Myth Happens

I am once again spending the night away from home, since home according to the notice we found on our door this afternoon is due to be visited by the sewer calliope in the morning. It is convenient to one of my doctor's appointments, but I am territorially resentful. Last night I went to bed hours before it was reasonable and obtained some sleep before the advent of construction thereby.

"Rocket Test on Remote Scottish Island Ends in Flames" is exactly the sort of headline I have seen in British science fiction of the '50's and '60's and it feels like a bait-and-switch that the rest of the article was extremely not written by Jimmy Sangster or Nigel Kneale.

Watching Herbert Wilcox's Odette (1950) just a few weeks after ITV's Wish Me Luck (1988–90) produces a slight effect of double vision in that Odette Sansom was one of several female agents of SOE remixed into the fictional protagonists of the television series, but not radically more of one than my knowledge of the Spindle network coming originally from Leo Marks' Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941–1945 (1998), where he devotes considerably less time to the relationship that developed in the field between the married Sansom and her future second husband Peter Churchill and rather more to his perennial suspicions of blown circuits, critical remarks on agents' coding skills, and reliably affectionate mentions of their wireless operator Alec Rabinovitch, whose parting gift of a photograph of Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling—a callback to the time only the interruption of the head of F section had prevented their mutual enthusiasm for boxing from devolving into a black eye for Marks—became one of the codemaker's few talismans of the war, outlasting its sender whom Odette eulogizes as one of the best and bravest pianists of SOE before turning him over to Peter Ustinov, who shoves all of his scenes up his sleeves for safekeeping and thus despite the admirable efforts of Anna Neagle and Trevor Howard walks off with a decent percentage of the picture. Perpetually disheveled and grousing as profanely as the BBFC will let him, chain-smoking through an evening of checkers with the pistol in his pocket all their secrecy never affords him the chance to use, he registers as instantly as if the audience has spent months in harness with him as the kind of unabashed pain in the ass who will have your back every time and kvetch about it: "Three weeks and not a goddamn message!" He hates mountains, both for transmitting through and sleeping on. He's always misplacing things and he never misses a sked. His last scene at Baker Street sees him out on a note of comedy, but his inflexible insistence on being returned to France is bittersweet when we know from the prologue delivered by no less an unreliable authority than Maurice Buckmaster that the drop will be—shipped to a concentration camp, not shot or hanged as an agent but gassed as a Jew—the death of him. Marius Goring in tinted glasses offers the only comparable color in the supporting cast as an Abwehr spy-catcher who likes to see himself as the good cop instead of the Gestapo, climactically and perhaps ahistorically called on his self-deluding Nuremberg defense. I have now seen Neagle as two national heroines and should perhaps catch one of her romances with Michael Wilding sometime. Sansom's tradecraft in Cannes and Annecy remains more interesting to me than her torture in Ravensbrück, which means I might as well re-read Elizabeth E. Wein's Code Name Verity (2012). I bet Peter Ustinov, like the real Rabinovitch, nom de guerre Arnaud, could swear in four languages.