Well… in my defense I thought my idea for how to do today’s rhyme, “Who killed Cock Robin?” was a good one when I started… The problem this was the first long story with a narrative I’ve had to do since I did “I Married My Wife on Monday.” Instead it was tedious and time consuming and I’m pretty sure it’s hard to identify any of the birds besides the owl.
I was worried that I was beginning to show signs of fatigue based on what I thought of the last couple of pictures but happily after today’s rhyme, There Were Three Cooks of Colenbrook, I feel much better!
My only concern in doing this (not that I let it bother me while drawing the picture) was wondering if “falling out” meant what it means now, since phrases drift even more than word meaning does… turns out it did, the dictionary even considers it a word with the earliest recorded usage being 1568… so yeah, I’m probably safe.
Well today’s rhyme, “Magpie, Magpie, Chatter and Flee,” was easy just draw a magpie flying and bobbing it’s tail, with no narrative at all. I was tempted to add a child watching them, but then why complicate things. So in the end the only problem is being a species that I only ever see in the zoo, it’s another bird I can’t draw from memory.
For this week’s selection I returned to spaghetti westerns and films that were inspired by spaghetti westerns, specifically those featuring a mysterious drifter like the one’s played by Clint Eastwood, and what better place to start then with the man himself. High Plains Drifter is Eastwood’s take on his best known character, as well as a brutal deconstruction of it.
As has happened many a time before a stranger rides into town, and like many a time before this town dreads the inevitable arrival of murderous bandits, and many times before the town turns to the Stranger for help. From there things get a bit different.
The Stranger cares very little for the town, in fact he has an agenda that is attached to some of the town’s dark secrets. Slowly he manipulates both the town and the bandits to the inevitable showdown, and when it finally arrives he comes down on everyone like divine justice.
This was the second film Eastwood directed. My opinion of Eastwood’s work varies. While I certainly like a lot of his films, I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan. But this one I really liked. Eastwood looks at the setting through an uncompromising sense and it works well with the Stranger as a possibly supernatural judge on the most venal, corrupt and cowardly community I’ve seen since I watched and reviewed Dogville.
The next film I watched was recommended to me when a review of High Plains drifter was compared to it. I hadn’t heard of the Spaghetti western hero Sartana, played by by Gianni Garko before so I couldn’t wait to start my introduction with the first film of the series, If You Meet Sartana, Pray For Your Death.
We open this story with betrayal, murder and greed with at least three factions backstabbing each other over a shipment of gold. Into this fray, seemingly out of nowhere comes Sartana a well dressed and charming drifter armed with a shotgun and derringer and seemingly unstoppable. From here the body count rises as Sartana fights against all comers and wins.
This was fun fluff. The character of Sartana may come off as too good to be true, to the point of almost being a Mary Sue figure but the execution works well enough. But frankly the best thing about this film was a very young Klaus Kinski hamming it up as the psychopathic villain.
I’ve been wondering if the phrase “Red Herring” comes from today’s rhyme, “The Man in the Wilderness Asked Me”, or if it goes even farther back. Personally I had always thought it was a needle in the haystack kind of thing, really difficult but not impossible. Anyway the annotation says versions of this poem go back to the 17th century so who knows.
It’s interesting that while it’s traditional to dress up animals in clothes in these poems, today’s rhyme, Pussy Cat Mole Jumped Over a Coal, is the first one I’ve come across where it’s mandatory. Not getting into my inability to draw one without a reference, cats look ridiculous in petticoats.
Incidentally, according to the annotation, in this case “mole” is an obsolete onomatopoeia for “meow”.
