Peter Lorre Takes to Santa with a Bat
Hollywood Canteen (1944)
We at TVC have not seen this 1944 film, Hollywood Canteen, but we want to. See TVC’s review of The Lost One here. And then Peter inveigles Mickey Rooney to take a loan for a date (in Quicksand)…is there no end to his perfidy?
Continue Reading →A House and its Head
(by I Compton-Burnett) Ivy Compton-Burnett* must have had a strange family life (just look at her hair). She was the seventh of her father’s children and the first of her (less than affectionate) mother’s five. A brother died of pneumonia, another on the Somme. Two of her sisters (“Baby” and “Topsy”) committed suicide together one Christmas Day. None of the twelve had children. None of the girls married. Certainly her books are about strange families. The Edgeworth family of A House and its Head is unhappy, decidedly in its own way. The solipsistic father Duncan is oblivious to his (first) wife’s misery and to…
Continue Reading →Bitings on a Complimentary Basis.
Get your bitings here
In 2004, while staying in a converted monastery in wild, windy, Avignon, we read an invitation to “bitings on a complimentary basis” at 7pm . In some trepidation we donned evening garb, strung garlic around our necks and descended to the ancient hall for what turned out to be “free nibbles” and not of the flattering, cannibal sort. The European grip on English translation had not improved by 2013, when, in the train station at Sorrento we read a sign which frightened and confused us.
Continue Reading →Munch more than a Scream
Oslo boy Edvard Munch (12/12/1863 to 23/1/1944) got a retrospective a year and a bit ago to mark his 150th birthday (and the Munch Museum’s 50th). The visual strut of an angst-ridden tripod of tortured genius (with Ibsen and Strindberg), his paintings prefigured Freudian dream analysis (e.g. “Despair”, “Anguish”, “Night in Saint-Cloud”, “The Sick Child”, “Separation” and “The Weeping Nude”, which last was completed about the time of his nervous breakdown).
Continue Reading →The Clearing House
Are we over the publishing tactic of “tease, obfuscate, hit-and-run”? Reports (and comma errors) are rife over the discovery of a Harper Lee spin-off, Go Set a Watchman, with Scout Finch now grown up and sittin’ at the back of the bus. The latest in a long line of similar finds, from The Original of Laura (nb: notes on index cards, not a novel) and similar teases over Kafka and J. D. Salinger, this has the added frisson of publication in the author’s lifetime. TVC can’t wait for future unearthed treasures: Luke Rhinehart’s Snake Eyes; J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter Goes to…
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