I just read John Buchan's The 39 Steps, and watched the Hitchcock movie of the same name.

Introductory Conclusion (ha!): While not starting out as a project, I would not recommend participating in absorbing both as one. Leave these units sole entities and enjoy them just the same, comforted in the knowledge that both have fallen off the copyrighter's radar screen and are now in the public domain.

The film version, produced by Michael Balcon, who produced one of my favorite films, Dead of Night, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock appears to be an almost completely new invention that utilizes only the main premise and some of the names of characters.

The novel, by proud Scotsman (by virtue of the portrayal of his countrymen and women, the opposite of Hitchcock's portrayal of brutsh stingy Scots) John Buchan, is a an extremely fast paced thriller that pits villains appropriate to today's one-worlder conspiracy theorists, against an improvised adventurer who is enlisted by a spy with several character-shaping pathologies and prejudices aiding his motivation and world view.

Along the way as we follow Richard Hannay the protagonist, there are plenty of Deus Ex Machina situations arising, such as stumbling upon the exact location at which he needed to arrive, accidentally meeting a reviled London colleague 12 hours distance from the city, and kindness from strangers that even Santa Claus couldn't engender.

This is all forgivable owing to the pacing and the tone of the writing. Hannay is the a protagonist in whose shoes on is willing to jump. The book adds up to a short thrill that grips one, and doesn't let go until the end.

Hitchcock's film, while wildly different in plot mechanisms and characters, maintains the best of the book, namely Hannay's pathological ingenuity in staying one step ahead of his pursuers. Equally gripping, with moments that provide a window into an England that is only 20 years and a World War since the original publication of the book, with the same Teutonic treacheries afoot, providing an analogous zeitgeist for the Mise en Scene, awaiting another global conflict, wile enjoying life in the interim.

So, on to the links:

Here's the book in it's entirety

Here's a link to a BUNCH of John Buchan novels I always have to laugh at the NO US ACCESS warnings!!!

Buchan's Wikipedia Bio, (he was a big shot!)

Wa-hey! Here's the Movie, and and here's where you can download it (on the left)and own the friggin' thing!




Radio Drama:
Mercury Theatre of the Air (Orson Welles)

A Criterion Collection obsessed fan's review of the Film.

Enjoy. It's the future - so far.

Labels: 1915, 30's, archive.org, England, film, Hitchcock, Scotland, Scots, Scottish, writing

It's supposedly a "meme" (I'm not seeing the virality of it, tho- so to me it's a "thing"), but it's forced me to cut the mental cheese to a certain degree...

The Rules: Players start with 8 random facts about themselves. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts. Players should tag eight other people and notify them that they have been tagged.

Marty Weil at Ephemera has tagged me.

Ecch. Here goes:

1. I believe reality is a construct of our conciousness as much as it is a set of empirical cause and effect phenomena and that both states coexist.

2. I love me some Zombies. Zack Snyder/James Gunn's Dawn of the Dead, Zombi, 28 Days Later, Planet Terror, The Original Night of the Living Dead and its remake ....the list goes on..... my whole family probably thinks more about what to do in case of a Zombie attack than in case of a fire. I never watched horror until about 4 years ago.

3. When I see an ocean or a baby, I feel as though I am looking into the face of the universe itself, and will always spend a little time letting the ocean sink in or greeting the baby.

4. I infrequently have flying dreams, but the best ones are where I'm in a contraption that never gets higher than, say, 35-50 feet off the ground.

5. A large part of my attitude about art stem from visits to MOMA as an adolescent. Kienholz, Lichtenstein, Yokoo, Rauschenberg, Wesselman, the Lumia Suite, the ability for film or a vacuum cleaner to be art all changed me.

6. I have a degree in film, but after my wife informed me I knew nothing about it I realized knew nothing about it. I was behaving like an egg-headed dilletante. I have been since reborn into the world of Turner Classic Movies.

7. I have eaten fugu.

8. This space intentionally left blank.

Those I will tag shall remain undisclosed, because I hate all "Boycott Amoco on Wednesday and we'll lower oil prices" "Send this email to 5 friends and Bill Gates will make crippled children walk" kind of stuff, yet I feel there's some post-profile validity to this. Conversely, if you want me to tag you just ask! :

Labels: action, ape, archive.org, art, atheism, audacity, augh, author, awesome, beauty, belief

Happy Birthday, M.K. my M.B.
In your honor, here's a tribute to something you hipped me to:

The Life of Riley starring William Bendix:


You, falling asleep to it in your room night after night, me, wondering about its staying power. I was too young to grow up with radio, but it was easy to see this was expert writing suited to the medium. "What a revoltin' development!" became part of the phraseology around here, and Digger O'Dell one of the ghosts that haunted our senses of humor.

But William Bendix wasn't good as Riley because he got lucky. He had a prodigious career, and if you never experience him in anything else, see him in Lifeboat if you haven't yet. It was post-Riley that I reexperienced his performance for the brilliance that it was.


This picture links to archive.org's complete listing of episodes in .mp3 format


This picture below is a link to 174 streaming episodes of the Life of Riley. He's bound to do a couple of his meat commercials in there somewhere.


Here's his IMDb listing
Here's a (it's amazing!) tool that shows when he'll be on U.S. TV next
And here's his Wikipedia entry


Happy Birthday, and....................poopoopeepee!!!!!

I know, I know- less words.

Labels: 1953, 1957, 50's, ads, advertising, adverts, anniversary, archive.org, awesome, birthday, blood, comedy, fun, funny, Los Angeles, public domain, time

I was looking at a site where somebody had posted a link to this as a download, and it made me wonder if it was public domain. Looking at another site today, I discovered it was.


Google Video has looooooong videos, and sure enough, someone already posted the entire film in its entirety.



The venerable Archive.org has it in a downloadable version, for those of you who wish to migrate it somewhere else.

Wonderfully enough, they also have the story (in Japanese) by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. A chap has translated it into English here.

The remake is also great...

The Outrage

With Paul Newman as a Mexican Mifune
Shatner.... as... a.... minister
Edward G. Robinson as a swindler
Laurence Harvey (Domino's Dad!) as the objectively conflicted husband


NOT ON DVD - why?!?!

Labels: archive.org, classic, film, Japan, kurosawa, lies, lying, nihilism, public domain, rashomon