A very happy birthday to Charles and Abe.
I wanted to do more with them this year but unfortunately because of timing you can do a Valentine’s Day story or a Darwin/Lincoln story… you can’t have both.
It was fun doing the Superbowl joke even though it’s two weeks late. (I suppose Lincoln would theoretically more likely be a Bears fan but as President it makes more sense he’d go pats.)
Having enjoyed Sweet Smell of Success so much I decided to continue with the works of Alexander Mackendrick and the comedies he made for Ealing Studios in England starring Alec Guinness.
The first film, Man in the White suit had Guinness plays Sidney Stratton a brilliant chemist obsessed with trying to create a dirt resistant and nearly indestructible polymer that will revolutionize textiles.
Once he successfully creates this miracle cloth both management and labor realizes the economic ramifications of an indestructible cloth that doesn’t have to be cleaned, repaired or, most importantly, replaced. They do everything they can to squash the discovery with Guinness on the run wearing the prototype the titular White suit.
This makes for a brutal satire of the industry at the time and how it reacts to an innocent visionary like Sidney Stratton.
I enjoyed most of the first half of this film with Guinness’s efforts to create his formula ending up with him bouncing from one textile mill to another and embezzling equipment, with the strange sound effect his equipment makes serving as a leitmotif for the progress in his research.
I can’t say I cared for the second half of the film quite as much. It felt like they crammed in too much from the industry deciding they could not afford progress to the final chase scene. A lot is made of the Sidney’s incorruptibility but I thought it was more of a case of his innocence. Most of the time it seemed as if he didn’t truly understand why he was being chased.
I actually saw an interview with MacCendrick on Criterion’s Sweet Smell of Success DVD where he said he believed Sidney wasn’t nearly as incorruptible as people thought with it just being a matter of the executives not knowing how to bribe him. Had they offered him with unlimited research possibilities he would probably signed everything.
The next film on the list the Ladykillers is a delightfully dark comedy about a team of crooks whose master plan revolves around a sweet little old lady Mrs. Louisa Alexandra Wilberforce, played wonderfully by Katie Johnson, who owns a “lopsided” boarding house next to the railroad.
While their caper is successful, once they get the money back to the house the human factor led by Mrs. Wilberforce makes everything fall apart, with their attempts to silence her permanently end with hilarious fatality.
This was a fun movie with a great ensemble cast led once again by Alec Guinness playing master criminal “Professor” Marcus, a wonderful antithesis to Sidney he is made up like a reject from a horror film with greasy hair, bad teeth and a sinister smile. (I kept imagining him being played by Peter Lorre if this had been made in the states at the same time) With him is a wonderful cast of character actors including a very young Peter Sellers,
I couldn’t help thinking of League of Gentleman as I watched this except where that was a caper of clockwork precision run by a group of professionals this was a hilarious shambles botched by a bunch of idiots… And I loved it because of it.
I think I’m beginning to get into my grove at last here. So today, the slip of paper in the bag told me to draw Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. And what says Clockwork Orange better than Alec holding court with his droogs Georgie and Dim (didn’t have room to include Pete) at the Korova milk bar trying to make up their rassoodocks what to do with the evening. (Hint. It’s going to be the old ultra-violence)
In hindsight I considered doing this at more of an angle rather than stick mostly to Kubrick’s signature two point perspective but regrettably I was halfway done when I thought of that. Also the Kubrick Stare is harder to draw than it looks.
For this week’s Tuesday Rhapsody we’re doing the last of Alan Hovhanes‘ Armenian Rhapsodies. (okay, tell a lie. It’s the second, but it’s the last of the three that we’ve done here.)
Enjoy.
This was another hard one since Woody Allen‘s Annie Hall is mostly just people talking. Which while fun to watch is hell for the cartoonist looking for ideas. For me what I remember about it most (besides all of the great surreal bits) Was Annie’s first appearance (not counting her in the tennis courts) in her street clothes which consist of the white blouse, black slacks (possibly mens) black vest and the completely incongruous sunhat. Is this what she as a free spirit feels comfortable in? or is this something a hick from Wisconsin mistakenly thought would look hip in the big city? Who cares, it’s her!
I have to say I think that this is one of the sketches where the “don’t refresh your memory” rule is paying off. I like the way “Alvy”, while having all of the necessary “Woody” qualities, does not really look that much like Woody Allen.
I think one of the reasons that this sketch challenge has been a bit of a… well you know…challenge, is because I have been over thinking things and trying to come up with an image that covers the whole of the movie as opposed to just one good image from the movies even if this is not actually in my list of rules.
I almost let this get the better of me for todays sketch for 2001: A Space Odyssey,. For the principle image I was inspired by the fact we know a lot more about Australopithecus than Kubrick and Clarke did so I was trying to do the scene as the bipedal hominid we know of today as opposed to a man in an ape suit.
I tried to work out a transitional image to the scenes in space which led to a huge mess that I couldn’t clean up in the allotted thirty minutes and putting Jupiter on the top of the picture just made it look like the scene was taking place on one of it’s moons.
So I just went with the final scene of 2001’s first act with the ape, the femur and the monolith and just remember this is better appreciated listening to Also sprach Zarasthustra while viewing
