Tag: Claudette Colbert

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Since He Went Away; or Ten Came Home

I could have gone on. I enjoy going on here about whatever comes to my ears or opens my mind’s eye; and even the realization that too much else is going on to warrant such going-ons generally won’t stop me from sharing it all in this journal. What did stop me (from going on about my recent trip to Prague, I mean) was our phone line, which is just as unpredictable as the Welsh weather—and apparently under it whenever it gets wet. Once again, we have been without phone or internet, owing to wires that seem to have been gnawed at by soggy sheep or are otherwise rotting away where the valley is green with mold.

What with our satellite TV on strike as well and my partner away overnight, it has been quiet here in our Welsh cottage. Just Montague and I (and an academic paper on pottery and communism I had agreed to edit some time ago). Listening to the blustery wind, the mailbox flapping in it with nothing for me in it, and the dog barking at it just made me feel all the more cut off from the world, as if being around had been postponed because of rain.

Anyway. That was yesterday. In the meantime, life has returned to the old cottage. I got to hear from a former colleague who happened to Google me after over a decade of silence; thank a friend for returning me to Prague by recommending The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the first chapter of which I read today, and was presented with this set of Ross Filmsterne, miniature photographs of my favorite leading lady, Ms. Claudette Colbert. I thought I’d spread them out here before adding them to my Colbert page. And I thought I’d share as well (and for once) just how much glad I am to be in the presence of the slyly (mis)leading man who came home and surprised me with those pictures today.

Now, had I been online yesterday, I might have noted the minor anniversary of Ms. Colbert’s participation in an all-star promotional broadcast titled “Movietime, USA,” a Lux Radio Theater special aired on 24 September 1951, ostensibly designed to commemorate the opening of a movie theater in downtown Los Angeles some fifty years earlier.

“Movietime, USA” features Colbert and co-star Ann Blyth in a scene from Douglas Sirk’s Thunder on the Hill, which had its premiere that month. Producer-host William Keighley sets the scene, which contains one of my favorite lines in movie melodrama:

This is England. The countryside near the North Sea. For two days now, an angry flood has engulfed the lowlands, and the villagers have fled to the only place of safety, the convent and hospital of Our Lady of Reims. Among the new arrivals are a woman and a girl . . .

That girl is rain-drenched Valerie Carns (Blyth), who doesn’t seem to care much about catching cold. When one of the nuns, Colbert’s Sister Mary, expresses her concern, the young woman explains that she was on her way to the gallows. She bursts out hysterically: “Can you see the notices. Hanging postponed . . . because of rain!” Never mind that some folks just can’t seem to find that proverbial silver lining. I settle for a working phone line.

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Wallace Beery Was Indisposed; or Stand-ins to Sit Down For

The show must go on, as they say. They, obviously, have not been on British soil this summer, most of which appears to be under water. “Fair Albion”? It’s Altantis, I tell you. While all those braving the deluge are keeping their stiff upper lips well moisturised, I am staying put and dry, steeped in theater and a flood of memories. This evening, I was being treated to radio adaptations of Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (previously discussed here) and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Never mind that such adaptations may be mean substitutes for the real thing. You’d have to be out of your mind to keep out of the theater-of-the-mind on a day like this. Besides, sometimes ersatz is all you can sit down to.

Who for instance, has ever seen or is likely to attend a production of Don Marquis’s comedy The Master of the Revels (1934), a condensed version of which was soundstaged on this day, 20 July, back in 1935 over at Al Jolson’s Shell Chateau? The star was Henry Hull, who, as the star of the sensationally long-running Tobacco Road, packed them in that summer at what is now the Eugene O’Neill Theater (where a couple of cloud-covered moons ago I had the dubious fortune of taking in this year’s Tony Awards darling Spring Awakening).

One year later to the day, Walter Huston and Claudette Colbert (pictured) stepped behind the microphone to recreate their roles in the Kenyon Nicholson’s comedy The Barker. The two Broadway-trained leads were substituting for no-shows Wallace Beery and Stuart Erwin, who were scheduled to go on that night in another play. Now, Clara Bow proved a lovely substitute for Colbert when the play was adapted for the talkies; but this is as close to Biltmore Theater anno 1927 as modern media will get you.

Also on this day, in 1942, radio played The Philadelphia Story, a star-studded event that raised the curtain on a new Government-sponsored venture, the Victory Theater. I’ve seen The Philadelphia Story some time ago at London’s Old Vic; but that show, starring Jennifer Ehle and Kevin Spacey (whom I didn’t like much tottering under A Moon for the Misbegotten, either), truly felt like a substitute for the movie version. At the Victory, at least, you get to hear the original cast of that cinema classic.

Yes, when summer pulls a Wallace Beery, you appreciate radio’s importance of being ersatz.

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I’m Not a Fan

Well, I’m not a fan of . . . anything. That is to say, I am not a fan of the word. Fan, fanatic, fanaticism. Those lexical expressions of inflexibility, those dictionary indicators of obduracy ought to be reserved for folks who are determined to blow themselves up for what they believe to be their beliefs, for the indiscriminals who are prepared to take the lives of others around them for the sake of an idea or an ostensible ideal (I’ve got Glasgow and London on my mind). No, I am not inclined to go quite so far in my devotion. It does not follow, however, that I am incapable of getting passionate or downright pigheaded, even when such fervor goes against my better judgment.

Permit me to opine for the sake of defining. For instance, I strongly disliked Britain’s former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, simply because I could not stand his grin and his (to me) mannered way of speaking; never mind his policy in Iraq, which was reason enough to disdain him. I have nothing yet to say about Gordon Brown, who mercifully abstains from mugging. I am opposed to Britain’s newly enforced smoking ban, no matter how many lives could presumably be saved by such a curtailing of pleasure. I refuse to visit my native country of Germany, along with Switzerland and France, and have choice words for those who turn down a nice cut of meat in favor of bean sprouts or tofu.

Unlike notions, opinions are never vague. Voicing them—a hazardous prerogative these days—is a retreat into what lies past caution, beyond apprehensions of censure known as political correctness, adjustments in expressed thought commonly disguised as reason, or, at any rate, as what is reasonable. Uttering what you can barely get away with can be a welcome getaway from the sincerity-divested shelter of platitude to which the mealy-mouthed have chosen to confine themselves. That goes only for the intelligent and open-minded; the unthinking, who can do nothing but opine, have no use for such relief, which makes them far more dangerous than any strongly voice opinion could ever be.

Meanwhile, I much rather rave than rant. I prefer to reserve my energy—and this little nook in the web—for things I look upon with uncommon fondness (such as radio, whose neglected virtues I extol in this journal) and people I adore in a manner that I, an atheist, refuse to label idolatry. A few decades ago, I decided that, while not fanatic, I fancied a certain leading lady of Hollywood’s aureate days. The lady in question is Claudette Colbert. French-born, no less. My latest acquisition—above poster for the 1947 thriller Sleep, My Love—arrived today and awaits a spot on whatever wall remains to display it. Space, by now, is at a premium; only yesterday, I made room for this announcement for Colbert’s 1941 vehicle Skylark. It is probably not what you’d expect to find in a Welsh cottage—unless, that is, you knew me and knew I had come to live there with someone so willing to humor my foibles and fancies.

So, what is the difference between a fan and a fancier? The fan cannot see; the fancier has a selective gaze. The fan discriminates; the fancier is discriminating. The fan is dead to the rest of the world; the fancier is alive to the idiosyncrasies of his or her passions. No, I am decidedly not a fan . . .

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Things Eve Peabody Taught Me

Well, it is the “Little Paris of Middle Europe.” At least that’s how our newly arrived Eyewitness Travel Guide introduced me to the city of Budapest. Since I am about to visit the Hungarian capital, I’ve been flicking the pages to get acquainted with the place, its people, and its language; but whenever I find myself in need of cultural initiation I go about it in a roundabout way, with a stopover in Hollywood. Or Paris. You know, the really big Paris to the West of Middle Europe.

You can really learn a lot from old Hollywood movies, as long as you don’t get taken in or turned off by fake sets and phony accents. Take Mitchell Leisen’s 1939 screwball romp Midnight, for instance, and profit from the experience of American adventuress Eve Peabody (as portrayed by Claudette Colbert, whose career was the recent topic of an Alternative Film Guide discussion). Eve’s story, the gist of which you can follow in this recording of a Lux Radio Theater adaptation broadcast on 20 May 1940, will teach you a thing or two about traveling on a budget of little more than a centime with a hole in it, about crashing a society party with a pawn ticket, and about the perils of unwittingly impersonating a Hungarian baroness—practical stuff not generally covered by Baedekers.

Now, as the previous entry into this journal will tell you, I have just been in the company of a true Hungarian baroness last night, one with an accent to prove at least the Hungarian part of her past. The misleading lady Eve, on the other hand, has to work somewhat harder to hoodwink her way out of the hood (in her case, the Bronx). After suffering a “nasty accident” in Monte Carlo (“The roulette system I was playing collapsed under me”), down-and-out Eve is forced to depend on little more than her wits, her sex appeal having gotten her into too much trouble already.

She takes the name of the first person she met in Paris, one Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), a Hungarian cabbie who’s been rather too eager to chauffeur her around town in her futile attempt to land a gig as a nightclub singer. “I guess, mine is strictly a bathtub voice,” she concludes, and makes a swift exit before Tibor can make good on his offer of taking her home. “No woman ever found peace in a taxi. I’m looking for a limousine.” However much she really likes the guy, it’s dough, not romance, that this dame is after.

At the swanky soiree onto which she happens when dodging those driving forces (the Hungarian, the rain, and the subconscious), the Czerny handle proves somewhat of a liability. The assembled high society assumes Eve to be one of the Czernys—a baroness, no less. And while it proves a breeze for Eve to slide around the foreign angle by alleging to be a Czerny by marriage, not birth, she slips on a treacherous bit of trivia and soon blows her cover.

When asked about that “most enchanting” city of Budapest, where she claims to have left her ailing husband, the baron, she is dealt a trick question about the town’s famous subway. “Did they ever finish that?” a guest at the dull get-together she’s managed to infiltrate inquires. “The streets are still a little torn up,” she responds, rather flustered. Her inquisitor did not need to hear any more to know this Eve from Adam. The Budapest metro, after all, is one of the oldest subways in the world, and Miss Peabody is little more than an impersonatrix eager to get away from a past that involved being squeezed each day into the Bronx local.

According to Hollywood justice, Eve gets away with it all . . . and walks away on the arm of Czerny to boot. In fact, having gotten it wrong works out all right for her. History, geography, facts and figures—none of that matters, Midnight suggests, as long as you’ve got beauty, charm and moxie. Considering that I still know so little about my destination, and a gold lamé gown like Eve’s does so little to enhance whatever charm I might have, I’d better cram plenty of moxie into that duffle bag of mine.

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It Happened Another Night: A Return Trip for Colbert and Gable

Well, you can’t go home again; but that sure doesn’t stop a lot of folks from getting a return ticket or from being taken for a ride in the same rickety vehicle. And with pleasure! Before I head out to the theater for another meeting with Moll Flanders, who’s been around the block plenty, I am going to hop on the old “Night Bus” that took Colbert and Gable places—and all the way to the Academy Awards besides.  On this day, 20 March, in 1939, the Depression era transport was fixed up for a Lux Radio Theater presentation of It Happened One Night. Whereas Orson Welles would try to shove Miriam Hopkins and William Powell into their seats for the Campbell Playhouse adaptation of Robert Riskin’s screenplay, Colbert and Gable (as Peter Warne) were brought back for Lux, reprising their Oscar-winning roles of runaway socialite Ellie Andrews and the reporter on her trail.

Also on board that night were Walter Connelly as Ellie’s father and, “believe you me,” Roscoe Karns as the fellow traveler Ellie can stand even less than the arrogant newshound—”Yessir. Shapeley’s the name, and that’s the way I like ’em.”

Of course, if you like ’em like Shapeley, George Wells’s rewrite of the Production-Coded tease that is It Happened One Night will be a disappointment. For starters, you won’t get to admire Colbert’s traffic-stopping gams or Gable’s retailer-headache of a bare chest. Capra’s down-to-earth comedy suffers badly from becoming airborne—if, indeed, it ever does.

On the airwaves, you won’t get to hear Ellie’s liberating plunge into the ocean; her story picks up at the bus terminal, with Peter getting fired while the “Extra, Extra” of a newsboy alerts him to the scoop that could revive his career. Before we quite get why Ellie is out of her element, Peter is already in his, as the elements of screwball are beaten to the pulp of romance.

The old bus sputters along as if someone had slashed its tires. Gone, too, are many of Riskin’s censors-defying innuendos. Still, if you got a mischievous mind, you can tear down the Walls of Jericho or any barrier that might keep you from imagining what is really happening between Ellie and Peter. “You haven’t got a trumpet by any chance, have you?” Luckily, I always carry a spare.

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Having Legs: The Calm After the Storm

Well, I don’t know whether hard luck can be said to have them. Legs, I mean; but this one sure lingers. So, just in case you were wondering: the violent storm mentioned in my previous post caused greater problems than the alluded to runaway trash can. I have been without phone and internet ever since and am typing these lines while sipping tea at a wireless cafe, repairs (or, at any rate, inspection and assessment of the problem) being scheduled for next week. Until the service is restored, I am biding my time watching old movies, reading even older books while broadcastellan—not designed for hurried oneliners from a cell phone or anything requiring a rushed update—remains dormant. I bet I am missing this more than any of you. . . .

My comparatively trivial “affliction” is well expressed in these lines by Walter Scott, whose Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer (1815) I picked up to while away the hours:

Here was a country gentleman, whose most estimable quality seemed his perfect good nature, secretly fretting himself and murmuring against others for causes which, compared with any real evil in life, must weigh like dust in the balance. But such is the equal distribution of Providence. To those who lie out of the road of great afflictions, are assigned petty vexations, which answer all the purpose of disturbing their serenity [. . .].

The legs on display here, by the way, belong to Claudette Colbert; I spotted them some time ago when flicking through an issue of the British Picture Post from December 1938. Ah, the joys of lagging behind the times . . .

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So Proudly We Hail(ed); or, Movies They Dare Not Make Today

Well, they sure don’t make them as they used to. I don’t know how many times you have uttered that line, indifferent to the rules of grammar, whether as a lament or a sigh of relief. Take So Proudly We Hail, for instance, the 1943 war drama I watched last night. Until I decided that doing so would be rather too self-indulgent (considering my love for a certain leading lady), I thought of discussing it yesterday, corresponding with the anniversary of the radio version in which stars Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, and Veronica Lake reprised their original roles (along with the long forgotten Sonny Tufts) on the Lux Radio Theatre.

So Proudly We Hail is a well-crafted, surprisingly unsentimental, and highly engaging melodrama about US army nurses serving their country in the battlefield that was the Philippines during the Second World War; as such, it is also unabashed wartime propaganda. I do not think that any producer in Hollywood today would dare to remake it, say, with Julia Roberts, Winona Rider, and Scarlett Johansson (to pick three contemporary actresses approximately of the respective ages of the three original leads). Why not? Allow me to speculate.

There’s a war on, lest we forget; but it doesn’t seem to reunite the West (or any Western nation) against a clearly defined enemy. Instead, we find ourselves in a war on terror—and the terror appears to be as much the cause as it is the effect, violence and violations being brought on by so-called anti-terrorist measures that continue to provoke it.

This is not a time in which to express pride in one’s country or its elected representatives; and those making decisions in Hollywood today seem least inclined foster a sense of loyalty and regard. I don’t think, though, that widespread dissatisfaction and skepticism—a critical attitude only the thoughtless or unthinking ever entirely suppress—account for the current rejection of propaganda drama.

As the reception of Clint Eastwood’s latest film suggests, people are not lining up to see movies with a political message. They might accept a controversial documentary inviting us to take sides; but they no longer appreciate being manipulated or swayed by dramatic fare. Propaganda is a dirty word these days, dirtier by far than advertising, which is still being tolerated.

However much we might groan, we tend to allow the promotion of a product, but get squeamish when it comes to the advancement of an idea. Corporations have taken a prominent place in—or even taken the place of—the government; and when peddling products, advertisers appeal to the individual, whereas propaganda seeks to motivate the community. It simply pays to stimulate division and selfishness, a targeting strategy generally marketed as choice. There no longer is a public, it seems; there are only people; and for advertising purposes, several million of these supposed individuals will do.

Unlike today’s conflicts, the Second World War was not endorsed by big business; companies were not eager to surrender sales or give up the production of consumer goods for a nation that needed to consolidate precious resources. So, I don’t think we’ll get to see Scarlett Johansson grabbing a hand grenade and blowing herself up for the sake of her country (as Veronica Lake’s character does) or picking up an empty can of soda for the benefit of the planet. Instead, she’ll grab that soft drink or lipstick or pair of designer shoes and fight for what she believes in . . . or what those placing the products in her hands want us to believe.

I did not grow up in a country or an age in which it was easy or felt right to be proud of one’s people; and, watching a film like So Proudly We Hail I sense that to be a profound loss. We so proudly hail individuality these days because corporations hand out the flags and buttons to match, knowing that we are at our most receptive and vulnerable when we are at our greediest.

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Racket Science: Two Coconut Shells, a Blowlamp, and a Raspberry"

Well, what does it sound like? Home, I mean. The everyday we inhabit. Perhaps, home is a space in which we no longer pay much attention to what our ears can pick up because we are so accustomed to and at ease with our surrounding soundscape. Or perhaps it is that private environment within whose confines we can drown out what is strange with a soundcarpet of our own weaving. Today, my sonic rug received another sound beating, and I guess this is some of the dust that fell off.

There was an awful lot of howling and rattling, produced by the fierce winds that, while no longer unfamiliar to me after two years of living here in Wales, still suggest the foreign, the uncanny, the inhospitable. I guess I could have countered it by turning on the radio or by playing some of my favorite tunes; but I rarely listen to music these days, at least not as a means of muffling the world or creating an alternate one. I am trying to remember past places I called home and the sounds that might have made them such.

Do you recall sounds as easily as images? We tend to take pictures of our friends and surroundings; but, unless we take moving images with our digital cameras, we rarely record our lives in sound. Right now, I am not even sure about my father’s voice, for instance. He died some ten years ago; but I hadn’t talked to him for some time before that. My family was just about as functional as the clan in Little Miss Sunshine, with which I finally caught up this evening at a local cinema.

I was the teenager in that picture—moody, aloof, and not inclined to share my thoughts with the family to which I scarcely belonged. I might have a photograph of the man somewhere. I’m not sure; but I could get my hands on one should I require such supplemental image for the mental ones still vivid. Now, I could not produce a sound portrait of my father; at least not one featuring his own voice. He breathed his last . . . and the “rest is silence.”

Our voice excepting, what sounds might best represent us? That is a challenge few radio artists had to meet: to create a life in non-verbal, non-musical sound. Generally, aural effects were thought of as a crutch to the spoken word. They might create atmosphere, aid in setting scenes or in visualizing a body moving in space. Footsteps and doorslams, that sort of thing. Instead of supplementing or complementing, sounds may also counter the image the word creates. We are told one thing, but hear another, wonder and chuckle at the irreconcilable differences.

There was a little of that in the BBC 4 documentary “Two Coconut Shells, a Blowlamp and a Raspberry”, which is once again available online for a couple of days. However cursory, it tells the story of the BBC sound effects department and the uses of noisemaking in 1940s comedy programs like ITMA (It’s That Man Again). As in the US, the low humor of bodily sounds was frowned upon by the BBC; but there were a few amusing substitutes of the “raspberry” kind to suggest forcefully what escapes all of us from time to time. It rendered as over-the-top what was generally off limits.

Comedy is exempt from the realism often expected of radio drama, the realism for which the medium was famous—and infamous. Last night I watched the MGM musical Hullabaloo, which feebly sends up the panic created by the Mercury Players’s production of “The War of the Worlds.” Some of the humor, such as there was, derived from the sounds coming out of lip-synching Frank Morgan’s mouth, unexpected voices including those of stars like Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr and Claudette Colbert.

Closing your eyes, you’d see a scene from Boom Town, the box-office hit that Hullabaloo promoted by way of promising, conjuring, and withholding. Sounds can contradict both words and visuals in a way Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” does; but they can also confront each other so as to shatter the mental images we create while listening.

Perhaps I would resort to this sort of playful surrealism in a sonic portrait of my jovial if booze-wrecked father, who, when I created my first audio plays with my tape recorder, advised me not to use a narrative voice but let noises and dialogue speak for themselves. Now, we are well past dialogue, my father and I; but in rendering him, I might use sounds that speak against the revisionist and fragmented image I’ve made up, sham yet real—the mental picture that has become as much of a crutch as the old doorslam.

Now, I was all prepared to review “Two Coconut Shells”; but my mind was unruly tonight and wandered off into the cloud-shrouded sunset like . . . two coconut shells in a gravel box; carried away by the autumnal fury of sound, it decided not to return home in time for today’s post. Instead, it’s that man again, knocking on my windblown mind like the proverbial skeleton in the family closet. He insists on revisiting from time to time, as much as I’d like to send him off with an old-fashioned raspberry.

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Larks, Turkey(s), and the Not-so-friendly Skies

Well, Jell-O again! To me, these past four weeks offline seemed like a summer hiatus, except that they were unscheduled and open-ended. Still sustaining and not in pursuit of a commercial sponsor, I am less certain than ever of an audience (save those lost souls who happen upon these pages in hopes of finding some dirt on—or salacious images of—Lois DeFee, a lesser-known burlesque queen I once mentioned in passing). I wonder who took my place during the interim and whether I will succeed in reclaiming my none-too-prominent slot. Just what has kept me so long (I hope that someone set apart from the apathetic might ask)? Here is the long and very nearly short of it.

After some two-and-a-half weeks of playing broadbandit in New York City, piggybacking rather than coffee-shopping for internet access to so little avail as to manage to file only a single report while on location, I returned to Wales to find our wireless network collapsed, the router having given up the proverbial ghost during a summer storm. And now, just as things are sliding back into their groove, I am taking off again for a weeklong trip to Istanbul. Not that air travel, let alone to Turkey, is a particular delight these days of tourism-targeting terrorism.

Air travel has always been rather uncomfortable; present security measures are even less comforting. Despite several checks and hassles, I still managed to board with a bottle of mouth freshener, which, much to my embarrassment, I discovered at the bottom of my hand luggage while fishing for my generally dormant cellular phone. I sunk into my seat feeling like a felon in flight, at least until I settled down to an episode of Tallulah Bankhead’s Big Show a New York pal of mine had shared with me.

It is with some delay, therefore, that, starting tomorrow and leading up to the fifth anniversary of the World Trade Center attack, I carry on with my NYC impressions as they relate to old-time radio, including accounts of my tour of various second-hand bookstores, landmarks and museums, a review of the rather radiogenetic musical The Drowsy Chaperone, assorted remarks about the construction of the Second Avenue subway and the current state of Yorkville (my old neighborhood in Manhattan). The news, such as they are, won’t be altogether current; but then again, I am forever catching up with the out-of-date and my own life need not be an exception.

Indeed, I find it difficult to gather experience and gather my thoughts at the same time. It is far easier when the experiences about which I write are lived vicariously, through radio plays, books, or movies; I gather, it is easier to gather thoughts along with dust. The time is ripe for some house cleaning and perhaps even some reventilating of the old broadcastle I am keeping here. Not only will I catch up with some of my favorite internet journals, but I will also make a few long overdue additions to my mossy blogroll.

The above image, meanwhile, constitutes the latest addition to my collection of Claudette Colbert memorabilia. While in New York City, I purchased the Cecil B. DeMille Collection, containing three of Colbert’s films (one of which, Four Frightened People, I reviewed for the Internet Movie Database earlier this year). And, more than two decades after discovering and losing sight of Mitchell Leisen’s Hands Across the Table (mentioned here), I could once again soak in the bubbles of this frothy charmer, along with Leisen’s Big Broadcast of 1938 about which I will have more to say in the none too distant future.

All this by way of reintroduction. However small the interstice until I take flight again next week, it sure feels good to spend some time sweeping the dust out of my cyberspatial niche . . .

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We Now Resume Our Regularly Scheduled Life

It has been a week of local excursions here in Wales, days spent sunbathing and splashing in the radioactive sea, bookhunting in Hay-on-Wye (the world-renowned “Town of Books”), dining al fresco, stargazing outdoors and on screen, playing with Montague, our unruly terrier, and being among friends (even after having been critiqued with the candor I reserve for those who matter to me). The occasion of it all was a weeklong visit by my closest if mostly long distance friend, the fatherland I haven’t set foot on for seventeen years. It is to him that I owe the wonderful book pictured above, a splendid addition to my collection of Claudette Colbert memorabilia.

Whenever I venture out to Hay, I return home with a few treasures. This time, I added a book on Harold Lloyd (my favorite silent screen comedian, whose films The Kid Brother, The Cat’s Paw and Girl Shy we screened during the past few days), as well as a coffee-table topper on screwball comedies (a book which I had previously gifted to abovementioned best pal, but with which I was pleased to get reacquainted). However convenient and economic it might be to browse and shop online, the thrill of the hunt (as previously described here), is something a carnivore of a booklover like me does not like to go without.

Now, the people of Film Pictorial, a British publication, are full of it. Legend, I mean, which is a term I much prefer to trivia when it comes to describing pieces of nothing from which to weave whatever your mind is up to at the moment. Trivia is for the mercenary; legend for the mercurial. I shall raid said volume from time to time here on these virtual pages. Where else might you learn whether or not you have a “Film Hand” from a writer who examines the “long little finger on the hand of Katharine Hepburn” or the “thickish fingers” of John Boles and Warren William to tell their temperament and acting skills?

The book also contains longer articles on “The Gallant Life of Norma Shearer” and takes readers to the homes of stars like Harold Lloyd, Bette Davis, and . . . Gordon Harker? Robert Montgomery, meanwhile, debates, along with Jeanette MacDonald, “At What Age Are Women Most Charming” and Myrna Loy reveals her “Own Ideas.” It’s all glossy but telling gossip, which I am looking forward to sharing, along with old news from , over the next few days.

Of course, my week was not without pain and what there is of sorrow in my life, among which my tumble down the slippery steps to my room and the breaking down of our car are the most dramatic examples. My lower back and my left toe still ache; the car might not be salvageable at all. In a matter of weeks, I reckon, such woes—which led to dipped feet in cooling springs and a ride through Wales in an Auto Club truck—will be nothing but cheerful anecdotes to be shared among chums. For now, they are inconveniences, at most.

As I have mentioned before, the weeks to come will be somewhat less than regular. On 7 August, I shall return, however briefly, to my old home in New York City. In the meantime, I resume my journal, hoping it will be appreciated by those who make it a habit to keep up with someone as gleefully out-of-date as yours truly, broadcastellan.