It's now Tuesday October 5th, and I'm writing to you from Pearl's house, where I'll be staying for the next seven days. Her daughter went home to the Bay Area for some rest and recuperation, and to take care of some personal business, so I'll be here housesitting in the meantime, and taking things to Goodwill. Right now I'm in my usual blogging spot, at the kitchen table, where I've been writing all those movie reviews for the past several years. I'd write 'em late at night, after Pearl had gone to bed. Very often they weren't finished, or needed to be refined, so I'd finish them up during my afternoon break the next day at my apartment. Before the movie reviews, I just wrote about odds and ends, or I wrote to Elizabeth. I hope she still reads, I began this blog on Blogger specifically for her after first communicating though MySpace. Man, that was over 9 years ago now. Time sure flies, and as we know it does a ton of other stuff too; as it's flying by, it simultaneously runs slow. It runs backward as we reminisce, forward as we anticipate. It also stretches and retracts like elastic, as some memories from decades ago seem like they happened yesterday, whereas a less ancient incident, maybe removed in importance, can feel like it's from another lifetime.
I can feel Pearl's presence all around me as I write, and it's a wonderful thing, because the feeling I get (and that I've gotten before when my Mom died) is that there is no loss. The person has only transitioned to another form and is still with us. I don't mean that figuratively but literally. Love is the connection, hence the phrase "love conquers all". I could go on and continue to expound on the subject, but I shant.
I do have a couple of movies for you. Last night I finally saw "The Old Dark House"(1932), director James Whale's masterpiece of horror about five travelers who find themselves stuck overnight inside a creepy mansion during a storm in Wales. A freaky family inhabits the joint. Horace and Rebecca Femm are a seriously twisted brother and sister tandem, he with the bearing of a mortician, she a bickering Victorian fishwife. Their butler Morgan (Boris Karloff in one of his scariest roles), is a scar-faced giant. He gets drunk and tries to rape Gloria Swanson. This is some far out pre-code stuff.
Swanson plays "Margaret Waverton", who as the movie opens is driving with her husband "Philip" (Raymond Massey) and a gentleman friend named "Penderel" (Melvyn Douglas) through pouring rain over the hilly Welsh countryside. They decide to stop at the nearest inn before they run off the road, and of course there is no inn, just a big house full of world-class weirdos.
Not long after the Wavertons and Penderel arrive, there's another knock at the door, more travelers in need of sudden shelter. This time it's "Sir William Porterhouse" (the great Charles Laughton) and his young girlfriend "Gladys" (Lillian Bond). It's hard to tell if Sir William is a lord or a gadfly. He seems highly educated but speaks with light humor in a countrified Irish accent. His relationship with Gladys appears to be platonic. After a strained supper with the Femms (gotta love that name), Penderel strikes up a conversation with her and they begin to fall for each other. Meanwhile, all hell is slowly breaking loose, and it's around this time that old Boris tries to get his mitts on Swanson.
"The Old Dark House" is about as off-the-wall a movie as you'll ever find, not only in characterization but in dialogue, and as an IMDB fan noted, it bears repeated viewings because there's so much going on. It's not your typical "Trapped in a Haunted House" movie, though it may well have invented that subgenre.
Also - as if it needed mentioning - James Whale was a genius. I have to cut in to my own unfinished thought here to say that, while I enjoyed "Gods and Monsters", I'd like to ask if we can stop looking at Whale as a tragic figure and regard him as one of the greatest directors in Hollywood history instead. The guy invented the Big League Horror Film, and I know that's a generic description, but whattaya want me to say? Gothic Horror, the Universal Horror Look, the Major Monster Movie? He invented all that too, but it's not so much that he invented it, it's the freakin' pictures he put up on the screen, the atmosphere, the sets, the sound, the sheer Otherworldlyness.
Have you ever seen a movie that looks or feels even remotely like "Frankenstein"? Or "The Bride of Frankenstein"? How about "The Invisible Man"? Each of those is a stand-alone classic, some of the greatest motion pictures ever made, regardless of genre, and then there's "The Old Dark House", which has all the top flight production values of the other films, and their great performances, but which comes so completely out of left field that you're kind of left scratching your head. "Am I to laugh or be horrified, or both"? And I don't mean that in the sense of a comedy/horror film, because this is not that. It's just plain weird, and equally deserving of merit as Whale's other three acknowledged classics. Some fans think it's his best movie, but anyway, my original point was that it's not right to view Whale as a tragic figure. The guy was a giant of cinema and should be regarded as such. Let's please stop politcizing everything.
At any rate, Two Gigantic Thumbs Up for "The Old Dark House". That's my highest rating. Watch it and see why. Oh, and the print is razor sharp. ////
I also went to Aliso yesterday afternoon and got caught in a thunderstorm. First time that's happened in all the years I've hiked there. As the rain poured down - for the first time in a year and a half - I took refuge under an oak tree still scarred by the fire of October 2019. Lightning flashed and crackled in the distance, followed by reports of thunder. I thought "if it lets up in the next five minutes I'll go on and finish my hike", but it didn't let up; rivulets of rainwater soon ran down the trail. I saw other hikers heading back and decided I should go too. The quality of light was amazing, a gauzy low yellow and grey. Everything was as still as a stone. Aliso is an undisturbed place of nature, and as such, it emanates it's own response to nature's cycles. The tree that sheltered me dripped raindrops, and I imagined it must feel good after all that time, yet I knew that the tree and all it's friends could've weathered another year of drought if need be. The oaks are hardy sentinels.
The other movie I watched, two night ago, was "Bluebeard"(1944) starring John Carradine as an artist who may be a serial killer. It was really more of an attempt at watching, and for the first time I'm gonna have to re-watch the movie before I review it because I kept nodding off, to the point where I was rewinding over and over, and missing whole scenes of the movie. I was dog-tired as I'm still dealing with the psychological and emotional effects of Pearl's passing. I'll watch it again soon though, and then I'll complete my review. In the meantime I'll tell you about the book I've just begun, "The Queen of Bedlam" by Robert McCammon. It's the story of a young man named Matthew Corbett, a lawyer's clerk who lives in New York at the beginning of the 18th century. He's had a hardscrabble life (he grew up in an orphanage), and only through sheer luck and perseverance has he made it to adulthood. Using his intelligence, he learned the basics of law through the tutelage of a barrister who was kind enough to take him under his wing. Now, with enough legal experience under his belt, he's become something of a crusader for law and order in a growing city of five thousand people.
Imagine NYC when the population was only 5K.
McCammon writes in Dickensian style, his New York is as gothic and grimy as London of fifty years earlier. In addition to all the problems a need for civic order can produce, there's also a madman on the prowl, a serial killer dubbed "The Masker" by the publisher of the city's broadsheet (a double page fold-out in lieu of a professional newspaper).
Matthew Corbett is ultimately hired by a wealthy widow, the owner of an English security agency, to become the agency's first officer in New York. Thus the idea of an organized police force is born. But this is no mere cop novel or detective story. Really it's more of a traditional horror tale, as McCammon takes you on a descriptive tour of the burgeoning town of New York in 1705, when the taverns were illuminated by candlelight, men carried lanterns at night, and madmen walked the shadows with only a Town Constable to stop them.
McCammon's writing style is one of the best I've ever read. You feel transported to the place and time, as if you're walking in Corbett's shoes during the era of Witch Trials and tricorner hats. This book is exactly what I need right now and it's really helping me.
That's all I've got for the moment. I'll try to write regularly while I'm here at Pearl's, though I can't guarantee full-length movie reviews just yet. Thanks for reading, and have a good rest of the day.
I send you Tons of Love as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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