Deborah Kerr

Deborah Kerr has died. The New York Times obit is HERE.

Honestly, I don't know very many of her films, and have in fact never seen her most famous, From Here to Eternity.

But she's the beloved lead of two of my very VERY favorite films in the world, so I feel a strange loss in any case, and I'd feel remiss in not at least suggesting that if you haven't seen either of these great films, that you do check them out.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, features Kerr in her 6th or 7th film, the one that made her a real star. She plays three roles in three time periods, women close to the main character, Clive Wynne-Candy, a slow but basically well-meaning military man, as the film spans 40 years of his life and army career. Above and below she is Edith Hunter, and English governess in Berlin who seeks Clive Candy's help in combatting anti-English propaganda in Germany during the Boer War.

Powell, as he writes in his two autobiographies, A Life in Movies and Million Dollar Movie, was quite in love with Kerr, and it shows in every frame she's in -- even if, as you can hear in his excellent commentary on the Criterion DVD, he took a perverse pleasure in dressing her in a horrible collection of period hats. I believe he says of this one below that he can imagine her taking off from a Heathrow runway in it:

And then there's another Technicolor masterpiece from Powell & Pressburger ("The Archers"):

Kerr plays Sister Clodagh, it's a story of nuns setting up a mission in the Himalayas, it's amazingly erotic for a 1947 film, it's one of the most beautiful color movies ever shot, and if you haven't seen it, I wouldn't want to say more. See it.

Looking over her filmography again, I see a lot of films I've never seen and probably will never see, but for Edith Hunter, Barbara Wynne, Angela "Johnny" Cannon, and Sister Clodagh (and, maybe, just a little bit, for her turn in the original Casino Royale), she'll always have a place in my heart.

from the shop

The New York Clown Theatre Festival is just over half finished, and if you haven't been to it, you've missed some great shows. Check out the site and some reviews.

I'm home from there tonight while Berit is running tech on this week's cabaret, as I have to study my lines some more for a new version of Ten Nights in a Bar-Room which I'm directing at the Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge in Red Hook, which goes up this Saturday for one performance at 4.00 pm. This is part of their "Showboat - Comin' 'Round the Bend!" exhibition focusing on 19th-Century Showboat entertainments. Trav S.D. is producing some of the events, including this show, which he asked me to bring back, as I directed it twice in 1999.

Now . . . my 1999 productions, as those who saw them will remember, were not exactly straightforward productions of this 1858 temperance play -- I set it in a post-industrial future, being performed by a company of men, women, and cyborgs interrupted occasionally by attacks from flesh-eating zombies. A review from the original production is HERE.

So, it wouldn't exactly do to recreate that production for the purposes of this event. We've instead created an hour-long version of the melodrama that we are somewhat trying to play as "straight" as we can, but with this text, no matter what, it still comes off as campy and over-the-top as possible. Quite frankly, it's a laff riot, I tells ya.

The cast is Fred Backus, Aaron Baker, Danny Bowes, Maggie Cino, Jason Drago, Ian W. Hill, Robert Pinnock, Dina Rose Rivera, and Trav S.D. And, no, for fans of the old version, Beppo the monkey puppet will NOT be appearing. Sorry.

Hope to see some of you there. It's a bit of a schlep, but not difficult - directions are at the links above to the Waterfront Museum.