Howard Hugh's Hell's Angels

Hell's Angels was the 1930 Howard Hugh's film that won the first Academy Award as best film. The version of the film I've linked has been remastered and colorized. Normally I dislike colorizing old black and white movies, but it works well in this instance. 

The Hell's Angels was originally filmed as a silent film, but Al Jolson's introduction of sound to films led Howard Hugh to reshoot the film as a talky. Still, there is a lot of silent movie DNA in the film. Their body language and facial expressions can be exaggerated. Most notably the blocking for conversations can be somewhat odd, rather than doing an establishing shot and then cutting back and forth between the characters, they tend to just face each other at an uncomfortably close distance as they talk in a static shot.

The story centers on two upper-class British brothers. Roy is upright and very proper and is infatuated with his girlfriend Helen, who he prizes because he thinks she is pure and demure. On the other hand, his brother Monte is a bit of a bounder, who drinks too much and chases any skirt he sees. Hilariously, when we finally meet Helen (played by Jean Harlow) she turns out to be a completely over-the-top strumpet. Hmmm... it appears Roy isn't the best judge of character. The film starts pre-WWI and follows them through their time in the RAF.

The above video is queued up to the start of one of its most famous sequences -- a Zepplin raid on London. The German Zepplin commander is adequately villainous, he's quite delighted when he thinks he's blown-up Trafalgar Square. When the English planes show-up he needs to lighten his dirigible to gain altitude and escape. Dropping his ballast and tossing spare equipment overboard isn't enough, so he orders some of his crew to jump off the ship and they, being good Hun automatons, oblige him by uttering 'for the Kaiser and the Fatherland' before jumping through the open bomb bay doors. Oh, the humanity.

There is another large set piece battle near the end of the film. Roy and Monte bomb a German ammo dump in a captured German bomber. As they try to escape the Red Baron and his Flying Circus spot them and give chase. A squadron of British planes arrives to try to cover their escape and a huge dogfight ensues. They used 137 pilots for film and the final dogfights scenes between the captured German bomber and the two squadrons is spectacular.

Should you watch it? The film is nearly 100 years old and so there are many differences in the presentation and mores of the day. One big example is that there is no score to the soundtrack, it is all dialog and ambient sounds. The film is also pre-code, so it is not as prudish as later films; Jean Harlow's dress that she wears to the party should have been enough to convince Roy that Helen may not be the delicate flower he imagines her to be. Yet, the filming and storytelling methods work nicely so I would say it is well worth a viewing. 

The YouTube version I linked to above has a blizzard of ads, if you prefer to skip that you can buy ad-free versions it.     

Eric Ravilious

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Eric Ravilious (1903 – 1942) was an English artist and designer. Although he worked in a variety of medium, he is best known for his watercolors. He painted landscapes and scenes of everyday life. He was also a British war artist, and he was lost in 1942 on a search and rescue flight out of Iceland. 

Eric Ravilious by Phyllis Dodd

Qaisimalaurittuq (Wish You Were Here)

Get ready for a wistful weekend with Elisapie and The Westerlies.

 

The Great Molasses Flood of 1919

On January 15, 1919, a 20-foot-tall wave of molasses, traveling at 25 mph, ripped through North Boston causing massive destruction and killing 21 people. It was caused when a 50ft tall tank, storing 2.3 million gallons of molasses collapsed. The molasses had industrial purposes, used in creating alcoholic drinks and compounds for explosives.

Along with the death and injuries, there was widespread damage -- an elevated rail line was bent, and several other buildings were demolished, with many more suffering different degrees of damage. The rescue and cleanup were difficult because, well... molasses is sticky. Eventually it was discovered sea water could break down the molasses, so water was pump from the bay and sprayed over the area.

The owners of the tank, trying to dodge liability for its failure, tried to blame an anarchist bombing plot, but that claim was dismissed and they were found liable due to poor construction. It was to lead to tightening building regulations to improve safety.

Below are some pictures of the aftermath of the molasses flood. As an aside, I've posted about molasses once before. 

Bui Xuan Phai's paintings

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Bui Xuan Phai (1920 - 1988) is perhaps the most influential 20th century Vietnamese painter. Born in Hanoi he is best known for his paintings of old Hanoi.

He was born in a Confucian household but gravitated to the arts as a young man. He attended an art school that taught traditional Vietnamese art methods, but he was to become heavily influenced by western artists such as Matisse, Picasso and Chagall. It was to mark his lifelong belief in artistic freedom and expression.     

In 1945 he supported the August Revolution which was the beginning of the fight for Vietnam's independence and freedom from foreign interference. He supported that through what he viewed as the Japanese, French and American occupations. 

However, in the mid 1950s he became embroiled in the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm movement, which is a push for greater freedom of speech and respect for human rights. As a result, he was declared a reactionary, fired from his teaching job, and barred from publicly participating in art. 

I find his palette interesting. It is not quite what you would expect to see in a Western painting, I assume it is more of a SE Asian color scheme, although red isn't lathered all over the scenes. In his urban scenes of Hanoi, he'll outline the building with a thick line and color in the surfaces. Again, a technique you rarely see in Western art. 

Bui Xuan Phai

Help Me, Rhonda

Get ready for a catch him on the rebound weekend with na Relo.

 

Reading the room

Say Cheese
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The Room - Kevin John Hart

It is my house, and yet one room is locked.
The dark has taken root on all four walls.
It is a room where knots stare out from wood,
A room that turns its back on the whole house.

At night I hear the crickets list their griefs
And let an ancient peace come into me.
Sleep intercepts my prayer, and in the dark
The house turns slowly round its one closed room.

 

Joaquín Sorolla's paintings

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Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863 – 1923) was an extremely influential Spanish painter, although he is not as well known outside of Spain. He started painting at a young age and quickly became a well-known Spanish artist. He was an expressionist who focused on light and wind. He painted a lot of beach scenes. He suffered a stroke 3 years before his death, which marked the end of his career as an active painter. 

Joaquín Sorolla self-portrait

Māori Ki Te Ao

Get ready for an autochthonous weekend with Stan Walker.

 

Low Life

Oh Hee-dong and his uncle Gwan-seok
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Low Life is a Korean TV heist caper set in the 1970s. It starts with a man, Gwan-seok, and his nephew Oh Hee-dong getting out of prison. They're nothing more than a couple of petty criminals. While in prison they had heard a story of a fisherman who had brought up a valuable piece of pottery in his net. The pottery had come from a wreck of an old Chinese vessel that was carrying gold and precious Song and Yuan dynasty pottery to Japan which had sunk in Korean waters in 1323. 

Gwan-seok decides that they'll try to dive on the wreck to recover some of the pottery which is extremely valuable. He connects with a shady pottery dealer, who deals in forged as well as authentic pottery, to use him as his fence. 

To fund the endeavor the fence connects him with Yang Jung-sook, the gold-digging wife a rich developer. She has her own agenda. Her husband is building an urban complex, and she plans on upping her social status by adding a museum to it where she will display the pottery. Well, display some of it in the front, the rest of the museum will be full of forgeries, and she'll sell the remaining pieces to turn a tidy profit.

Yang Jung-sook the financer for the looting

Gwan-seok gathers up his nephew and some flunkies and heads to the coastal village he'll run the salvaging operation from. The boat captain he intends on using, who is perhaps the sketchiest character on the show, decides his boat is too small and so he has to borrow his cousin's larger vessel. 

Everybody in the fishing village knows about the wreck, and so they quickly figure out what the boys from Seoul are up to. The local goons aren't happy to see Gwan-seok's gang roll into town and so a fight soon ensues. 

However, older heads prevail and they decide, due to the stakes of the operation, to pool forces because the job is too big to do alone. Regardless, bad blood simmers between the two groups which threatens to break into more fighting at any moment. Oh, they also bribe the local police to turn a blind eye to what they are up to. 

The Seoul goons face-off against the bumpkin goons

As the show goes on it becomes apparent that they really don't know what they are doing. They have no idea of how to loot a sunken ship, so most of their plans go completely awry and they try to fix things by brute forcing it with more people. This only deepens their problems because more people mean more shares to be divided, and dividing shares, which is already a complex enough problem, is made worse by their greed and mistrust of each other. And that mistrust is well deserved, because these dirtballs would, and do, back-stab each other in an instant.

Of course, it all goes pear-shaped, and watching things go off the rails is a lot of the fun of the show. It's well-done: nicely filmed, written, and acted. It is certainly worth watching. I saw it on Disney, I'm not sure if you could find it elsewhere. 

Their fine salvage ships

     

Baseball paintings

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Now that the World Glass, or World Pot, or whatever that soccer tournament is called is over we can get back to more interesting and exciting sports. I'll admit to watching none of the World Dish matches. However, through some sort of cultural osmosis I figured out that, since penalty shots offer the highest odds of scoring, the most popular play is to flop on the ground and fake an injury to try to get a penalty shot. It sounds screwy to me, but what do you expect of a sport that uses feet instead of hands with their evolutionarily advanced opposable thumbs?

Anyway, since summer is upon us baseball teams, unless they've already bumbled their way out of contention, are entering the pennant race. So, to flush our memories of the World Cutlery matches, I offer up paintings of people playing the fine sport of baseball. They're mainly American, but since baseball is popular in Asia as well, I've also added in a few Japanese baseball paintings. 

Johnny Guitar

Get ready for an overblown weekend with Anastasiya Norenko,
Pavel Velikohatsky, Angelina Kharchuk, Tala Siekierzynska and Ekaterina Serbina

 

Preparing a meal in rural Nepal

The video is from a valley in eastern Nepal. It starts with the grandparents grinding corn and millet for flour. Their grandkids, who are visiting during a school holiday, gather fruits and greens. They tend to their animals and then gather to cook and eat a meal.

The valley they're in is very lush. I always pictured Nepal being nothing but snowy mountain tops with sherpas and Yeti running about. However, where they live it is very green with a lot of foliage. 

  

The Macchiaioli painters

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The Macchiaioli painters were active in Florence, Italy in the mid 19th century. They were revolutionaries who supported the fight for the unification of Italy. They broke from the academic style of painting and, through their use of color and form, are considered proto impressionists who emerged a decade before the more famous French impressionists who followed.  

Members of the Macchiaioli at the Caffè Michelagnolo

Total Eclipse of the Heart

Get ready for an occultationing weekend with Angie McMahon.

 

Walking in Yangon

Yangon is what the old city of Rangoon is currently called. In 1989 the military junta changed its name, as well as changing the country's name from Burma to Myanmar. The name changes business gets tiresome, but I guess since we changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, we can't complain too much.   

At any rate, the walk is through some very busy main and side streets. There were a tremendous number of food stalls everywhere. In my post on eating in ancient Rome, it was stated that the Romans primarily ate street food because their apartments weren't really set up for cooking -- I wondered if that wasn't the case in this city?

The buildings were a bit run down looking, with burglar bars even on upper story windows which is never a good sign. However, the people were dressed in new looking clothes and there were nice cars parked about. I'm guessing it was a middle-class neighborhood.

 

William James Bennett

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William James Bennett (1787−1844) was born and trained in art in England. In 1816 he moved to the United States, where the bulk of his work was produced. He is best known for using a printing method called aquatint. That is a method where acid is used to etch the plate which results in broad tonal areas which resemble watercolor painting. 

Edited to add: these images are from the Meisterdrucke website. You can reproductions at it. There are more at the link.