Greetings, patient readers. The saga of the Siren's Internet access would not make a good movie, unless you consider it compelling cinema to watch a woman screaming at a voice-recognition system because it doesn't recognize her voice. Today the Siren called and explained to a puzzled but pleasant Time Warner representative that she was very, very sorry she had said all those mean things about Time Warner because, bad as Time Warner is, Verizon is much worse. Anyway. Only intermittent access for the next week. The Siren will be strolling through occasionally, she hopes. At least the new abode is nice.
Meanwhile, the Siren doesn't want to leave her blog dark over the Thanksgiving weekend. So she is offering a post that is more on-the-fly than usual. The film books are still packed away, due to the sad fact that when you have a family to feed, finding the frying pan is of somewhat more practical urgency than locating your lost copy of
Memoirs of a Professional Cad. (I miss that one in particular.) Nor do I have any idea where
A Proper Job is located--we had excellent, careful movers but labeling wasn't their strong suit. My favorite so far was the box inscribed "Electronics" that contained most of my vintage handbag collection. Poor Brian Aherne may be lurking right next to the frying pan, for all I know.
And that is a pity, because I would have liked to re-read what he had to say about
The Great Garrick from 1937, one of the Warner Brothers Archive DVDs I bought a while back. David Ehrenstein is a great fan of this James Whale film, and the Siren shares his high opinion. The Siren does recall that Aherne described how the part was created for him by Ernest Vajda, who pitched the idea to Aherne in the actor's living room one night. Vajda then pitched it to Mervyn Le Roy, with even more embellishments (and, one presumes, cocktails). Aherne claims that by the time the screenwriter got around to writing, as opposed to narrating, the story was changed and wasn't as good. It was also
a box-office dud.
Well, perhaps Aherne's recollection was enhanced by the drinks he knocked back with Vajda, because the film is delicious, a great farcical fantasia about actors and role-playing in which, as
Jonathan Rosenbaum puts it, "the art and pleasure of acting" is "demonstrated...in countless varieties of ham." (Elsewhere he compares it, with good reason, to
The Golden Coach.) It is by far the best Aherne performance the Siren has seen. He gives you Garrick's magnetism alongside his occasional bouts of stage fright, but he also shows that neither mode is entirely free from performance. With the rest of the delightful supporting players, including Olivia de Havilland, Edward Everett Horton and Melville Cooper, Aherne makes you think artificiality is a better form of reality, if it comes with such gusto and commitment to the part.
Plus, the movie is gorgeous to look upon, with that otherworldly shimmer that Whale always gave his productions. The Siren was particularly enamored with the way Whale staged people within the frame. He had a massive cast to deal with, and they're all up to something whether they are center stage or off to one side, yet you always have a sense of where everyone is. And Whale had a great way with period interiors, shooting them like living spaces, not sets. Which begs the question, what does it mean to have fully inhabited 18th-century sets in a film about theatricality?
The Siren's WB Archive double-feature was
It's Love I'm After, also from 1937, which paired so well with
The Great Garrick that she would love to recreate the bill some time.
It's Love I'm After isn't as beautiful or layered as
The Great Garrick, but the Siren enjoyed it mightily all the same. It contains one of the few really good comic performances of Bette Davis. Now before you fire up the torches, do understand that Siren yields to no man or woman in her love for Bette. But, for all that Davis could deliver a choice witticism with matchless style in her dramas, in full-out farce she often smothered the laughs. (Exhibit A:
The Bride Came C.O.D.) Here she has a funny script and an able co-star in Leslie Howard, and most of her scenes are hilarious.
Ah, poor Leslie Howard. Tied forever to Ashley Wilkes, a part he hated right down to his costumes. ("I look like a fairy doorman at the Beverly Wilshire," he groused, "a fine thing at my age.") The Siren has seen
Gone with the Wind at least a dozen times, and she says with utter confidence that it isn't the least bit typical of his talents. Unlike Davis, his strength was comedy. Howard was the definitive Henry Higgins. (Do you hear that, Rex Harrison, you old scene-stealing so-and-so, from your perch in the afterlife?) Howard excelled in the foppish sections of
The Scarlet Pimpernel, was witty and bright in
The Animal Kingdom. Here, as ham actor Basil Underwood, Howard moves through many performance modes, trying on various roles. Like Aherne, he leaves us to question which scenes are Basil "on," and which are off. His line deliveries are a treasure. The Siren's favorite is, of course, "Who's Clark Gable?" which may be the most truthful moment Basil has in the picture. Lack of clairvoyance is a blessing, isn't it?
Yet another common feature of the films is Olivia de Havilland. Swaddled in furs and panniers in
The Great Garrick, here Olivia comes down a staircase in a silk pajama thing that is as revealing as 1937 ever got. Her character, as in the Whale film, is the least clued-in of the bunch, playing for real while everyone else tries on roles. It's the most ingenuous of ingenue roles, but de Havilland manages to be funny and engaging.
And so, with an appreciative nod for the lady on her banner, the Siren wraps this up and wishes her patient readers the very happiest of Thanksgivings. She is very thankful that they continue to stop by, come light posting or even lighter posting, come Verizon or Time Warner. And that, my friends, is no line.
