All Slights Deserved

One morning last summer, while watching The Wicked Lady , I found myself intrigued by the mischievous glint of the actress who'd been cast in the role of the supporting role of  Lady Henrietta Kingsclere, sister-in-law to Margaret Lockwood's character in the film. A quick check of the ever-reliable (except when it's not) Wikipedia advised me her name was Enid Stamp Taylor, a name hitherto unfamiliar to me. After first making her mark in Hitchcock's Easy Virtue,  Taylor had enjoyed moderate success as a leading lady in British films of the 1930's before settling into smaller parts.  As it happens The Wicked Lady  was her penultimate picture; she died as a result of injuries sustained in a fall (most likely caused by a seizure) just a couple of months after it was released, aged just 42.  It was when I ran an image search for Taylor on Google that my attention was grabbed not by a photograph, but an illustration of her that adorned an old cigarette card. Noth...

I was commenting just a couple of weeks ago (with regard to Sexmission ) how eastern European comedy comes across as very broad and affected to western sensibilities, at least during the Cold war era. Probably the closest we've seen to an English language film done in the same style would, for obvious reasons, be Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers , which for all its visual flair and Komeda's wonderful score falls rather flat with the slapstick pratfalls. As I mentioned last time the prominence of this kind of humour probably owed a lot to the censorious climate, where more subversive wit was usually frowned upon. A good example of this is Milos Forman's The Fireman's Ball , which although not especially radical by our standards was criticised in Czechoslovakia for its veiled attack on the petty bureaucracy of communism. No such ire was directed towards Lemonade Joe , which was released a few years earlier; perhaps because it does precisely the opposite ...