1. It's been a blast diving back into the Alec Guiness archive. Guiness appeared in a string of movies in the 1950s where he played characters who were unremarkable but stepped outside of the strictures of their ordinariness to do remarkable things. If you've seen The Lavender Hill Mob or The Man in the White Suit you know what I mean. Today, I finished watching Alec Guiness as George Bird in Last Holiday. I wish everyone I know had seen this movie only so I could write about plot details; I'll just say that at its core, this movie is about the absurdity of human life -- I'd call it a dive into existentialism, a movie that asks us to see not only the absurdity of our day to day existence in terms of what we value, that is, how we assess the world around us, but also invites us to confront the classic existential dilemma of being born, of coming into this world with only one certainty: we will die. It's a smooth and elegant movie on the surface with lots of cocktails, fine meals, and people of means living leisurely in a posh resident hotel. Underneath this easy living, however, certain characters long for something deeper, like deeper bonds with others, while others are content to be blithe and oblivious. It's a perfect setting for existential inquiry into the absurd.
2. In Barnacle Bill, a lark of a light satire, Guniess plays a career naval officer whose career stalled thanks to his being plagued with sea sickness. So he buys a rickety amusement pier, transforms it into a ship that never goes to sea, and is able to be in command of a vessel and its crew for the first time in his life. The movie develops into a citizen vrs. city hall conflict and satirizes the abuse of political power, bureaucracy, and greed in way that reminded me of a Marx Brothers movie.
It seems that over the last, oh, forty years or so the stakes for making money making movies and launching and sustaining big careers, winning awards, and creating lucrative franchises have gotten higher and higher. In these Alec Guiness movies, as well as in the Sherlock Holmes movie I watched two nights ago, the stakes for making money, building careers, copping awards don't seem to exist. They are almost carefree movies, light on their feet, breezy, witty, as serious as they need to be, but movies, somehow, that stick with me. It's fun to think about how Alec Guiness, who, in Barnacle Bill, plays an absurd naval man whose primary service to his country was to be a guinea pig for experiments in curing sea sickness, would one day become a legendary Jedi master.
3. It's been cold outside, gray, and not very inviting. I haven't gone out much and I've decided to entertain myself by watching a variety of things on television -- like Sherlock Holmes and 1950s Alec Guiness movies. Tonight, I tried out something else and watched the first episode of the first season of the Father Brown series from 2013. I haven't read any of the Father Brown mysteries. Tonight it was fun entering into the village life of the Coswolds which seem so pastoral, so distant and protected from the problems of the world. But, it turns out that in bucolic Kembleford, murders occur. So does infidelity. Immigrants complicate things. Denizens of this quiet town with its pubs and polished brass beer taps and sunny tea rooms enter into illicit congress with one another. Father Brown has heard many dark secrets and knows about much of this activity thanks to his years in the confessional and has become quite a detective. It was fun to see him in action tonight and I think I'll watch some more of these episodes.
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