Today was, by common consensus, a particularly nasty winter day. It was far from the coldest we’ve had this year, and far from the windiest or snowiest. But the elements so mixed within it as to create a sort of ideal balance in which each contributed optimally to human discomfort.
Tomorrow looks to be about the same.
And yet, over the weekend—particularly on Saturday—you could feel that we’ve swung closer to the sun now. Those sunbeams had some punch. Patience is all we need. Time is on our side. Puff and blow all you like, Winter—the cavalry is on the way!
On Sunday I watched four old English Bulldog Drummond movies. My renter has a bargain collection of old mystery movies, and he lent it to me. I was interested to see the Drummond flicks because I’d read something S. T. Karnick wrote about the author of the stories, H. C. “Sapper” McNeile. I believe I may have read a Bulldog Drummond story once, but I have no memory of it. I don’t know how well the movies retained the spirit of the stories.
Although the character of Bulldog Drummond was first played in a sound movie by Ronald Colman, most of these films star an adequate actor named John Howard. One odd exception is “Bulldog Drummond Escapes,” which stars a very young Ray Milland. Although Milland was a good actor with a distinguished career ahead of him, he’s absolutely awful in this role. Drummond, at least in the movies, is a sort of Peter Pan type, a grown man with a boyish enthusiasm for adventure and danger. He also talks a lot of piffle, kind of in the style of Lord Peter Wimsey. Milland doesn’t seem to understand that you have to handle piffle lightly. He seems to take his piffle seriously, which makes him just appear nuts.
The father figure who balances the boyish Drummond is Col. Nielsen, a Scotland Yard inspector who tries to gently restrain his excesses. Nielsen is played by various actors in the series, most interestingly by John Barrymore. Being Barrymore, he gets top billing in the films in which he appears, and takes a more active part in the story. Instead of an aged, sedentary figure, Barrymore’s Nielsen is a mature daredevil in his own right, mixing personally in the main action. I have no doubt that Barrymore insisted on this, and that the scripts were rewritten to make him a more romantic figure. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t originally demand the part of Drummond.
It’s fascinating to watch Barrymore at work. His style of acting was entirely different from the sort of thing we have today. He represented an older thespian tradition that centered on conveying the beauty of the text, rather than baring the soul of the character. Very often, in this blog, when I compare the things of the past to the things of the present, I’m advocating for the old stuff. I don’t feel that way about acting. The old style of acting may have had its beauties, but I like the new way of doing things better.
I did a play with a guy in Florida, when I was in community theatre, who belonged to the old Barrymore school. He didn’t so much speak his lines as utter them. He struck attitudes on stage, and presented his profile for the admiration of the audience. He had a hundred pointless stories about his days in theatre in New York City—all the plays he did that failed, all the big plays he almost did, and all the famous people he exchanged a couple words with at parties. (The character of Sean in Blood and Judgment is based on him, to some extent.) He was an older man than I, but not so old that he wouldn’t have been a contemporary of Marlon Brando and all the actors of the Method school. I can only assume he made a conscious decision to reject Stanislavsky. If so, he made a bad choice. Then again, based on my acquaintance with him, I’m not sure he possessed the minimum intelligence necessary to practice the Method. All in all he was an ass, and nasty to the techies and stagehands, which is always the mark of a coxcomb.
I did appreciate the opportunity to observe a dinosaur in action, though.
(One final observation: the actress Heather Angel, who often played Drummond’s fiancee in the films, was absolutely adorable.)