Omnibus: A Portrait of Raymond Chandler

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The full title of this BBC documentary is Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: A Portrait of Raymond Chandler. The film was broadcast in 1969, ten years after Chandler’s death, and has been on iPlayer recently to judge by the logo in the corner, but it’s not one I’d seen before. It would have been ideal viewing a couple of years ago during my attempt to watch all the films listed in The Big Noir Book. While working my way through the film list I was also reading some of Dashiell Hammett’s novels (The Maltese Falcon is excellent; The Dain Curse is terrible) and all of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Or almost all…I didn’t read Poodle Springs, his final book, left unfinished then completed by other hands. I enjoyed the Philip Marlowe novels so much I was tempted to start them all over again after I’d reached the end of Playback. Added to the enjoyment was the opportunity to see how much the books were mauled when they passed through the Hollywood mill. The BBC documentary opens with a clip from The Big Sleep which has always been the best of the adaptations (it can be difficult getting Humphrey Bogart out of your head when you’re reading Philip Marlowe’s narration) but even this one alters the story while downplaying the sexual content (homosexuality and pornography in the novel), something that all the films of the 40s do their best to avoid.

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A Portrait of Raymond Chandler was written by John Foster and Fred Burnley who present the writer via his own words in a sequence of dramatised interviews and enactments of scenes from the novels. There’s also a brief interview with JB Priestley, an intriguing thing in itself as I’d no idea that Priestley knew Chandler. The enactments don’t work very well—all the very small and very English rooms look nothing like Los Angeles architecture—but Edward Judd makes a decent attempt to apply his hard-boiled manner to the detective role without any Bogart impersonations. Judd appeared throughout the 60s in a succession of science-fiction films, and the film works best when he’s reading from the novels. Omnibus used him for the voiceovers a few years later in another portrait of a writer, Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision, a film about Hunter S. Thompson. The Chandler documentary appeared just ahead of the wave of renewed Hollywood interest in the Marlowe books that broke in the 1970s. Among the film clips there’s a short scene from the soon-to-be-released Marlowe, an updated adaptation of The Little Sister which isn’t one of the best Marlowe films but it has some nice interior shots of the Bradbury Building, and you get to see Bruce Lee demolish James Garner’s office with his feet and fists.

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The Big Noir Book, or 300 films and counting…

The art of Dick Ellescas

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The Boy Friend (1971).

I chanced upon the album cover art of Dick Ellescas a few weeks ago when I was searching for something on Discogs. Classical music labels are extraordinarily lazy when it comes to packaging their recordings, as a result of which the commissioning of original art always stands out. Dick Ellescas turned up again more recently when I was working my way through the Ken Russell filmography. Russell’s Sandy Wilson adaptation, The Boy Friend, was released in the US with an Ellescas poster that combines an Art Deco style with the modishness of early 70s graphics. This also stood out from the crowd and sent me in search of more of the same. The examples here are only a small selection from the Ellescas oeuvre; Discogs credits him with over 30 album covers. The Strauss cover below is uncredited so there may be more out there. Some of Ellescas’s illustrations for Cosmopolitan magazine may be seen here.

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The Magic Christian (1969).

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Borodin/Liadov: Symphony No.1/From The Book Of Revelation From Days Of Old/A Musical Snuff-box (1971); Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, USSR Symphony Orchestra.

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Strauss: Die Frau Ohne Schatten (1971); Kurt Eichhorn, Orchestra of Bavarian Radio, James King.

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Continue reading “The art of Dick Ellescas”

Weekend links 776

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Illustration by Adolf Hoffmeister for a Czech edition of The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells.

• It’s good to hear that Czech animator Jiri Barta is back at work on his long-gestating feature film based on the Golem legend. The new iteration looks like a reimagining of the entire project.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells.

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey breaks down more of his Great Enchanters pages.

• At Colossal: Charles Brooks photographs the interiors of musical and scientific instruments.

• At Igloomag: Philippe Blache on neo-noir, doom jazz and related atmospheric music.

• At The Daily Heller: The book-brick that is the 1,264-page Emigre Specimen Encyclopedia.

• New music: Changing States by Matmos, and Of Shadow Landscapes by Skotógen.

• At the BFI: Josh Slater-Williams selects 10 great Japanese time-travel films.

• Lawrence English remembers the sound-art pioneer Alan Lamb.

Tunde Adebimpe’s favourite albums.

Time Machine (1967) by Satori | Time Machine (1968) by Lemon Tree | Turn Back Time (1971) by Time Machine