Maurice Chevalier Florida

Cranky Hanke's Screening Room: Ken Russell: The Right Filmmaker at the Right ...

I “discovered” Ken Russell in June of 1975 when I was 20. Now, at that point, Ken had been making films for some considerable time. If you want to be technical about it and go all the way back to his amateur films, he’d been making films since I was two years old—starting with a short called Peepshow in 1956. (It’d be years before I saw it. Now, anyone can see Peepshow in three parts on You Tube. And it’s astonishing how everything—from the sense of nostalgia to the big close-ups to the feeling of melancholy to the aggressive editing techniques—is already there in incipient form.) Even when he’d broken into the international feauture film scene, movies like Women in Love (1969), The Music Lovers (1970), and The Devils (1971) didn’t penetrate the artistic wilderness of central Florida—and I wouldn’t have been old enough to see them anyway. The Boy Friend (1971) got as close as Tampa. I don’t recall Savage Messiah (1972) or Mahler (1974)  coming around at all.

It wasn’t until Tommy (1975) came along that my path crossed his. And it’s only fair to note that Ken’s name wasn’t the selling point—nor was the source album. My best friend had been very keen on the Who album and played it for me in 1970 when we were rooming together a USF. I wasn’t whelmed. (I’m still not that fond of the original album, but I’ve learned to like it—at least in parts.) But in 1975 I was very much an Elton John fan and his recording of “Pinball Wizard” on the radio sold me on seeing the movie. I’ve been over this before, but the point here is a little different since it’s grounded on where I was with movies at that time.

My guess is that it was just as well that I hadn’t seen the earlier films at that point. With the possible exception of The Boy Friend —the replication of Busby Berkeley numbers and the inclusion of bits of plot and dialogue from 42nd Street (1933) would have appealed to me—I don’t think I was ready for these movies until 1975. Having been self-taught in the realm of movies during the nostalgia boom of the 1960s and early 1970s, I was something of a classicist—though not a traditionalist. That simply means that I’d wandered through the classics more or less on my own, and found that very few of the movies I found to be great were even included in those “50 Great/Classic/Best” films books. Put another way, I’d be surprised if you could turn up another 17-year-old who washed dishes the summer after high school graduation to finance a 30 minute movie in the style of Ernst Lubitsch with an all Maurice Chevalier (1929-32 recordings) soundtrack.

Age Quotes | Taxes Death And Trouble

“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” Abraham Lincoln

“Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.” Robert Southey

“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” Mark Twain

“I’m not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You’re as old as you feel.” Elizabeth Arden

“None are as old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.” Henry David Thoreau

“Age is something that doesn’t matter, unless you are a cheese.” Billie Burke

“Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.” Mark Twain

“Everyone is the age of their heart.” Guatemalan Proverb

“Age is a high price to pay for maturity.” Tom Stoppard

“Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.” Florida Scott-Maxwell

“Age appears to be best in four things, – old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust and old authors to read.” Alonso of Aragon

“A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.” Robert Frost

“Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age.” Jeanne Moreau

“Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” Maurice Chevalier

“Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.” Groucho Marx

“Everything slows down with age, except the time it takes cake and ice cream to reach your hips.” John Wagner

“They say that age is all in your mind. The trick is keeping it from creeping down into your body.” Unknown

“Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.” Trotsky

“Don’t let aging get you down. It’s too hard to get back up.” John Wagner

“Age is a slowing down of everything except fear.” Mignon McLaughlin

“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.” Victor Hugo

“People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live… [We] never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.

Maurice Chevalier, up on top of a rainbow

Record research

Félix Labisse

I remember it well

My Paris