Three Beautiful Things 09-12-2022: Debbie Rests, I Hole Up with a Farce, I Hole Up with Philip Marlowe

1. Debbie rested today, for the most part. She spent some time making lesson plans for her sub, but for the most part she took it easy. I'm not sure if her health improved today, but it didn't worsen. Diane helped us out a lot by bringing by a superb dinner. Debbie said the meal was so good that it made it worthwhile to have Covid! 

Around this house, when it comes to illness, we like stable. 

Things were stable today.

2. Debbie and I are avoiding much contact with one another. I spent almost every minute of the day in the Vizio room, unless I was in the bedroom, checking on Luna, who seems to be doing all right herself.

I decided to turn to Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford and the hilarious farce The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), a sweet parody of boarding schools and British bureaucracy that centers on a British bureaucrat's blunder that results in the students and staff of a girls' school being sent to reside at a boys' school. One chaotic incident after another results and for about 90 minutes my focus was on the high brow absurdity of this story and how brilliantly it was filmed and performed. 

3. Later, I decided I wanted to watch a contrasting movie, and, boy howdy!, was Murder, My Sweet (1944) ever totally different from The Happiest Days of Your Life! Murder, My Sweet is an early film noir. It's a movie version of the Raymond Chandler novel, Farewell, My Lovely, and features Chandler's hard-boiled private investigator, Phillip Marlowe. The storyline is convoluted with double crosses, twists, turns, and lots of crime. I enjoyed Dick Powell playing Marlowe.  I thought both Anne Shirley and Claire Trevor were stylish, elegant, and intelligent in their roles. Trevor played the young wife of an elderly, wealthy man and Anne Shirley played her stepdaughter and both of them played and were played by Philip Marlowe. More than any film noir movie I've watched over the last several weeks, Murder, My Sweet included expressionistic, almost psychedelic passages, no doubt inspired by the German expressionists, making the movie all the more adventurous, not only in its story, but in how it was directed (by Edward Dmytryk) and filmed (Harry J. Wild).