Tag: Blackpool

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Back to Blackpool: Lost Jewelry, Google Searches, and a Silent Discovery

Well, what do you want from me? That, I’m sure, is a question many web journalists ask themselves when pondering their reception. What is it that leads those following the threads of the internet to the dead end that is broadcastellan? In recent days (after the aforementioned Chinese invasion), the vast majority of folks who stumbled upon this journal did so by Googling for answers regarding Marlene Dietrich’s lost jewelry. Considering that the discovery of Ms. Dietrich’s earring in an amusement park in Blackpool, England, occurred and was shared here some time ago, I am rather puzzled by this upsurge of curiosity (as captured in the screenshot below).

Perhaps, it was a quiz show question and, owing to my musings on Dietrich’s loss, someone has won a little something. While not one chiefly concerned with giving people what they want (otherwise, I’d be writing less cumbersomely on matters less obscure), I took this as an occasion to return to the site of this attention-grabbing incident by screening Hindle Wakes (1927), a silent film partially shot on location in Blackpool (as well as the Welsh seaside resort of Llandudno).

Maurice Elvey’s Hindle Wakes (1927), the first film I successfully digitized from video tape using our (previously maligned) DVD recorder), takes viewers on a ride on the Big Dipper, the rollercoaster from which Dietrich dropped her bauble some seven years later. Like Bhaji on the Beach (1993), it captures the atmosphere of the place, a Vegas for laborers in the north of England, as well as the difficulties of getting away from one’s cares and responsibilities. More than earrings are lost here; and even though visitors hope that their indiscretions remain uncovered, their everyday invariably puts an end to the carnivalesque.

Despite this potentially tawdry premise, Hindle Wakes refrains from the sensational; indeed, its most thrilling scene, the drowning of the heroine’s female companion—a male-rebuffing tomboy whose behavior and demise called to mind the character of Martha in The Children’s Hour (previously discussed here)—is only talked of, not shown. Quietly remarkable, Elvey’s adaptation of Stanley Houghton’s oft-filmed 1918 play documents an indiscretion and its consequences.

Startlingly unconventional, the conclusion departs from both the virgin/whore schema of Victorian melodrama and the finance or romance driven match-makings of Victorian comedy, as the impecunious yet strong-willed heroine deals with her misstep without stooping to a makeshift union with the wealthy man who made love to her while engaged to another.

Of all the forty-odd movies I have seen so far this year (and listed, right), Hindle Wakes is at once the most obscure and surprising. Yet, if it had not been for all those stopping over in search of Dietrich’s jewelry, I might not even have watched it last night. Never mind the quiz show prizes; I walked away with something after all.

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Lost and Found: A Blackpool Romance

Well, this is a story sure to give hope to all those who, like me, are prone to misplacing things. Things will show up . . . eventually. In my case, it all started with a set of house keys I buried in a sandbox. Then went my retainers, which disappeared into the trash before they could do much straightening. Nowadays, I am constantly fishing for my glasses, rarely in places where I could have sworn to have left them. So, when I learned today that an earring lost by Marlene Dietrich has been unearthed at last, I just had to pass on the good news. My thanks to James Robert Parish, author of The Paramount Pretties (one of my Christmas presents last year) and It’s Good to Be the King, a new Mel Brooks biography, for alerting me to the story. It goes something like this:

Back in 1934, the glamorous Blue Angel descended upon the spa town of Blackpool, England, where she mingled with the vacationing multitude—purely for the sake of publicity, no doubt—at the Pleasure Beach amusement park. As if to prove that she was almost down to earth, Dietrich took a ride on the Big Dipper, the park’s new wooden rollercoaster. That is pretty much what I did when I went there some seventy years later—except that, rain-drenched as I was, I looked about as glamorous as a pair of wet socks. I sure wasn’t wearing anything that I could not afford to lose. Experience had taught me as much.

Ms. Dietrich, on the other hand, couldn’t afford not to look her most fetching as the stepped into the coaster. She probably looked just as smart leaving the park, with just the one, her hat covering the denuded lobe. At any rate, the earring was missing. No mere bauble, it was dear enough to the future star of Golden Earrings—a romance not based on her Blackpool experience—that she later inquired about it in writing, albeit to no avail. Today, said pearl was dug up from the mud, of which there is plenty in Blackpool, a place so vulgar that it makes San Jose look like a haven of cultural refinement. That, at least, was my impression, not having had the thrill of encountering a star of Ms. Dietrich’s calibre (or any calibre, for that matter), however pleasant the company in which I travelled.

No doubt, the folks who run (or ran down) Blackpool are delighted at this find. It is as if Ms. Dietrich were giving an encore performance from the grave, once again lending allure and intrigue to that aptly named dump of a seaside resort. To me, there could not be a more poignant illustration of the decline of Western civilization than the picture presenting itself to the workers who found said piece of jewelry among false teeth, glass eyes, and a wig, objects not claimed to have been lost by the star. According to a spokesperson for Pleasure Beach, the pearl “appears to have withstood the test of time quite well.” The same can certainly not be said of the site of this dig.

One thing Marlene Dietrich never lost—aside from her place in Hollywood history and the items aforementioned—was her German accent. Nor have I, as you can plainly tell by listening to one of my old-time radio podcasts; but in Ms. Dietrich’s case, the accent was both an asset and an impediment, accounting in part for the many ups and more downs of her career before, during, and after the Second World War.

Just before the golden era of Hollywood and radio drama was up, the aging actress could once more exploit the exotics of her Teutonic timbre. Having to rethink her media exposure at a time when rollercoaster rides and appearances at popular spots like Blackpool were not enough to keep alive a film career that had very nearly run its course, the aging diva began to take full advantage of the magic of radio to star in two dramatic series of her own. Dietrich and the radio—there’s an idea for a future podcast. Now, where did I leave my iPod?