What's everyone up to right now?

[Rev. Rye]

Somehow, I just noticed that I do not own the Criterion Blu-Ray of A Matter of Life and Death. I thought I ordered it just after it was released in 2018, but I just checked my records (and my order histories at Criterion.com and Barnes and Noble) and found I did not.

[The Grand Nudger]

Trying to get used to the growing season sleep schedule. My chicks are keeping me up at the moment - they've gotten sick.

[Rev. Rye]

Just got some books in the mail, How to Read a Person Like a Book and The Prague Cemetery. The latter is about a man named Simone Simonini, who appears to have been involved in damn near every bad thing to happen in continental Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, up to and including forging the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It also includes several illustrations from old novels of the same era. Except for one near the end that is of far more recent vintage. Yeah, it was kind of shocking to open the book to a random page (page 424 to be precise) and see what would become, a few years after, an alt-right meme, but given the context, it's not too out of place. Perhaps a sign of how the old prejudices still remain, even after we like to think we've outgrown them...

[Rev. Rye]

Asked Jonathan if it would be okay to do an article on the Nazi Titanic film (which I have on Blu-Ray) for Anglotopia, because the anniversary of the sinking is approaching, I have little better to do, and I think that the film's history (both its distortions of the events of the sinking, and the singularly insane production) would make an interesting read. Still waiting on his answer.

[ignoramus]

^ Tell me more about the movie... I'm curious now.

[Rev. Rye]

^ Tell me more about the movie... I'm curious now.

This is going to be a long one, so strap in:

Here's the gist of the plot: White Star Lines decides to get some profit by short-selling their stock (despite White Star being a privately held company with no stock to sell) and have their stock prices go up when their new ship the RMS Titanic breaks the speed record across the Atlantic (even though, in practice, this would never have been an option because EVERYONE knew the Titanic was built for luxury, not speed.) This leads to J. Bruce Ismay (who is portrayed as evil, despite the real Ismay doing what he could to save passengers, getting into the last lifeboat at the last minute, and getting what is almost certainly PTSD from the event) to railroad Captain Smith into breaking the record, wich culminates into the ship crashing into an iceberg (surprisingly, the Jews are not mentioned once; one would think the Nazis would at least make the iceberg Jewish.) There is one officer on the ship who is not on board with this plan, the fictional First Officer Peterson (and, bizarrely, Murdoch, the actual First Officer on the ship, is a character, although it seems Kino Lorber's subtitlers were so thrown for a loop by this that they renamed him Morlock.) He regularly points out that this is a bad idea (in direct violation of the Fuhrerprinzip, mind you), and once the worst happens, he does what he can to help the passengers, even saving a young girl and swimming her into a lifeboat (which is apparently a folk legend told about Captain Smith shortly after the ship sank, except Peterson manages to find a seat on the boat for himself, too.)

The history is even more bonkers; it's probably the most troubled production history for a film I've ever heard. So, Goebbels decides to create a prestige propaganda film to rile the German people's hatred of the English, and he decides the Titanic disaster would be a good vehicle for it. He even bends rules over mandatory blackouts for the production after director Herbert Selpin requests to shoot nighttime scenes at night. Bear in mind that by this point, the British were really starting up their bombing campaigns against Nazi Germany. This will become important later. To add to the realism, Selpin hires sailors from the Kriegsmarine as consultants and extras. Unfortunately, these sailors were more concerned with bothering the women on the cast and crew (I can't find any specifics, but I have heard the term "rapey" used to describe their behaviour.) This disturbed Selpin so much that he called an emergency meeting of the crew wherein he castigated the Kriegsmarine (and the German military, by extension) for their unprofessionalism, and his longtime screenwriter Walter Zerlett-Olfrenius was disturbed enough by it that he reported Selpin to the Gestapo. On 31 July 1942, Selpin reported to Joseph Goebbels himself and was asked to repudiate these remarks. He refused. The next day he was found dead in his cell, hanged by his own suspenders. It was claimed to be a suicide. NOBODY bought it, and Goebbels had to warn the increasingly enraged cast and crew that anyone who didn't play ball would have to answer to him personally. Presumably, at some point, a Gestapo officer told them "It would be such a shame if you hanged yourself with your own suspenders."

Eventually, it was completed, having cost a total of Four Million Reichsmarks, more than any other film made in Europe at the time (and while I can't find any reliable sources, some say that, adjusted for inflation, it was actually only slightly less expensive than the James Cameron version.) And yet, when it was completed, they decided to bury those costs, for various reasons, partly because of the Selpin affair, partly because it's actually pretty easy to see Peterson as a good German concerned about the disaster the Nazis were pushing Germany into, partly because they were more concerned with the Soviets than the Brits, and partly because, by that point, the Allied bombing raids were really wearing on the German morale, and those scenes of the passengers in steerage trapped like rats would hit far too close to home for comfort. So, it was only released in the occupied territories and banned from Germany proper altogether.

And the story doesn't even end there. In the last days of the war (between Hitler's suicide and Donitz' surrender), the ship used in the film, The Cap Arcona would have 5,000 concentration camp prisoners scuttled into it, now dressed up to look like a warship. It was bombed. There were survivors, but three times as many people died in the sinking of this fake Titanic as the actual Titanic. As for the film itself, the ban was lifted after the U.S. Occupation decided a censored cut (with some of the most egregious scenes removed) wouldn't be that bad (although it was briefly made available, re-banned and un-banned when it became a cause celebre and consequently the hottest ticket in town). And to this day, it's more or less created a narrative and stylistic template that virtually all future Titanic films would follow. Indeed, four shots from the film were used in A Night to Remember.

And he finally got back to me. Skip to 2:50 of this video to see his answer:

[ignoramus]

Trying to get used to the growing season sleep schedule.  My chicks are keeping me up at the moment - they've gotten sick.

This put a smile on my face.
I'm imagining the cat thinking "I wish I wasn't so constantly full of KITKAT"

[Jackalope]

I'm putting in a vegetable and herb garden and drinking entirely too much for my own good.

[DodosAreDead]

I'm missing college and consuming copious amounts of blueberries. Also TIL grocery store cranberry juice with red wine is actually great for quarantine blues.

[Rev. Rye]

Watching Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and I can’t help but notice one strange detail about the battle with the Crazy 88:





Do they have Mountain Dew in their veins, because in the black and white scenes, their blood is a translucent white. And no, it doesn’t look like an artifact of the conversion to black and white, because the aftermath of the battle is in color, and when I used my phone to compare and contrast the black and whites, the bloody parts showed up dark.