The following is my 5800th post here at kelloggbloggin.blogspot.com.
1. It was possibly in 1993, on my 40th birthday. I know it was a birthday around thirty years ago. Friends asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate. I'd read about Ealing Studios of London and how, soon after WWII ended, they made a bunch of small scale, black and white comedies. I'd recently read about two of them, Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Lavender Hill Mob, both featuring Alec Guiness, and I asked that we rent them from Flicks and Pics and enjoy a double feature on my birthday.
I thought each movie was perfect. They were delightfully absurd, wonderfully performed, light, and entertaining. I didn't, however, pursue my enjoyment of these movies right away. Instead, I scratched my itch for light British comedy by reading, or listening on audio tapes, to P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Bertie stories and they watching Stephen Frye and Hugh Laurie play those roles on the public television series, Jeeves and Wooster.
One day six or seven years ago, when we lived in Maryland, not far from the American Film Institute's Silver Theater and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, I rekindled my love of these movies by going to a double feature at AFI. I watched Alec Guinness in The Lavender Hill Mob and another Ealing production, The Man in the White Suit. My entire body tingled with enjoyment.
I watched more of these kind of movies soon after we moved to Kellogg and bought the Vizio and purchased a Fire Stick. Two pop right to mind: I loved watching Alec Guinness in both Barnacle Bill and Last Holiday.
So, today, I was looking into and reading about movies and somehow -- and why has it taken this long? I don't know -- it came to my attention that the British Film Institute has a streaming service for not much of a monthly fee called BFI Player Classics. It features a wide variety of classic British movies, including many produced by Ealing Studios.
I subscribed.
2. So, today, I watched two British comedies, both with my current favorite, Margaret Rutherford, in the cast.
I began by watching Ealing Studio's Passport to Pimlico (1949), in which a neighborhood in the London district of Pimlico discover, in the most absurd way, that they are not Londoners, not British subjects, but citizens of Burgundy. I will give no more of it away except to say that manifold forms of chaos break out and the movie becomes a most entertaining satire, lampooning the inefficiency of post-WWII bureaucracy in England and the government's general impotence when faced with a crisis -- or should I say "crisis". It's also a testament to the power of a neighborhood, with the help of the general London citizenry, to collect its resources and its wits and figure out how to survive the crisis that develops by pulling together, by helping out one another.
3. I gave myself a short rest and then watched a sweet comedy (not from Ealing) entitled, The Smallest Show on Earth (1957). It tells the story of a couple who one day discover they have inherited a rundown cinema in the a place called Sloughboro. Given the chance to sell the Bijou, the couple decides to give running the theater a go and the movie centers around the ups and downs they experience in their venture. Not only does this movie include Margaret Rutherford in its cast, but Peter Sellers plays the Bijou's projectionist, a character over thirty years older than the actor, and both of them give performances that are at once comical and touching.
In the near and far future, I will be charging headlong into more of the BFI's offerings, along with Criterion movies and the boxed set of discs I bought last month.
Vizio University is getting more and more stimulating by the day.
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