Tag Archives: Alec Guinness

THE LADYKILLERS (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955)

Uncategorized, , , , ,

A friend recently reminded me that THE LADYKILLERS is set around King’s Cross, with St. Pancras visible in so many of the external shots. So when I saw the disk at the shop earlier today, I thought I’d revisit. The area is unrecognisable from now. A fat-faced Peter Sellers in an early film role and Herbert Lom, with hair, are recognisable but both look so different than they did in their Inspector Clouseau heyday. And what’s with Alec Guiness’ odd prosthetics make-up? It’s thought to be patterned after Kenneth Tynan but I see him more as a cross between Nosferatu and his henchman, and rather unnecessary. None of this ultimately detract from the ingeniousness of the comedy which Alexander Mackendrick directs with a very pleasing combination of the macabre and the endearing. A shared sense of good manners and propriety is the very basis of William Rose’s screenplay, the rationale for each plot development, and the film is unthinkable without it. I suppose it’s part of what makes Ealing Ealing. I saw it in the Studio Canal disc, and it looks wonderful, but the default is German, which makes watching things, particularly the extras, irksome, as none of the main titles are translated; a bother when they offer essential information on the disc. Stil, the three-strip technicolour looks wonderful.

 

José Arroyo

An observation on The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann, 1964)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , ,

fall-of-the-roman-empire

 

I´m a great admirer of Anthony Mann. He´s not only the director of some of the greatest Westerns ever but a kind of celebrity in Spanish pop culture as he married Sara Montiel, the reigning diva of Spanish Cinema of the late fifties to Mid-sixties. The producer Samuel Bronston, is also an important figure, bringing in to Spain big-budget runway productions such as El Cid (1961)and 55 Days at Peking (1963)and, along with them, lots of money and employment. I somehow missed The Fall of the Roman Empire. I enjoyed it very much but would have to see it again to offer more valuable observations.

The one thing that led ,me to write the post is that I was idly watching the film and thought, ‘oh those hills look just like the ones of the area in Spain I was born into’. Then I search in wiki and realise the film was indeed shot there. And it was weird to see *my* landscape figured by all those blond blue-eyed faces: Stephen Boyd, Alec Guinness, John Ireland, Christopher Plummer, Mel Ferrer. Even Omar Shariff, Sofia Loren and James Mason, though darker and more plausible, didn´t quite fit in.

It was a kind of blondfacing of landscape, a cultural erasure where the world belongs to some types of faces — at home in and ruling all kinds of landscapes — and not to others. Of course I grew up watching this kind of thing in Canada, where Montreal and Toronto stand-in for New York and British Columbia stands in for Colorado or whatever. But this felt different somehow, the landscape of the Sierra de Guadarrama standing in for an ancient Rome peopled by lbondes (at least the red hair of the invading German Barbarians was motivated by the plot). A thought, though one probably not worth very much as millions of Syrians are denied safety in Turkey and in Europe.

 

José Arroyo