…director, composer, screenwriter, and inventor. His novel, Mr. Cantonwine: A Moral Tale, was published in 1953. I read it as a high schooler (in the 1990s). Why, yes, I was that teenager. Here is Mr. Barrymore as a younger man:
Lionel Barrymore: Born 28 April 1878.
This is my contribution to the Great Villain Blogathon. Disclaimer: I’ve been disgustingly sick for a week, and this is the best I could do. Oh, and spoilers! There are [a few] slight spoilers!
“Sometimes the truth is wicked.”
The world would be an easier place to navigate if all toxic substances were marked with a skull and crossbones. Unfortunately, some poisons shimmy through the cracks and enter polite society unnoticed or unheeded. There are few things deadlier or more intriguing to citizens at large, than evil wrapped in a pleasing package. From real life to pop culture: Oh, how we love good-looking villains!
Gene Tierney is at her finest as Ellen.
The film universe of the 1940s is full of swanky dames and femmes fatales, duplicitous creatures out for revenge or a fast buck. They seem to inhabit one vast, inescapable hellscape: smoky, urban, gritty, and ruthlessly relentless. There are no winners, only: comers, takers, makers. Leave Her to Heaven’s Ellen Berent Harland (Gene Tierney) is a rule-breaker, a curious abstainer from the decade’s expected bad-girl protocol. She is neither noir cookie nor hard-hearted moll, but something infinitely more frightening: charming, civilized, and unstoppably obsessed. Her love, bleeding out, cannot be stanched.
Ellen’s milieu, too, is different. She carves a path of cunning and destruction through some of the loveliest natural backdrops on film this side of Westerns. It’s a Technicolor world, full of towering pines, deeply blue lakes, and handsome mountains surrounded by sunshine and clean air. Beauty kills as well as the beast. Continue reading
Stained glass of William Shakespeare, State Library of Victoria
Stained Glass of William Shakespeare, State Library of Victoria
Jean Renoir Quote
Anna Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, 1922.
Portrait of Anna Akhmatova, 1922 by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
“You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms…”-Anna Akhmatova
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”-Augustine of Hippo
I’m going on a road trip in June. I will likely arrive in Savannah with a lap full of granola bar crumbs and a stack of partially read books with sadly torn pages clawing at my ankles. My dreams of writing, in situ, many pages of deft and witty observations of what it means to take to the road on a wild adventure full of whimsy and wisdom, all whilst perfectly coiffed and lipsticked, will already be mouldering in a ditch somewhere in Tennessee. Perhaps quite literally. One can dream, though, and in these dreams my ideal and obsessively bookish packing lists take several forms. Up first: random shiny things that set the stage for the theme lists to follow.
In order to record fleeting yet worthy impressions:
Small Leather Journal Sketchbook “Not all who wander are lost” by in blue. $15.00
John Waters Quote
A Small Press Life: Books. Art. Writing. Life. Tea. 