Marvel recs

In the ongoing process of catching up with what I missed during the book fair, I bring you recs from the fabulous heroines_fest, aka the one about comic book women:

Solutions for better living: in which likeadeuce writes curtainfic for Jessica Jones, Carol Danvers and friends, and it is fantastic. Complete with robots attacking Ikea. And too many one liners to quote. I love it to bits.

Reason to believe: in which two of my favourite characters Joss Whedon contributed to the Marvelverse, Hisako Ichiki and Abigail Brand, have a chat post-Breakworld and pre-Secret Invasion. Hisako's doubts and questions as well as Brand's no-nonsense manner are rendered perfectly.

If the world stops spinning: one of the many great things about X-Men: First Class was the retcon of teenage Jean Grey and Wanda Maximoff, the doomed ladies of the Marvelverse, having a passionate friendship. It's simultanously delightful, a breath of fresh air and touching if you remember what life has in store for them. This story captures them at their transition to adulthood and does both of them justice.

Orsoniana

Some weeks ago rozk linked to a trailer for a new movie called Me and Orson Welles, which from the looks of it is about Zac Efron's character having a romance with Claire Dane during the legendary Mercury production of Julius Caesar (which they appear to be recreating very faithfully going by the glimpses in the trailer). Christian McKay is Orson Welles, looking slightly too old for Welles in his early twenties (this was long pre-Kane) but otherwise very much like the original did. Which is as good a reason as any to give you my opinion on movie recreations of Welles, and a choice collection of favourite descriptions by contemporaries who had interestingly ambivalent relationships with him.

So: as far as cameo appearances are concerned, Vincent D'Onofrio as Orson Welles in Ed Wood is great, and the one scene in which Our Hero, about to gain immortality as the declared worst director of all times, meets his idol in a bar and bonds with Orson about money men and actors, is just fun. Welles also shows up, sort of, cameo-ish in Heavenly Creatures where the two teenage heroines regard him as "the most hideous creature alive" and have sexual fantasies about him in which he chases and ravishes them in Harry Lime get-up (and in black-and-white); you can tell Peter Jackson had fun with that as well.

Then there are the movies in which Welles is an actual main character, and which deal with his productions. For example, Tim Robbins' Cradle will Rock is a good ensemble movie set around the story of the Federal Theatre Project in the 30s and the production of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle will Rock (produced by John Houseman, directed by Orson Welles), and it captures a lot of the spirit of time, but the presentations of Welles and Houseman both are disappointingly one dimensional. This Welles has all of the temper tantrums and none of the charm and talent that made people put up with said tantrums to begin with, not to mention the genuine passion he had for the theatre.

And then there's my favourite, RKO 281, about the production of Citizen Kane. It takes some liberties with history - the biggest one is inventing a meeting between Welles and Hearst early in the movie in order to give Welles some animosity towards Hearst, when in fact as far as we know they never met until after the film was shot. (And for that post-Kane meeting we have only Welles' account, which is in fact used for the film's next-to-last scene, down to Orson saying "Kane would have taken the tickets"; if it didn't happen, it's a good story and a downright irresistable one if you want to shoot a picture about Citizen Kane.) But it still gets everyone and everything involved - Welles, Hearst, Mankiewicz, Marion Davies, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, the Hollywood of that era - and manages to work both if you're familiar with the story it tells, and the film it's told about (in which case you can play "spot the famous Citizen Kane shot this scene pays homage to"), and if you're not. The characters are three dimensional; if you think Hearst comes along as too harmless, bang comes along a scene where he casually threatens and humiliates L.B. Mayer by invoking the antisemitism of the time. And here, Welles' outbursts, when they occur, serve another purpose than fulfilling the "temperamental director" cliché; you can tell scriptwriter John Logan has read Simon Callow's The Road to Xanadu, because the movie relationship with Hermann Mankiewiczs encapsules the pattern Callow sees in young Orson forming intense emotional bonds with and then destroying reprobate father figures while also flirting with them, the fearlessness married to a self destructive streak a mile wide, and the ongoing question "what if I'm really a fraud?" Liev Schreiber has more regularly handsome features then Welles (who described his face once as that of a "depraved baby"), but the resemblance is still remarkable, and he has the mannerisms down as well as the charm, the unrelenting drive to create, the intensity and the capacity for cruelty. Lastly, given that Mankiewiczs, much like his younger brother Joe, was one of the wittiest scriptwriters of 30s and 40s Hollywood, it's good to know Logan's script delivers the quick repartee as well. And of course the film as a dream cast - in addition to Schreiber as Welles, there's James Cromwell as Hearst, John Malkovich as Hermann Mankiewiczs, Roy Scheider as RKO studio executive George Schaefer and Melanie Griffith as Marion Davies. (An especially tricky job because with her you have both Davies' own films and Dorothy Cunningham's performance as Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane to compare.) All of which makes RKO 281 my favourite filmic recreation of Orson Welles so far.

Now, about those quotes, which are from Run-through by John Houseman, and All for Hecuba and Put Money In Thy Purse by Micheál MacLiammóir.

( In which there is barbed fascination and lots of subtext )