The Occupation of Paris

They hoped Petain was playing the Germans at a double game and was secretly planning the liberation of France. --Terry Crowdy

You have to reach for it in odd places, in schematics like The Song of Bernadette, a film not so friendly to institutional Catholicism as it might initially appear, though it is otherwise reverent to Mary, who was elevated by the Church as a strategism against pagan goddesses like Diana, but Vincent Price, in the right role, wasn't all high camp, and rather presages how he'd die in this youthful vehicle. The film, dated as it is, has its own medical model ruthlessness towards cancers we're still fighting, to little avail, and beneath the surface, buttered up with palatable salvation, it is a bit stark about disease.

Of all celebrity absences, I feel Price as a loss, a cutout with his outline that comes through in translation. I haven't quite digested Lauren Bacall's death either, though I have little reason to mourn her, as I study a film like Birth with care, as a precursor to The Others, which also acts as a sealant to Kidman's split with Cruise, maniac man with a grin. I do mourn Peter Falk, but his homeliness is a dated palliative to a liberalism stripping us of every possible anchorage.

In my relief at finding the late Bruno Cremer's new time slot, he too felled by the crab, I wondered if I'd have been happy married to a cool cucumber like Georges Simenon, and rapidly surmised a negation due to a sense of an urgent ruthlessness about his work. If I ever get back on my feet, however unlikely, I need to read more Simenon. My hatred of what I've done to myself is killing me as fast as any future date with advancing COPD, congestive heart failure, or colon polyps. I keep missing medical appointments for script even as I master the shimmy to deal with the Jazzy Quantum, and leave you now to try try again, setting the scaffold, my wheels, at least, still turning; my version of immortality, living on as one of Maigret's enigmatic females. I do not know how to save Europe, but I am related to the Marinelli's in Italy who work the Don Matteo production crew.