Shall We Have A Drink First Or Shall We Go Right To Bed?
Thursday, November 20, 2014
"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”
Goodbye to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood
"Shall we have a drink first or shall we go right to bed?"
Sally Bowles (Julie Harris) to Christopher Isherwood (Laurence Harvey) in I Am A Camera
 |
| Miss Mew |
My grandmother used to often say this of people who put foot in mouth.
La
ignorancia es atrevida. Ignorance is daring.
Or:
Asomó el rabo. He
showed his tail.
The latter remark had
to do with the fact that my Roman Catholic grandmother had been born in
Catholic Spain in the 19th century and people then made comments
related to Darwin
and that mankind had apes as ancestors.
The above is but a
gentle reminder to me that at age 72 I still live and learn. The learning bit
seems to be quickening as the more I read and the more I see, the more I know
how little I know.I had never heard of the film I Am a Camera and for reasons that escape me, little of what I read about author Christopher Isherwood in my NY Times stuck in my memory. I Am a Camera came into my consciousness (sort of randomly) while reading Pauline Kael - 5001 Nights at the Movies while sitting where "el rey va solo."
I Am a Camera is a 1955 film directed by Henry Cornelius starring Laurence Harvey, Julie Harris, Shelley Winters and Anton Diffring. No film with Julie Harris can ever not be good. It is a change to see the aristocratic Diffring play a repressed Jewish man when he later appeared mostly as scary Nazi officers in American war films.
There is only one copy
of I Am a Camera in Vancouver
that I know of. It is currently at home rented to me by Limelight Video on
Broadway and Blanca. It is a VHS tape so I have my now most useful RCA cables
connecting my recently brought-back-from-basement- retirement VHS machine to my
Sony Trinitron TV.
Of the film my friend
John Lekich (who has never seen it) told me that when the Broadway play (also
with Julie Harris) premiered in 1951 noted American theatre critic Walter Kerr said
of the production directed by John Van Druten. “Me no Leica.”
The film was
entertaining, funny (and best of all it did not have Joel Gray in it. If you wonder why; just look it up.) It
managed to only hint of Christopher Isherwood’s (played by big -haired Laurence
Harvey) sexuality when Harvey
says, “I am not the marrying kind.” British censors in 1955 must have been
draconian.
There is a tiny twisty
connection for me that came to mind when I finished seeing I Am a Camera. In
the late 80s Les Wiseman and I would sometimes skip warm-up acts at the
Commodore concerts when the bands were bad or not sophisticated enough for
sophisticated rock music critic Wiseman. We would walk around the corner to our
favourite cheap beer hangout, the Dufferin at the Dufferin Hotel. It had second-tier exotic dancers
who in our opinion were surprisingly inventive to compensate for perceived
lacked charms. One of the waiters looked exactly like Laurence Harvey. He must
have known this as he cultivated that big hair protruding over his forehead.
One such day, the warm-up
band was terrible. We left the Commodore and we ran into our favourite exotic, Miss
Mew who was the only dancer in town who included the music of Lou Reed in her act. She asked
us where we were going. We answered. She said, “It’s changed.”
We sat down and
ordered our beer. The Harvey
waiter was not in evidence. I then told Wiseman, “There are quite a few men
here who are holding hands.” Wiseman noted, finished his beer and said, “Let’s
go.” We never returned and I believe neither did the dancers. The Dufferin,
indeed had changed.
I never did see a
waiter at the Dufferin with Nordic good-looks who might have played a Nazi
officer in an American war film.
