On being a child of one's generation, redux.

I hate the way Sir Thomas Malory writes Gawain. I am used to Chretien de Troies's easy-going, charming Gawain -- "the Ladies' Knight" because he acquires a new lady-love in each story he appears in -- who occupies the position of Top Knight in King Arthur's court by virtue of being Arthur's sister's eldest son,* of being the best fighter out of the normal members of the court (as I recall, he is once knocked off his horse by Perceval in "Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal"; once battles Yvain to a weary sundown truce in "Yvain, ou le Chevalier au Lion"; and otherwise handily defeats all rivals), of being both brave and level-headed (brave enough to join Lancelot's quest to save the Queen in "Lancelot, ou le Chevalier de la Charrette" (sp?) without Lancelot's ulterior motive, level-headed enough not to charge the preoccupied Perceval but speak to him. In both these instances, Kay plays the rasher, more anti-social reflection of Gawain's good impulses, and is rewarded by being kidnapped himself in the first and having his arm broken in the second). He is the Compleat Knight, pious in measure and worldly without corruption, a fine fighter who fights without regret and so bold a lover, he is the only knight willing to woo a woman with dark hair (the marvelous Lunete, first adviser to Yvain's wife in "Yvain")! He is not always right -- his advice that Yvain leave his wife immediately after the wedding to go questing is obviously foolish, and nearly leads Yvain to lose her altogether -- and he is not always successful (each tale must have its own hero, and he is the hero of none). But he is clearly, and appropriately, Top Knight. And he is a terrible charmer to boot. Chretien wrote in the fourth quarter of the twelfth century. By the Prose Lancelot Gawain remains Top Knight at Arthur's court, but has been thoroughly displaced in the heart of the reader by Lancelot, who to this day is enshrined as Official Top Knight in popular culture. The triangle between Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere is central to many modern depictions (as to the third section of the Prose Lancelot, the section I read many years ago under the title The Death of King Arthur in Penguin, unless I'm totally mixed up), and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" mentions the name "Gawain" only to offer him to one beast or another -- the ravenous rabbit, I believe. To Malory in 1475, Gawain has nothing of the Top Knight about him at all. He is viler than anything in Chretien's world, even the enemies. He is probably about the tenth-best fighter, but easily and plainly outclassed by Lancelot, Tristan, Lamorak (!! Perceval's older brother; in Chretien's tale, Perceval's elder brothers all died when he was a child and achieved no great fame), Palomides (Tristan's self-declared rival, the pagan knight who also loves Yseut la Blonde), and probably several others including his own younger brother Gareth, whom he doesn't fight directly, at least as far as I've gotten. (Somewhere not so very far into Book II.) He is called "the Ladies' Knight" not because all the ladies love him but because at nineteen he swears a special oath of protection to ladies after having accidentally chopped off a lady's head in a chapel instead of her lover's/. Chretien's Gawain is patient enough to suffer abuse at the hands of ladies who pronounce him a merchant wearing armor to avoid taxes because he does not fight in a tournament as a true knight would, and not fight at the tournament because it would be foolish to risk a wound when he is on a quest; Malory's Gawain is so angered by others' acknowledged superiority that his brother ends up killing their mother.** And on, and on. I have little patience with the elevation of Tristan (and less with the spelling "Tristram") to a high place at Arthur's court; I love Tristan and Yseut but they are a different story. I have other quarrels with Malory: even so strange a tongue he can render samey and sing-songy. But my real problem is how he treats Gawain. And this is where the title of this post comes in. Upon being struck by how difficult this actually made it for me to keep reading at a certain point, I thought: "So this is how it feels to have a headcanon." * Sister's son has long been recognized as a place of special honor in Arthurian legend: Tristan is also Mark's sister's son, and his maltreatment at Mark's hands is rendered especially bitter by the expectations his narratively special place has set. ** Lamorak's tourney victory enrages Gawain who believes Lamorak the killer of G's father Lot, so G persuades his brother Gaheris to follow Lamorak -- it turns out, to a tryst with their mother Morgause, where Lamorak denies having killed Lot. Gaheris announces that it would be unchivalrous to murder a naked knight and promptly kills his mother instead.

On bizarrely specific subgenres and/or typecasting.

Maybe you knew Peter Lorre starred in a movie about hands that take a man over and then are revealed to have murderous capacities and inclinations -- "Mad Love," which not only is fabulous on its own account but (so they say) was the film that convinced British censors finally to give up on film by film, scene by scene work and simply ban horror movies altogether, thus eliminating at one blow such a chunk of the market, and setting such a precedent for other wary censorship boards, that the justly celebrated Universal Horror pictures unit was shuttered.* BUT did you know that ten years later, in 1946, he played the English (!) private secretary of an eccentric composer living in Italy who, after his employer's death, becomes fixated on the idea that the composer's hands have survived him and are wandering around committing murders on their own? It turns out he's crazy and he's been the murderer all along. Nevertheless the Addams Family's The Thing has nothing on ... "The Beast with Five Fingers". Everything in the movie except Peter Lorre is more or less pointless. But the beast is cool.

This became a whole subgenre of horror movies, made as recently as the eighties to my knowledge, in which hands he wasn't born with and that seem to operate independently of the rest of his system bend a man (it is always a man, I think) towards depraved violence. Mostly newly-attached, à la Orlac, but certainly The Thing testifies to the continued amusement to be found in the disembodied sort as well. I believe there are a dozen or more horror movies based on this premise, or element.

I bring this up because I've just now seen Dennis Price, known mostly as Louis Mazzini in "Kind Hearts and Coronets" in 1949, playing quite a similar character eight years later in a movie known alternatively as "The Naked Truth" or "Your Past Is Showing." Louis is an amoral striver bent on revenge against the relatives who disinherited his mother for marrying an Italian, ambitious for their rank and wealth. After much thought and study he is able to conceive and smoothly execute the murders of enough d'Ascoynes (all incarnations of Alec Guinness) to inherit it all. The movie ends ambiguously: he's certainly done better than the universally hapless and largely wicked and idiotic d'Ascoynes, but he has barely escaped a death sentence, albeit for the one death in the movie for which he isn't responsible, and seems less than half a step from returning under its shadow. It seems impossible that he should escape, but improbable that he should fare so much worse against this round of obstacles than against previous; and we aren't sure what to wish for, in several different ways. ("Kind Hearts and Coronets" has the rare distinction of combining farcical serial murder with a subtle exploration of the emotional and practical dilemmas of being in love with two people, who bring with them two sorts of lives and two visions of what he could be. It's like "Arsenic and Old Lace" with a touch of "Trouble in Paradise." And no, I can't think of a higher compliment I could have paid by comparison.)

"The Naked Truth" also ends with Price's character escaping from the frying pan (in this case a blimp) to leap, evidently, straight into the fire (the ocean, 200 miles from England). But it doesn't get so far as "Kind Hearts" in any direction. Price's part in it is large, but he is not, as in "KH&C," the center of every plotline and the narrator of every sequence. Still, the film begins with a series of visits his character -- Nigel Dennis -- makes to a series of prominent people who subsequently evince alarming levels of desperation. A scientist shoots him(?)self, an MP collapses on the floor during a speech, a model tries to gas herself (but only succeeds in blowing up her apartment), a novelist jumps from her window but lands safely in the grocer below's fruit barrels ... As in "Kind Hearts" Price's character wreaks more havoc and inflicts more pain than his social and financial ambitions require, without ever telling the wealthy, famous, and/or powerful people he blackmails -- that's how he sows his mayhem: after much thought and study he's conceived and executes a flawless strategy of blackmail unpunishable under British libel laws -- without ever telling them how he feels about them. Perhaps without fully admitting to himself how he feels about them. One can't maintain resentment and contempt in such exquisite balance for the long term without slipping in one direction and another: usually, for Louis and for Dennis, resentment. But revealed resentment is an open wound, and they bandage it with what is after all quite justified contempt for "their betters." (Dennis's brief but leisurely glance around Lord Mayley's large and expensively-furnished house, right after Dennis has mentioned that he inhabits a tiny and decrepit barge on the river, surrounded by condemned properties -- that glance, the accompanying slight motions of brow and lip, the almost-visible shrug of self-conquest, of restoring contempt to its rightful place as his ruling passion -- ah ... !)

I suppose the plots aren't quite similar enough to constitute a subgenre: it does make a difference whether you blow up a man's darkroom with him in it or just threaten to expose the follies of his youth. But the character is so similar -- just a little older, a little puffier, a little quieter, a little harder-bitten -- that it's hard to imagine it wasn't built around, or heavily tailored to, Louis Mazzini. Allusions to a well-known earlier role are a long tradition, but this isn't quite the same as Cary Grant playing a nasty sophisticated newspaper editor chasing Ralph Bellamy away from his (Grant's character's) ex-wife two years after having played a nasty sophisticated socialite chasing Ralph Bellamy away from his ex-wife. Cary Grant is always Cary Grant; his characters in "The Awful Truth" and "His Girl Friday" form a natural pairing, but they're not very different from the nasty sophisticated powerful people he plays in "Suspicion," say, or "The Philadelphia Story." Similarly if Dennis Price had been cast as a conscienceless, resentment-driven, brutishness-abhorring, poor, clever, malicious man -- well, that's typecasting, but it's also the reason why types are cast: it works! An actor who can do xyz can do xyz again for you, if she's a professional. But this is like asking Cary Grant to partner with Katharine Hepburn to catch an escaped domesticated panther in Connecticut, and then sending him off to capture an escaped domesticated tiger on Long Island in another movie -- making this the main mover of the plot, but also the only thing importantly in common with the earlier depiction. I don't have any analysis to offer, just interest.


* Maybe you even knew that "Mad Love" was linked not only to the earlier, silent, German adaptation of the novel "The Hands of Orlac" -- but also to James Whale's famous (but not that great) "Frankenstein" and Tod Browning's notorious (and pretty okay!) "Freaks." Colin Clive, who as Frankenstein had stitched together disparate human parts into a monster of melancholy temperament and violent disposition, plays Stephen Orlac, a young composer and concert pianist who loses his hands in a train accident; brilliant humanitarian surgeon and secret torture porn fetishist (you think I'm exaggerating? Look at those Grand Guignol plays some time. The sample they show us involves a man interrogating his wife about her lover by applying burning hot pokers to her genitalia) Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre), in love with Orlac's Grand Guignol actress wife, for her sake performs a double hand transplant -- stitching the hands of newly-executed Rollo, a homicidal knife thrower -- played by Edward Brophy, who if you click through you will find played a knife-thrower named Rollo in "Freaks," too. With hands attached but not reconciled to their new master, Orlac becomes a Frankenstein's monster, the unwitting subject of a horrifying experiment in playing God that we know can only end in violence and misery for both creator and creature. Later, Gogol pretends to be a revived Rollo, whose head Dr. Gogol has reattached to his neck, and who comes to warn Orlac about his hands.

... you didn't know all that? Well, it's neat, isn't it?

Oh, you did know it. Okay, good for you. You're a black-and-white horror film rock star.