Los Peores Pasteles de Londres

A clip from the 2008 Madrid production of the Stephen Sondheim / Hugh Wheeler musical SWEENEY TODD, Vicky Peña performing Mrs. Lovett's first song, "The Worst Pies in London," as spectacular an introduce-a-character number as exists in musical theater.

The Spanish translation of Sondheim's lyrics do a fairly good job conveying the gist of what is said, and the rest of the work can be carried by the music - the character is all right there, even without the words - the humor, the chatty daffiness, the flightiness, the abrupt shifts in thought and attention.

The 'Mrs Mooney' section can't capture the brilliant construction of the original in detailing how she deals with the scarcity of meat:

Mrs. Mooney has a pie shop,
Does a business, but I notice something weird--
Lately all her neighbors' cats have disappeared.
Have to hand it to her--
Wot I calls
Enterprise,
Popping pussies into pies.
Wouldn't do in my shop--
Just the thought of it's enough to make you sick.
And I'm telling you them pussy cats is quick!

That marvelous onomatopoeic consonance of "Popping pussies into pies" and the surprise kicker at the end "And I'm telling you them pussy cats is quick."  Here's Caroline O'Connor's performance of "The Worst Pies" from the 2011 Paris production.

I'm not sure if the song's final joke every quite gets across,

Is that  just revolting?
All greasy and gritty,
It looks like it's molting,
And tastes like--
Well, pity

because it is too unnatural to say "And tastes like shitty" - the intended missing word to rhyme with the gritty, so I'm not sure the audience ever makes that connection - unless the actors somehow sell it. The joke only becomes apparent after the fact with Mrs. Lovett's improvised, "Well, pity," and then the audience figures out what the previous missing word is meant to be.

Surprisingly, the joke hits better in the Spanish version, merely because the rhyme is true:

Sólo grasa y nada más
Por más que lo intento

Por más que me esfuerzo
No logro que pierda
Su aroma de --

The mind naturally and immediately fills in the rhyming blank, "mierda," in a way that doesn't happen in the English original.

Finally, a 1980 British documentary made for the London premiere of SWEENEY TODD, Sheila Hancock, the actress playing Mrs. Lovett, talks about performing "Worst Pies" with some rehearsal footage and the composer performing the song at piano, while detailing the business.

Telenovela Watch - LA TEMPESTAD debut

This week's Telenovela Watch with a brief preview of LA TEMPESTAD, starring William Levy, 2010 Miss Universe Ximena Navarrate, and Spanish actor Iván Sánchez.  LA TEMPESTAD has struggled to catch on with viewers in Mexico, indeed, most of Televisa's latest efforts are floundering.  Any call for more original, modern, innovative telenovelas is seriously undermined by Televisa's lone hit - CORAZÓN INDOMABLE - as old-fashioned and tired a remake as Televisa has produced in recent years.

Telenovela Watch - CORAZÓN INDOMABLE

Some thoughts in my Telenovela Watch on the Mexican telenovela CORAZÓN INDOMABLE.  It’s a big hit in Mexico and is doing okay in the US.  I kept delaying tackling it as my opinion kept shifting: I liked the first episodes, hated the next 20, liked the Pygmalion stage, don’t care for what has followed.

Two on Margaret Sullavan

“’I know every movie of hers.  In her last movie, NO SAD SONGS FOR ME, she has a child and husband whom she adores, and Viveca Lindfors plays a woman who is teaching the child the piano, and Margaret Sullavan arranges a romance between her husband and Viveca, so that he won’t be alone, without telling them she’s dying of cancer, of course...So it’s self-sacrifice on two levels.  But you see, the way she acted, there was a toughness in her that prevented any of her movies from becoming really silly.  I can remember, when she looked in the camera, to the doctor who was telling her, and she said, “You mean—cancer?”’  He gasped in a hoarse voice.  ‘You know, she always spoke like that.  Something in her voice.  So I wrote a song, because she died of everything.  She died of rifle shot, she died of a machine gun, she died in childbirth, she tied of TB.  But she never died of the same thing twice, and I swear it was in her contract.’”  Stephen Sondheim from STEPHEN SONDHEIM, A LIFE by Meryle Secrest


"Margaret Sullavan was a star whose deathbed scenes were one of the great joys of the Golden Age of Movies.  Sullavan never simply kicked the bucket.  She made speeches, as she lay dying; and she was so incredibly noble that she made you feel like an absolute twerp for continuing to live out your petty life after she'd ridden on ahead, to the accompaniment of the third movement of Brahm’s First Symphony."  Gore Vidal

Favorite Movies of the 1940s

I was recently delving into the 1946 movie DUEL IN THE SUN for some reason or another which set me off on a dawdling undertaking of making a list of my favorite movies of the 1940s.  Below is that list and some sub-lists that also came about in the process.

Movies I think are great

Beauty and the Beast (1946, Cocteau)

The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945, McCarey)

The Big Sleep (1946, Hawks)

Black Narcissus (1946, Powell & Pressburger)

Blood of the Beasts (1949, Franju)

A Canterbury Tale (1944, Powell & Pressburger)

Canyon Passage (1946, Tourneur)

Cat People (1942, Tourneur)

Caught (1949, Ophuls)

Christmas in July (1940, P. Sturges)

Citizen Kane (1941, Welles)

Cluny Brown (1946, Lubitsch)

Le corbeau (1943, Clouzot)

Dark Passage (1947, Daves)

Day of Wrath (1943, Dreyer)

Duel in the Sun (1946, K. Vidor)

Dumbo (1941)

Experiment Perilous (1944, Tourneur)

Force of Evil (1948, Polonsky)

Foreign Correspondent (1940, Hitchcock)

Good News (1947, C. Walters)

The Great Dictator (1940, Chaplin)

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944, P. Sturges)

Heaven Can Wait (1943, Lubitsch)

High Sierra (1941, Walsh)

I Know Where I’m Going! (1945, Powell & Pressburger)

Isle of the Dead (1945, Robson)

Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1945, Eisenstein)

Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946, Eisenstein)

I Walked with a Zombie (1943, Tourneur)

Jour de fete (1948, Tati)

The Lady Eve (1941, P. Sturges)

The Lady from Shanghai (1948, Welles)

Late Spring (1949, Ozu)

The Leopard Man (1943, Tourneur)

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948, Ophuls)

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, Powell & Pressburger)

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Welles)

A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Powell & Pressburger)

Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli)

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944, Sturges)

Monsieur Verdoux (1947, Chaplin)

Notorious (1946, Hitchcock)

Orpheus (1949, Cocteau)

Out of the Past (1947, Tourneur)

The Palm Beach Story (1942, P. Sturges)

Quai des Orfevres (1947, Clouzot)

Rebecca (1940, Hitchcock)

The Red Shoes (1948, Powell and Pressburger)

The Restless Moment (1949, Ophuls)

Rope (1948, Hitchcock)

Scarlet Street (1945, F. Lang)

The Seventh Victim (1943, Robson)

The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Lubitsch)

Suspicion (1941, Hitchcock)

La terra trema (1948, Visconti)

They Live by Night (1948, N. Ray)

They Were Expendable (1945, Ford)

The Thief of Bagdad (1940, Powell, Berger)

Thieves’ Highway (1949, Dassin)

The Third Man (1949, Reed)

To Be or Not to Be (1942, Lubitsch)

Under Capricorn (1949, Hitchcock)

Les visiteurs du soir (1942, Carné)

White Heat (1949, Walsh)

The Woman in the Window (1945, F. Lang)

The Woman on the Beach (1947, Renoir)

Movies I don’t think are great but enjoy immensely

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948, Barton)

Berlin Express (1948, Tourneur)

The Big Steal (1949, Siegel)

The Black Swan (1942, H. King)

Blood on the Moon (1948, Wise)

Body and Soul (1947, Rossen)

Border Incident (1949, A. Mann)

Born to Kill (1947, Wise)

Brute Force (1947, Dassin)

Casablanca (1943, Curtiz)

A Chump at Oxford (1940, A. Goulding)

Cobra Woman (1944, Siodmak)

Colorado Territory (1949, Walsh)

Daisy Kenyon (1947, Preminger)

Dressed to Kill (1946, Neill)

Escape in the Fog (1945, Boetticher)

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943, Neill)

The Ghost Ship (1943, Robson)

Go West (1940, Buzzell)

Green for Danger (1946, Gilliat)

Gun Crazy (1949, J. Lewis)

Hangover Squre (1945, Brahm)

The Heiress (1949, Wyler)

I Married a Witch (1942, Clair)

I Shot Jesse James (1949, Fuller)

Johnny Belinda (1948, Negulesco)

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949, Hamer)

Leave Her to Heaven (1945, Stahl)

Lost in a Harem (1944, Reisner)

Macbeth (1948, Welles)

Mademoiselle Fifi (1944, Wise)

The Maltese Falcon (1941, Huston)

Mildred Pierce (1945, Curtiz)

My Favorite Wife (1940, Kanin)

My Name Is Julia Ross (1945, Joseph Lewis)

A Night in Casablanca (1946, Mayo)

Nightmare Alley (1947, Goulding)

Now, Voyager (1942, Rapper)

The Outlaw (1943, Hughes, Hawks)

Portrait of Jennie (1948, Dieterle)

Samson and Delilah (1949, DeMille)

The Scarlet Claw (1944, Neill)

The Sea Hawk (1940, Curtiz)

The Set-Up (1949, Wise)

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943, Neill)

The Spiral Staircase (1946, Siodmak)

Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942, Thorpe)

This Gun for Hire (1942, Tuttle)

The Uninvited (1944, Allen)

Whirlpool (1949, Preminger)

The Window (1949, Tetzlaff)

The Wolf Man (1941, Waggner)

Mostly great movies with things that annoy me

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, Wyler)

Bicycle Thieves (1948, De Sica)

The Clock (1945, Minnelli)

Fort Apache (1948, Ford)

Gilda (1946, C. Vidor)

Going My Way (1944, McCarey)

The Grapes of Wrath (1940, Ford)

Henry V (1944, Olivier)

His Girl Friday (1940, Hawks)

How Green Was My Valley (1940, Ford)

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Capra)

Laura (1945, Preminger)

My Darling Clementine (1946, Ford)

Odd Man Out (1947, Reed)

Paisan (1946, Rossellini)

The Pirate (1948, Minnelli)

Red River (1948, Hawks)

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949, Ford)

The Southerner (1945, Renoir)

Sullivan’s Travels (1941, P. Sturges)

They Died with Their Boots On (1941, Walsh)

This Land Is Mine (1943, Renoir)

Mostly bad movies with moments of greatness

The Barkley’s of Broadway (1949, C. Walters)

The Curse of the Cat People (1944, Wise, Fritsch)

Dead of Night (1945, Crichton, Dearden, et al)

Detour (1945, Ulmer)

Easter Parade (1948, C. Walters)

For Me and My Gal (1942, Berkeley)

The Fountainhead (1949, K. Vidor)

The Gang’s All Here (1943, Berkeley)

The Harvey Girls (1946, Sidney)

Jane Eyre (1944, Stevenson)

Lifeboat (1944, Hitchcock)

The Long Voyage Home (1940, Ford)

The Paradine Case (1947, Hitchcock)

Spellbound (1945, Hitchcock)

Till the Clouds Roll By (Whorf)

Unfaithfully Yours (1948, P. Sturges)

The Unfinished Dance (Koster)

Ziegfeld Follies (1946, Minnelli)

Movies others regard as great that I don’t like

Adam’s Rib (1949, Cukor)

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, Capra)

Double Indemnity (1944, Wilder)

Fantasia (1940)

Gaslight (1944, Cukor)

Gentleman’s Agreement (1947, Kazan)

Hamlet (1948, Olivier)

Key Largo (1948, Huston)

The Lost Weekend (1945, Wilder)

On the Town (1949, Donen & Kelly)

Open City (1945, Rossellini)

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943, Wellman)

The Philadelphia Story (1940, Cukor)

Pinocchio (1940)

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, Garnett)

Sergeant York (1941, Hawks)

Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Hitchcock)

To Have and Have to Not (1944, Hawks)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, Huston)

Woman of the Year (1942, Stevens)