Jeeves & Wooster

Watching the TV series ‘Jeeves & Wooster’ which completely passed me by and I’m keen to fill in a cultural blank. I’m not sure it aired on Australian television at all and the first I heard about it was glimpsing a VHS copy at my local library.

I’m struck by a couple of things about Hugh Laurie’s performance as the bright young thing Bertie Wooster. It’s not the least surprising that he is a great and gifted comic actor. That was obvious since his turn as the idiot Prince Regent in the second series of Blackadder, but just how good he is is a constant revelation, particularly doing pure physical comedy. At these times, his resemblance to Stan Laurel is amazing, especially while doing a certain gormless, self-satisfied smirk.

I’m reminded of Stephen Fry’s comment during his recent Sydney appearance that he was surprised, upon meeting young Hugh during their Footlights days, by his assured comedic chops. Laurie was a natural comedian who seemed to have been born with a full comic toolbox at his disposal.

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when!’

Bertie attempting to describe a Member of Parliament upon making his acquaitance in Wodehouse’s ‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’.

Irma La Douce (1963)

Pottering in the Woodend Bookshop the other week, I found a copy of the ‘Irma La Douce’ screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, published in 1963.

It appears to be a cheap movie tie-in paperback, badly typeset, a Midwood-Tower Book, “First printing anywhere”. Other books under that imprint appear to be almost exclusively ‘naughty books’ of the early sixties, the kind you still find in Opp shops, with titles like ‘A World Without Men’ in illustrated covers in garish colours. Which makes me think that perhaps the primary consideration for the publishers was the film’s subject matter and the opportunity to put Shirley MacLaine in a transparent blouse on the cover.

Opening it at random, I came across this exchange. Irma the streetwalker is complaining to Moustache, the wordly barman, of her money troubles.

Irma: If only Monsieur Camembert were still around. You remember Monsieur Camembert, don’t you?
Moustache: Do I? Big spender.
Nestor: Who’s Monsieur Camembert?
Irma: That’s what we called him – he was a cheese wholesaler at the market – used to see me twice a week – always gave me five hundred francs – so I didn’t have to see anybody else. I had lots of time then – went to cooking school and I knitted sweaters and I played solitaire – he was such a nice man.
Nestor: What happened to him?
Irma: His wife died – so he stopped coming around.

That is why I love Billy Wilder scripts so much. Even with collaborators, that sweet but sour Viennese Jewish sensibility is always there.

It been years since I saw the film, but I remember it to be only a moderately good Wilder of that strange mid-sixties period, where the things he did so well before didn’t seem to click anymore and good scripts were let down by poor casting and a general air of uncertainty. He wasn’t alone in that, of course. Hitchcocks of the same period often have similar problems.

It is reported that Wilder originally wanted Marilyn Monroe, who he had worked with on ‘Some Like It Hot’, for the part of Irma. She died before the production began, as did Charles Laughton, who was first choice for Moustache.

There are, as always, some great jokes.

The pimps’ union is called the “Mec’s’ (tough guy’s) Paris Protective Association” (MPPA), which is also the acronym for Motion Picture Producers Association.

Irma: A painter once lived here. Poor guy, he was starving. Tried everything, even cut his ear off.
Nestor: Van Gogh?
Irma: No, I think his name was Schwartz.

Other Billy Wilder posts: The Front Page, Billy Wilder: A little bit less and Stalag 17.

Head of skate

Say it ain’t so!

Labor’s outlook a little brighter

While I don’t envy the the responsibility for a moment, I think the federal Labor caucus chose well today.

Yesterday I was considering the various future scenarios with friends, including the possibility that Kim Beazley may be re-elected to the leadership of the Labor Party. A quote from the comic genius Peter Cook came to mind:

I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I’m pretty sure that I can repeat them.

That’s ‘Docklands’ with a C

A reminder of why I like Barry Humphries so much. There has recently been some salacious news that Melbourne’s Docklands precinct is becoming “a centre for unlawful, high-end prostitution, with escorts charging up to $800 an hour for sex in luxury high-rise apartments. A representative of the legal brothel and escort industry said his group had evidence that ‘scores and scores’ of women were using apartments in the emerging suburb.”

Humphries muses, in a piece by Gabriella Coslovich in the The Age magazine:

They should turn it entirely into a red-light district. It is at the moment; it has a very high percentage of prostitutes. It should be totally devoted to vice; it would make it a centre. People would get out of the plane and say ‘Docklands’!

It should have neon lights. It should be like Wanchai in Hong Kong or that place in Bangkok, Patpong; or Pigalle in Paris!

Of course a name change would be in order. ’Docklands’ doesn’t sound interesting.

They could change the word ‘dock’; a consonant could be changed, just by moving it back in the alphabet, couldn’t they?

A small triumph over literary theory

In an article that will have teachers everywhere silently nodding their heads in sympathy, The Onion reports of a certain courageous notebook computer at Brandeis University which committed a self-inflicted execution error so that professors, academic advisors, classmates, and even future generations of college students would never have to read Jill Samoskevich’s 227-page master’s thesis.

Professor John Rebson had already read through three drafts of his student’s 38,000-word thesis, entitled ‘A Hermeneutical Exploration Of Onomatopoeia In The Works Of William Carlos Williams As It May Or May Not Relate To Post-Agrarian Appalachia’.

“I guess when she got to the chapter about how the ‘imitative tactility’ used in the first two stanzas of ‘Young Sycamore’ can act as a ‘neo-structuralist, pre-objectivist perlustration and metonymy’ of the importance of anti-Episcopalian sentiment in the rise and fall of central West Virginian coal miners’ unions, the computer just decided that something had to be done for the greater good.”

Thanks to this laptop’s steadfast courage, Jill’s classmates or future students will never have to pick their way through dense and discursive passages about ‘The Red Wheelbarrow‘ and North Carolina farming communities.

“I’ve already forgotten why ‘Queen Anne’s Lace’ symbolizes the advances in modern agricultural implements, but I’ll never forget that brave computer’s last words: ‘You will lose any unsaved information in all applications. Press any key to continue,'” fellow student Mark Weiss said.

“One determined computer has triumphed over years of misapplied literary theory.”