IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 19 minutes, rated 5.3 by 435 cinemitizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Mixed. Good moments but no whole.
Two journalists mistakenly enter the Democracy of Gudavia and soon wish they had not done so. They are an odd couple, Brit Leslie Phillips is the photographer who plays the effete skirt chaser he made his own and burly and blunt and brash Paul Douglas is the American wordsmith.
They discover that once in Gudavia there is no way out for in the alpine castle is a mad scientist trying to develop super humans by dousing them with gamma rays. He wants no publicity from these two. One of his prodigies is the piano playing Hedda who resists by being creative, and the other is the martinet Hugo. These two are both about twelve years old.
They also find Eva Barton; that convinces them to stay. ‘Amen,’ sighed the fraternity brothers.
There are some nice scenes of the mountains on travelling mattes. A few scary moments with zombies from the mad scientist’s failed efforts. For, as he notes, mindless zombies have their uses, in a remark that anticipates the Tea Party. There is another scene that anticipates ‘The Village of Damned’ (1960).
But Hugo steals the show. He is the super-kinder who does the Mad Scientist proud. His weakness at the end is finely judged and effective though his subsequent transformation is saccharine. But the turning point is well done. He is played by Michael Caridia who was fourteen at the time.
The screenplay draws on many tropes, the micro state of Gudavia that appears on no maps, the mad scientist in the hilltop castle playing god, his hollow-eyed zombies, the Hitler youth uniform Hugo wears, the loving grandfather…… It has so many loose ends that none of them are tied. It is partly farce as with the comic opera military of Gudavia, and deadly serious when Hugo is a piano critic.
Eva helps Dr Mad in his experiments without a qualm until the journos arrive, and then goes all distressed. See, here is the evidence, and get a load of those condensers.
There is a nice scene in the telegraph office where the official is the perfect bureaucrat. Ever so polite and ever so pointless.
The project had a vexed production and at some point a young Albert Broccoli with Irving Allen took over production. Yep, them. Looking back from Chubby’s later career, one can see first drafts for scenes used later in the Bond films.
It was made in England. Douglas was there with his wife Jan Sterling who was playing Julia in production of ‘1984’ (1955), which has its own version of little Hugo. ‘1984’ and this film were released as a double bill at the end of 1956, one dead serious and one not.
There are comments on Paul Douglas’s career in the review of ‘It Happens every Spring‘ elsewhere on this blog and also on Eva Bartok’s in the review of ‘Spaceways’ elsewhere on this blog. He quit a successful career in radio sports journalism to try his hands in movies at age 42. She had more drama in her private life than in any movie she made, escaping Naziis and then Communists, and then a great many men.
‘Varina’ (2018) by Charles Frazier.
Genre: fiction and biography.
GoodReads meta-data is 368 pages, rated 3.7 by 4,857 litizens.
This book is a novel about the life and times of Varina Howell (1826–1906). Who? Varina Davis. Huh? Mrs Jefferson Davis. If it is still a ‘Huh’ go back to Angry Birds on the Smartphone. I read it as a biography of this First Lady. First Lady? Read on.
As a girl Varina was too tall, too serious, too dark, too talkative, too well read, too interested in the wider world, too big, too judgemental, too…. At seventeen her family was only too glad to see her wed Jefferson Davis, more than twice her age.
Jefferson came with baggage. He had married for love years before. It was a match not sanctioned by either family and the couple eloped. She was the daughter of a future president, Zachery Taylor. It was the time of the anti-vaxxers. On the honeymoon she died. Jefferson went into mourning and stayed there for seven years. N.B. Her parents did not want her to marry a soldier as Davis then was, not that there was any objection to him personally. They did not blame him for her death.
His family was an older brother, Joseph, who by primogeniture owned and ruled the family plantation with a whip in hand. The much younger brother, Jefferson, had nothing but the sufferance of Joseph. There was little of that. To get Jefferson out of the way, Joseph gave him a property to manage, but he retained ownership.
He pushed Jeff into the army to get him out from underfoot, and later pushed him into politics for the same reason. He disapproved of the first marriage because he wanted a dowry out of it, and when the couple eloped there was no dowry. The later marriage to Varina was arranged to suit Joe. Jeff had been moping around for seven years after his first wife’s death. In this telling Joe simply wanted to get Jeff settled. Not that he felt sorry for him, more annoyed with his constant gloom.
Old Joe had met Robert Owen, when the latter was on a tour in the United States, and Joe tried to realise some of Owen’s philosophy on his planation, adapting it to the slavery that — in Old Joe’s terms — united capital and labour. His descriptions of this arrangement are ridiculous but have the sort of inner logic that appeals to an autodidact. He had the words but not the substance of Owen’s practice per New Lanark, which we have visited.
Davis served first in the Black Hawk War in which few shots were fired in anger (where he may have crossed paths with Abraham Lincoln) and then in the Mexican War with distinction, and traded on that record to enter politics, pushed at every step by Old Joe. He become a Senator and then Secretary of War. He and Varina lived for years in Washington on the D.C. and no doubt he had a case of Potomac Fever. She liked the life there, entertaining and being entertained. The soupçon of Europe ambassadors brought. The access to northern merchandise unknown in Mississippi. The aura of history made and in the making. All of this appealed to this very young woman.
In ‘Varina’ there are several accounts of close personal relationships between owners and slaves. These are very nicely done. Jefferson had a body slave named Pemberton who went with him everywhere and who came to run the planation in all but name. They drank from the same cup; talked each morning and evening of the work. Yet occasionally when Jefferson was irritated a sting came into his voice, and Pemberton went quiet. Master and Slave were well aware of each other’s place.
In another instance there was a young women who grew up with a slave companion. They gossiped together; giggled together; picked out clothes together. They were like sisters, but not quite. Then one day when the white woman needed money she sold the slave’s ten year old child for the money to buy a new dress. The slave woman was heartbroken. When she wailed and cried, she was beaten…into submission.
Getting back to the book at hand, the story is told in flashback. Varina is interviewed long after the war. Much of her story concerned April 1865 and after. The evacuation of Richmond and the long flight south toward the El Dorado of Havana. In the course of this flight she observed the ruination visited on the Carolinas, and Georgia.
More often then than not doctors prescribed morphine for women, and Varina mixed hers with red wine, a lot. Doped up and docile seems to have been one goal. The name ‘Varina’ is a variant from the Greek for Barbara, referring to those who do not speak Greek.
Toward the end of her time, she edited and finished the memoirs that Jefferson could not complete. This seems an act of financial necessity in these pages and nothing more. The memoirs were an asset to be realised in difficult times.
There are vivid descriptions time of life along the Mississippi, sometimes easy going and at other times deadly.
It starts slowly and is written in the present tense. This latter is enough to put me off but one night for the lack of an obvious alternative on the Kindle I persevered, and it got more interesting and the present tense faded. Equally irritating is the absence of conventional punctuation, like quotation marks to set off and identify statements by the characters. Grrr!
After reading much about Jefferson Davis I wondered how anyone, wife included, could put up with him – pompous, prickly, proud, and worse. In both Allen Tate’s ‘Jefferson Davis: His Rise and His Fall’ (1929) reviewed elsewhere on this blog and Eli Evans’s ‘Judah Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate’ (1988), reviewed elsewhere on this blog, Variana figures as a player in the tragedy of the Confederacy.
Benjamin was one of the very few Richmond politicians who got along with Davis and he did so in good part by working with and through Varina, but none of that figures in this account, which is weighted to her life before and after the Confederacy, not during. That is too bad because my impression is that she exercised a moderating influence on the generally intractable Davis.
Which parts of the story are fact and which are fiction? I cannot say but the author seems scrupulous and includes a short bibliography.
Charles Frazier
Side Bar: Fanny Wright likewise tried to apply Owen at Nashoba Community in the 1820s Tennessee. Her aim was to teach slaves to earn their freedom through work so that emancipation would come at no cost to owners. While the rhetoric was high, the reality was not. I visited the locale in Memphis and did some library work on this community in Nashville a time ago. It was celebrity vanity at work.
22 October as never before or since.
1721 Peter the Great became emperor of all the Russians, and a quite few others. I once found this statue referred to as depicting Catherine the Great in a book by two journalists. Thus was confirmed many of my suspicious of the fourth estate. Seen it with my own eyes.
1884 Twenty-six countries adopted Greenwich Mean Time as longitude zero, with 24 time zones, at conference in Washington D.C. Greenwich was the focal point of a great many nautical charts and maps and was chosen because of that.
1938 Chester Carlson (1906-1968) invented the photocopier in the family kitchen. He tried to sell the machine to IBM, RCA, Kodak and others, but they see no use for a gadget that makes nothing but copies. He called it xerography meaning literally dry writing as distinct from the wet process of mimeograph. He made several fortunes out of it and gave most of it away, including a good deal to the United Nations. Below is the first exposure he made.
1975 USAF gave Sergeant John Matlovich a General Discharge because he had publicly declared his homosexuality. This charge denied Matlovich pension and health entitlements. A court later found for Matlovich. The medals were for killing, and the GD was for loving, he said.
1978 Pope John II was inaugurated. Polish born, he held on until 2005. He galvanised the papacy like few others and became a world leader in more than name.
21 October
When What
2137 BC Two Chinese court stargazer, Hi and Ho, made the first extent record of a solar eclipse. Hi and Ho? Irresistible.
1790 The French Revolutionary Government chose the Tricolor to replace Bourbon standard as the national flag. Red and Blue were the colours of the patron saints of Paris, Denis and Martin. The Marquis de Lafayette suggested adding the white as a traditional colour of France. Seen many of them.
1854 Florence Nightingale went to Crimea with 38 nurses during the Crimean War. We passed by one of her hospital sites in Istanbul once upon a time.
1879 Thomas Edison demonstrated the first commercial light bulb.
1944 The Provisional Government of Charles DeGaulle enfranchised French women.
20 October.
480 BC Greeks defeated Persians at Salamis in a naval engagement. Accordingly all those Greek words related to politics entered into Europe, e.g., democracy.
1097 Members of the First Crusade arrived at Antioch (Antakya) and set about destroying any and everything. Such was their Christian enlightenment. It is in that part of Turkey that lies between Aleppo Syria and the Mediterranean Sea.
1820 The United States bought Florida from Spain. The insects came at no additional cost. Been there.
1947 The House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) targeted Hollywood. Elia Kazan, Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor (of Grand Island), Walt Disney, and Jack Warner happily named names like Katherine Hepburn and Edward G Robinson among others as dangerous radicals. N.B. that Ronald Reagan steadfastly refused to name anyone. David O. Selznick was one of the few major figures in Hollywood who resisted HUAC. Members of HUAC loved the publicity that came from ruining lives and careers. It was the unacknowledged monster that roved Hollywood for a decade.
1973 Queen Elizabeth II opened the Sydney Opera House. Work had begun in 1958. When looking at it today remember it was done by slide rule, hand, and eye. Most the cost was born by a lottery run for years. Been there many times.
19 October has quite a history.
202 BC Roman general Scipio Africanus defeated Hannibal at Zama, ending the Second Punic War. Scipio prevailed against Hannibal where many previous Roman commanders had failed. Scipio was an innovator. He greatly simplified commands, delegated authority downward, and overcame the elephants by letting them pass through the lines with the lines closing behind them against the Hannibal’s infantry.
1812 Napoleon began the retreat from Moscow. What defeated him were General Typhus and General Hubris. General Winter deliver the coup de grace. Elsewhere on this blog there is a review of Andrew Roberts’s excellent biography of Napoleon that goes into more detail about his Russian campaign. The graphic shows the advance and retreat as diminishing resources, from the brilliant Edward Tufte’s book ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.’ It is often cited as the most elegant and intuitive presentation of a mass of data at a glance.
1917 Salvation Army Officers Helen Purviance and Margaret Sheldon delivered doughnuts to front lines American troops in France. They carried weapons and sported gas masks, along with the doughnuts to give to the dough boys. There were hundreds of Salvos in rear areas doing the cooking and packing. What if any relationship there is between this nickname — doughboys — and doughnuts is much discussed on the inter-web.
1943 Streptomycin was isolated by researchers. It became the first antibiotic effective against the scourge tuberculosis (which the anti-vaxxers wish to bring back). The researchers thereafter engaged in a long and torturous legal battle over the subsequent the glory and gold. Penicillin was the first antibiotic, and this was the second.
1954 Britain ceded Suez canal to Egypt by treaty and withdrew the 80,000 troops it had there. In a last spasm of colonialism two years later Great Britain went back into the Canal in one the most catastrophic foreign policy blunders of the ages. The irony is that the blunder came from the hand of one of the most experienced diplomats England ever produced.
17 October…..
When What
1888 Thomas A Edison patented an Optical Phonograph (movie) projector.
1907 The Marconi company began commercial wireless service between Nova Scotia and Ireland.
1912 Serbia and Greece declared war on the Ottoman Empire over Macedonia. This was the First Balkan War and a prelude to World War I.
1949 Work began on the Snowy Mountain Hydro-Electric project, one of the wonders of modern engineering. It was built by post World War II immigrants and it is still powering the east coast of Australia. It was in part social engineering.
1973 OPEC embargoed oil sales to USA and other Israeli allies.
18 October, just one thing after another.
1648 The Boston Shoemakers create the first trade union in North America. Why is no sporting team in Boston call the Shoemakers? Huh? Answer me that!
1851 Herman Melville published ‘Moby Dick.’ For reasons now lost, I read it both in high school and college. The student edition I had was abridged to delete much of the whaling and sailing detail.
1909 New South Wales surrendered 2,400 square kilometres of land for the Australian Capital Territory. In the field pictured below the planned city of Canberra arose. Been there many a time and hope to go ago in December to see an exhibition from the British Museum.
1929 English Privy Council ruled that women are persons in the law. The Premier of Alberta had named Emily Murphy, a municipal court judge for a decade, to a Senate vacancy. She had been the first woman magistrate in the British Empire. The Federal Government rejected the nomination and the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the authority of the Government of the Day to do so. Murphy and four associates, all member of the Alberta Legislature, pressed the case to the Privy Council in London, which in time ruled that women were persons and so qualified for the Senate. After 1949 such an appeal was no longer possible. Sometimes it is nice to have a higher authority on the job.
1954 Texas Instruments marketed the first transistor radio. I listened to many a ball game on a transistor radio (sometimes under the covers). It was another step in the miniaturisation of communication.
16 October update.
When What
1901 A Congressional vote to censure President Theodore Roosevelt failed by one vote. The cause? He had invited Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) dinner at the White House, saying that Mr Washington was a great American. He was an emancipated slave. I read Edmund Morris’s three volume biography of the remarkable Teddy some time ago. I read Washington’s ‘Up from Slavery’ as a boy.
1916 Margaret Sanger opened the first American birth control clinic in Brooklyn. A police arrest followed. A biography of her is on my long reading list.
1934 The Long March began; it lasted 368 days and covered 6,000 miles. As many as 50,000 died en route. From this ordeal Mao emerged as the unquestioned leader of the Communist Party of China.
1970 The October crisis deepened with the declaration of the War Measures Act. There were 8000 armed troops on the streets of Montreal and Gendarmerie royale du Canada made 500 arrests without habeas corpus. Minister of Labor, Pierre Laporte was murdered in retaliation. Strangled with his crucifix chain by one of kidnapper while the others watched.
2002 Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened in commemoration of the Library of Alexandria that was lost in antiquity. A smoker did not use the ashtrays provided.
15 October had its moments. Did it ever!
1529 Sultan Suleiman of the Ottoman Empire folded his tent and abandoned the siege of Vienna and retreated before the winter struck, so much wiser than either Napoleon or Hitler. I am told his tent can be seen in the Arsenal in Vienna and we hope to see it soon.
1917 The French Army executed Dutch woman Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (Mata Hari, ‘eye of the day’ in Malay) by firing squad at Vincennes. When stupid French strategies were repeatedly defeated, there could only be one explanation. Witchcraft! Some things never change.
1928 After a four day trip the German dirigible Graf Zeppelin landed in Lakehurst, NJ, ushering in a new era of lighter than air luxury Trans-Atlantic travel. That is what the posters said. We saw some specially designed lightweight luggage for Zeppelin flights at the Handbag Museum in Amsterdam.
1935 Il Duce’s Italians invaded Ethiopia. The League of Nations proved unequal to the challenge this war brought. Haile Selassie made a remarkable plea in Geneva for intervention. There are clips of it on You Tube. Frank Moorhouse’s ‘Dark Palace’ (2000) recounted some of this drama. I once spend a couple of days in the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva reading index card records.
1964 Nikita Khrushchev was ousted as secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin took over. It was a frightening time of uncertainty on the Platte.
