Sunday, August 3, 2008

Free association: It's all fun and games until you wind up at Zsa Zsa Gabor.

You could read this Spiked article on the New York Reality TV School ("...those striving to be reality TV stars, but having difficulty with its number one tenet ‘be yourself’, will receive expert tuition from a number of successful American reality TV stars..."), or you could just remember that being natural is only a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.

From Lord Henry to George Sanders, the actor who portrayed him in the 1945 film version of Dorian Gray and who is up for the deluxe retrospective treatment over at Bright Lights:
. . . Aptly enough, it was Alfred Hitchcock who gave Sanders his first classic roles on film. Midway through Rebecca (1940), we hear the Voice purring and sneering offscreen, then watch as Sanders' black sheep Jack Favell hilariously tries to keep his aplomb while tripping through an open window. Jack is a rotter who resorts to blackmail at the end of the movie, caressing the words "foul pl-a-a-ay," as he schemes to get enough money to retire (always Sanders' ultimate goal). He almost steals Rebecca, and Hitch quickly gave him an even better part in Foreign Correspondent (1940), where he tosses off one of his best lines, "You know how women are with firearms, they have no sense of timing!" Sanders leaves no doubt as to the double meaning of this dangerous remark, but all is not fun and games here; toward the end, Hitch moves in his camera on Sanders as he watches an old man being tortured. We don't see what's happening, but we hear the torture, and we see it reflected on Sanders' extremely expressive face; his sophisticated complacency is pricked, and beneath this pose is a scared, apprehensive child. When his mask of hauteur is down, Sanders' face registers all kinds of emotions, sometimes against his will: he gives a look of sexual appraisal to Joel McCrea in Foreign Correspondent that can't have been fully conscious.

No comments:

Post a Comment