First I have to say : Elizabeth, your soup looks delicious. Next time if you could please include a recipe. :)
I have to learn more about curry, because I love spice and I love hot food. I can imagine how a sweet potato and curry soup would warm and fill the soul on a cold winter night. I am not an expert on soups, but I am pretty good with French Onion, and I've gotta make a batch pretty soon. The dreaded L.A.Cold hasn't set in yet, but by January we'll be in for it, so I'll have to get the soup pot out, something I haven't done for a couple of years. I've only ever made French Onion and Split Pea, but I'd like to learn some new soups. You are already a good cook, as evidenced by many prior posts, and I hope you don't mind if I continue to comment - here at the blog - about anything "not personal" (as mentioned recently). I mean, I've been your friend for all this time, right? So I'll keep my comments here, but I've gotta chime in on things like food, or anything artistic. I hope all is going well for you. Stay safe and stay well and keep posting! :):)
Well anyhow, tonight's movie was "Red-Haired Alibi"(1932), a pre-code crime drama about a young woman (Merna Kennedy) who gets involved with a big city gangster, not knowing who he is until it's too late. "Lynn Monith" works in a department store; her bright red hair attracts the male eye, and soon after "Mr. Travers" (Theodore von Eltz) shows up at her perfume counter, they are out on a date. She's nice but naive, he's an underworld sharpie, though he presents himself as a businessman (don't they always?). Lynn is about to be unemployed - her store is to be razed for an office building - and she makes this known to Mr. Travers. It's the reason she went out with him in the first place : she needs a new job. He promises to get her her one if she'll move to New York. She agrees, but has no idea he's setting her up as his alibi for a murder.
The plot isn't bad, it's an interesting setup, with realistic dialogue, almost as if you were watching two people having a conversation, with one of them - the young lady - getting the wool pulled over her eyes. And the early actress Merna Kennedy is quite good. She looks similar to Norma Shearer and has a very natural acting style. I've noticed this as one of two tendencies in the first years of sound pictures. One is for actors to continue to use the techniques they learned in their Silent Film days, which feature exaggerated gestures and expressions. But the other is a very natural presence in front of the camera, as if the actor is comfortable simply being himself. I must step in to say that I've noticed this advanced technique more often in early sound actresses rather than in their male counterparts, but it's as if some actors (or actresses) were already hip to what the changes in talking pictures entailed. They knew, or were told by directors, to "tone things down" and not to "play to the back row" as they may have done on the stage or in Silents.
All of this is to say that Merna Kennedy was a very good actress. This is the only film I've seen her in (and she died young, at 36), but she's the main reason to watch the movie. Though the story is good, the technical aspects of the production are wooden. There is no music, the camera is static and the direction dull, without any dynamic tension whatsoever.
Finally it is worth noting that "Red-Haired Alibi" is Shirley Temple's very first feature film. She is either three or four here, depending on when the movie was shot, and she is not yet the Charming Moppet she'd soon become, in fact she's so unaware of being in a movie that she speaks all of her lines by rote, and doesn't know where the camera is. But hey, she's only three, and in one more year she went on to rule Hollywood. She must've had a lot of training during that time, and was obviously a very smart kid.
Still, the only reason to watch the film is for Merna Kennedy's performance, or if you are a fan of pre-code Hollywood (though even in that regard, it's not very "pre-code racy"). /////
Now, this next bit is gonna come out of left field. It's not about a movie or anything relevant, and I'm sorry. I apologize in advance, but I have to go on a tirade about Siege Engines. Have you ever heard of them? I hadn't until two days ago, and now I'm hooked on 'em. It happened almost instantaneously. I'm reading a book called "The History of Warfare" by John Keegan, and he mentions them in detail, and I know it's ridiculous but I'm cracking up because the name gets me. I've always had a "thing" about funny words or names, as I'm sure you've noticed, and when I first read Keegan's chapter about something called a Siege Engine, it got my hackles up simply because of two things : the sound of the words together, and the fact that the author was describing a weapon from Medieval times.
I remember thinking, "what the hell is a Siege Engine"? Then I thought, "there were no engines in the Dark Ages! I'd better Google this".
I discovered that the Siege Engine was used as far back as 800 BC. Keegan writes about the weapon as if the reader is already familiar with it; I wasn't, so I had to Google it, and when I saw the images I just started laughing. I'm sure it wasn't funny to those it was used against, but to me, it quickly became a riot, and now I've got Siege Engines on the brain. The whole thing sounds very Monty Python, at least to me, and when you see what one looks like, you'll agree. It resembles an Industrial Strength Battering Ram, where the log itself is housed in a kind of A-Frame cabin, like a chalet. The whole thing is on wheels (wooden, of course), and it's huge. It looks like a dozen men would be needed to operate it.
Anyway, I thought to myself : "Nowdays, they just kick your door in". But back then, some cities built walls several feet thick (the Walls of Jericho were 10 feet thick), so you couldn't just have a linebacker-sized police lietenant kick the door down; you needed a Siege Engine. Now, it is true that in Los Angeles, in the late 80s and early 90s, our Police Chief Darryl Gates had his own version of a Siege Engine. It was more or less a small tank, perhaps with a battering ram attached (don't recall for sure), and in fact I think it was called the LAPD's "Battering Ram". Chief Gates would use it against Crack Houses that had been fortified, and some of them were impenetrable by any other means. Drug dealers would install metal doors and wrought iron window grates on their dens of iniquity. All glass was blacked out, and I remember at one house the only opening was a slot in the front door, which was as fortified as a bank vault, and you'd put your money through the slot and a baggie would come out in response, with your purchase.
No, I didn't go there myself. Good grief, people. I saw it on the news. (geez...) :)
But anyway, when the cops discovered one of these houses, Chief Gates would call out the Battering Ram, which now that I think of it, qualifies as a Siege Engine of sorts. And they always showed it on the news, knocking down a crack house, as a warning to other dealers. But my point was that, in movies you basically just see cops kicking in someone's door, but 2500 years ago the walls were ten feet thick so you needed a Siege Engine to get the job done.
To sum up, the reason it's hilarious is, first, the name itself : "Siege Engine" just sounds funny. Secondly, when you combine the term with what the thing actually looks like, it's straight out of Monty Python. Or, it could also be a Heavy Metal thing. You could call your band Siege Engine. Really I think that Jerry Seinfeld needs to do a riff on the subject. He could take it all the way, get to the bottom of it. "What's the deal with Siege Engines anyway"? For me, sorry but it's just one of those things I find hilarious, so I had to mention it. And yeah I know I'm nutty. :):)
Tons of love. See you in the freakin' morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox :):)
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