I got out my passport today and looked it over.  It's from eight years ago, right before my short time on the Niagara.  As it turned out, I didn't even need it, as I wasn't with the ship when it crossed into Canadian waters and the St. Lawrence River.  I'm glad I got it, though.  Several years after that, in 2004, I went to Scotland.  The only stamp in my passport so far is from the nice security guards at Edinburgh Airport.  This fall, I probably won't need it either, as we're not supposed to cross outside the three-mile line when working aboard ship.  Still, it'll be nice to have it along just in case--and for luck. 

There's my photo on the inner lining.  Beaming all over my face, looking pretty much as I do now, perhaps a little thinner and more carefree and optimistic.  My hair is raked back unflatteringly from my face and the photographer exaggerated the size of my chin.  I do have a big chin, but not as long as all that.  Still, that's me, all right.  It went to Scotland with me, and now it'll go on three college trips with me, and in the future I mean to take it all over the world.  

Getting into W-M made me look twice at other assumptions of mine.  I've been assuming I can never do some really ambitious stuff I want to try, like all that world traveling I told you guys I wanted to do some day.  Up till recently, I've been treating it as a fun pipe dream, speculating vaguely and never actually firming up any plans.  But, you know?  I made this work out, I can make that work out too.  I ought to decide what exactly I want to do and where I want to go, and then set about making it all happen.

Recently, I watched Maltese Falcon.  I posted about that already, come to think of it.  Of course, I loved Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo, even with his hair in ring-a-lets like the girl in the song.  I was still appalled by the stupidity of the villains, though.  What kind of challenge is there for Spade in beating a bunch of weak-minded idiots like those clowns?  No wonder I don't like Spade.  If I'd been writing the script, Mary Astor's character would have ( Spoilers, I suppose. )I'm telling you, she would have Mary Sued all over the place.  Why didn't they consult me?!  I'd have made her something far better than a cardboard cutout.

Anyway, my point in all this: my favorite moment in the movie might not look like much to anyone else.  When Cairo is unconscious and Sam Spade is going through his stuff, he takes out Cairo's wallet, which is full of money, ID, theater tickets, and miscellaneous odd trinkets.  And a passport.  He pages through it, and you can read over his shoulder if you want to.  I paused the DVD right there.  The passport has a photo of Cairo looking shifty.  Beside it on the information sheet, you can see: "Occupation: Traveler".  The pages are all covered in stamps from all over the place, in various languages and alphabets.  

I loved that.  Joel Cairo may be the Little Henchman that Could, but when I saw that passport I wanted to be him.  I was full of a sudden strong longing to have a life that could fill up a passport.  Now, I'm looking at those empty pages ahead of me, and thinking, "Let's get something down on you."  I've got two years left to go before I need to renew my passport, after all.

Seeing as how it's Bastille Day (and the posh shop downtown has a tasteless poster of a guillotine in its front window), it's a good time to post about Passage to Marseille, that heartwarming WWII movie about a hardy band of Free French ex-convict airmen.  Despite featuring Humphrey Bogart, it's obscure enough that I can't find it for rent anywhere.  I watched it off of YouTube a couple of weeks ago, one night when I couldn't get to sleep.
( Teh plotz )

Every bloody trope and cliche that could be rammed into this movie with a shoehorn is present, alive and well.  Right down to the  ||||  ||||  |||| marks on Matrac's cell wall when he's in solitary confinement.  Even the bad lines are kinda fun.  Humphrey Bogart has a sublimely badly-written speech, mumbled to himself as he paces his cell like a wild beast in torment.  It consists of variations on the theme of, "My country is a rathole, the dirty rats sold me out, I hate France, gahhh!", repeated to an absurd degree.  It made me want to write a filk to the tune of that song from "Kiss Me Kate".  Let's see...

I hate France!
Philippe Petain can kiss me on the pants!
It may belong to Germany but it's no longer my land.
They hung me out to dry and packed me off to Devil's Island,
They jumped in bed with fascists, which has made them yet more vile, and
I-I-I-I hay-ay-ay-ate France!

Send help please!
They feed us on baguettes and moldy cheese!
We spend our nights in killing fleas and days in cutting lumber,
We've been dehumanized, I have no name, I have a number,
And worst of all I have to wear a silly stripy jumper,
Oh send help please!

NB: opinions expressed in this short character comedy piece are not necessarily those of the author, who has great respect for the French and owns several stripy pullovers herself.

I just walked into the video store to return some overdues, and there at the counter was my favorite video store clerk.  He and I have known each other slightly since I was a teenager, when we once acted in a play together.  Let's call him Georgie, as that was his character in the play.  He's always fun to be around.  I've rather restrained myself from talking about movies with him, though, since, let's face it, he works in the store, so I figure he must have had it up to here with people telling him all about their favorite movies all day long.

Well, I walk in tonight, and there's Georgie at the counter.  He smiles at me and goes, "Hi, Teeny", while he's counting change at the register.

He's wearing a T-shirt with Dr. Gogol on it.

Okay, this would probably not interest anyone but me, but I was delighted.  It wasn't even one of the creepy-looking movie stills.  It was more like this 'un.

I just about went into a tizzy.  We both enthused about how great Mad Love is, and we both went, "Whoa!  The only other person I know who's ever watched that movie!"  He'd been given the shirt by one of their suppliers, and he liked to wear it occasionally, though no one else particularly noted it.  Then I chatted away with him and the lady cashier, talking sixteen to the dozen all about how much I loved Peter Lorre, and all the film noir I'd gotten into watching on account of him, and how I was working my way through all the old black-and-white horror I could find.  Georgie is into quite old horror, it turns out--I would have figured that out long ago if I'd ever taken the time to talk to him about it--and we stood there going, "Oh wow!  How about 'The Walking Dead'!  Have you ever seen 'Dracula's Daughter'?"  It was great. 

Then I came home, watered my cobra lily, fed my white cockatoo, and sat down at the parlor organ to play through Suite For Rainswept Nights And Large Floppy Rubber Bats.

We don't have a TV at my place.  If I want to watch a movie, I put it on this computer, or use my parents' laptop if a bunch of us all want to crowd around a screen.  You can't find everything you want on DVD, though.  So I've been having an ongoing midweek film session.  If I have a Wednesday or Thursday with nothing else to do in the early evening, I toddle across town to Arkham Women's College and use one of their viewing rooms to watch an old VHS tape from the video store of something obscure that I can't get on DVD.  (Sometimes, if I feel like living dangerously, I bring a bag of pretzels, even though the sign says No Food or Drink In Library.  What can I say, I enjoy life on the edge.)

Crime and Punishment last week, The Man Who Knew Too Much this week.  The first was more fun, but they both had their moments. 

About The Man..., it didn't really click for me.  I didn't think much of the acting.  The kid was good, though.  They should have given her a lot more screen time.  Most of the good guys seemed weirdly unconvincing; when their daughter has been kidnapped, I don't buy flippant humor and slapstick fight scenes.  If the idea was to keep the overall tone light and exciting rather than to be realistic, I suppose it succeeded at that, but I still didn't quite buy most of the characters most of the time.  It also featured Peter Lorre as a slithy tove.  ( Spoilers. )

C&P was the 1930s black and white version with Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov, directed by Joseph von Sternberg.  It was outrageously unfaithful to the book.  It was the pulp-fiction thriller version of C&P written by screenwriters who have only read the Cliffs Notes rather than the Dostoyevsky novel.  And it was wonderful.  I raved about it a little the other week, but it's worth saying again: the movie is full of stuff that should have happened in the book.  One of the reasons the book is such a wrench to read is that there keeps being no emotional crisis, no catharsis.  There is this murder, whereafter the murderer can't enjoy himself at all; he was an anxious, miserable young sod before he killed the two women, and afterwards he's still an anxious, miserable young sod.

Not in the movie.  Oh, boy.  In the movie he's a clever and conceited youth with a huge sense of entitlement, who has pictures of Napoleon and Beethoven glowering from his bedroom walls.  (The soundtrack was full of pointless quotations from Beethoven's Fifth.  Like a lot of other stuff in the movie, it was very funny and I don't think it was intended to be funny.  Every time anything of any significance happened, DUH DUH DUH DUMMMM!)  It's amazing what a spot of first-degree murder will do for your inner man.  Raskolnikov gains a sudden bizarre burst of confidence, wherein he marches down to his publisher and demands a better contract, then goes out and gets his sister unengaged to a guy who looks like Pooh-Bah.  If P.G. Wodehouse had written Crime and Punishment, he'd have come up with someone like Lorre-as-Raskolnikov.  I read somewhere that Peter Lorre had always wanted to do a film version of C&P, since he was a fan of the book.  He certainly could have found a screenplay with more literary merit, but he couldn't have found a funnier one.  It's appallingly oversimplified, but it's so charming that I forgave it much.  It's as if he's said, "Screw subtlety and sensitive performances, I did all that in Mad Love and now I'm going for some antiheroic slapstick."  (Oh, and PL has very short hair, unfashionably short for the 30s, brushed straight forward.  I thought, "Hm, this must have been right after Mad Love," and, by gum, I found out afterwards that I was right--he was growing his hair back in just as fast as he could.)  ( Also spoilers, plus more fangirling. )

Oh, right--I promised you Crime and Punishment and zombies, didn't I?  Well, for anyone who was puzzled by my last entry, this is what I meant to address.( Spoilers for a book that came out 150 years ago. )

And on a completely different note,  I've been watching excerpts from the 1935 Crime and Punishment with Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov, and it looks... well... bizarre.  The way that a really uneven Film Of The Book can be disturbing and yet fun.  They seem to have packed it down from a long, sprawling moral drama into a short, fast-moving thriller.  The old pawnbroker gets a lengthy scene that makes us hate her--y'know, so we won't feel bad when Raskolnikov gives her the chop.  And I think they try to give Raskolnikov a clearly-defined motivation, give him a lot more fun stuff to do, and generally remake him into the kind of antihero you can laugh and cry with, instead of the depressed young lump of misery from the book.  Of course, he's also played by Peter Lorre, so he has to have a chance to play with people's lapels and invade their personal space.  I'll suspend complete judgment until I've watched the whole film in order, but so far it looks misguided but fun.

You have to watch this one sequence.  If you have ever read Crime and Punishment, please, please watch this.  It's wonderful.  It's so wrong, but I love it so much.  The scene in the book bears no resemblance to this one at all, but, you know?  That doesn't matter.  They ought to have done all this in the book.  It's like Dostoyevsky as played by Harpo and Zeppo Marx.

PAWNSHOP HORROR:
STUDENT MURDERS 
OLD LADY WITH AXE
(He had the axe, not the old lady)

Isn't it wonderful having enough time to read just for fun again?  But I thought I ought to read something that would also broaden my mind, so I chose Crime and Punishment.  (Also, admittedly, I want to watch the Peter Lorre movie and I'd feel bogus watching a film of a classic if I hadn't first read the book.)  I think I expected it to be incredibly dull and contain long authorial tracts of no bearing on the plot, kind of the way Notre-Dame de Paris turned out to be very little about Quasimodo and Esmeralda and very much about architectural archaeology.  Then again, Moby-Dick has a very poor ratio of plot to content, and I love it anyway because I enjoy Ishmael's voice and Melville's weird outlook on life in general and the whaling industry in particular.  Such being the case, I was willing to give Crime and Punishment a try.  Oh!  Also, I remembered asakiyume 's recommending it to me once, so I wanted to try and see what she'd seen in it.

( Well, I loved it. )

(pic from here)

My crush on Peter Lorre continues unabated.  Evil, lovable, and funny: three great tastes that taste great together.  This has to be a record--it's been more than a month now, and not only do I still love him, I have yet to see him give a performance I don't like.  Okay, I've only watched five or six movies featuring him, because it's hard to find a lot of his stuff, but that's still a good record.  It's like he's been blessed by Loki.  Hammy?  Yes, sometimes, in the very best way.  Over the top?  Once or twice.  Inappropriately good in the midst of an otherwise lousy cast?  Occasionally.  Dull or uninteresting?  Never.  I could look at him all day. 

I also find old, fat, debauched Lorre just as likable as young, dapper, cute Peter Lorre.  (Yeah, I'm in love.)  The problem is that he isn't in anything good in his later years.  I watched a little bit of "The Raven" on YouTube, and there was a fairly entertaining sequence with him doing the voice of the title character, but it goes downhill from there.  They couldn't think of anything clever to do with him once his character appears in human form, so they just have him stand around and be short.  I don't think I like Roger Corman movies.

( Lots about Lorre. )

YouTube has been taunting me with little morsels of all the movies I know I'll have a hard time finding in full.  It's like getting a free sample of the most wonderful old smoked Gouda at the deli, and then never being able to find it for sale anywhere.  This is one that works perfectly well on its own, though.  Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, fighting on the side of good.  I want a couple of guardian angels like these two.