Thursday, 4 August 2016

Watching Carlo Gesualdo, who is the transgressor ? : Breaking the Rules

The Marian Consort, Gerald Kyd, and Carlo Gesualdo at Jesus College

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

3 August
An evening with The Marian Consort, Gerald Kyd, and Carlo Gesualdo (Prince of Venosa), in the chapel of Jesus College, during Cambridge Summer Music Festival, on Monday 18 July 2016 at 7.30 p.m.








Prelude :


This piece of writing – by way of an account or review of the music-event Breaking the Rules at Cambridge Summer Music Festival 2016 – should have been fully written up and finished much nearer the time, and so would have been more detailed¹ (and less impressionistic), but it is what it is…

The Marian Consort


With Breaking the Rules, it took no more than a flick-through the Festival's promotional booklet to establish that The Marian Consort (@marianconsort) were, as a creditable ensemble, working in tandem with an actor (Gerald Kyd), and that their collaboration was likely to provide an unusual experience, with a Cambridge college chapel as the back-drop...


Moreover, Cambridge Summer Music Festival (cambridgesummermusic.com / @cambridgemusic) has a tradition of such interpretations of composers in relation to their lives and works, one example being a one-man show around a decade ago where, in the chapel of Clare College (@ClareCollege), we heard a performer embodying Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (C. P. E. Bach), and playing his work, and with - to close, as the light outside faded - a composition by his father, Johnann Sebastian (J. S. Bach), his Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903.

Taken from The Full Monteverdi - LIVE SHOW 2004-2007


Or who can likewise forget I Fagiolini, with their theatrical Full Monteverdi, giving us the experience - right in the midst of us - of the love and passion of Claudio Monteverdi's madrigals ? [This at a regular Festival venue, Emmanuel United Reformed Church (EURC) : you can read here about director John La Bouchardière's film, made with I Fagiolini (@ifagiolini) and its music director, Robert Hollingworth.] Or that, in 2011, before presenting her programme Beloved Clara in 2016 - with its insights into the lives of Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms - Lucy Parham (@LucyParham) had brought us, amongst other things, a tea-time talk with Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) Sarah Walker (@drsarahwalker) about Liszt’s Women, also at EURC, and complete with an element of piano performance ?

Lucy Parham



An account of the performance / event :

One heard afterwards, from asking one of the members of the ensemble’s technical crew, that previous venues had been Brighton Festival (@brightfest) and Lichfield, and thus gathered that – for all – the experience must accordingly be a very site-specific one : at this venue, lighting the chapel of Jesus College had apparently been a joy, and from the nave one had been able to see the colours and shades of the chapel itself, thus giving energy to the different parts of Kyd / Gesualdo’s story.

Therefore, one assumes, variations to moves and to cues – and to where and how to project the moving images that were also such a part of the evening – must also have been determined in situ to suit the architecture (and how it is laid out at floor level), with cast and crew then practising and, as they had, making them highly cogent. (To an extent true, of course, with any ensemble that is prepared to explore the physical and / or acoustic properties of a place - including when The Hilliard Ensemble performed with Jan Garbarek in St Paul’s (@StPaulsLondon) or the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge (@Kings_College), with the former processing separately to a central point, and the latter wandering where he might, and weaving magic between their vocal-lines on alto (or tenor).)


Straightaway, The Marian Consort (@marianconsort) impressed both with the beauty that one could discern in the individual voices, and in the quality of the ensemble - working around and alongside their collaborator Gerald Kyd, and fitting themselves to this oft-used performance-space (the nave and transepts anterior to the chapel proper of Jesus College (@JesusCollegeCam)).


Sometimes as a choir à 5, rather than the full à 6², they were in a sharp and tightly defined relation to the words of Kyd (as to timing, ambience, etc.) and his demeanour as Carlo Gesualdo – or, at least, a version of him (or versions ?), as scripted by writer Clare Norburn (@clarenorburn) (please see below). This was assured performance, even more so in an unfamiliar context, and where, on the evening, they had to match the tone and mood of Kyd’s role.



That said, there are ways, and ways, of performing Gesualdo’s work, some of which seem to find it less necessary to prepare the ear for, or assimilate, his dissonances / use of dissonance : for example, when The Delphian Singers performed, in the chapel of Clare College (@ClareCollege)), for Easter at King’s 2013³ (@ConcertsatKings)) – as if what Gesualdo does were so extreme that it must be accentuated, and cannot be allowed to resemble that of his (longer-lived) contemporary, Claudio Monteverdi... ?


The Discovery of Bomarzo at Aldeburgh Festival (Solomon's Knot and Mira Calix)

After all, Monteverdi cited and spoke highly of Gesualdo⁴, and Solomon’s Knot, performing in The Discovery of Bomarzo - at Aldeburgh Festival (#AldeburghFestival / @snapemaltings), in collaboration with Mira Calix (@miracalix) - gave a concert without an interval that, amongst others, included works by both, but did not draw attention to Gesualdo’s use of dissonance any more than to that of Monteverdi [an excerpt can be seen on Solomon's Knot's (@solomonsknot's) web-site at www.solomonsknotcollective.com/the-discovery-of-bomarzo.html] :

At Aldeburgh, Gesualdo was represented by pieces from The Fifth Book of Madrigals (1611), and one from the Sixth (published in the same year). However, Glenn Watkins⁴ (op. cit., pp. 36-60) spends a chapter in considering the arguments and evidence for the composer's assertion that they had been written fifteen years earlier (i.e. when Gesualdo was in Ferrara (please see below)), and so not as a reaction to events to which notoriety has attached (please also see below). (Likewise, The Gesualdo Six (@TheGesualdoSix) perform a programme with Ligeti’s Nonsense Madrigals interspersed with madrigals by both composers (including The Sixth Book of Madrigals, but do not manage the dissonances in a different way, so that Gesualdo’s then sound extreme.)





The script for the performance did not seem over-developed (i.e. not 'too highly polished', since slickness can lie that way), and its raw humanity, and that of Kyd as Gesualdo (‘K/G’) - obliged to re-experience his music through his life, and his life through his music - fed each other : if we must search for emotional or literary parallels (and it is absolutely not necessary to know them at all to watch and understand Breaking the Rules), there is an affinity with much of Beckettt’s work, but, most nearly, an echoing of the structural interplay of Words and Music (Paroles et musique), his work for radio, as to the function of the musical portion and its integration into the operation of the text.

On another level, when in mid-speech (although we never did know when K/G might summon music - or, vice versa, it summon him away from us, and significantly often to the period when he was in Ferrara (please see below), K/G also felt like an imagining of one of the souls to whom Beckettt's beloved Dante had assigned a role in the Inferno. Not, though, the passive repetitive patterns of Beckettt at his most discernibly Dante-esque, in Play (not least since Gesualdo was not, at this time in the evening, the adulterer), but in the narrative energy of his trilogy of novels - or that of Winnie in Happy Days (Oh les beaux jours). (Even just a very little of Hamm’s superficially self-contented story-telling style in Endgame (Fin de partie) ?)

At The Lammermuir Festival 2016, Gerald Kydd with The Marian Consort in Breaking the Rules (photograph by Robin Mitchell, for the Festival)


Although, at the time, it may have seemed dramatically ‘unhelpful’ for K/G to ask, nigh at the outset, who we were to judge Carlo Gesualdo, [what we conveniently call] History does nothing but judge him - for ‘Murther’ ou des autres dissounances. (Sometimes with the most unlikely accomplices !) Yet, if, after an accusation against The Marian Consort’s and his explicit audience, we thought that going back and re-creating the so-called fourth wall was not easily done (a term also ill suited to theatre in the round), we had not reckoned with writer Clare Norburn's understanding of the effect of K/G's presence, or his dynamic within this work, and with live singers - present almost as part of the action, or of his psyche.


At that point, and for all that one knew (not then having reference to a programme), the evening might have run to one long unbroken act. Over the course of the second half, one also proved to have wrongly figured that K/G wanted to keep from us an account of what happened to his wife and her lover – he did tell us towards the end, and how it had not been a casual discovery, or acts that had been committed in the heat of anger.


Nowadays (please see the Tweets below), and ignoring that this was in the late sixteenth century (and that the Gran Corte della Vicaria did not find that Gesualdo had committed a crime), the concentration seems to be on the fact that he killed these people at all⁵ (not, which appears to have been what sensationally exercised people at the time, the manner of it). So there are casual comments on whether Gesualdo’s dissonances reflect his remorse, in the course of Elin Manahan Thomas introducing a concert, otherwise excellent, of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European instrumental music by Il Giardino Armonico.



Whatever the reason why we hear it (and probably believe it - and all that it implies - just because we do), it is a much-told story, originating from the composer’s friend Ignaz von Seyfried, that when he acted as page-turner for Beethoven at the premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 3, von Seyfried saw almost nothing but empty pages. Too often, the stories that are readily told about composers, not least Gesualdo, are actually to the exclusion of the music and of meaningfully engaging with it. (Likewise, we hear time after time that Ralph Vaughan Williams professed agnosticism, but does that information get in the way of hearing his musical or other concerns in Job : A Masque for Dancing (1931), or Pilgrim’s Progress (1936) ?)

K/G (Gerald Kyd as Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa)

With excellent collaborators in The Marian Consort and Gerald Kyd, Clare Norburn’s (@clarenorburn's) act of Breaking the Rules is giving us a prolonged period to listen to the account that K/G chooses to give of himself and his life – all brought into the context of his music and of, musically, how he harks back to two years in the mid-1590s, when he was in Ferrara (whose elite musical world has since been adeptly treated of by Donald Macleod and his team on Radio 3’s Composer of The Week (#COTW)).

As we hear K/G, and also the music, what seems to have taken root most in his memory and feelings is his time at the Court of Ferrara, and the music that he composed there / then (please see above, concerning the date of composition of his last two books of madrigals), at the same while as enchanting him, imbuing him with a vivid sense of loss : as Norburn herself observes (in a full programme-note), Gesualdo’s ‘flowering as a composer is linked to a series of visits he made to the cultural hothouse of the day, Ferrara, which brought him into contact with other musicians and composers'.




Norburn gave us the moment in time when the piece is located. As well as in the programme, the piece itself sets out, in the guise of K/G, an understanding / interpretation of the significance of Gesualdo's earlier life. As she comments :

 Like most second sons, his intended path was to enter the priesthood and cardinalate [...]. At the age of seven, his mother died and he was sent away to Rome to be brought up by Jesuits. When Carlo was 18, his brother died and his path suddenly changed. Suddenly he was expected to marry and carry on the family line.

Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (around the age of 13)


One York Early Music Festival (@yorkearlymusic) considered the musical responses to, and historical consequences of, the death of Prince Henry (one of which was to bring Charles I onto the throne in Henry's stead, in succession to James I, Charles' and his father). As with the early and unenvisaged death of the Prince of Wales (19 February 1594 – 6 November 1612), Gesualdo’s brother Luigi, three years his elder, had been due to succeed and become Prince of Venosa⁶, but Luigi died in 1584 : Charles and Carlo had both been brought up with a different future in mind for them, and for their elder brothers, and Breaking the Rules took time to explore the effect that it had on the latter.

Following Henry’s death, the musical tributes alone, which include settings of ‘When David heard’ by Thomas Weelkes and Thomas Tomkins (thus making comparison with David’s grief at the news that his son Absalom has been killed in battle), were effusive. How difficult, Norburn and K/G suggest to us in this challenging work of drama, to be the one who has not been brought up to rule (or have a spouse), and yet be looked to do those things (knowing that the death of another, one's brother, brought it about and / or that no one had intended one to have that status)… ?







Postlude :








* * * * *












End-notes

 ¹ Which is to say, not relying overly on memories that had been meant to be recorded in words on the night, rather than becoming vague with time first...

 As it was, it was always going to have these opening two or three paragraphs [their relevance, now, seems unclear], which were roughed out then (although then used, in between, in reviewing Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon (2016) (@tnd_film)) :

In other words, is the faulty notion behind Nicolas Winding Refn Presents... this ? It is as if, counterfactually, Stravinsky had not only done very little with the Pergolesi materials to re-embody them as his own, but had also, and without good reason, allowed those facts to be known before their time.

 Whereas Stravinsky himself was too good a self-publicist for that, and, first allowed the Pergolesi name ‘to stick’ by arranging the work (in collaboration with Paul Kochanski) for violin and piano, publishing Suite d'après des thèmes, fragments et morceaux de Giambattista Pergolesi (1925). (Later, as well as an eight-movement Pulcinella Suite (revised in 1965), he produced arrangements, in collaboration with Gregor Piatigorsky and Samuel Dushkin, respectively, called Suite italienne for cello and piano (1932-1933) and violin and piano (1933).)


 ² Partly determined by the number of parts and / or getting in position for the effect of 'a voice off', from the choir. (The seating, in the chapel at Jesus College, was in the nave and transepts.)

³ Conducted by Toby Young in the programme Drop, drop slow tears, with Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsories (as well as works by Kenneth Leighton and James MacMillan), on Wednesday 27 March 2013.

⁴ In The Gesualdo Hex [W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., New York / London (2010)], by Glenn Watkins, we read (p. 56) :

 Monteverdi countered [being charged with taking contrapuntal licences and making use of unprepared dissonances] that the older prima pratica of Ockeghem and Josquin des Prez hadplaced a premium on the beauty of the contrapuntal writing. The new seconda pratica, however, which he specifically attributed to Gesualdo and a small group of composers beginning with Cipriano de Rore and ending with Giulio Caccini, held counterpoint and rhythm as subordinate to the text [...]


⁵ Although, from the same period, do we take for granted in Shakespeare (from Othello to Leontes’ bloodthirsty jealousy in The Winter’s Tale), or in the execution of Anne Boleyn, that (real or imagined) infidelity came at a high price ?

 ⁶ On the death of his father, in 1591 (and a year after he had killed his first wife, Donna Maria), Gesualdo became the third Prince of Venosa (and the eighth Count of Conza). (Prince Henry, dying ten months before Gesualdo, was thus his exact, if younger, contemporary.)

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, 2 August 2016

Some bollocks about 'saving' the @BBC £150m...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

3 August
















Postlude :






 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Sunday, 31 July 2016

Poetry in a Tweet : Poem for The Dispossessed

Poetry in a Tweet : Poem for The Dispossessed

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

30 July





© Belston Night Works 2016


End-notes

* A companion-piece to 'You *tease* !' ~ 60-word story...




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, 28 July 2016

Cambridge Summer Music Festival (#CSMF16) : concerts with a first-time visitor to Cambridge

Cambridge Summer Music Festival : concerts with a first-time visitor to Cambridge

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 July
Some Tweets about four concerts, in three days, at Cambridge Summer Music Festival (#CSMF16), with - and chosen by - a first-time visitor to Cambridge


A follow-up to A quick overview, by Tweet, of I Fagiolini’s programme 'Amuse-bouche' at Cambridge Summer Music Festival...



 1. Benjamin Appl (baritone) (@BenjaminAppl), standing in for Louise Alder (soprano) (@louisealdersop), with Gary Matthewman (piano) (@songpianist) at The Fitzwilliam Museum (@FitzMuseum_UK) ~ Monday 25 July at 7.30 p.m.










Interlude (general grumping) :






Resuming with Appl (@BenjaminAppl) and Matthewman (piano) :







2. The Piatti String Quartet at ‘Little St Mary’s’ (The Church of St Mary the Less [Wikipedia®]) ~ Tuesday 26 July at 1.15 p.m. :




3. The Academy of Ancient Music (@AAMOrchestra), directed by Pavlo Beznosiuk, in The College of St John the Evangelist, St John's College (@stjohnscam) ~ Tuesday 26 July at 7.30 p.m.










4. #Gallicantus at The Round Church ~ Wednesday 27 July at 9.30 p.m.












Also from #CSMF16 : A quick overview, by Tweet, of I Fagiolini’s programme 'Amuse-bouche' at Cambridge Summer Music Festival...




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, 23 July 2016

A quick overview, by Tweet, of I Fagiolini’s programme Amuse-bouche at Cambridge Summer Music Festival

An overview of I Fagiolini with Amuse-bouche at Cambridge Summer Music Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 July

A quick overview, by Tweet (and free text), of I Fagiolini’s performance of their programme Amuse-bouche, under the directorship of Robert Hollingworth, for Cambridge Summer Music Festival at Emmanuel United Reformed Church, Cambridge, on Saturday 23 July at 7.30 p.m.


A still from I Fagiolini - Ode à la gastronomie

Directed by John La Bouchardière and made by Polyphonic Films




In both halves, we also heard from Anna Markland (as well as her voice in the ensemble) on piano, with two of Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes (Nos 4* and 6, respectively), and, to close the first half, with Roderick Williams’ arrangement for piano and choir of the central movement (marked Adagio assai) of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major









All in all, whether one wants to relate to the majority of the texts that we heard before the Françaix as surréaliste, or in some other stylistic or genre terms, these composers brought out qualities in them, and likewise the members of I Fagiolini under Robert Hollingworth’s direction, that made them compelling, and highly inviting of our interest :

In his Lieder, Franz Schubert sometimes transformed poems to which one might otherwise not have devoted much attention : here, it was not that the poems of Éluard or Apollinaire were unattractive, but that interpreters such as Poulenc could, in and through their sound-world, cause their visions to open up – in a way that, beforehand, their words on the page, even in the French, did not easily allow one to experience…





To conclude by way of an encore, after the well-received strangeness of Jean Françaix’s text and its treatment, something more familiar still than the Satie pieces : ‘Baïlèro’ from Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne.



Very much a Post-script - Schumann, Surrealism, and Satie [in Satie’s Parade] :









One can read more about András Schiff here [from Kirshbaum Associates Inc., his representatives in North America], and Wikipedia® on Parade, Satie's Opus ??, here...



 End-notes

 * Regarding which the audience, wrongly, seemed almost more enthusiastic than the preceding Sept chansons (by Francis Poulenc)… ?


Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, 21 July 2016

In a few sentences, casting out NWR¹'s The Neon Demon (2016)

In a few choice sentences, casting out NWR¹'s The Neon Demon (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 July


In a few choice sentences, casting out NWR¹'s The Neon Demon (2016)



Martin Creed ~ Work No. 232 (2000) at Tate Modern (@tate)



With a film, some will want to go into it, already knowing everything about it...




Or having (in its proper sense of reading every word) perused what Little White Lies (@LWLies) – or even Picturehouse Recommends – had to say (or did say, without ‘having to’ say it), and which will have determined them to watch - or to shun².





'when you were young, you dressed yourself and walked where you wanted'
John 21 : 18


Nicolas Winding Refn's (NWR¹'s) The Neon Demon (2016) is very deliberately mannered, and to the extent that his dialogue desires - in massive swathes of overly-delayed reaction - to be portentous. However, alongside its mise-en-scène³, instead it ends up just feeling very ponderous : nigh tediously so, with an affect that aims at insightful awkwardness, but largely conveys leadenness.

 Music choices, as ever, are strong, but, having made a graphic point of doing so in Drive (2011), NWR seems unable to do other than try to shock his audience, as if crediting that it will have a lack of interest in the first-blush, well-worn premise of the traps of (the topos of) a beautiful young girl, come to California to trade on attributes that she knows herself to possess.





 Prey on her what may - which, of course (and in order to provide the shocks), it duly does...



 This is what [some] others said, at more length… :






[...]










End-notes :

 ¹ Winding Refn is now monogrammed, with the claimed status of the royal or the regal, at the head of his films. (Although, according to Wikipedia®, A series of uncombined initials is properly referred to as a cypher (e.g. a royal cypher) and is not a monogram.)


² Maybe it is the bane of many a film-maker (or distributor) that a book is judged by what is not even its cover, though those in the latter category do not entirely help their cause when a trailer makes an excellent film seem weak, or a poor film worth the watch, because of how scenes, snippets and elements of dialogue have been unrepresentatively mixed up and divorced from their filmic setting, in favour of creating an impression that the work itself does not substantiate (let alone footage that is in a trailer, but did not make the cut to appear in the film itself…).

 ³ Which obviously heavily evokes Tony Scott's Tarantino-scripted True Romance (1993) (whose being shot by Scott left Tarantino himself free to direct Reservoir Dogs (1992)).




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, 20 July 2016

Starting with @PeterBradshaw1's @guardian 'review', some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)

Some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 July

Starting with @PeterBradshaw1's @guardian 'review', some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)














Next, engagement with the Every Film in 2016 review from Neil White (@everyfilmneil ~ http://everyfilmblog.blogspot.co.uk) :




More to come...




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, 10 July 2016

From the archive : Ma Apsley deputizes at inaugural Cary Grant Comes Home for the Weekend Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

10 July

From Horfield to Hollywood - Guest Review ~ Diana Davis

I was thrown in at the deep end to review the event From Horfield to Hollywood, including a discussion with Laura Rawlings (BBC Radio Bristol) and an expert panel. The reason being that The Agent Apsley [@THEAGENTAPSLEY] was unable to cover the event, owing to another commitment in Cambridge, so he suggested I attend, and Charlotte Crofts, the event and festival organizer, agreed - as I have always been such a fan of Cary Grant...

 It will come as no surprise to most Bristolians that the Watershed was packed with fans at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning – even George Ferguson, wearing his trademark red trousers, was there, to herald the start of the Cary Grant Comes Home for the Weekend Festival : to celebrate the transformation of Bristol schoolboy Archie Leach into Hollywood icon Cary Grant, and his endearing relationship with the City.

The film Cary Comes Home was directed by Stuart Napier ten years ago for ITV, and Laura Rawlings kicked off the proceedings by telling us that, on the anniversary of Cary Grant’s birth (18 January) this year, BBC Bristol decided to produce a radio programme about his life, and so invited listeners to contribute tales about him. She received many different stories, because people had met him walking around the City, or remembered him from school. She felt sure that it would be possible to make another film about their encounters in the future.


Dr Kathrina Glitre, Film and Screen Writing Lecturer at UWE, said how she just fell in love with him when she was eight, after watching Arsenic and Old Lace [(1944)], and saw a lot of his films. She was a teenager when he died, and spent the whole day in bed in misery. I feel sure that most women in the audience felt exactly the same, as his charm, elegance and sheer acting skills were mesmeric when he was on screen.


To think, too, that the-then Archie, as a poor child of eight, returned home from Bishop Road school to find his mother just not there must have been heart breaking. To be given no explanation by his callous father, Elias, who had packed his wife off to the psychiatric 'asylum' at 100 Fishponds Road - on what grounds we do not know* - beggars belief.

In a film-clip, a psychiatrist said that, as Archie's mother was quite strict about his appearance, she could have been suffering from OCD [Obsessive Compulsive Disorder]. Archie therefore felt for years it was something he had done that had caused her to go away.


 It is commonly known that he helped back stage at the Empire Theatre and the Hippodrome, and, in so doing, met Bob Pender, who gave him the chance to join his acrobatic troupe, since he was impressed with Archie’s skills. So Archie ran away from home in order to do so.

His father tracked him down up north and insisted he returned home to continue his education at Fairfield School - and, when he did so, Archie discovered that his father had remarried. However, Archie’s desire to join the troupe (so the story goes...) made him peep into the girls’ toilets, and thus he was expelled : he then rejoined the troupe, and went to New York City with them, as he was now 13.

In 1935, Cary learned his mother was alive when one of the Kingdon family, his mother’s relatives, saw a film of his and thought that he bore a strong resemblance to the Archie Leach whom he had known as a boy. It was 1939 before Cary was able to make contact with his mother, and another six years before he was able to visit her. He ensured that she was released from the psychiatric hospital, and was the perfect son to her right until her death.



After the interval, Professor Andrew Spicer, a lecturer at UWE [University of the West of England], gave an interesting talk about James Bond (Agent 007) and why Cary turned down the role. Cubby Broccoli, a friend of Cary’s, had wanted him to play the part of Bond in Thunderball [(1965)], but Cary did not want to be tied down for a total of seven films. In any case, he would have been too expensive, as the film had a budget of only one million dollars, and Cary’s fee would have eaten up most of that. It was felt that an unknown actor would best suit the part, and Sean Connery [that unknown then] landed the job !

 Stuart Napier’s film on Cary Grant’s life, with Cary occasionally speaking in his everyday voice, was highly interesting. He had been a very astutute man, and had realized, when cast opposite Audrey Hepburn in Charade [(1963)], that - on film - the age-gap between them was too great. He therefore insisted that the scene in the lift be re-written, which meant that he was then able to tell her that she was a child who needed a good spanking, and to behave herself, when she was coming on to him.


In her summing-up, Laura Rawlings referred to the story that Cary [when still Archie] had been playing football in the Bishop Road school-playground, and, when one of his front teeth had been knocked out, there was no money available to have a false tooth. However, mercifully the gap grew over and, as evidenced in a photographic still, he did indeed have only three front teeth. If one had not been told, one would not have realized at all !

There are not many cities whose inhabitants who can boast both about Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge, the s.s. Great Britain, and a Hollywood star whose origins began in their home town of Bristol :

Hurrah for Cary Grant !



To come, in the Festival itself, on 16 and 17 July :




 End-notes

 But watch carycomeshome.co.uk or @carycomeshome, and this space... ?




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, 9 July 2016

Report from Cary Grant Comes Home for the Weekend Festival 2016 : Notorious (1946) at Averys Wine Cellars

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 July




This posting will accrete into some sort of collage account of 'A Grand Day Out' in Averys Wine Cellars, Bristol, for the launch event of Cary Grant Comes Home for the Weekend Festival 2016, with a special screening - with wine interludes, and cheese and bubbly preludes - of Notorious (1946)



Attending this event had only been proposed and then booked, on the day, on a train to Bristol Parkway, as a much-delayed birth treat for The Agent's maternal...







When Cary checks his e-mail / voicemail - or gets that text-message ? - we already know the bad news for Ingrid and him...





Andrea Riseborough as Colette McVeigh in Shadow Dancer (2012)







 To come, in the Festival itself, on 16 and 17 July :






 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)