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.

The devil is in the nose

It's all part of an effort to bring attention to "Red Nose Day," which started in Britain in 1988 to raise money for poverty-stricken children in the UK and Africa.-- Todd Leopold

Part of what makes the career arc of Price interesting, aside from Tim Burton's panache in utilizing how an old man would die from emphysema, is the dramaturgic hints of truly great acting beneath the surface, which forms the irony of his later horror comedies, although he did try to play Richard the III seriously in an old black and white, and it was a bad performance. Yet, in The Song of Bernadette, Price was the Grand Inquisitor, and he wasn't a joke; he was frightening, as anyone would be in threatening prison to a future saint, borderline savant, persecuted for not towing the line. How well researched the screen play for Saint Bernadette was remains beyond my purview, but the film respects its audience, and has interesting things to say about caste, about chronic illness, disruption, and the criminalization of poverty, long before it became vogue to a modern progressive sensibility.

If actors become typecast due to their range limits, need for money, the impetus to keep working, Vincent Price leaves room for doubt, the possibilities of richer interpretation only occasionally realized. The meta-fictional Madhouse (1974) toys with hamming it. Peter Cushing also had minimal straight screen roles before he started killing vampires and dying as the mad scientist, but the realism beneath the camp genre is not quite edgy enough, and Pinewood Studios dropped an egg, perhaps because Vincent wouldn't quite be pushed. Cushing had moments of true stark menace here, but this was 74. Watergate, and radicalism opted to get a bit puffy, losing its way in the stuff of being a fashion statement. There is a great deal of this in Vincent's 70's films. Spoofing the textures, the hair, the rich cuisine. Only in The Whales of August, up against Bette Davis in tenacious infirmity does he tone down this mercurial quality. This was his true swan song to those whom he became endeared to over the years-- not Burton's fantasy about human nature, but as an aging ladies' man too emotionally brittle for constancy, a sweet and vulnerable dilettante. He certainly wasn't my generation, and skirted the edges of my grandparents time, but he is irreplaceable, however thick the melodrama.

If you'd like me to surprise you  with a positive diachronic movement in time, one of the members of Liberty on the Rocks was involuntarily kind to me at the last meeting. I have forgotten what that is like, to be offered attention, friendship, without an ulterior motive, without throwing myself at the man, without pushing any buttons, without using digital space to push limits. It won't save a hair on my dry and peeling scalp, but I suppose it is why we cling to life.