I first saw My Man Godfrey this November and thought it was comic gold. Both a commentary and a parody of the upper crust in the middle of the depression.
So for today’s sketch we have Godfrey standing outside of the chaos that is the Bullock family before he enters the fray to calm the situation with copious matinees.
In hind sight I would want to tighten this image quite a bit moving Godfrey about an inch to the right. I was briefly considering having Molly the maid standing right behind Godfrey with a facetious “have fun in the shark pit” look on her face but I thought that would have been a distraction from the contrast between Godfrey and the Bullocks.
I had really mixed feelings when a drew the card for today’s Sketch, Touch of Evil. Make no mistake I loved the opening ten minute tracking shot of the car bomb scene and I loved Orson Welles‘ performance as the definitive bad cop Hank Quinlan. Though I felt the whole thing was dragged down by Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh, utterly cardboard performances as the “dashing Mexican detective” Mike Vargas and his wife Susie, which was the most blatant example of Race-bending that I had ever seen at the time. The problem is I’ve only seen it once and at the moment I don’t remember many of the details regarding the plot.
The reason behind this is once you get past this story of police ethics, corruption and murder you quickly realize Touch of Evil is about just one thing. Orson Welles.
As Hank Quinlan, Welles dominates every scene he is to the point you forget everything else (well besides the amazing camera work.) Anyone could have played Mike and Susie just as long as they were pretty. So the only thing I could really think of for the sketch was Welles’ domination of the film.
The October Monster sketch challenge was such a useful creative exercise that I decided to do it more often. I’d put it off for a couple of months because of playing catchup on my buffer. So now that I feel that I’m mostly caught I would start my first drawing challenge of the year. Febuary’s topic movies. For my selection for the random bag I pretty much cribbed the American Film Institute’s top 100 list with a few additions and subtractions (after all I did most of the horror films in October)
After this there are the usual rules. As usual I am expected to come up with the idea and execute it in the ball park of thirty minutes, this means if the idea isn’t one of your best you still have to own it and try to make the most of it. This means the odds of having a good sketch are about 50/50 but that’s what makes it a challenge.
Rules that are new for this month. No checking references, your sketch is based entirely on how you remember the film and if what you remember isn’t exactly accurate… that makes the drawing more interesting. Despite this there will be no improvising… so for today’s example If I were to think that Brian Cox or Mads Mikkelsen were better Hannibal Lecters that’s too bad. I have to draw Anthony Hopkins for your Silence of the Lambs picture… or at least the idea of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. And while we’re on the subject no cartoons that are just puns on a movie’s title. If you don’t know anything about the film no picture. To spell out exactly what I mean, after somehow avoiding reading it in school, I was well into my thirties before I learned that The Catcher in the Rye was not about baseball. Of course that won’t be an issue since I triaged the movies I wasn’t familiar with out of the list.
So anyway as you might have guessed today’s sketch was indeed from Silence of the Lambs. The scene is Clarice Starling first encounter with Lecter. I tried to go for a combination of dread having had Lecter hyped up so much for the last 15 minutes and having gone down a dark hallway with caged monsters the brief relief of seeing this small neat man (I’d almost imagine him wearing a silk scarf if the guards had let him) I tried to focus on the “nice purse and cheap shoes” aspect of Starling, nervous and worried she’s out of her depth and even more worried that Lecter can sense this. I can’t help wondering what the movie had chosen a “plainer” character actress rather than Jodie Foster .
For this week’s selection I decided to watch some films from Vincent Price’s early career, and by sheer happenstance, also the early career of Charles Bronson,.
I had grown up with Vincent Price being carefully crafted self parody feeling kind of like a loving but very creepy favorite uncle. I had gotten a taste of just how good and scary he could be when I first saw The Abominable Dr Phibes so I wanted to see other examples of what made him the godfather of horror.
The first film I watched wasn’t a horror film , though it did feature an over the top megalomaniac, was Master of the World with Price playing Jules Verne’s other mad genius, Robur the Conqueror, who tries to blast the world into abandoning war from his airship, the Albatross,
While this was fun, and Price puts on an appropriately driven performance, Master of the World felt like a low rent response to Disney’s 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and it never really managed to trigger my suspension of disbelief. Not just because the Albatross aways looked like the model in front of a blue screen that it was, but also because I kept wondering if there was any infrastructure behind the Albatross and where would Robur go once they ran out of ammunition.
Along with Price’s performance what interested me the most was the conflict between Bronson’s pragmatic American agent who would do what it took to wait for the right moment in order to stop Robur’s plans and the much more traditional hero, played by David Frankham who wants to do what is right as soon as possible and mistakes Bronson’s pragmatism for cowardice.
The comic relief from Vito Scotti playing the ship’s cook was entertaining too.
The second film was one of the horror classics of the 1950s House of Wax. Price is at his best as an eccentric sculptor and proprietor of a wax museum who is driven mad and terribly scarred when he is caught in a fire caused by his business partner to destroy the wax museum for the insurance money. He becomes a serial killer who uses his victims as models for his new wax museum encasing them in molten wax. (Bronson played his mute assistant, Igor)
I had known about this movie’s plot since high school and so I ws very much watching it in a “Rosebud was his sled” state of mind. So as I watched this I couldn’t help wondering if the director intended for this to be a mystery at all if the reveal of the wax statues being murder victims was meant to be a surprise. Price’s burn makeup didn’t really disguise him so I was not fooled when he reappears running the titular House of Wax seemingly unscathed by the fire (revealed to be a wax disguise in the end) I don’t know how much of a difference this would have made in the long run but it was a detail that I couldn’t help thinking about over and over.
All in all this was some fun over the top campy entertainment. In the end what I liked about it the most was it avoided the usual cliche of the police being useless (perhaps that became a cliche later) Anyway while they were certainly skeptical when our heroes arrive with their concerns but ultimately they put the pieces together on their own and ultimately, despite our dashing young heroes best efforts, are the ones who save the day.
I follow a lot of skepticism blogs. And when your read a lot of them one of the first words you learn is Paridolia. That is to say what you have when you see shapes in the clouds, faces on Mars or Jesus on toast. If you’re into symbology you can notice all kinds of things not all of them necessarily religious.
This brings me to my point. About a week ago I slammed my shin really badly on… something because I was experimenting with putting a light on my backpack strap while taking my favorite short cut (in daytime) Ravenna Park. It technically worked but it also shone the light right into my eyes so while I could see what was in front of me at a range of twenty feet I couldn’t see anything right in front of me. So I didn’t see how close to the side of the path was until it was too late and I slammed my shin against… Something.
This and a few other things are the reason I’m shopping for a good bike light right now.
My shin was a mess but nowhere as bad as it felt. Anyway I was coming out of the shower today and I happened to look at the scab and I couldn’t help noticing that upside down it looked kind of sort of like Kokopelli!
Unfortunately I don’t think there’s much call for ancient southwestern trickster fertility deities showing up in anything in the general tinfoil hat market… Still it makes for an interesting conversation piece.