Ten Things 4

Trailer Park Boys, On Human Bondage and the Yarras treble...

Gideon Haigh

1/ The IPL’s on, apparently.

2/ Many years ago, I anointed our club, the Yarras, The Vincibles. We have never struggled to live up to the title, but that might be about to change, as last weekend we won three out of three grand finals. WTAF?! This was greatly assisted by my, for various personal reasons too boring to explain, not being there. I omitted to mention a couple of weeks ago in describing my record of playing losing grand finals my record of watching losing grand finals - given success in my absence, I suspect I will in future be asked to continue staying away. I remember sitting down at the 2011 AFL Grand Final and finding myself alongside a fellow Geelong fan who had been present at the 1989, 1992, 1994, 1995 and 2008 Grand Finals, while missing 2007 and 2009. His friends had pleaded with him to stay at home, and I have seldom seen a man so nervous, especially during that third quarter when the game was on a knife edge - at least all was well that ended well. We are all familiar with the rituals and artefacts we convince ourselves can influence sporting events - Nick Hornby lovingly ennumerated his in the chapter ‘Sugar Mice and Buzzcocks Albums’ in Fever Pitch. But perhaps the ultimate superstition is not going and/or not watching, taking one for the team by sacrificing a pleasure. There is the true sporting masochist.

3/ Word arriving from other toilers. Tim Rogers reports that the Taradale Tightpants went down in their final. John McEncroe, who wrote in last week from Main Ridge, also suffered defeat in his first grand final. As you ask, John, yes, I have also been run out off a no ball, on my partner’s call, not that I’m bitter. Good news, though: Tim and John are both keen for next season, only 180 days away. Me too.

4/ Ricky in Trailer Park Boys: ‘Fuck, I missed jail this year. Was it awesome?’

4/ Mildred in Of Human Bondage: ‘You cad, you dirty swine! I never cared for you, not once! I was always makin' a fool of ya! Ya bored me stiff; I hated ya! It made me sick when I had to let ya kiss me. I only did it because ya begged me, ya hounded me and drove me crazy! And after ya kissed me, I always used to wipe my mouth! Wipe my mouth!’

5/ I’d read W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage but somehow never seen the 1934 movie adaptation til the weekend. The contrast between the leads is incredible. As Philip Carey, Leslie Howard is marmoreally cold, to the point of being unconvincing. How could he have have conceived such a prolonged and tortuous infatuation when he displays all the emotional register of one responding to being jostled on a bus? But Bette Davis, who in twenty previous films for Warners had played only simpering ingenues, fought for the role of Mildred Rogers, in the film John Cromwell was making for RKO. ‘I spent six months in supplication and drove Mr Warner to the point of desperation,’ she wrote in A Lonely Life. ‘Desperate enough to say "Yes" - anything to get rid of me.’

6/ I wrote a few weeks ago about Beatrice Straight in Network, the shortest performance to win an Oscar; Davis’s is reputedly the best not even to be nominated (at least at first). Talkies had barely arrived, and the acting overall displays some residual overstatement from silent days, but Davis was surely one of the first actresses to demonstrate the new medium’s full potential, with an accent meant to be cockney but more or less unlocateable, almost otherworldly. There is such implied menace and contempt to her non-committal drawl in the face of Carey’s importuning: ‘I don’t miiiind’. Everything in her performance counts. The first time we see waitress Mildred, she is holding her stack of plates uncomfortably high; it foreshadow the brittle authority which will explode in the climactic scene, where her arms flail and her teeth gnash with what her biographer Ed Sikov calls ‘the feral rage of a cornered animal.’

7/ Also new was the Production Code, by which the movie barely squeaked despite Mildred’s illegitimate child and general licentiousness - an irony being that in order to take the role Davis had undergone an abortion. One of RKO's concessions to the censors was that Mildred should die of tuberculosis (‘It’s in my lungs’) rather than the syphilis implied by her heavy make-up. ‘I made it very clear that Mildred was not going to die of a dread disease looking as if a deb had missed her noon nap,’ wrote Davis. ‘We pulled no punches, and Mildred emerged ... as starkly real as a pestilence.’ The funny thing is, nonetheless, that she also cuts through Carey’s tedious self-pity and artistic pretensions - literally, by slicing through one of his God-awful paintings with a knife. Ninety years on, I thought that the character of Meredith had worn surprisingly well - though this be madness, yet there be method in’t.

8/ Rather than attend the preview, Davis sent her musician husband Oscar Nelson, who returned with a warning that the role might damage her career - not a good sign for their marriage, frankly. When he divorced her four years later, Nelson’s main complaint was that Davis failed to perform her wifely duties because she was reading ‘to an unnecessary degree’. She even insisted on ‘reading books or manuscripts when [Nelson] had guests. It was all very upsetting.’ Married four times, Davis also breaks the heart of her hardboiled detective lover Dudley Smith in James Ellroy’s Perfidia, set in 1942. ‘I’m close with Harry Cohn, you know,’ he says. ‘Would you ever consider doing a film for Columbia?’ Davis retorts: ‘’You’re crossing the line with me, sweetie. Please don’t do that.’ Then: ‘Dudley flinched. His eyes burned. Tears ran down his cheeks.’ As Barbara Stanwyck said of Davis: ‘She had a kind of creative ruthlessness than made her success inevitable.'

9/ The movie also got me reading some Maugham short stories. How good is ‘An Official Position’ (1937)? The characterisation, the setting, the mood, the savagery of the denouement - why, someone should make it into a movie.

10/ Thanks to those who responded to the previous post, very much at the Et Al end of this Substack’s range. I may by now have been cancelled, but not being on social media will be the last to learn; at least I can’t be deplatformed, given as I own this platform. My friends at Crikey have taken an interest, and I’m with them: any opportunity to show Sharri Markson, Ben English and Bevan Shields in the mud is to be seized with both hands. Continued full disclosure: so far we’ve had one unsubscription, which is, of course, everyone’s prerogative - I fully understand the strong views on this subject and don't lack sympathy with them. A commenter with the amusing handle ‘Mikhail Tai Playing the Berlin’ also claims to be leaving in high dudgeon. Although this did remind me of that famous self-deprecating quote of Tal, one of the Soviet Union’s great grandmasters, that chess featured two types of sacrifices: his and the right ones.