February 1944: Passage to Marseille

















Claude Rains! Bogart! This is no B movie.

I found this to be a frustrating watch. It’s a sort of mid-war fantasy about war. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s so… stiff? Perhaps it’s because everything looks like it’s filmed on a sound stage? Even the outdoors bits?

This is definitely not Casablanca II, although it tries hard. Ideologically, it paints a rather large number of French people as horrible people, while the framing of it is telling us that France is great. It’s kinda weird.

Great bluray transfer, though.

Passage to Marseille. Michael Curtiz. 1944.

Popular movies in February 1944 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
17707.6The Sullivans
3117.4Le ciel est à vous
72217.4The Uninvited
4507.3On Approval
4737.2Million Dollar Kid
14207.2It Happened Tomorrow
3507.1None Shall Escape
11886.9Charlie Chan in the Secret Service
29336.9Passage to Marseille
6886.8The Purple Heart

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

January 1944: Career Girl











That’s some design on those er leotards.

Indeed.

This is a cheap and short B movie, I guess?

It’s got a classic set-up: A Broadway hopeful moves into a hotel for Broadway hopefuls. Lots of good movies have been written around that concept… and while this is very likeable, and it’s got some good lines here and there, it doesn’t quite sparkle like these things are supposed to.

But it’s a very amiable way to spend an hour. I could watch stuff like this all night long.

And… it’s got the most insane hairdos! I think the same hairdresser has done all the actors, and it’s one wild hairdo after another, all around the same preposterous construction concept.

Career Girl. Wallace Fox. 1944.

Popular movies in January 1944 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
55867.9The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
211687.8Lifeboat
6897.7María Candelaria (Xochimilco)
31087.4The Spider Woman
28607.3Phantom Lady
21227.2The Lodger
25666.5The Fighting Seabees
8376.4Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
3174.1Nabonga

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

CCCB: Mind as Passion

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Eenie meenie… It’s Thursday, so time to pick another book to read from the cache of my most ancient unread books and bake another cake.

And this time the lucky winner is Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion by Liam Kennedy. Which I apparently bought at a sale in mid-90s (so it’s a bit newer than most of the books here, I think).

Back when I was pretentious teenager (before maturing into a pretentious adult), I used to read books written by all kinds of intelligent people (preferably in places where people could see me reading them), and Susan Sontag was one of them. I vaguely remember On Photography and… er… Notes on “Camp”? Was that a book or just an essay in a book?

Oh, yeah, it’s in this one:

Isn’t that a stylish edition?

Anyway, I was a fan, so I picked up this book about Sontag and never read it. Because you know.

It’s not really a biography, but it’s an overview of her writings. Here’s a sample:

But the thing is, I’m not really that interested in reading about Sontag’s writing. It’s interesting to have it contextualised to see what she was writing against, I guess, but it just mainly reminded me that I probably should be re-reading Sontag instead of reading this book.

It’s refreshing to read a British take on her writing. And, I mean, it’s well-written and all.

Let’s look at the cake instead:

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The cake to go along with the book is ginger layer cake with rhubarb fool.

Look at my expert decorating skillz!

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It turned out pretty delicious, although I over-baked the ginger cake by a couple of minutes.  (I was watching Xena, and I couldn’t find the time buzzer thingie.)  And the rhubarb for the fool could probably have been a little less wet — the fool turned a bit more runny than was probably warranted. I mean. A lot more runny.

But it was pretty delish anyway.  Mmm.