It has been a long day surprisingly filled with errands. Notes.

1. Because we had recently seen Roger Livesey in Green Grow the Rushes (1951), I showed spatch I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) last night. I hadn't seen it in the ten years since I wrote that post; I had remembered Pamela Brown like a rain-tangled Artemis of the Hebrides and Wendy Hiller's polished cheekbones and finally wild hair, but I had forgotten that I find Livesey more beautiful here than in any other role I have seen, which is fair, since Hiller needs to fall in love with him inside of eight days, knocked sideways by her heart as if by the gales between Mull and Kiloran. He's long-legged and he looks as good in a kilt as the dancers of the pre-war days that old Mrs. Crozier dreamily recalls ("The men—the men are more splendid than the women!") before the cèilidh, but his quizzical face and his sea-sounding voice seal the deal for me. Rob noted how often and unusually the actors are backlit, mixing the theatrical with the natural world. Here as in A Canterbury Tale (1944) the cinematography is Erwin Hillier's and while I can't say for certain that he was the decade's best photographer of landscapes in black and white, he can show you a rainbow against a luminous grey sky and that really impresses me. He got the location footage for the Corryvreckan scenes himself, which is William Wyler levels of committed. It paid off: everything in the film feels at once real and charged beyond the ordinary, whether it's Catriona amid her wolfhounds, Torquil rebuilding an engine, Joan leaning into a ladder to watch the dancing, Bridie waiting at twilight on the jetty's sea-washed stones. A telephone box by a waterfall. What happens when the wind finally drops.

2. In keeping with Powell and Pressburger suddenly falling back into my life, I read that the BBC has commissioned a new adaptation of Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus (1939). I should give the film another chance; I enjoyed it the first time, but the distancing effect of the vividly, deliberately artificial sense of place kept me from connecting with it as much as I think I might have if I had approached it like The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), which isn't interested in realism for a second and doesn't expect its audience to be, either. (To be fair to my hindsight self, I wouldn't see Hoffmann until about two weeks after Black Narcissus and I never did write about it. I never wrote about A Matter of Life and Death (1946), either, but that one actually left me cold. The way Andrew Moor writes about David Niven in that movie is making me think I should reconsider it. I hope he's right.) I have no idea how a more realistic version will work. It will not have Jean Simmons in brownface, which I am fine with, but it will also not have Deborah Kerr, Kathleen Byron, or David Farrar, and that's more difficult.

3. Thank you for the 1940's pressbook for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), BFI. I have not seen that film in ten years, either, and should. A number of Theo's lines have become germane again.

In non-film news, I really resent this administration for firing James Comey in a way I cannot celebrate.