In our last episode, I was saying how charming I found the English actress Heather Angel, who played Bulldog Drummond’s fiancée in five films and went on to a fairly successful career, working with Hitchcock among other directors.

I note from her Wikipedia entry that she married a television director named Robert B. Sinclair. In 1970, their home was invaded. Her husband tried to protect her, and was killed by the burglar.

On top of the shock and grief of such a traumatic experience, I can’t help thinking that the irony must have been agonizing. How many times had she done movie scenes where there was a fight over a gun, and the hero saved her life? But when it came to real life, it didn’t work out like in the movies.

Irony, in its more drastic forms, is a pretty cruel thing. I recall that shortly after “The Rockford Files” series ended, James Garner got into a road rage incident with another driver, and the other driver cleaned his clock and left him badly injured. Granted, Jim Rockford wasn’t the most two-fisted of TV detectives, but he usually figured out a way to sucker-punch his opponent and run away.

Then there’s the “Superman Curse.” I still remember what a shock it was when George Reeves shot himself. An early moment of cognitive dissonance. “Wait—how can Superman shoot himself? Bullets bounce off him.”

Ditto when Christopher Reeve fell of a horse and broke his neck. How can the most powerful being in the physical universe be paralyzed?

So if you hear one day that I’ve been smashed to jelly by the hammer of Thor, you’ll know that Irony has struck again.

What notable incidents of Irony you can think of?

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.)

Made my annual trip to the tax preparer after work tonight. I ended up a victim of Urban Sprawl, as the business had moved way the heck out to the northwest (where the buffalo still roam and men are men, I trust). I had their directions with me, but as I followed the road eastward, (apparently) past all development, and found myself surrounded by gravel pits, I figured I must have gone the wrong way (I often get turned around, reading maps. I think I have an internal compass, but I also have an internal distorting magnet). So I turned back west, and that was no better. Finally I broke down and used my cell phone to call them (costs me money, since mine is designed for emergencies only. Which this was), and the lady explained that I’d been right the first time. I’d just lost confidence.

There’s a lesson here, I suppose. Something about putting your hand to the plow and not looking back, or Lot’s wife, or something. You can be wrong because you went the wrong way, or you can be wrong because you went the right way, but insufficiently.

In my heart, though, I believe that if I’d stubbornly kept on east on my first try, the space-time continuum would have spiraled, the earth’s crust would have shifted, and my goal would have turned out to be west after all.

Have a good weekend.

Though the link to Valentine’s relics was appealing (see last post), let me offer you a better Valentine’s Day post even though you will probably see it the day after. Here’s a fun, artsy video of Anderson & Roe playing their arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango.”

I’ll be short tonight, I’m afraid. I have a dentist appointment coming up (God bless a dentist who schedules evening hours!), with all the gladness and merriment inherent therein.

By way of The View From the Foothills, here’s a neat little utility to clean up your computer desktop.

Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Although he’s one of the great heroes of my life, I’ve gotten into the habit of arguing against him in recent years. For instance, I consider his constitutional argument extremely weak.

And yet…

And yet, he operated from a transcendent vision of America. He truly believed that this country was the laboratory of the future, that a better world was being created in these states. Nothing, he believed, should be permitted to destroy what was being done here. Slavery was a double threat, first because it made a mockery of the American vision, and second, because it was a political threat to national unity and purpose. Abolitionists derided him as a weakling because he wasn’t prepared to go straight in and get it abolished. He preferred a gradual, peaceful approach. That approach became impossible, and so he made the fateful decision to go to war to preserve the Union.

He himself was the living embodiment of the American dream. He’d been born in a dirt-floored cabin, to people who many considered only marginally human. He’d taken the opportunities this country gave him and used them to rise to the highest office in the land. He believed that everyone should have the same opportunities, and he never wavered from that commitment. In the end he died for it.

I’ve been to his birthplace, one childhood home, New Salem, his Springfield home, the White House, Ford’s Theatre and his tomb. I can’t get free of the man, and I don’t want to.