Thursday 22 July 2010

THE SILVER SCREEN



Here is a mercifully short and exquisite fillum starring myself, made in Palençia in the Bullfight Bar. A brief movie career, but glorious.

Indeed, films are the subject of today's offering. Recently my dear wife bought me sixteen movies on Cd's made by Ealing Studios. I lived many years in Ealing and knew the studios, and the pub across the road from them, The Red Lion, well.
The films involved all date from the forties to the sixties, before the BBC took over the studios.

So far, I have watched four - Nicolas Nickleby, Hue and Cry, The Ladykillers and The Lavender Hill Mob.
'Nickleby' is not bad - the others are awful. Worse than I either remembered or expected. I should have known.

Not that I don't enormously enjoy watching them - many use location shots of various parts of London, which is very nostalgic for me.

I should have known that they would be bad, because Wittgenstein, who liked to relax during the nineteen-forties by going to 'the pictures' declared - as an unassailable truth - the the British were incapable of ever making a watchable movie.
He favoured American Westerns and musical comedies. His favourite 'star' was Carmen Miranda.
Well, he was a philosopher.

Looking at these laborious, dim-witted efforts, one can see his point. Still, I have to say that during this time, David Lean and Hitchcock were making some excellent works of art.

But not in my back yard.

2 comments:

Laura said...

Well that was fun! Nice to "see" you. I think you may have a future in film....

Matt O'Gara said...

Bravo! Enfermeria in a bar. That's clever!
What about my old fave - The man in the white suit, is that in the Ealing list?