Todd Mc

 Cary Grant's Suit

20k Leagues Under the Sea - This is the kind of thing that happened to you if you grew up in the 1950s: you were turned into an enemy agent, acting against your own family, by the manufacturers of Robot Commando and Frosted Flakes. They fed you with endless movie and comic book versions of the world war that had just ended. And you got what Rossini you could from Bugs Bunny. 

We frequented the public library in the next town, because it had a charming room just for children, complete with murals and tile pictures round a fireplace. As a Californian kid I always took an interest in fireplaces because I didn’t know what they were for. In this library I discovered an illustrated book based on the Walt Disney movie of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. So for a while the central text of my existence was an abridged and otherwise distorted, and drawn, version of a motion picture adaptation of a novel. We should call the Fifties the Age of Adaptation — did a single one of us experience the original of anything? 

O, I was a submerged little fellow, submerged by worry ~ adult worries. THE BOMB - these frightening drills at school. When you’re a boy and you think no one likes you, you get submerged in antagonism too. Boys are apt to want REVENGE -it’s a very popular idea. Girls just go quietly insane. But this submergence in your own submergence, this is the very idea of Captain Nemo, whose very motto, 

MOBILIS IN MOBILI 

moving in the moving element, showed his original and vengeful power, his love of freedom. This is not so different from James Bond stuff (from which my parents always protected me) ~ Ian Fleming probably owes Jules Verne a lot — but Bond is extremely adolescent, the good guys and the bad guys. To have a CONTROL PANEL from which you can wreak havoc on everybody that annoys you in seventh grade — that is what James Bond is about. Can you imagine what an insipid, leering old drunk Jan Fleming must have been? What a namby-pamby? I keep him on the same detestable shelf in my mind as Tolkien, the shelf of really fouledup English people who unleashed torrents of bullshit on the world from which we will never recover. 

Yes, okay — of course there’s some kind of phallus trouble going on when you build a cigar-shaped boat with a spike on the end of it and RAM other ships. But Captain Nemo did it in a good way. He was making war on war. If you have a splendid logically twisted idea like that you just have to run with it. At least in the movies. And of course we got it, on some level, that James Mason was having some kind of Weirdo orgasm when he came to the engine room for collision speed

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There is something strangled going on about Germans in White Christmas. Is Danny Kaye wearing a German field cap in the hospital? Traitor. Why does Bing suddenly start talking in a German accent when he comes at Rosemary with a tray of sandwiches? Does that make the sandwiches more attractive? The inn is, as Mary Wickes says, a “Tyrolean haunted house’. Why is there a guy with a German accent amongst the US Army buddies attending the tenth reunion? Is he a spy? Is he an offering of postwar reconciliation? 

The Romantic Glue of the Sandwich The scene with Bing and the sandwiches, the prelude to the ‘Count Your Blessings’ number, is attractive for two reasons. First, the Fifties sandwiches, stuck with Fifties toothpicks and Fifties olives. The large stone pitcher of cool buttermilk and the beer taps at the bar. Inspired, Bing comes out with his unique sandwich theory: the kind of sandwich you eat at bedtime determines what kind of women you will dream about. It’s not clear if Rosemary wants or expects to dream about women, but she’s all smiles. She’s supposed to be all smiles. In my stateless, anguished period I did like seeing this: it reminds me of many autumn and winter afternoons in many American houses, having a ham sandwich superfluous to my needs, and gazing out at a leaf strewn yard. Bing says to Rosemary Let's gather around the fire. I snap to attention. The Columbia Inn is very stylish in gust that early Fifties way — there’s a lot of fieldstone, a large open hearth designed to be sat around by the guests, surmounted by a sleek copper flue.