There’s no whiff of enchantment for most of Robin Redbreast, a 1970 folk horror classic from BBC’s Play for Today. Its eeriness goes hand-in-hand with its cool lucidity. There’s no special beauty to this countryside, and we spend most of our time shut up in a house anyway. The locals don’t sing merry songs, and they don’t offer any unusually intense community support. Whatever they get out of what they’re doing, we don’t see it. They’re ordinary even in their eccentricities: what village story, in all of English literature, doesn’t have a beaky amateur historian and a nosy cleaner? They all do, surely. “Known for it,” as one character here would say.
The plot, too, is so ordinary you could rip it out of a Hallmark movie. A career woman from the city retreats to a rural hideaway after a bad breakup. There—with a little help from some meddling locals who are way too involved in her love life—she meets a strapping young man.
But this all moves on the rails that have still only barely encroached on this secluded, clannish place. The story—the stories, rather—the trite “romance” and the folk myth powering it—cut through the life of Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper). That, too, is an ordinary life, if in a different key: it’s a slice of chattering classes realism, a kind of sophisticated grind. Norah is a modern woman. She can intellectualize and anatomize her disappointing long-term relationship; she has a professional life. She’s familiar with casual sex. She speaks frankly about abortion.
And her hired woman, Mrs. Vigo (Freda Bamford), makes sure she meets Edgar (Andrew Bradford), a.k.a. Rob, a village foundling who’s grown up into a Rocky Horror-like physical beauty and a Rocky Horror-like strange, freshly-uncorked naivete.
He doesn’t know how to talk to women. He doesn’t know how to talk to people, really: his date night conversation is a barely broken stream of Nazi military history, because he was told he should be an expert in something, anything, and this is what the ads in his men’s health magazines promoted to him. It’s the date from hell, so it doesn’t matter that her diaphragm is mysteriously missing.
But a plot contrivance—because that’s the story she’s being forced into—means she has sex with him anyway, and everything steadily becomes worse from there.
Worse … but not nightmarish, not hallucinatory. The string-pulling is right out in the open, and no one even tries to make the lies believable, but there’s nothing she can do about it. The choreography of her new living hell is all so simple and low-level that it keeps feeling like she could get around it, but she can’t; there’s no transcendence on their side, but there’s none on hers, either. The cruelest moment in the film is an inaction, not an action, and it’s not even from the villagers but from Norah’s friend Madge (Amanda Walker), who blithely tells her lover, Jake (Julian Holloway), to be glad Norah’s call cut out before she could make a real plea for help. If she’d managed to ask them to come get her, they’d have to, but since she didn’t, they don’t.
The nightmare and its accompanying transcendence swoop in only in the film’s final minutes, as the placid surface of Norah’s world literally breaks apart. The one lingering shot of unreality comes exactly when it should, when it’s showing us what Norah finally knows, and what can she now feel for the first time. This has always been underneath. This is ordinary. There is no ordinary, and there never was.
Robin Redbreast is streaming on Tubi.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Four, Episode Six, “Foot Chase”
Intensity building. Everyone is breaking off into many smaller stories, if not in a Shieldian way then at least an Always Sunny one. Shelby decisively breaking from Boyd is a great move; if nothing else, gain power and then eliminate the person who can take that power away. Colt is gradually losing his shit and it’s actually kind of sad to watch; Ron Eldard has sad, sympathetic eyes, like he knows what he’s doing is stupid and wrong. Ava’s continuing her evolution into crime lord, with a stop over at “I still see other people as people” way.
We get a little story with Tim helping out an old military buddy (who, naturally, fucks things up for him). Tim ends up serving a lot of the same pleasure of early Raylan, just being polite and effective around a dumb fuck and violence (“Good thing I never took off my pants, huh?”).
Every season, Walton Goggins gets hotter.
Biggest Laugh: “Here we go.”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “I used to work for a crime scene clean-up crew.” / “Think you got me beat.”
Top Ownage: Shelby wanging that guy over the shin (“He does speak English.”).
Men in Black – It won’t actually fix anything but damn, a pro-immigration movie that starts with Tommy Lee Jones allowing Mexicans into the US over the objections of Border Patrol agents and then basically showing the agents to be idiots feels quite good. A fun movie top to bottom, but just don’t think very hard (or at all) about the plot or the many plot holes. Just enjoy Jones and Will Smith and Linda Fiorentino and Rip Torn having the time of their lives and all the practical effects and the many many gags and the time capsule of 90s NYC. And every every time I watch something with Fiorentino, I wonder what went wrong. She should have been a star.
The Practice, ‘Killing Time” – So the case from the previous episode where Ellenor learned the truth that the accused didn’t do it, his wife did but cannot tell? It’s back and literally nothing is resolved and we never see this case again, so why was it extended into a second episode? Well, maybe to allow both Dylan Baker and Virginia Madsen vamp for the camera effectively. (Both make good antagonists.) But the meat of this is two other cases and four other strong guests. (Even for a show known for its top notch guests, season six started at new heights.) In case one, Rebecca discovers that a lawyer renowned for fighting the death penalty has been very selective about who gets his full help and who instead gets given the solace of God. And while the lawyer seems awful, there is a logic to his behavior. In case two, Eugene helps a man in jail 12 years for a crime he insists he did not commit. Now the man is up for parole, is told his only hope is to show contrition, and still refuses to confess to a crime he didn’t do. Ron Silver is solid as the death row lawyer, Steve Railsbeck his usual creepy self as a man facing execution but accepting his fate, L. Scott Caldwell is appropriately self righteous as the head of the parole board, and Charles S. Dutton is incredible as the man begging for his freedom.
Frasier, “Wheels of Fortune” – Lilith’s con artist brother shows up at Frasier’s door, in a wheelchair, and claims to have seen the light after he was paralyzed and to have become a preacher. Frasier thinks the whole thing is a scam, and of course is totally sucked in, and totally right. This one just barely works because we know exactly how it will go and enjoy seeing Frasier humbled, and because Michael Keaton is very good as the con man. But it doesn’t really feel right for Frasier to be sucked in by a preacher. The show has never really said as much, but I imagine Frasier and Niles are agnostics at best. Or maybe the point is to show that even Frasier and Niles can fall for such flim flam. (Keaton lifts huge chunks of Steve Martin’s dialogue from that messy movie about a faith healer.)
Agreed on both the considerable pleasures of Men in Black and on the deep cultural wound inflicted by Linda Fiorentino not being in more movies.
Jay feeling the need to tell Edgar’s wife Beatrice exactly what she should do for herself is hilarious and kind of nice.
She was “difficult” but it’s hard to know what that means with female actresses. There’s Faye Dunaway who is famously rotten to work with, and then there’s Katherine Heigl who told the truth about what she thought of her roles, which Will Not Do in Hollywood. Fiorentino’s great in The Last Seduction regardless.
Back when I was volunteering for a non-profit, I saw Fiorentino gave a testimonial at an award show for an actor who she knew in New York and had since made the “A” list. Her talk veered into a nervous apology for some slight that she had made about the recipient years earlier. It was cut from the subsequent broadcast. It felt very inappropriate, and very sad. On the other hand, another A-lister who also has a difficult reputation, attending the same event, stormed out of the ceremony for a time because she wasn’t happy with the food she was served. That actor is still working. Bad reputations don’t immediately make you unhireable in the industry. I think that the nature of those issues is a big factor.
Jared Leto’s entire career is proof of this.
Burnt Offerings
A ’70s haunted house movie that works off strong performances (some naturalistic, some stagey, some campy, but all fitting together) and oppressive atmosphere. A late-career Bette Davis kills it as a vibrant, theatrical older woman who, once in the clutches o the house, passes from “older” to “old,” her life and personality vampirically drained out of her until she spends much of the time tired and confused. That’s the kind of too-close-to-home horror this story does well: everything involving the family’s young son and the pool is agonizing, too. Good menacing imaginary chauffeur. Surprisingly effective “the house is coming alive again” effects. A good adaptation of an even better novel.
The Pitt S1E2 – “How would you like this to go?” Still getting the names down but all the new trainees and residents have distinct personalities and it goes a long way in making moments more effective. There’s even more horrific and chaotic shit happening in the background than The Shield, like the Nebraska kid desperately trying to revive his patient while life goes on, until it can’t. (The woman sobbing so loud over her son that it affects almost all of the floor for example.) More gallows humor with the rats coming off the unhoused man and Robby cracking jokes – one character confirms my suspicion that you have to laugh or you’d just cry all the time working here. The reveal of Fiona Dourif wearing an ankle bracelet is great, with Victoria evidently not sure how to react. If I had to ask any character anything, I’d question her as to why she’s working in the ER beyond parental pressure.
Me to my friend regarding my ER doctor uncle: “This is what Seth does all day?!”
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Help Wanted” – I really liked this one. Will check in with more tomorrow.
I don’t know what it says about me that my big takeaway when I watched this for the first time was, “Seems like a pretty good job!”, but at least my wife was also saying the same thing.
Yeah it’s pretty good up to a point. Then after the big reveal it becomes a GREAT job!!!