All Posts – Page 44 – Prattling before the Pratfall

Quiet on the Set! Action!

It’s safe to say that GOOD LUCK TO YOU, LEO GRANDE is a film for grown-ups. This preview is rated PG-13, for very explicit language.

Emma Thompson Calls Intimacy Coordinators “Fantastically Important.”

I dunno if this controversy is for real. It seems likely to be something thought up to generate buzz for the movie, and that’s okay.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/emma-thompson-calls-intimacy-coordinators-123044188.html

This isn’t the first time Emma Thompson has shown her stuff on camera. Thompson is exceptionally attractive in Carrington, from 1995. The film includes one of the most intense scenes of passion to ever appear in mainstream cinema as distinct from “dirty movies.” It’s done, to borrow a term from the Leo Grande trailer, “doggy style.”

Questions about how love scenes in movies are filmed are as old as the medium, going back to Edison’s The Kiss in 1896. Legend — urban or otherwise — has it that, nearly 100 years ago, Greta Garbo and her leading man John Gilbert “did it” for real on a movie set. Their love affair is covered in Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film.

Early on, one of my goals for this blog was to post the entire 13-part Hollywood series, transferred from my LaserDisc box set. It took a lot of time and effort, but I did it, to my later regret. People started contacting me, offering to pay for copies of Hollywood on DVD. I had, and still have, the hardware to do that.

Panasonic DMR-ES15S Progressive Scan DVD Recorder

I quickly suspected that some of those requests were coming from those who were probably not only fans, but dealers wanting to sell bootleg copies. I declined those offers, but having the videos online made them available for downloading by those who were sufficiently tech savvy.^*

Which made me wonder if I might be opening myself up to legal trouble. I found an interview with Kevin Brownlow, who produced the series with the late David Gill. Brownlow was asked about a DVD set, and he said some of the family estates were holding out for more money. So I decided to play it safe and took the page offline. It’s still here, but hidden.

Times have changed from the days when YouTube allowed video uploads of only 10-minutes. Someone braver than myself has taken the risk that I didn’t, so far without being deleted. This series has the absolute highest Dog Rat ***** rating. Consider it not just recommended viewing, but mandatory. Some of these transfers were definitely sourced from VHS.

The playlist is missing Part 4: “Hollywood Goes to War”. I’ll add it separately.

Part 10: “The Man With the Megaphone” wasn’t allowed by YouTube, but somebody else managed to post it.

^* For all I know, the DVD’s for sale at this link could have been made from my transfers: https://www.moviedetective.net/product_p/holl.htm

Triple Agent Action

Boris Karloff sure did appear in a lot of “B” movies. British Intelligence, from January 1940, is an engaging, fast-paced one-hour adaptation of a 1918 play. The story stays in the first world war, but was updated with an obvious anti-Hitler message, two years before America entered the war in Europe. The depiction of the Zeppelins flying over London is very effective.

The Hold of Holbein

Study for portrait of the More family, 1527. The completed painting was lost in a 1752 fire.

Back in February, The New Yorker had a review of an exhibit at the Morgan Library in New York.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/28/review-holbein-capturing-character-morgan-library-museum

Hans Holbein the Younger’s work is stunning, being vastly superior to his father’s art. The quality and immediate visual appeal of Holbein’s paintings wouldn’t be equaled until Vermeer a hundred years later. While displaying the same level of technical skill as Jan Van Eyck in painting decorative clothing and objects, Holbein’s superb drawing ability was a complete break with long-standing medieval artistic conventions. Offering a level of realism never seen before, Holbein was, in a word, modern. If Holbein’s portraits are secular Realism, Michelangelo’s paintings are religious Mannerism.

I have beheld Holbein’s portraits of Thomas More and his nemesis Cromwell at the Frick Gallery. The painting of More was an obvious labor of love compared to the spare and cold portrayal of Cromwell, making it quite plain which of the two men he favored. Cromwell proved that anyone who believes they can ally themselves politically with a madman, and survive unscathed, is dead wrong. If you have an interest in Holbein, and can spare an hour, this history is very worthwhile viewing. (Two completely different meanings of the word “spare” used in the same paragraph! That’s what I call blogging at its best.)

There’s a woman in the cartoon^* above whose pose is strikingly similar to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Lady With An Ermine. The way her hands are placed, she could be holding an ermine herself. Even the head covering and bead necklace echo those worn by Da Vinci’s woman.

Da Vinci probably painted the portrait about five years before Holbein was born. Was Holbein merely fashioning the drawing in the popular manner of the day? Or had he seen Da Vinci’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, or a copy of it, and was offering a sly nod to the Italian master? While unknown, it’s believed that Holbein may have visited Italy. Da Vinci died when Holbein the Younger was about twenty.