Hawkeye was an asterisk

Sutherland as Fortinbras

Ten days before Canada Day, we learned we'd lost another Canadian institution - Donald Sutherland.

He played a wide variety of roles, many of them in films that aren't exactly my cup of tea, but I remember him for three things - none of which were Shakespeare.

In the wake of Sutherland's death, I was looking for some of his performances when I stumbled across him at something like 28, appearing  briefly, as a gangly, snaggle-toothed Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince who turns up to clean up the carnage in Hamlet.  This was the 1964 televised production (available, thankfully, on YouTube, it's well worth a watch), filmed on location at Elsinore in the autumn of 1963, which starred a very dishy pre-Sound-of-Music Christopher Plummer, and a rather heavily made-up pre-Alfie Michael Caine.  

None of these guys were famous at the time, all three became so, although it took Sutherland considerably longer.

M*A*S*H was, of course, the film that did it for him.

It's one of the three things I do remember Sutherland for, along with his appearance in the music video of "Cloudbusting" with Kate Bush (based on the more sentimental aspects of the life of Wilhelm Reich),  and his performance of the easy-going, bewildered father in Ordinary People.  "Cloudbusting" is easily found on line, but Ordinary People must be on some streaming service I don't get.  My days of simply renting the DVD have disappeared, along with my beloved Pic-a-Flic, which closed about nine months ago.

M*A*S*H, if you can believe it, is available on Disney+, which we do get, in order that the Resident Fan Boy can get his Doctor Who fix.  

I settled down to watch M*A*S*H for the first time in years.

Just a little personal context:  Demeter loved this movie.  She saw it years before I did, of course, and now denies liking it so much, but I remember her raving about it years ago.  When I finally got an opportunity to see it (probably at the university cinema), I was puzzled.

Oh, it's entertaining.  And it was ground-breaking:  the improvisation, the overlapping dialogue, the gore in the operating theatre (which is mild, by today's terms, but shocking for 1970, particularly in a comedy). However, I remember feeling somewhat uncomfortable, and it took me several more years before it hit me - while I was watching it last week.

Hawkeye Pierce is an ***hole. 

Sure, he's a surgeon, and saves lives under appalling conditions, but plenty of surgeons are jerks.  The guy who safely delivered both my daughters by Caesarian was a jerk.  A fellow mum who was a doctor herself, smiled when I described my experiences with him and said "Well, he's an excellent technician." (Which helped, actually.) 

Also, I realise that M*A*S*H is set in the early 1950s, and seen through the lens of the anti-war attitudes of the late 1960s.  (The movie was released in 1970, but filmed a year or two earlier.)  

Even as a young woman, though, I felt uneasy about how the nurses are treated in the film, i.e. as fair game.  Hotlips Houlihan is, admittedly, a pain, but her punishment for being a lippy female and a senior officer is really over-the-top, isn't it?  Her humiliating exposure in the shower is the prelude of her reduction to a simpering hanger-on.  In one of our last glimpses of her, she's standing like an escort, as the men play cards. 

Here's a famous exchange from early on in the film.  The punchline from the late René Auberjonois is funny, but listen to what Pierce is saying to Houlihan.

See, if she were a normal woman (and apparently she's sufficiently pretty) he'd hit on her, and she'd acquiesce, because that's the natural order, right?  (Yes, she's being a highhanded twit; he's still an ***hole.)

Donald Sutherland, according to all reports, was not a jerk.  He was a fine, multi-faceted actor. We are diminished in the loss of him.

Re-view, re-watch, reaction, re-visit, repeat

This morning, I made my daily mistake of checking my Twitter feed before rising.  I follow Colin Mochrie (which isn't a mistake), but he was commenting on a status by someone named J. Kelly Nestruck, who, as it turns out, is a theatre critic for the Globe and Mail.

Nestruck thunderstruck me with the following observation:

 

Actually, I'm not sure why I was thunderstruck. I've seen debates elsewhere over the years about the use of re-reading books, for heaven's sake. That really knocked me sideways.  Re-reading books?  Of course, you re-read books.  You re-read to review, to pick up the details you missed while rushing to the climax the first time, to re-visit in order to bring your older and - please gawd - wiser, better-informed self back to see how your reaction has changed.

You re-watch movies for the exact same reasons.  Now, some films (just like some books) are not worth a subsequent airing.  And some films, entertaining enough on the first or even second viewing, lose their charm with repetition - Love Actually (sadly, a favourite of both elder and younger daughters), Elf (still beloved by younger daughter), and Bridget Jones's Diary spring to mind.

There are even a small group of films that I feel require rewatching, because I didn't quite get them the first time.  Alone in Berlin is in this group; I didn't think much of it at first, but have watched it twice since and my appreciation has grown.

Some years back, I devoted an overlong, and rather too labour-intensive post to films that I like enough to watch repeatedly.

I think, given it's been eleven years, that I should add a few -- but only a few.  Once again, this is not a "best films" list; they are simply films I enjoy, and, so far, have not tired of.  There were 35 films in my 2009 list, so I'll just pick up where I left off:

#36. They Might Be Giants 

George C. Scott, Joanne Woodward, Jack Gilford

This should have been on my original list.  I stumbled across it on television when I was a teenager, and fell in love with the music, and the quirky story.  Viewed as a grown-up, I find some of the dialogue cringey and sentimental, but if you love character actors, the performances by Jack Gilford and Oliver Clark are particularly beguiling.

#37.  The F-Word

Daniel Radcliffe, Zoe Kazan, Adam Driver

This is sort of When Harry Met Sally for millennials, but manages to avoid the cookie-cutter plot of your average rom-com.  The script is by a fellow who went to my university, and the setting is a fairy-tale version of Toronto, where somehow, it's never winter -- yet I recognized the city perfectly.  The cast, a blend of Canadians, Brits, and Americans, is delightful.

#38. The Lady in the Van

Maggie Smith, Alex Jennings, and pretty well the entire cast of The History Boys

Based on Alan Bennet's play about an old homeless woman who really did live in her van in his front yard in London for several years.  A beautiful and messy mixture of humour, pathos, tragedy and mystery.

#39. Boyhood

Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke

I first saw this at the soon-to-be-lamented Bytowne Cinema, and remember thinking at the time:  I have never seen anything like this.  Director Richard Linklater, filming in short spurts over about thirteen years, told this story of growing up in real time.  It's a childhood in Texas, so a little foreign to me, but I still recognized many elements of my own children's younger years.

That'll do for now.

Fade to black

When I began my days in Hades, there were three cinemas remaining in downtown Ottawa: the rather drafty and smelly triplex in the Rideau Centre, the cluster of screens of varying sizes at the World Exchange Centre, and the Bytowne Cinema, the local seat of art films, which was housed in an old-fashion movie house which had blinked on Rideau Street for well over half a century.

After a decade of seemingly endless Ottawa winters, the downtown cinemas disappeared, chilled out by Netflix, I guess.  I've never seen the appeal of Netflix, and I rather like my films on a large screen, hearing the reactions of those around me.  The big-box cinemas were an eighty-to-ninety-minute round-trip by bus, so I purchased the yearly membership to Bytowne, which was a thirty-minute walk from my house, and near two bus-routes, if I didn't feel like the hike.

It offered a wide range of films:  Canadian, foreign-language, animation, classics.  It also featured a rather eccentric clientele at times, but a seat in the large darkened auditorium was a trip back in time.

It was one of my lifelines in a city that never became home to me.  Yesterday, they announced it was closing down.  The second COVID lockdown was the final straw.  A particular pity, since, as far as I can see, cinemas are not a source of spreading, super or otherwise.

Even though I don't have to live in Hades anymore, and have absolutely no reason to return, my heart is breaking.  Surely I wasn't the only person clinging on to the Bytowne for dear life.

Irreversible

This morning, I left the house early to travel down to the southern edge of Hades to catch a morning screening at the South Keys Cineplex. The film was not one I'd ordinarily go to. It's a political and military thriller entitled Eye in the Sky.

The story was told in real time: you see a sixty-something woman rise in the early hours, leaving her husband to sleep while she slips across her backyard, accompanied by her dog, to a small office where she opens her computer with her fingerprint, and we realize that she is a high-ranking military officer setting out to deal with a crisis. The officer is Helen Mirren (the part was, of course, originally written for a man, and she demonstrates how unnecessary this was), the film is produced, in part, by Colin Firth, and the reason I travelled across Ottawa to see it was because this is the last film performance by Alan Rickman.

My daughters were exposed to Alan Rickman at an early stage and on the Valentine's Days preceding their respective births. I was six months' along with elder daughter when the Resident Fan Boy and I went to see Truly Madly Deeply in February 1992.

I wept profusely, and it was not all down to the hormones. I could weep now, each time I remember that I failed to purchase a DVD of this film, copies of which are now only available at exorbitant prices.

Younger daughter was on the way when I saw Rickman in Sense and Sensibility.
I didn't weep, but I did buy the DVD, thank goodness - Emma Thompson's commentary alone is worth every penny.

My daughters, of course, mourn the man who portrayed Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies. I do, too, but I had been a fan of his since just before their births, and can't help but feel that somehow, they are favourably marked by these two films which they attended in utero.

Eye in the Sky is very much an edge-of-your-seat sort of experience, and, of course, I soon forgot it was Alan Rickman playing a grandfather trying to locate and purchase a required toy, before revealing himself to be a lieutenant-general trying get a decision out of Whitehall politicians while lives hang in the balance in Nairobi. Naturally, he gets the very best line in the whole movie: "Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war." He delivers it without a hint of self-righteousness nor heavy-handedness.

While I am relieved that there are so many of his performances caught and preserved, I am so very sad that there will be no more.

Designated mourner

I'm well aware that I'm not the only one upset by the passing of Mike Nichols.  However, when I look at the huge variety of films he directed, aside from The Graduate which is what seems to be the focus of the articles and obituaries, then I remember his work in front of the cameras and microphone, I feel the jolt again.  What a mind-boggling talent he was.

My favourite Nichols and May sketch is on my iPod with one of my favourite lines:  "Many think of Adler as a man who made mice neurotic.....", but seeing Elaine May and Mike Nichols in action adds a whole new dimension, as in this sketch (early 1960s, I think) which shows a move with cigarette smoke that made its way into The Graduate The first 17 seconds of the soundtrack are missing, but don't let that stop you:



However, about ten years ago, I was idly switching around channels on a Sunday afternoon, and stumbled upon The Designated Mourner, written by Wallace Shawn (the "inconceivable" villain in The Princess Bride, among other things).  Not knowing what it was, I watched in horrified fascination.  It's a "talking heads" play, only three actors describing, almost dispassionately, the horrors of being a doomed intelligentsia in some unnamed repressed regime.  You may not feel inclined to watch the whole thing -- I might, seeing as some wonderful soul has posted it on YouTube in memory of Nichols -- but try watching Nichol's performance in the last ten minutes of the movie (go to the 1 hour, 23 minute mark), as his character, who has survived the culling, describes how he learned what became of his ex-wife.

Yellow to Hero

For the past few years, I've been trying to follow the philosophy of "Show up", meaning making more of an effort to get out and attend things.

Today, I got out and attended Boyhood, which was shot over twelve years.  They cast a seven-year-old boy and the director's seven-year-old daughter as his older sister.  I think she's supposed to be about two years older, but luckily, the developmental lag that boys seem to have worked in the movie's favour.  Shooting for a few days a year for a total of 45 days between the spring of 2002 and the autumn of 2013, all the characters, the boy and the girl, and the adults that surround them (including Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette as the parents) age 12 years without the need for prosthetics or special effects, and even though the film is close to three hours long, you barely notice it.  (Except for the part where I had to run to the washroom.) 

Both young actors were born in 1994, so their childhood and adolescence is contemporary with that of my daughters.  The story, though, is a very American one and it's set in Texas which is damn near a universe of its own.

While I'm not sure how much of the characters' experience would be recognizable to my children -- the American school experience was very foreign to me, even though I had close American friends as a teenager -- they would certainly recognize the music.  Starting in 2002 with "Yellow" by Coldplay, we hear snatches of Blink 182, Britney Spears, Weezer, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, and of course, Gotye, among many others.  The song that stayed with me as I hurried out into the night and damn near got run over by a car bearing down on me in the lit crosswalk, was "Hero" which I've certainly heard before -- somewhere.  The lyrics are particularly apt, especially as the main character, now age 18 drives across Texas  to start college.  The original video, I discovered, is also a bit of a heart-breaker. 

Even more Doré

Can't resist adding a couple more items about Gustave Doré as a result of searching around the web for things to illustrate yesterday's post.

As I mentioned, there were three or four screens dotted around the galleries, showing works by Doré followed by film clips showing his influence.  One particularly surprising one were these engravings from The Divine Comedy

 followed by a fairy scene from the 1935 film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

There were also several links with various film versions of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.  However, while I was looking up images last night, I came across this

and was immediately reminded of this scene from 1951's Scrooge, my very favourite rendition of A Christmas Carol.

I also searched high and low for excerpts from the documentary shown at the National Gallery of Canada with English subtitles, but all I could find  (aside from the usual slightly tedious promotional video from the National Gallery) was an overview of the exhibit from the Musée d'Orsay which features many of the same speakers (though not Tomi Ungerer, alas). Although I recognize much of what is glimpsed in this video, I'm left with the impression that the show at the Musée d'Orsay was considerably bigger. On the other hand, as I observed in yesterday's post, I'm pretty sure I didn't see everything, even in two visits.

I'll drink to that

Every now and then, I triumph over adversity. "Adverse" would be an excellent adjective to apply to British Columbia's liquor laws as they pertain to minors.  Minors are not permitted in pubs in BC.  If you enter a pub with children to purchase lunch or even wait for somebody, chances are you'll be asked to leave.  Minors are not permitted in government liquor stores in BC.  If you're in a rush and would like to pick up a bottle of wine for dinner, forget it if you have a kid in tow.

This didn't bother me so much growing up.  My mum simply didn't go to pubs and I would wait outside if she entered a liquor store. However, we've been living in Ontario for the past 14 years and are now used to not having to think twice before entering a pub or purchasing a bottle.  As far as I know (and you're welcome to pelt me with statistics if you feel otherwise), Ontario kids aren't any less responsible about alcohol than BC teenagers - not that either group is famed for its abstemiousness.

The British Columbia government is now discussing relaxing rules about allowing kids into pubs, but until then, we have a new wrinkle, theatres in Victoria are now trying to encourage more patrons by getting liquor licenses.  This means kids aren't welcome at evening performances, only at matinees.  Okay, I prefer matinees myself, so booked afternoon tickets for a performance of "Judy!" (a show about the life of Judy Garland) for my resident JG fan, younger daughter, who recently did a passionate rendition of "The Trolley Song" for her spring recital.

Younger daughter is also a Beatle fan.  Earlier this year, I was delighted to hear  that the Vic Theatre, a cinema in downtown Victoria where I first saw The Princess Bride and Gone with the Wind amongst many other films, had re-opened as an arts film venue.  I was even more delighted to learn they would be screening A Hard Day's Night, a film younger daughter has adored since toddlerhood, but has never seen on a big screen. My delight withered when I noticed that the film, while rated "G", was denoted as "19+" along with a blithe reference to beer and wine being available.  I had already told younger daughter about the film, and heart sinking, emailed the organizer for clarification (named Scarlett in a case of neat symmetry), fully expecting to be told "no dice".

Instead, she told me that while she hadn't been expecting any underage viewers to come, that we were welcome.  The next day, the "19+" had been removed from the web site and a note added advising patrons that liquor would have to be consumed in the lobby "as minors will be in the audience".

I think younger daughter was the only minor in the audience.  I also think most patrons brought their drinks in with them anyway.

Younger daughter turned to me while Paul McCartney was crooning "And I Love Her".

"Ohhhh… I just adore this song," she sighed.

Nothing adverse about that.  And yes, I did thank Scarlett in person.

Another argument for not getting your history from films

Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Relationship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley by Geoffrey C. Ward

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


When I saw the film Hyde Park on Hudson a few months ago, I had never heard of Margaret Suckley (pronounced "Sookley"), but I do know something of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his era, so I found myself questioning what I was seeing.  Of course, the thing with so-called historical films is that there is a time constraint and a need to create dramatic tension, so you know the facts are going to be meddled with.  Still, the President getting a blow-job in an automobile in a secluded field?  A bit Bill Clinton, isn't it?  The King and Queen of England becoming anxious at the idea of consuming hot dogs?  A bit over-the-top, wouldn't you say?

As the credits rolled, I noted that the movie was based on a play, and the play was based on a book.  I went home and placed a hold on the only copy in the library.  It took three months for my turn to come up.

At first, I thought the wait had been a waste of time.  Geoffrey C. Ward, a well-known biographer who has collaborated on occasion with the documentary film-maker Ken Burns, is not the author of this book, but the editor and annotator of this collection of the letters and diaries of Margaret Suckley, whom he had met while researching his own books on FDR.  My disappointment gradually abated as I read further.  Margaret (known as "Daisy") was articulate, idealistic, and absolutely in love with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was her distant (sixth) cousin.  (His wife Eleanor Roosevelt was her fourth cousin, while FDR and Eleanor were themselves fifth cousins once removed.)

Daisy is very much a product of her time and class.  Although her family had lost much of their wealth during the twenties and thirties, she speaks from a viewpoint of privilege and her attitudes towards people of colour, although liberal for the times, would get her into a lot of trouble today.  She does, however, come across as sweetly naive, and you will not find a word of criticism against FDR whom she worshiped. 

It was this very lack of criticism and her willingness to keep in the background that, no doubt, kept her in the very inner ring of FDR's circle long after the intensity of their friendship slackened. It was a friendship that lasted more than thirty years, and she was present at his death.  Did this relationship ever involve a Bill-Clinton-ish encounter in an automobile?  After reading Daisy's letters and diaries (some of FDR's letters and notes are included), I somehow doubt it.  Both FDR and Eleanor had intense and romantic friendships, and I supposed some of them may have involved physical intimacy.  However, Daisy's starry-eyed adoration over many years doesn't seem to fit in with that.  We need to remember that it was a very different time.

For anyone interested in Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his era, this is indispensable, and Ward's annotations are even-handed and unobtrusive.



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Overkill

When I was writing up my review of Laurent Binet's novel/blog/series-of-unfortunate-events HHhH last night, I planned to mention my previous encounters with Reinhard Heydrich. Not personal encounters, thank goodness; Heydrich died in 1942 and was perhaps one of the most terrifying and deadly members of the Nazi administration -- which is saying something. However, I'm doing NaBloPoMo this month and I submitted my post within minutes of midnight as it was.

Binet mentions the television film Conspiracy in his book, which is indeed a memorable movie about the Wannsee Conference with a cast featuring such remarkable actors such as Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, David Threlfall, Colin Firth, plus about a dozen other actors who are familiar, not because they are famous, but because they are hardworking British (mostly) character actors.

Here is a taste of Branagh's and Tucci's interpretation of how Heydrich and Eichmann ran the meeting:

However, as chilling as Conspiracy is, the production team couldn't resist adding dramatic tension by making Threlfall's character and Firth's character more sympathetic, "good Nazis" (with some scruples, however faint) to contrast with the "more evil Nazis" (no scruples whatsoever). It's a disturbing aspect of an already disturbing reenactment.

Besides, I couldn't help comparing it with The Wannsee Conference (Die Wannseekonferenz)(1984). I stumbled upon this late one night on a PBS channel some years ago. At the time, I was bewildered, having never heard of the Wannsee Conference. I saw men, in various Nazi uniforms, chatting genially, sipping drinks, then sitting through what appeared to be a typical business meeting complete with maps and graphs. It makes the agenda all the more horrifying. No added drama is needed:

Heydrich, the "Butcher of Prague", is portrayed here by Dietrich Mattausch a busy and distinguished German actor who was born, ironically enough, in Sudetenland, now part of the Czech Republic.

A couple of years ago, I read an online review of this film by someone who had attended several business meetings in Germany. He said they were much like this one. Presumably without the swastikas and the outline for the murder of millions.

Maybe I've had enough of this kind of thing for a while. I've been having nightmares. On the other hand, just wait until you hear what else I've been reading this month...

Real cool

It was beginning to seem like a dangerous way to skip the first Hockey Night in Canada in many months. The Resident Fan Boy, younger daughter and I penguin-walked and skidded down the icy sidewalks between walls of snow. Fifteen centimetres of snow in one morning had given away to rain by evening, freezing into silver chutes. However, we had purchased rush tickets earlier in the day for a screening of West Side Story, with the instrumental soundtrack provided live by the National Arts Centre Orchestra and for the sake of younger daughter, who adores this musical, we were going - come Hades or high water (or frozen sidewalk).

Our rush seats, a wonderful bargain courtesy of younger daughter's student status, were in the mezzanine this time, almost dead centre. We had a beautiful view of most of the NACO, although the horn section was obscured by the movie screen because of our height above the stage. The conductor, who normally opens with a humourous banter, took the stage, bowed and immediately sat in front of what appeared to be a screen the size of a large laptop. We've been to Pops concerts where the musicians played live soundtracks before -- an evening of selections from films based on Rogers and Hammerstein musicals and a showing of Bugs Bunny cartoons years ago. I'd never seen how the conductor synchronized the live musicians with the soundtrack either of those times and now rather wished I'd brought my binoculars.

As the MGM lion roared and the three eerie whistles signalled the beginning of the film, I was astonished to feel my chest constrict with excitement. I mean, I've seen this movie dozens, if not scores of times. However, I don't think I've ever seen it on a big screen in a packed auditorium -- and Southam Hall in the NAC complex is a large venue. Three large green vertical columns moved from left to right across the monitor in front of the conductor who raised his baton and brought the musicians in.

The images and music were almost as familiar as the back of my hand, but I found myself concentrating in a way I'd never done before, marvelling at the beauty of the dancing, even in the fight scenes, noticing tiny things for the first time: how Riff controls his gang with a wordless jerk of the head; the playground where Tony begins singing "Maria" is the place where he will die at the end; the foreshadowing hint of "There's a Place For Us" at the end of the rapturous lovers' duet "Tonight".

Something else I'd never noted properly - the fabulous dancing of the Jets' girlfriends, both at the fateful gymnasium dance where Tony and Maria first meet and later in the edge-of-hysteria dance number "Cool" where the remaining Jets try to come to grips with the deaths of the rival gang-leaders Riff and Bernardo.
Watch those girls dance! They're doing most of the same moves the male dancers are, and they're doing it in skirts and heels. ('Twas ever thus.) Most of the dancers you see here were in the original Broadway production, although not necessarily in the same roles. The blonde girl is Carole Andreas, the original "Velma" on Broadway and also the wife (now ex) of Robert Morse who created the role a J. Pierpont Finch in How to Succeed in Business Without Even Trying.

More than fifty years later, some of the lingo is dated, but the dancing isn't. I was a bit taken aback when at intermission, an acquaintance of the RFB told me that she wasn't prepared for how skinny the dancers were. She meant she didn't think they looked substantial enough to be in a street gang, perhaps being more used to the six-packed footballish image of the present-day tough guy. We had just watched this men scramble over fences, hurdle horizontal bars, dance with girl on one shoulder. I told this woman that I wouldn't want to pick a fight with a Shark or a Jet: "They could dance circles around me."

For a great deal of the film, I simply forgot to watch the musicians as they played along, which is probably a testament to how good they were. The NACO, after all, is a world-class orchestra. I watched as younger daughter sat forward in her seat for the entire three hours, rapt. The Resident Fan Boy and I felt the same. It was almost like seeing the film for the first time.

One more thing: I never felt this way for one second during my first and only viewing of Les Miserables. West Side Story has heart-break and passion, but it's also got dancing and humour, all conveyed through the varied (let's emphasize this - varied), intricate music of Leonard Bernstein, the clever lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, and the fluid choreography of Jerome Robbins, to say nothing of the performances by the cast.

West Side Story dances circles around Les Miz. Simple as that. It was worth the skid.

Memories of Mackers

When I was seventeen, my Grade Twelve literature class had a field trip to go see Roman Polanski's infamous version of Macbeth which was playing at a local cinema as part of a Shakespeare-on-film festival with matinees for school groups.

When Polanski made this flick, it was only a year or so after his wife had been butchered, among others, by Charles Manson's disciples in Los Angeles. On top of this, Polanski added in images born of his boyhood memories of the Nazi persecution of Jews, including his own family, in Poland. This version of Macbeth omitted no opportunity for horror: the Thane of Cawdor was executed before our eyes, King Duncan's murder was shown in every gory detail, as was the rape and murder of MacDuff's household. Early on in the film, Macbeth and Duncan were having a little chat, while in the valley behind them, struggling men were being dragged to a huge gallows and strung up.

I spent most of the movie with my fingers in my ears and my head between my knees (I could do that when I was seventeen), but I could still hear the gasps and groans of my classmates. Plus sickening crunches.

The corker was when I emerged shaking into the lobby where a knot of girls from my school were in deep conference, punctuated by "EEEEEW"s. When I got close enough to hear the discussion, my life changed. They were disgusted by the fact that the witches were naked. It was then I knew that something was fundamentally wrong with society. More than two hours of rape, decapitation, skewering, and they were upset by nude old women. I wish I could say that attitudes have changed in the intervening years.

Anyway, last week, I finally received my library hold on Patrick Stewart's recent portrayal of Macbeth. It was on PBS a couple of years ago, but I only managed to catch bits of it, enough to know that I'd like to see the whole thing. Unlike Polanski, Rupert Goold (who directed this for the Chichester Festival Theatre and eventually brought the production to Broadway before it was adapted and filmed for television) elects to suggest rather than show -- which can amplify the terror. The one aspect that is rather more graphic than Polanski's version is in the interpretation of the witches who here are the Weird Nursing Sisters.

A YouTube contributor going by the handle tizerandchips has thoughtfully put together a comparison of our first glimpse of the witches from Polanski's version, Goold's version, and in the middle, from Australian Geoffrey Wright, three diabolical Melbourne schoolgirls.
Wow. After all that, we need to counteract the evil charms, don't we? Rather than sending you outside to turn around three times and spit, I offer my best-beloved scene from the third season of Black Adder where the Eighteenth Century incarnation of Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) explains the "Scottish Play" superstition to Baldrick (Tony Robinson) and then puts two supercilious actors (Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Connor) through the wringer. Hugh Laurie is the baffled Prince George.


And as a final antidote, counter-curse, or what you will, this delightful ditty by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, the same team who brought us the hilarious and heart-breaking musical "The Drowsy Chaperone". This was the opening theme for the second season of "Slings and Arrows" - one of my favourite TV series ever, and is sung here by the late great Graham Harley:
Call me superstitious or cowardly or weak
But I'll never play a character
Whose name one dare not speak

I'll play Hamlet
In doublet and hose
Or either of the Dromeos
But sorry, I won't play Mackers

I'll play Richard the Third
With a hump and a wig
Or Henry the Eighth
That selfish pig
But sorry, I don't do Mackers

Every soul who plays this role
Risks injury or death
I'd rather sweep the bloody stage
Then ever do
Mac-you-know-who

So give me King Lear, Cleopatra,
Romeo, Juliet, Doesn’t mat-ra
I’ll play them all for free
But I’d be crackers
To take on Mackers
Y'see I’m skittish about the Scottish Tragedy
Och-ay!