Showing posts with label gerald thomas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gerald thomas. Show all posts

1 Jan 2024

A Tale of Two Ears and Notes on Aural Regeneration

This ear? 
Yes, that there.
 
 
I. 
 
For Síomón Solomon, the human ear "is not merely a passive cavity or vacuous opening but a transfigurative chamber of auditory fantasy" [1]. If this makes it for some the most poetic organ, so too does it help to explain why for ear fetishists aural sex is the only game in town.
 
One famous lughole lover is the American filmmaker David Lynch, who not only assigns the severed, decomposing ear crawling with ants discovered in a field at the start of his cult movie Blue Velvet (1986) symbolic importance, but gives it something of a lead role [2]
 
For as Solomon goes on to note, Lynch became so fixated with the prosthetic ear, that he and his make-up supervisor Jeff Goodwin referred to it as a character in its own right - 'Mr Ear' - and designed it out of silicone rather than latex, "even embellishing it, in a superbly disquieting fetishistic signature, with locks of Lynch's own scissored hair" [3]
 
Lynch's ear serves much the same function for Jeffrey Beaumont as the rabbit hole does for Alice; it is what leads him (and us) into a troubling and dangerous underworld. It is only when he finally comes through his ordeal that he (and we as viewers) exit the ear.
 
Of course, not all detached ears found lying on the ground have such a serious symbolic role to play. In Carry On Screaming! (dir. Gerald Thomas,1966), for example, Oddbod's ear has a strictly comic function, allowing for a couple of predictable (but still amusing) gags. 
 
Whether the ear possesses the same remarkable regenerative capacity as the repulsive-looking finger which Oddbod also loses, wasn't made clear in the film, but the possibility of regrowing lost tissues or organs is an intriguing one worth looking at in a bit more detail ...
 
 
II.
 
Salamanders are well-known for their ability to regenerate complex body parts and this has long fascinated scientists keen to discover if people too may one day be able to regrow lost limbs, etc. 
 
Whether this would involve genetically engineering human-salamander hybrids or simply transplanting blastema tissue from these loveable amphibians, I don't know. But, either way, it would be remarkable if doctors found a way to induce regeneration (and tumor regression) in animals such as ourselves with a limited ability to repair our own bodies and a penchant for the quick-fix of forming scar tissue. 
 
Having said that, it might prove easier simply to 3D print new bits and bobs in the lab, as in the recent case of a young Mexican woman who had her external ear reconstructed using this technique to create a living tissue transplant. 
 
According to press reports [4], the transplant procedure was successfully carried out at a US hospital in March 2022 and such newly developed technology promises to transform the lives of people born with microtia; a rare congenital condition in which one or both outer ears are absent or incompletely formed.
 
The company behind this groundbreaking work  - 3DBio Therapeutics - said the new ear was composed of a 3D-printed collagen hydrogel scaffold using the patient's own cartilage cells. Clinical trials involving several other patients are ongoing, but fingers crossed the organ won't be rejected so that what's ear today won't be gone tomorrow.    
 
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 101. For further discussion of Solomon's audiopoetics, see the post of 10 May 2021: click here.
 
[2] To watch the scene in Blue Velvet in which Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Kyle MacLachlan) discovers the ear, click here.
 
[3] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp. 99-100. 

[4] See for example Roni Caryn Rabin, 'Doctors Transplant Ear of Human Cells, Made by 3-D Printer', The New York Times (2 June 2022), and/or Nicola Davis, 'Woman's ear rebuilt with 3D-printed living tissue implant' The Guardian (2 June 2022).


9 Apr 2022

Carry on Cross Dressing

 
Top: Tony Curtis as Josephine and Jack Lemmon as Daphne in Some Like It Hot (1959)
Bottom: Kenneth Williams as Ethel and Charles Hawtrey as Agatha in Carry on Constable (1960)
 
 
I. 
 
For lovers of film and for lovers of drag, Billy Wilder's romantic comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), starring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, is perhaps as good as it gets.
 
And indeed, there's certainly a lot to admire about it, including the performances of Curtis and Lemmon as the two jazz musicians, Joe and Jerry, who go on the run - disguised as women - after witnessing a gangland murder. They could have played the roles of Josephine and Daphne simply for laughs, but instead they invest their acting talent in creating an illusion of womanhood that is convincing as well as comic [1]
 
Perhaps that's why although the Curtis and Lemmon characters of Joe and Jerry are portrayed as red-blooded (heterosexual) males, whose decision to wear female clothing is a sign of their desperation rather than perversity, Some Like It Hot was produced without approval from the censor-morons who enforced the Hays Code and feared the slightest hint of queerness. 
 
Or perhaps they just found Marilyn Monroe's character of Sugar Kane too hot to handle ... [2]
 
 
II.

As good as Curtis and Lemmon are in Some Like It Hot - and as loveable as we may find Josephine and Daphne - they are not, in my view, as good (or as loveable) as Ethel and Agatha, as played by Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey in Carry On Constable (1960) ...

Directed by Gerald Thomas, Carry On Constable is the fourth in the series of Carry On films and contains many of my favourite actors, scenes, and lines of dialogue - including the scene in which Charles Hawtrey as Special Constable Timothy Gorse and Kenneth Williams as PC Stanley Benson, decide to go undercover - dressed as women - in order to catch a gang of shoplifters.

The Carry On films would, over a 20-year, 30-film span, often include scenes of drag; one thinks of Peter Butterworth, for example, as DC Slobotham disguised as female bait in Carry On Screaming (1966), or Kenneth Cope, as Cyril, pretending to be a student nurse in Carry On Matron (1972). 

But whilst heterosexual actors playing straight characters dressed as women may be mildly amusing, it lacks the camp frisson and sheer joyfulness of two homosexual actors openly playing queer characters dressed as women. And thus nothing tops the scene with Hawtrey and Williams dragged up in Carry On Constable, which readers can enjoy by clicking here.
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Curtis and Lemon were helped to play Josephine and Daphne by the legendary female impersonator (and trapeze artist) Barbette, who was hired by the studio to coach them in the art of drag. 
      Much admired by Jean Cocteau, Barbette was described by the French poet and playwright as a combination of angel, flower and bird who transforms effortlessly back and forth between man and woman, revealing the performative aspect of gender. In a seminal 1926 essay, Cocteau instructed his fellow artists to learn from Barbette if they wished to understand the nature of artifice. Cocteau also commissioned a series of photographs by Man Ray of Barbette and cast her in his experimental first film Le Sang d'un Poete (1930).
 
[2] Peter Majda makes the important point that it's not just Curtis and Lemmon who are performing exaggerated forms of femininity in Some Like It Hot - that their co-star Marilyn Monroe is also "essaying another aspect of her comedic persona, which is a cis female-form of drag"; one that is, in fact, "more complicated and layered because she's a woman, playing on the expectations of femininity".
      For Monroe's hyper-feminine (and almost cartoonish) character of Sugar Kane is also carefully constructed with clothes and cosmetics and also relies upon a certain ways of walking and talking, etc. As Judith Butler once said: We are all transvestites.
      See Peter Majda's post entitled 'Performative Femininity and the Absurd: Drag and Comedy in "Some Like It Hot"' (17 April 2019), on his excellent blog A Seat in the Aisle: click here
 
 

12 Sept 2018

A Fond Farewell to Fenella Fielding

Fenella Fielding as the fiendishly beautiful Valeria
 Carry On Screaming (1966) 

It is again with sadness that I mark the passing of another wonderful comic actress - just days after the death of Liz Fraser - Fenella Fielding, star of my favourite Carry On film, Carry On Screaming (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1966). 

The exotic-looking and exotic-sounding Fenella was born in Hackney, in 1927, to a Romanian mother and a Lithuanian father, with whom she had an unhappy (often physically violent) relationship. Spending much of her childhood in conversation with her dolls, she dreamed of becoming an artist and performer from an early age (much to the horror of her parents who hoped she would become a shorthand typist).

After eventually fleeing her awful home life, Fielding found herself in an amateur production at the LSE playing alongside Ron Moody, who encouraged her in her ambition to become a professional actress. Soon, she began appearing regularly in various reviews and by the end of the 1950s she had made something of a name for herself as a beautiful butterfly of comedy.

Throughout the following decade, Fenella was an established figure in Swinging London: Vidal Sassoon did her hair; Jeffrey Bernard took her clubbing; Francis Bacon and friends were all enchanted. She appeared on TV (in The Avengers, for example) and on film alongside male co-stars including Dirk Bogarde and Tony Curtis.

On stage, meanwhile, she pursued her real passion - drama. An accomplished and versatile actress, Fielding captivated audiences and critics alike with her interpretations of Ibsen, Shakespeare and Euripides. Noel Coward and Fellini both regarded themselves as fans of this highly intelligent and amusing woman who kept a copy of Plato by her bedside.        

Of course, this aspect of her life and work has been fatally overshadowed by her role in Carry On Screaming. It is as smoking-hot Valeria wearing a fitted red velvet dress with plunging neckline, designed by Emma Selby-Walker, that she has entered the popular and pornographic imagination and will forever be remembered.

Serious performers and dramatists may not like it, but classical theatre, it appears, cannot compete with cinematic camp-vamp. And if the role of Valeria provided the kiss of death to Fielding's career, it also guaranteed her cinematic immortality.

I don't know if Fenella will be buried or cremated, but I kind of hope it's the latter, so she may smoke for one last time and the ghost of Orlando Watt might look on and cry: Frying tonight!  


Note: those who are interested might like to click here to watch Fenella in her most famous scene as Valeria in Carry on Screaming, alongside the brilliant Harry H. Corbett as Detective Sgt. Bung.


2 Jan 2017

Why I Love Carry On Cruising

Kenneth Williams as First Officer Marjoribanks


There are many reasons to love Carry On Cruising (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1962), the sixth film in the series and first to be filmed in colour.

Firstly, it retains all the innocence and queer charm of the earlier black and white films and is essentially a finely balanced romantic comedy without too much sentiment or too much vulgarity; it's tender without being soft-centred, saucy without being smutty.   

Secondly, regular cast members - Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Connor - all deliver excellent (nicely restrained) performances; and, just as crucially, stand-in cast members Lance Percival and the lovely Dilys Laye also do fine jobs. The former, playing the ship's cook, occupies the part originally meant for Charles Hawtrey, dropped from the cast for demanding he be given top billing and a gold star on his dressing room door. The latter, playing a young woman looking for love whilst cruising the Mediterranean, replaced Joan Sims at short notice after she was unexpectedly taken ill just days before the commencement of filming.

Cruising also co-stars the magnificent Liz Fraser and - as I think we can all agree - any film or TV show with Liz Fraser is instantly improved, even if, sadly, not always worth watching. When she departs the series after Carry On Cabbie (1963), it's a real loss. Seeing her in her black underwear always makes happy (and nostalgic); she has the erotic charisma that Barbara Windsor in the later movies, for all her infectious giggling, completely lacks.                    

Someone else who always makes happy (though for very different reasons) is the diminutive, Australian-born character actress and funny-woman, Esma Cannon, here making her third of four appearances in the Carry On series. British cinema would not be British cinema without her and Miss Madderley is a very welcome passenger on board the Happy Wanderer. Her table tennis scene with Kenneth Williams is particularly pleasing.   

Finally, Cruising also contains a somewhat curious scene in which James and Williams discuss different schools of psychoanalysis. James, as Captain Crowther, declares himself to have always been a Freudian and too old to change; Williams, as First Officer Marjoribanks, quips in response that that's nothing to worry about or apologise for - just so long as one remains Jung at heart

It's not the greatest joke ever written. But it's inclusion in a film of this nature is surprising and a welcome relief from the more predictable double entendres, sight gags, and elements of slapstick.