Kathy Routliffe

Rabbit, rabbit! To inaugurate the spring month, it snowed flurrily all yesterday morning. This afternoon we are flooded with freezing sun. I can't believe Purim is already upon us. So many names need to be blotted out.

As of the start of the month, I seem to have had over a hundred-dollar drop in my Patreon membership without any notification of a mass die-off in subscriptions. Any suggestions on interpreting this deficit would be appreciated since it is my only steady source of income at the moment and we are so broke.

I am still feeling in something of a mental blast crater about the news. I have spent my afternoon on the phone. rushthatspeaks who also spent his afternoon on the phone is coming over and we are going to lie on the couch and complain about doctors and lawyers. And business executives.

Of his foreshortened filmography, David Farrar was right to class Cage of Gold (1950) with his three films for Powell and Pressburger. He would never again be as luscious onscreen as he had been as the louche and irresistibly uninterested Mr. Dean of Black Narcissus (1947) or even as bitterly vulnerable as the self-dodging Sammy Rice of The Small Back Room (1949), but neither had he been asked to splash out his saturnine charm like Bill Glennon, the cornucopia of post-war shadow sides who fascinates this Ealing blend of domestic and underworld noir even when it knows, like his string of cross-Channel women, better.
 
Even in his era's extensive catalogue of damaged veterans, Bill is a disturbing shape-shifter, a violet-eyed spiv who can sit for his medal-ribboned portrait only half ironically as "St George, World War Two." Airmen were so heroized during the war itself, it feels like an especially provocative tilt at a generation of odeon myths to leave uncomfortably open whether this decorated wing commander became a crook after the war because it damaged him too badly to settle to civvy street or whether he made such a successful flyer because he was an amoral adrenaline junkie to begin with and whether it even matters when the results either way are this gorgeous, destructive, at once worldly and immature man. "I ask about your plans, you make a joke about the atom bomb." He romances the gamine artist of Jean Simmons' Judith Murray in a whirl of air shows and nights on the town as if incarnating the RAF-struck fantasies of her adolescence and leashes the cosmopolitan chanteuse of Madeleine Lebeau's Marie Jouvet with a bluntly demon lover's alternation of vanishing acts and the most incredible sex. The jeweled wristwatch that circulates among them does more than symbolize his inconstant attentions, it underscores his loose-ended opportunism, the streak of nihilism in his pleasure-seeking that can distract itself mid-scheme with a tastier prospect and cut and run from either at a moment's expedience. "Sweetheart, to live you have to have money. If your only trade is shooting down aeroplanes, you have to make it the best way you can." In the age of the welfare state, he's a creature of the unrepentant war, inseparable from its reckless glamour and threat: James Donald as the romantically second-run Dr. Alan Kearn labors with thankless conscientiousness for the future of the nascent NHS, but the blackout dazzle of Bill never appears except out of one past or another, the repressed on a perma-return ticket. What's the Time? glowed the legend of the world clock at Piccadilly Circus underneath which he was introduced transacting some elliptically clipped business that in hindsight cannot have been remotely legit, considering that bigamy and blackmail comprise merely two of his offhand income streams. His last words which for a twist sound like true ones will reach us through the spectral double exposure of memory. Of course his talent for inconvenient reappearance includes from the dead. Farrar had such bodily presence as an actor, Bill can't be too ghostlike when his dark-tousled, tweed-slouched figure commands the most venal conversations with the look of a raffish don, but he is elusive for such a comprehensive rotter, never once given the socially soothing out of a psychological explanation or even a total write-off. Just as it would have been nicer of the film to smooth the anxieties of his criminal present by revealing a past to match, it's nastier of it to suggest that he may retain some real feeling for the woman he's improvised into a badger game, which doesn't make it untrue. "Judy and I have a thing for each other that takes some breaking. We always had. You should know that."
 
Cage of Gold was produced and directed by the indispensable Michael Relph and Basil Dearden and while its preoccupation with the war's ambivalent legacy could be taken to point toward the social problem cycle for which their post-war collaborations became best known, it's also a fluid and full-tilt showcase for the British noir style. The screenplay by Jack Whittingham hinges its split modes so cleverly together—a criss-cross of perspectives that could each have formed their own, more conventional crime melodrama—that the film can't help but deflate when it converts in its last fifteen minutes into a much more forthright procedural with the introduction of Bernard Lee's Inspector Gray, but until then it seems to delight in laying down one immaculately expressionist set-up after another like the surge of commuters that sluices a pair of not yet lovers into one another's fateful, Tube-crowded arms. The elfin legend of Léo Ferré accompanies the star attraction of La Cage d'Or within a self-referentially gilded set that turns by dressed-down day into a vorticist rattan of shadows. The lid of an overboiled kettle chatters like the tremble of a pistol whose barrel telescopes with the steam-shriek into the circular blare of an impatient car horn. Even locations as familiarly establishing as the Albert Bridge or the Arc de Triomphe can flip in the hard-lit lens of DP Douglas Slocombe into a luminous mews of fog or an implicitly chthonic gate, as fast as the whip-timed cutting of Peter Tanner can slam a telephone's last word on the emptily curling smoke of a suicide. An abortion is discussed as frankly as the sign in a register office wearily requests, "Confetti must not be used in these premises." The joke about the wireless that pits the Third Programme against "comics and crooners" has faded to period detail, but it still feels sharp for Judy's stomach to turn at the gleefully untouchable misdeeds of Mr. Punch. The supporting cast of Herbert Lom, Harcourt Williams, Gladys Henson, and Grégoire Aslan occasionally feel heavyweight for their screen time, but Simmons offers more than a beautiful target as her pixieish innocence slowly cools and Lebeau is stealthily less decorative than her devoted role, though the demands of reliable virtue leave Donald with little to show until he's caught polishing the prints off a crime scene. With one speculatively raked brow, Farrar dominates and he should, magnetically troubling, unresolved to the end. "She had everything I ever really wanted except money." I am in the wrong region for the restored Blu-Ray, but it's not unwatchable on the Internet Archive and certainly clearer than it looked on the former TVTime where I discovered it four years ago and it seemed to have been heavily stepped on. Even so, not unlike its antihero, it haunted me. This thing brought to you by my wanted backers at Patreon.

I hope Rob Grant would take it in the intended spirit that when I heard the news of his sudden death, all I could think was "All most of us get is 'Mind that bus!' 'What bus?' Splat!" The first six and a half series of original flavor Red Dwarf (1988–99) were a social staple of my sophomore year of college, watched primarily in my case from the top half of a bunk bed occupied by a structurally unwise number of students who would shortly branch out into whatever British television comedy we could get hold of the tapes for. It became an immediate and ineradicable part of our language. Decades later, the number of quotations from especially the first three series that have worked themselves into my present household lingo would be difficult to estimate without a rewatch. In storage with the rest of my library, I still have some of the tie-in novels, including at least one of the separately authored parallel continuations, which unfortunately for this memoriam may have been Doug Naylor's. I cannot find that I ever saw another project of Grant's except for the first series of The 10%ers (1993–96) and I am still stricken to lose yet another artist while Kissinger's heirs don't even seem to be in this machine. Not everybody has to be dead, Dave.

Stepping out of the house for a short walk around the neighborhood, I discovered that a friend had sent me a surprise gift in the mail and that between their post office and my doorstep it had been stolen. I received a gutted envelope slit down the side containing brown paper from which the gift had been shaken out. The stiff paper of the accompanying note had wedged hard enough into the envelope that after some stricken searching it was still in there; the handmade buttons and the picture were not. I assume the thief was looking for checks or more conventionally defined valuables, but it seems unspeakably cruel to let the envelope continue on its way and arrive to tell me what kindness I had been robbed of. I still have the note. The kindness itself did travel the distance. But I still want the thief to fall in front of a freight express.

The snow has plastered our windows like blinds. This morning it scudded so thickly down our street that the air itself couldn't have been any clearer: it made walls instead of veils of the late streetlight. The yew trees look like calcified humps of stalagmite. It's still blowing around out there, bending the whippier evergreens of the neighbors' yard like a wind sock. I can hear a commuter train whistling dimly from over Route 16. I am informed we have broken the previous state record for snowfall in a day set by the 1997 April Fool's Day Blizzard which had itself surpassed the Blizzard of '78. Our porch is drifted ankle-deep.

I spent much of yesterday running pre-blizzard errands, but the local state of the parking spots is the truest gauge of the meteorology about to go down.



I have not yet managed to get hold of her memoir, but I deeply appreciate being notified of the existence of E. M. Barraud, who identified herself with chalk-cut hill figures, candidly described her relationship status as "technically single, but 'married' in a permanent homosexual relationship with another woman," published under her assigned initials and was known in Little Eversden where she worked for the Women's Land Army as John. She gave her wartime responses for Mass-Observation as both a man and a woman: "People are people, not specifics of a gender." I had never even encountered her poetry.