Visual Diary #19

Chats with Men in Shops, Beach Shack, Monstrous Maniacs in Power

Old man at Op Shop

Old Man: Are you local?

Me: No, we’re just driving through. Are you?

Old Man: Well, I’ve only been here forty years.

Me: You like it?

Old Man: My wife died twelve years ago. Since then it hasn’t been so good. She was lovely. She was my second wife. The first one was useless.

Beard Guy in Record Shop.

Me: So how long have you been here?

Beard Guy: About a year and a half. The shop used to be in my house. But that wasn’t so good for women customers.

Me:

Beard Guy: Yeah, they didn’t like the dungeon.

Me: Have you got a folk music section?

This is the beach shack. Everything in it was old. You had to turn the cistern on (a tap). There were built-in bookshelves with books about shells and birds and two copies of Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. And a heap of Arthur Ransome books. All the coffee cups were mid-century sized. At night there was yowling in the trees (koalas?) And stampeding in the roof (possums?) and in the daytime there were all kinds of happy birds. I read Patti Smith’s new memoir Bread of Angels - I didn’t love it like Just Kids - but it was still good because Patti.

This is Claude Rains as The Invisible Man (1933). I watched a colourized version of it on the Internet Archive. The colours were beautiful and muted - lots of greens and blues. Also window-scenes and snow. It only goes for an hour and ten minutes and I think this might be the perfect film length for all Hitchcock said about the average bladder retention. I’d only ever seen clips of the film before. It’s vey odd and English and of a time when monstrous maniacs in power were more likely to be fictional. James Whale directed. Much buffoonery. A couple of spectacular accidents (train and car). Super outfits for Gloria Stuart as the very forgiving Flora. (My favourite line is when Claude Rains compliments her hat - felt ad-libbed.)