When I sat down at the desk today, I was informed  that an accident involving a cable in New Jersey had disabled this site — along with lots of others, I presume. It was not fixed until tomorrow.

I did not rave or rail; I did not feel put out in the slightest. I worked on the writing project instead. Remarks that I might have made about Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing, which I watched during yesterday’s nap, flew right out of my head. I had seen the movie only once before, and remembered it a little differently. I’d forgotten just how certifiable Keir Dullea’s character is. and Noël Coward didn’t seem so creepy. But Laurence Olivier’s performance was as uncharacteristically mellow as I recalled. I’ll have to watch it again, just to see if he raises his voice even once. Ray Soleil, when I mentioned this later, credited the actor’s subdued demeanor to Marilyn Monroe, with whom he had just made a film (directing as well as acting) that fell far short of “box-office hit.” But I think that Olivier cannily recognized that there was already a surfeit of hysteria in the Preminger’s movie. 

Or perhaps he was simply reacting against The Zombies, a Beatles knock-off band that is shown gyrating and inspiring dance-floor gyrations on a television in a pub. Kathleen tells me that The Zombies weren’t so bad, really; she even bought one of their records.

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