howard | dual personalities

Good news!

by chuckofish

July is Leslie Howard month on TCM.com! Here is the line-up for the Star of the Month.

So set your DVR for Tuesdays in July when they’ll be showing some well-known Leslie Howard movies like Pygmalion, Of Human Bondage and The Scarlet Pimpernel and some not-so-often seen ones like Berkeley Square and The Animal Kingdom. What a treasure trove!

You can see my favorite Leslie Howard movie The Petrified Forest (1936) next Tuesday–so mark your calendar! This movie was based on the play by Robert Emmet Sherwood, which Leslie Howard had starred in on Broadway. He insisted that Humphrey Bogart reprise his role as Duke Mantee, “the world-famous killer” in the movie. He did and the rest, as you know, is history. Bogart was duly grateful and even named his daughter after Leslie years later.

Bogart has lots of good lines which he makes the most of:

“Since I’ve been a grown up, I’ve spent most of my life in prison… I’ll probably spend the rest of it dead.”

and

“You can talk sitting down; I seen ya’ doing it.”

But Howard, as the dreamy Alan Squier, gets plenty of his own:

“So that was once a tree? Hmmm. Petrified forest, eh? Suitable haven for me. Well, perhaps that’s what I’m destined to become, an interesting fossil for future study.”

and

Gramp Maple: “But let me tell you one thing, Mr. Squier. The woman don’t live or ever did live that’s worth five thousand dollars!”

Alan Squier: “Well, let me tell you something. You’re a forgetful old fool. Any woman’s worth everything that any man has to give: anguish, ecstasy, faith, jealousy, love, hatred, life or death. Don’t you see that’s the whole excuse for our existence? It’s what makes the whole thing possible and tolerable.”

I even included an Alan Squeir quote on my senior page: “I had a vague idea I’d like to see the Pacific Ocean and perhaps drown in it. But that depends.” My mother raised an eyebrow at my teenage angst, but no one else ever commented!

Above all else, Leslie Howard was a great British patriot, who used his Hollywood fame to further the cause of England in WWII, by making several propaganda films like Pimpernel Smith and The First of the Few.

He died at the age of 50 in 1943 when the plane he was in was shot down by the Nazis. They thought he was a spy and they were correct. According to Sir William Samuel Stephenson, the senior representative of British Intelligence for the western hemisphere during the Second World War, the Germans knew about Howard’s mission and ordered the aircraft shot down. Stephenson further claimed that Churchill knew in advance of the German intention to shoot down the aircraft, but decided to allow it to proceed to protect the fact that the British had broken the German Enigma code.

I’m surprised no one has ever thought to make a movie about Leslie Howard. Wouldn’t he be an interesting subject?

8 Comments

January 16, 2012

I remember nothing

by chuckofish

I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound doesn’t it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.”

–Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing

Almost. And I don’t have an iPhone. I have to be content to look things up on my laptop, so I can’t do it in restaurants or on the subway etc.

Actually the search engine I love and use the most is IMDB.com–the internet movie database. My brain used to be its own movie database, but, sadly, it is no more. I have to look things up. But thankfully there is IMDB, just in the nick of time. Sigh.

I used to be a whiz at Trivial Pursuit (the original version) and could always answer the movie questions. It was almost embarrassing at times how much I knew. But fun facts about old movies just took hold in my brain like French vocabulary or chemistry equations did not. I have no doubt that some of my friends growing up thought my interest in the movies was a tad tacky, bien sur, but that’s the way it was/is. I loved the movies themselves–it wasn’t some screaming-Beatlesmania-kind of thing. I will admit I was probably the only tenth grader in 1972 who loved Leslie Howard, who had been dead for nearly 30 years at the time. I even stayed home from school once to watch It’s Love I’m After (1937) on television. There were no DVDs back then and no telling when the chance might come again to see it, so I had to take such action! (My mother approved.)

So anyway, I had to check on IMDB to find out the name of that movie I stayed home from school to watch. Thank goodness I can handle the obligations of that particular search mechanism!

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