setsuled | Entries tagged with glynis johns

I somehow missed the news last week that Glynis Johns had died. She was a hundred years old, the English actress died in Hollywood. Most people remember her now as the mother in Mary Poppins but that fine film was preceded by many years of divine turns by the great Glynis. A comedic actress of wonderful subtlety and instinct, her wit paired well with her cheesecake looks. Perhaps her finest hour was as Danny Kaye's love interest in The Court Jester.

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It seems she was a delightful person in life. This interview about her mermaid comedy, Miranda, has stuck with me for years:

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On top of everything else, she was also a singer and she was the original singer of the song "Send in the Clowns"--Stephen Sondheim wrote the song for her.

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Here's to you, Glynis Johns.

X Sonnet #1806

Addressing digits, clocks create a time.
As eras close, eruptions pop for corks.
Forgotten days were special hills to climb.
The year became an extra pack of forks.
Her foggy breath revealed the airy sprite.
But now the clouds disrobe the pixie pack.
They danced as lightning charged the lounge with light.
The while waiting trolls prepare a sack.
From dizzy heights to frothy shores she swam.
Desire plucked her bottle off a shelf.
No greater light was ever shed by dame.
Yet all were charmed as by a little elf.
The bosey bits ascend above the tank.
She enters now among the angels' rank.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Location: A fish tank
Current Music: "Blossom Lady" - Shocking Blue

Is it comforting or horrifying thinking there are invisible forces, inevitably punishing or rewarding people as morality demands? 1973's The Vault of Horror is, like the EC series of horror comics in the 1950s, a depiction of a world where people are usually punished in equal measure to their wicked designs, often ironically. Actually taking almost all of its stories from Tales from the Crypt, this anthology film for Amicus directed by Roy Ward Baker features a wonderful cast performing tonally very faithful adaptations.

The Vault of Horror comics, like The Haunt of Fear, were mostly interchangeable with Tales from the Crypt, all published by EC Comics, featuring many of the same writers and artists, like Al Feldstein and Johnny Craig, telling similar stories. Tales from the Crypt stories were typically introduced by the Crypt Keeper but the Vault Keeper, from Vault of Horror, and the Old Witch, from Haunt of Fear, would appear to introduce stories in Tales from the Crypt, too.

Sadly, the Vault Keeper is absent from this film, despite the fact that it is something of a followup to Amicus' Tales from the Crypt which featured Ralph Richardson as the Crypt Keeper. The framing story for this Vault of Horror film features the main characters of each story, a group of five men, finding themselves stranded on one floor of a building by an apparently malfunctioning elevator. To pass the time, each tells a story of a dream he had where he died after committing some form of wrong doing. Each remarks on how real the dream seemed. I'll leave it to you to guess what happens at the end.

The only story not from Tales from the Crypt comes from EC's Shock SuspenStories, "The Neat Job", written by Tales from the Crypt's prolific writer Al Feldstein. This one stars Terry-Thomas and Glynis Johns and, as you might expect, plays more to comedy than the other stories. He's (of course) an obnoxious wealthy man and Johns is his good hearted but clumsy wife. It's a pleasure watching these two together though they have the ugliest house I've ever seen.

The climax of the story mostly leans on Johns who does a good job building tension with an otherwise slapstick routine as she breaks one thing after another, trying to clean up the house before the fastidious Terry-Thomas arrives home.

The other stand out story, based on a Tales from the Crypt story by Jack Davis, is "Drawn and Quartered" starring Tom Baker with Denholm Elliott in a small but crucial role. This film came out a year before Baker was cast as the Fourth Doctor but he's already showing an admirable taste in eccentric attire.

Baker plays a painter living in Haiti in poverty when he learns a friend (Elliott) has made a fortune selling his paintings back in London along with two accomplices, a dealer and a critic, who conspired to drive up the market value of Baker's art while keeping him out of the loop. It being Haiti, the painter turns to a distinctly comic book version of voodoo for revenge. If Dorian Gray were more interested in revenge killings, you might have gotten something like this story. Baker, with his hypnotic bug eyes and deep voice, easily enthrals the viewer, and his showdown with Denholm Elliott is captivating.

The other stories are all decent enough and the film's competently filmed by Roy Ward Baker.

Twitter Sonnet #1038

Delivered lines of growing wheat matured.
In questions asked the atoms turn to suns.
So nameless orbs at autumn late interred.
Along the sides of fish the river runs.
The thousandth first was time to plant the husk.
On beams below the brain's a sudden storm.
The solar flare became a neon tusk.
Across the sand the desert's getting warm.
Examined toast attracts the cooking mouse.
Beneath the boiling brush the paint began.
A canny clip assessed the vault in house.
A travelogue disclosed the rice again.
In helpless paintings pens can take the gun.
A moment's cat can easily outrun.

Current Mood: rushed
Current Location: 画
Current Music: "Let's Dance" - David Bowie

Your average fantasy story relies on some, at the least, improbable things being allowed to occur unimpeded, like the impetuous attractive protagonist and the virtuous attractive love interest having their relationship coincide with the precarious affairs of the state. So effective parodies often make hay by making things more complicated, which is the case with 1956's The Court Jester. Many unforeseen complications take this would-be Robin Hood tale right off the rails despite the best and worst intentions of its characters and the result is one of the greatest comedies of all time.

Danny Kaye stars as Hubert Hawkins, not a court jester but a former carnival performer who's joined up with the merry men of the Black Fox (Edward Ashley). The Fox is basically Robin Hood, robbing the rich and giving to the poor in defiance of a tyrant, Roderick (Cecil Parker), who's seized the throne. The rightful heir is an infant and in the care of the Fox. Part of Hubert's duty is to flash the purple pimpernel on the baby's butt to confirm the lad's royal status to the crew.

Hubert and Jean (Glynis Johns), one of the Fox's captains, are charged with taking the baby, hidden in a wine cask, to an abbey where it'll be safe. But on the way, Hubert and Jean fall in love and run into the jester Giacomo (John Carradine in a cameo) who's on his way to the castle. Jean immediately realises it's an opportunity to smuggle Hubert into the castled in the guise of Giacomo where he can steal a key from the king's quarters, enabling the Fox and his men to sneak in and take the castle through a secret passage.

It all seems simple enough, though audiences might have already been disconcerted by the fact that the Black Fox isn't the main character. But now the plates really start spinning because at the castle there are two plots already cooking against the king--one from his daughter, Gwendolyn (Angela Lansbury) and her witch servant, and another from the king's advisor, Ravenhurst (Basil Rathbone), who's plotting to kill some new rivals for the king's patronage. The comedy comes from how these plots unpredictably intersect due to each player's imperfect understanding of the situation.

Kaye is quite good, not just at the funny stuff but his sword fight at the end with Rathbone has some of the energy and skill seen in the duel between Rathbone and Errol Flynn in Robin Hood. Lansbury is very good but even more crucial is Glynis Johns in a role many directors might have been content to cast with a lightweight. But playing the straight requires a special skill--a big part of how well the famous "vessel with the pestle" bit works is Johns' ability to say the tongue twister like it's so easy she truly can't understand why Hubert can't get it. She also has a pretty funny scene where she convinces the king she has a terrible contagious disease in order to ward off his advances.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: The secret passage
Current Music: "It Might as Well Be Spring" - Bill Evans Trio

It's a cool woman indeed who keeps her poise when her husband brings a mermaid home. Googie Withers manages to carry it off when her husband carries home the beautiful Glynis Johns in 1948's Miranda, a charming comedy that uses a mermaid as a metaphor for the foolish roving eyes of new and soon to be husbands.

A doctor named Paul (Griffith Jones) goes to Cornwall on vacation without his wife, Clare (Withers), and is promptly captured by a mermaid named Miranda (Johns).

She plans on holding him captive in her underwater cave forever until she's taken by the idea of spending some time among humans disguised as a woman paralysed below the waist, one of Paul's patients. She's worried she'll suffer the same fate as her aunt Augusta, who was pickled and exhibited in a sideshow, so she compels Paul to keep her identity a secret from everyone, including his wife.

But when Paul brings a beautiful young woman into the home, who seems delighted to be carried around by men whom she doesn't hesitate to call "beautiful" and shower with other compliments, Clare seems more bemused than angry and she chats knowingly with her best friend, Isobel (Sonia Holm), about Paul's likely ulterior motives.

But Isobel and the servant, Betty (Yvonne Owen), are less amused when both their fiancés--an artist named Nigel (John McCallum) and a butler named Charles (David Tomlinson)--become infatuated with her.

Tomlinson's character might have been comforted to know he and Johns would play husband and wife sixteen years later in Mary Poppins.

The only woman who really likes Miranda is the only woman who knows she's a mermaid--the nurse Paul brings in to care for her played by Margaret Rutherford.

Paul had described Nurse Carey as an eccentric and had apparently decided not to employ her anymore but somehow thinks she's perfect for this job--explained when, upon seeing Miranda naked in the bath, Carey exclaims happily that she's always believed in mermaids.

1948 was a good year for mermaid movies--Miranda was released in Britain the same year Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid was released in the U.S. While Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid is a gentle forerunner of Lolita, lampooning how ridiculous the reality can be when a much older man tries to live out his fantasies with a real young woman, Miranda is more about anthropomorphising those fantasies. Miranda is truly not human, her selfless ease with being a companion to all men, her constant even temper, and her complete inability to fulfil anyone's sexual needs make her very much like a breathing pin-up poster or, to put it in grander terms, like a muse. Indeed, given how much delight Nurse Carey takes in her the latter term might be more appropriate. But just like a pin-up, as much as she freely gives to men she's not troubled at all by her inability to fulfil their ultimate desires. And just like a pin-up, the men look extremely foolish when they want to leave their girlfriends and wives for her.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Location: Under the sea
Current Music: Das Rheingold, Zweite Szene - Richard Wagner

To-day's my sister's birthday and also Robert Mitchum's 100th birthday so happy birthday to you both. Last night I watched Mitchum in 1960's The Sundowners, a relaxing, almost slice of life story about a family of sheep drovers in early 20th century Australia. Directed by Fred Zinnemann, it has a wonderful quantity of location footage and real sheep shearing that turns out to be gently fascinating.

The Carmodys roll into frame in a covered wagon with little fanfare during the opening credits. The film does a nice job of bringing the viewer in with a fairly normal group of people who happen to have the lovely job of herding sheep. It reminds me of the obsession poets used to have with the idyllic lives of shepherds--there's something just so pleasant about even the arguments between Paddy (Mitchum), Ida (Deborah Kerr), and their son, Sean (Michael Anderson, Jr.).

The actors do a respectable job at Australian accents, refreshing after movies like Sister Kenny where no-one even bothered. I will say, as much as I love Deborah Kerr, she's definitely miscast here. When they're alone in their tent, Paddy compliments her body, telling her she's how women ought to be shaped, unlike the skinny women they'd seen in town--"Broomsticks, nothing to hang onto." She immediately replies with an amusing and lightly chiding, "Did you try?"

The only problem is Kerr is pretty slender herself. Throughout the movie the script comes back to the idea that Ida has looks that show she's worked hard and in poverty all her life but as fun as Kerr is with some of the snappy dialogue in this film she's just too naturally elegant and poised. In one scene, we see her wistfully watching a society woman in a train and in the next scene we see her in the hotel looking like this:

She has a bit of a tan but mainly she looks as crisp and graceful as any lady of refinement--really more so than most. Her and Mitchum are a really sexy couple, though.

More appropriately anachronistic is Peter Ustinov in a supporting role as Rupert Venneker, an English hired hand that takes up with the Carmodys, the strangest and most intriguing character in the film.

He won't say much about his past unless he's forced to defend his dignity and mention the time he spent as a captain on a Chinese ship or the great family he was born into in England. He seems to strike up a romance with the always charming Glynis Johns as the hotel owner but the relationship doesn't go where you might expect and it's not for entirely mercenary reasons Rupert's drawn to the Carmodys. Some might say what we're seeing is repressed homosexuality, which I think is possible, but there are other equally possible explanations for his isolation which is for the most part only incidentally referred to.

There's a conflict running through the film between Paddy and Ida over the idea of continuing as drovers, as he wants, and settling down on a farm, as she wants, but for the most part the film is episodic. We watch the Carmodys take a job shearing, Ida working in the kitchen. A coworker's wife gets pregnant, a fight breaks out in the road after two trucks of workers nearly collide, there's a brush fire the family barely escapes. Rupert convinces Paddy to enter a shearing competition--and Mitchum is clearly doing some actual shearing.

Mitchum, even in these circumstances, is, as usual, magnetic in his zenlike coolness and idle strength.

The movie ends with a nicely unresolved feeling as though the story of the Carmodys and Rupert is still going on somewhere, pretty much as it was most of the movie.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Location: The Outback
Current Music: "To the South" Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon OST - Tan Dun

So you want a better life. Why not go to war? It'll very likely improve both you and your spouse, or at least that's the message in Alexander Korda's 1945 wartime propaganda film Perfect Strangers (Vacation from Marriage in the U.S.), a message all the more insidious for the fact that it's a pretty good movie with amazing performances from Robert Donat and Deborah Kerr.

The two basically play two roles each, and maybe a transitory third role. They start the movie off as a dull, miserable married couple, the Wilsons, Robert and Cathy. Robert is a meek, set in his ways bank employee, at one point contemptuously called an "old maid". Cathy is a stay at home wife who never wears makeup and seems to have a perpetual cold. Then Robert finds himself forced to join the navy and, while he's gone, Cathy joins the Wrens, the women's branch of the Royal Navy at the time.

Gradually, both are transformed and the actors carry it off brilliantly in their performances. Donat's body language becomes more relaxed and expansive--maybe going slightly too far later in the film when he's propped himself up against the fireplace while sitting.

Cathy, under the influence of her worldly new cohort, Dizzy (Glynis Johns), starts smoking and wearing makeup. Both separately start to think they could never go home to their stuffy spouses, each has as close to an extramarital affair as the censors would allow--Robert with a nurse who tells him about how her recently deceased husband went from being a boring clerk to an exciting world traveller whose memory she admires, Cathy with an intellectual in a scene Korda lifts almost wholesale from Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale.

When the Wilsons are rediscovering each other in the third act, both are surprised to find the other can now dance, prompting the reply from both, "One picks these things up." The message isn't terribly subtle--join the navy, get the sexual experience that will make you more appealing to the opposite sex. Yet I did find it charming and kind of insightful that both Robert and Cathy felt that they were suffering before because they thought the other needed them and it was this suffering that made each seem so helpless to the other. And Donat and Kerr sell it so well. Donat's best known roles were behind him at this point and this was near the start of Kerr's career so it's also an interesting overlap of two eras.

But I would rather the film had been about Deborah Kerr and Glynis Johns having adventures. My favourite scene in the movie is just the two of them on an overcrowded train, taking turns resting their heads in each other's laps.