Visit: A Tale of Two Movies
Weather: Back into the 80 degree(F) zone -- hot for here.
Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Just click to help.
Garage Sale Booty: Rick O'Shay, Hipshot, and Me by Stan Lynde -- signed first editions, hardbound and paperback. My friend Bill Blackbeard helped Stan with newspaper versions of his first comic strips when a house fire destroyed the original art. Yeah, I can call Lynde by his first name too -- he's always been an accessible, easy-to-know person.
A package of Superman and Batman radio serials from the 30's and 40's on cassette tapes.
Media Watch: We finally saw ALL of Sashi Kapoor's Jab Jab Phool Khile after spending about 16 years of looking for it again -- it is a fabulous, although a touch too-traditional, Bollywood movie. (Made in 1965, but still popular forty years later!) It's locations have obviously changed -- Bombay has really built up into the skies over the decades, and sadly enough, Kashmir is no longer a mellow haven for tourists.
I'm recording Jamaica Inn on TCM tonight -- it's suposedly a cinematic textbook in over-acting on the part of the film's co-producer Charles Laughton, to the dismay of his director-for-hire Alfred Hitchcock. It also features the equally great over-acting master Robert Newton in the cast. I can't wait to see Newton and Laughton doing a scene together. These guys were GOOD, and some excess on their part might be a spectacle to enjoy. Newton's making Laurence Olivier ALMOST crack up on-camera in Henry V is well worth watching as well.
There is NO mention of Daphne DuMaurier in the credits, although she wrote a famous gothic novel by this name. (Hitchcock did at least two other movies based on her writings, though -- Rebecca, and The Birds.)
I passed by the real Jamaica Inn many times when I lived in Cornwall, and even visited it once. It is high on the edges of Bodmin Moor, north of the ancient market town of Bodmin. The moors are still wild places, with creatures, vegetation, and climates all their own, and even get snow in the winter, while palm trees flourish in the vales on the south coast. Jamaica Inn is at least ten miles from the nearest salt water, and would have served no purpose for smugglers, wreckers, or pirates. DuMaurier herself did a good turn or two for Footsbarn Theatre when they were based in Cornwall, but her aristocratic social position, and advanced age were barriers to any real involvement, or material help.
