A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Sunday, November 23, 2025

Blackout (Terence Fisher, 1954)

Belinda Lee and Dane Clark in Blackout
Cast: Dane Clark, Belinda Lee, Betty Ann Davies, Eleanor Summerfield, Andrew Osborn, Harold Lang, Jill Melford, Alvis Maben, Michael Golden, Nora Gordon, Alfie Bass. Screenplay: Richard H. Landau, based on a novel by Helen Nielsen. Cinematography: Walter J. Harvey. Art direction: J. Elder Wills. Film editing: Maurice Rootes. Music: Ivor Slaney. 

Any movie that starts with Cleo Laine singing "St. Louis Blues" even before the credits run has my attention. Unfortunately, Terence Fisher's Blackout (aka Murder by Proxy) doesn't repay it. It's a welter of plot twists and red herrings and withheld information that begins with a drunken American (Dane Clark) being propositioned in an unusual way by a beautiful woman (Belinda Lee). Naturally he wakes up the next morning in a place he's never been before, with a furious hangover and a blood-spotted topcoat. From then on, he keeps sticking his nose in places he shouldn't and getting mixed up with people he should avoid. It's standard whodunit stuff, but without much punch in either performances or direction. The chief reward of the film for me is that it added to my collection of Mondegreens and closed-caption goofs: When Laine sings the line in "St. Louis Blues" about the St. Louie woman's "store-bought hair," the captioner turns it into "stubbled hair." 
 

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