Daily Office:
Tuesday
¶ Matins: On Saturday night, we heard the third and final concert given by Itzhak Perlman with Members of the Perlman Music Program. It was even superer than the first two.
¶ Nones: The first glass of Pineapple NuLyteley, she go down so smooth. Very faint aftertaste, not unpleasant at all. As for the D-Minus-One Film Festival: one down, three to go. Oremus…
§ Matins. I hope that someone can explain, however, the inscription on the lid of the harpsichord that was rolled out for the Third Brandenburg: Solvet Saeclum ex Favilla. This is the second line of the Dies Irae, the brimstone prayer from the Requiem Mass, and it translates, roughly, as “Heaven and earth reduced to ashes.” If you see the musical connection here, please let me know.
§ Nones. I had planned to watch Danish movies this afternoon and evening, but the Video Room had only one of the items on my list. (Horrors! Can Netflix be next?) So I picked up a mixed bag to titles. I thought I’d get Joan Crawford out of the way. You can tell that Daisy Kenyon is a 20th-Century Fox film by the quietly luxe sets and the beautiful grain of the film — no black, no white, just every imaginable shade of grey — but Crawford seems to have brought her lighting man with her. Her presence is indistinguishable from her appearances in Mildred Pierce, Humoresque, and Flamingo Road. The film itself appears to be something of a battlefield, one from which Otto Preminger did not return victorious. Crawford is more grown up and less histrionic than she tends to be, but the movie is still all about her, and she easily upstages the interestingly non-violent duel between Dana Andrews and Henry Fonda. Elizabeth Janeway, who wrote the novel, later became something of a feminist firebrand. The future is foretold in Andrews’s character, a charmer who’s a bit too used to having things his way. As for Henry Fonda, he seems to be an entire generation younger than Crawford, even though he was a year older. (Andrews, who looks the oldest — or at least the most composed — was the youngest of the three.)
Daisy Kenyon is not an undiscovered masterpiece, but it dates from a great period in motion picture history, especially at Fox. It’s fun to try to figure out what Preminger was after.