gwynnega

This has been a rough week, but I do have some good things to report:

The contract has been signed, so I can announce that my novelette "A Wild Patience" will be published by GigaNotoSaurus in 2020. I'm very pleased about this.

Also, my contribution to Aqueduct's The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2019 is online, in which I talk about my favorite books (and a few items in other media) of the year.

Finally, the other day Captain Phil's Planet aired a great interview with Sara Karloff (daughter of Boris), and in the same episode played my rendition of my poem about Bride of Frankenstein, "she's alive, alive"!

It is Henna Day, on a warmish LA day that I wish were more autumnal. I've been watching/rewatching a lot of spooky old movies on TCM this weekend. Things I have learned:

Vincent Price's wrap-around sunglasses in The Tomb of Ligeia are pretty much the best thing ever. Also, the black cat in this movie is the hardest working cat in show business.

Mark of the Vampire (1935) is as incomprehensible as I remembered. The vampires are not really vampires, but actors playing vampires...yet Bela Lugosi still manages to transform from a bat into a man? Still, the vampire Luna is awesome.

The reconstruction from stills of Tod Browning's lost film London After Midnight (1927), starring Lon Chaney Sr. (which Browning remade as Mark of the Vampire), is far more compelling and understandable than the remake. I hope someday a print of the movie will be found.

Either Ira Levin saw The Seventh Victim (1943) before he wrote Rosemary's Baby, or New York City and Satanists preying on young women just go really well together. The Seventh Victim is one of the few Val Lewton films I hadn't seen, and it immediately became one of my favorites.

We are having autumn. I am wearing knee-high boots and a sweater jacket. This makes me very happy.

Last night I watched Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on TCM. I'm not sure how many times I've seen it. When I was a kid, back in the prehistoric pre-VCR days, my dad had a book of stills from the film (and also one for the 1931 Frankenstein), which may be why I'm so familiar with the film shot-by-shot. But I was struck anew by what a visual masterpiece the film is.

It's pre-code, of course, which means it gets to get away with this overtly sexy scene with Miriam Hopkins--but what's really amazing about the scene is the genius of Hopkins' superimposed swinging leg at the end of the clip:



I always have to remind myself that it's actually Fredric March playing Hyde, he submerges so completely into the role (and it's not just the superbly hideous makeup). The scenes of Hyde's abuse of Ivy (Hopkins) are hard to watch--but as this essay points out, it's a brilliant study of abuse: "Hyde is persistently vicious and domineering, with Jekyll as the winning personality who smooths things over with money and kind words. The only difference is that, up until the very end, Hopkins has no idea that the two men in her life are really one."

Last night I also watched part of Tod Browning's Mark of the Vampire. I've seen it before once or twice, but it was as incomprehensible as ever. Bela Lugosi and Carroll Borland wander around looking inscrutably vampiric (I could watch the awesome Borland doing her thing for hours), while various non-vampires (played by Lionel Barrymore and Lionel Atwill, among others) scurry around doing who knows what. The "surprise" ending is very WTF-ish.

Last night I watched Deathdream, an early seventies horror film from Canada about a zombie Vietnam vet. It stars Richard Backus, who manages to convey rage and pathos while being creepy as hell and, at times, very amusing. It also features John Marley and Lynn Carlin, of John Cassavetes's Faces, as the vet's parents--and they play their parts as if they're in the midst of a gritty realistic Cassavetes-esque drama, only to find themselves in a low-budget zombie flick. A fascinating film.