In two days I travel to see selkie and family, which I am really looking forward to, and will be doing so by plane, which I haven't done in a dozen years, and I am in a terrible mood because after a run of aggravatingly disrupted days I was finally in too much pain to sleep at all last night or see the movie in theaters I had planned tonight, so have some things like links.

1. Apparently the claim that SS Warrimoo existed simultaneously in two different days, months, years, decades, centuries, and hemispheres is unverifiable, but since it would have been both the funniest and the uncanniest thing the captain could have done with proximity to the International Date Line on New Year's Eve 1899, I shall hope it actually happened. I can only imagine how displeased the Elements on assignment were.

2. In the absence of a playscript, I persist in my quest to figure out what gives with The Girl Who Couldn't Quite (1950). I have been able to find little information on the production itself beyond a tantalizing claim in Film Industry in December 1948 that "John Argyle's first production for 1949 is to be a screen adaptation of Leo Mark's [sic] successful West End play, The Girl Who Couldn't Quite. The script is being written by the director, Norman Lee, in collaboration with Roma June, Leo Marks, and Lewis Cranston," which is definitely not the disposition of writing credits in the finished film, but I was able to cheat Google Books out of the summary of the stage play provided in Samuel French Ltd.'s The Guide to Selecting Plays (1966):

The Girl Who Couldn't Quite. Comedy. 3 Acts. By Leo Marks. M: 1 Young to Middle-aged Character Comedy, 2 Middle-aged Comedy, 1 Manservant. F: 1 Juvenile Character, 1 Young to Middle-aged, 1 Middle-aged. Produced 1947. A sitting-room. The story of a young girl, Ruth Taylor, who from some unknown cause suffers moods of fear and depression and is incapable of laughter. Her wealthy father is dead. Her mother, engaged on carrying on his charitable work, suffers equally from her early widowhood and the tragedy of Ruth's condition. Then, suddenly, gazing out over the garden, Ruth laughs at last. The cause is the appearance of a quaint tramp who, on being brought into the house, answers to the name of Tim. In the hope that he may be the solution to the problem, Tim is invited to become a guest for an indefinite period and after some reluctance he is persuaded. A queer character, with original ideas of kindness and charity, he is eventually responsible for a great change in Ruth although his methods are most unconventional and often embarrassing. By his simple sincerity he extracts from Ruth the origin of the fear that caused her strange mental state, namely, a cruel and unnatural nurse. The effort of self-revelation brings about an attack of amnesia. Ruth completely forgets her surroundings and family, as well as her past fears. Tim, however, is now dangerous to her full recovery, and must go. The family, intensely grateful, find it both painful and difficult to break this news to him. At last it dawns on Tim that his moment of parting has come. He takes with him no reward but the knowledge of his achievement and Ruth's affectionate gratitude, though she may never know what he has done for her. Fee, £4 4s. Price, 6s.

Which actually didn't give me much more information than I had in the first place from Leo Marks beyond confirming the general opening-out of the play for film and specifically did not help me assign an authorship to the issues of tone and pacing and random jags of subplot, so I fell down a fragmentary rabbit hole of available contemporary reviews. The best in terms of information as well as appreciation looks like Harold Hobson, who saw the play in the second week of its run at the St. Martin's Theatre in August 1947 and leaves the impression that it shared its faults and virtues more or less directly with the film:

The Girl Who Couldn't Quite is by no means half-witted. It is very far from imbecile. I would not indeed be understood to suggest that it is a good play. Even the effects of a three weeks' holiday of blazing sunshine working on a nature generous and kind-hearted to the point of moral weakness cannot blind me to the fact that The Girl Who Couldn't Quite has several surprising errors of tastes, and in the matter of construction is what Mr. Winston Churchill once happily described as a "boneless wonder."

It is confused and confusing. It jumps at curtain-rise into the middle of its subject with so breathless a leap as to bark the skin off its knees, it mentions key-words so casually that intelligent and attentive playgoers may be excused if they do not know what its most exciting scene is about, and the author too frequently gives the impression that he is waiting for something to turn up. Now and again, however, something does turn up; it is generally inappropriate, often impressive, and always unexpected.

There are several scenes in the play that are quite touching, there is one that is very moving, and another that is gripping and frightening. The central character is a young girl who has been so terrified in childhood that nothing can make her laugh; the doctors can do nothing for her, the psychiatrists are baffled, and even the best-regarded comedians of our time cannot bring to her lips the faintest ghost of a smile. Then, through the windows of the great house in which she lives, she sees a man, handsome, tall, splendid, and she breaks out into the first laughter she has ever known. Naturally, there is a hue and cry after this magnificent stranger, who is eventually brought into the drawing-room, captured and struggling, and turns out to be, as most of the audience has already guessed, not splendid, or tall, or handsome, but a scarecrow tramp, jabbering, in the patient and gentle voice of Mr. Clifford Mollison, the most extreme illiterate Cockney.

It is this Cockney who cures the girl. In a scene of considerable power he elicits from her the terrible story of her nurse, and it is typical both of the play's strength and its weakness that this story has some of the creeping terror that Hugh Walpole used at times to evoke, and yet hardly makes clear that it is about a nurse at all. But, to those who are fortunate enough to get the hang of the thing, this scene is a worthy companion-piece to The Killer and the Slain, and even to The Turn of the Screw. It is, moreover, like nothing else in the play, which, when it is not puzzling by its technical maladroitness, has a sentimental charm recalling (faintly?—perhaps) Barrie and Milne. This charm is seen most beautifully in the ending, where the girl, cured, in one respect sees less clearly than when she was ill; Mr. Mollison—at last perceived (and wrongly perceived) as a thing of rags and tatters merely—most softly and grievously takes his dismissal: a scene sad and enchanting.

[. . .] Finally, then, the piece is full of mistakes, and its inept title puts one in the wrong mood to appreciate its merits. But the merits are there. And Mr. Marks may well reflect that eventually it is by his merits, and not by his defects, that an author is remembered. Or where would Wordsworth be?

Which is not what I expected to find. I am left with the confused best guess that the stage and film versions may have differed in their random jags of subplot and issues of pacing and tone—if Hobson complains about the play leaping straight into the main action, it can't have suffered from the film's meandering first act—but worked out to the same effect, the muddle of a comedy of manners around the weird, real heart of the fairy tale. Or the screenplay is just that much closer to the playscript than the credits gave out. In any case, this review also looks like the one Marks was thinking of in his footnote: "One benevolent reviewer . . . likened its climax to The Turn of the Screw. The others screwed it altogether, though a few were kind enough to suggest that the author try again." I found some of those, too.

3. From talking with rinue about Benjamin Britten, I just found out that Montagu Slater, whom I know almost strictly as the librettist for Peter Grimes (1945), wrote a 1944 novel about speedway racing called Once a Jolly Swagman, later adapted into a 1949 film of the same name which I can't believe I missed in the summer of 2020 because it has (a) motorcycles (b) Dirk Bogarde, so spatch and I are going to watch it for my erev birthday, i.e. immediately.