This week’s fodder (or should I say “fodda?”) for the Foreign Blu-ray Report is the silly but endearing 1954 spectacle The Black Shield of Falworth, in which Tony Curtis gets medieval on Janet Leigh. The crisp, gorgeous detail of the disc gives viewers profound insight into the pomade that so inspired Elvis Aron Presley. Further observations will be found, as ever, at The Auteurs’.
Don't yield, back "Shield"
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It would be cool if it’s Harold Bloom.
No, it was not Bloom. This fellow’s younger, and lighter. Hint: he wrote a book that was half about another critic who also very much disliked “Hurry Sundown.”
I’ve never met Bloom, although I know a funny half-anecdote about him. Many, many, MANY years ago, he remarked, at a party, to my old friend Rosemary Passantino that he thought she was rather surprisingly good-looking for a graduate student, which I always thought was pretty funny.
Harold Bloom, that old honeydripper.
In Tony Curtis’s memoirs he admits that all the ribbing he has taken over this movie over the years still pisses him off. I liked that for his honesty. He pointed out that the real idiot was the one who stuck him with the line; he also said the mockery struck him as anti-Jewish (he’s on thinner ground there methinks) because a Brit could come over and play a Roman general or anything else, but if an American has a recognizable accent he gets stomped.
Also, Curtis is from da Bronx.
I love these kinds of movies, cut my teeth on them along with Busby Berkeley and John Ford and musicals. So if widescreen Technicolor is a fetish, I got it bad.
@ The Siren: Ah, but I didn’t SAY Curtis was from Brooklyn! I merely described his intonation as “Brooklynese!” How’s that for weaseling out of an error?
Over at the Auteurs’ entry, I added this footnote: “*A friend points out that Curtis hails from the Bronx, not Brooklyn. This is true. And yet, the nasality and enunciation seem to say Flatbush Avenue more than Arthur Avenue. I admit that I don’t make as much of a study of this as I ought to, living where I do. I have a slightly older friend who recently took in the latest Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s ‘A View From The Bridge;’ his sole complaint was that the accents used by the actors were more Bensonhurst than Red Hook. ”
The use of the masculine pronoun is a ruse; it’s Michiko Kakutani.
It’s Wifred Sheed. “Max Jamisen” is the book.
Drat, wrong decade.
RE: The Harold Bloom story, see Naomi Klein