historical black ashen gloominess in the Martin-Gropius-Bau as an annex to a landmark retrospective on Deutchlandbilder: Kunst aus einem geteilten Land (German art out of a divided land ). Tucked away in the second floor of the building, the annex exhibit, sponsored by what was then the Foundation of the still unopened Jewish Museum, confronted the visitors with a very different mood. The artists there were not among the anguished Täters but among the detached if not tranquil Opfers, to use the classical German expression for perpetrators and victims. One work of art stood out in particular, Joshua Neustein's black ashen Berlin, entitled 'Aschenbach '. In a a small white walled room, an elaborate two tiered golden chained traditional crystal chandelier hung disconcertedly low at waist level, revealing without however illuminating, an entirely black floor. The floor represented a turn of the 20th century relief map of central Berlin entirely made out of barely consolidated black ashes. The overall feeling was one of frozen eternal desolation: light on one side, darkness on the other without the least interaction.
The 'Aschenbach' reference had a double resonance. In literal terms the word means 'stream of ashes', an appropriate description of the central canal that ran through black ashen Berlin in the work of art. But Gustav Aschenbach is also the name of the protagonist of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a barely camouflaged allusion to Gustav Mahler, the Jewish composer who was forced to convert to Catholicism in order to become the conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. Mann's novel depicted the tension between Northern and Southern identities and passions, decadence and death in the plague infested lagoon where inhabitants and visitors alike refused to acknowledge the overwhelming presence of the fatal disease, a disease that could also include, from a Jewish point of view, assimilation and conversion, as a loss of identity. By referring to Aschenbach, Neustein thus transcribed Mann's own pessimistic reading of Western civilisation and the dying metaphor of Venice to a Berlin whose black ashen reality clearly evoked the Holocaust, but not only the Holocaust." -- Diane Pinto
http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=265
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