Day: January 3, 2024

I just want to come clean and admit that despite my projecting a devotional film buff profile all my life or at least since the ‘80s, I never got around to seeing Carl Dreyer‘s The Passion of Joan of Arc (’28) until last night.

But I finally went there, man, and now I’m “experienced” in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the term.

An English-subtitled version of the definitve director’s cut (i.e., the 1981 Oslo version) became available for free public domain streaming on 1.1.24, you see, and that’s what I watched. Lying in bed, MacBook Pro, best headphones.

Good God, what a lapel-grabbing, no-way-out masterpiece! Right away it leaps out at you and says “stop scrolling and whatever the hell else you’re doing and grim up and give it up and watch this, will you?”

I knew right away it was made by a genius…a no-bullshit artist from the same general gene pool as Eisenstein, Murnau, Fincher, Eggers, Kubrick, Ford, Bresson, Fellini, Kurosawa, Scorsese, Powell.

The incessant close-ups, the feeling of Dreyer being in total control, the penetrating focus, the brilliant use of montage, the tracking shots, the sets (painted pink so as to stand out against the white sky), the anguish, the purity, the pain and the cruelty.

What a bleeding, bllistering, open-hearted titular performance by Renee Jean Falconetti.

And the cinematography by Ruolph Mate, who also shot Foreign Correspondent and Gilda and directed D.O.A., When Worlds Collide and The 300 Spartans (a decent sword-and-sandal epic).

I can’t stand tapping this out on the iPhone with the car running…more later.

We haven’t seen much snow in the northeast recently, and the odds are that with global warming and all we’re not going to see much of the stuff from here on. Spotty, half-assed snowfalls at best.

I grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut, and each and every winter we were pretty much blanketed with snowfalls between December and March. Two or three and sometimes four, I mean. Shovelling out the front steps and pathways. Shovelling out driveways. Snowball fights. Carrot-nosed snowmen in the front yard.

Blizzards, I fear, are pretty much a thing of the past. I endured an astonishing blizzard in NYC in ’81 or thereabouts.

It’s going to snow this weekend, I’m hearing, but not that much. It didn’t snow at all last year. Be honest — the world that some of us knew in the mid to late 20th Century is going away. Climate change is affecting everything. We’re all melting.

Otherwise all I can say is that (a) Zac Efron sure looks better without the buffed-up wrestler bod and that godawful Prince Valiant hair, and (b) award–wise Colman Domingo, due respect, isn’t happening,

When the 58-year-old Gene Tierney sat for a chat on The Mike Douglas Show in 1979, she bore little resemblance to the beautiful, tres elegant femme fatale she played in Otto Preminger ‘s Laura (‘44).

The Douglas interview was 35 years later, of course, so why the shade? Because Tierney seemed altered by more than time.

She looked and sounded Lucille Ball-ish, to be honest — like someone who’d been smoking unfiltered cigarettes for decades and enjoying her nightly cocktails.

And she spoke with a slightly coarse accent that didn’t exactly scream “finishing school,” which was how she sounded in Laura. She pronounced “awards” as “awauhds”, Warner Bros. as Wauhnuh Brothuhs” and father as “fahthuh”.

Plus Tierney had sadly been grappling with mental issues off and on since the ‘50s, and given my own younger sister’s decades of battling schizophrenia I know what that shit looked like.

All to say that for those who’ve been blessed with good genes and have revelled in their youth and the fair-weather life that often results when people can’t stop talking about how ravishing your green eyes are, they don’t know what they’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

Tierney and her well-to-do family (her father, Howard Sherwood Tierney, was a flush insurance broker) began living in nearby Westport in the mid 1930s. Their home was in the Greens Farms region, and is located at 2 Tierney Lane, presumably christened in honor of her dad. (I’m wondering if Howard’s middle name was somehow connected in a family way to nearby Sherwood Island.)

I’ve been meaning to visit the Tierney homestead since moving here in the spring of ‘22. One of these days.

Gene Tierney made it to age 70. She died on 11.6.91.