STRANGERS ON A BINGE

So we saw went and saw the movie Hitchcock at the weekend.  This blog ain’t called Psycho for nothing.  Norman Bates: "Birds really eat a tremendous lot. But -I-I don't really know anything about birds. My hobby is stuffing things."

 It was good. It’s a very rare movie about middle aged, or possibly even old age, love.  You know that Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville - both 60ish at the time - are going to end up together even as you know they stoke psychotic impulses each other.  This may be too sophisticated an observation for mainstream moviegoers to embrace fully, though the movie seems to be doing reasonably well at the box office.

The best food scene features an anguished Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins), fearing that  Alma (Helen Mirren) is being unfaithful, and opening up the domestic fridge in the middle of the night and eating what I imagine must have been thousands of dollars worth of foie gras.  Alma comes upon her husband and joins in – with a jar of caviar.

I think I have eaten as much foie gras in my life as I shall ever really want to (based more on taste-preference rather than any moral sense), but I’m left with the sudden feeling that I haven’t eaten nearly enough caviar.  Still time to rectify that, I suppose.

Evidence below that the "real life" characters weren't quite as glam as Hopkins and Mirren, though their surroundings certainly look opulent enough.

I couldn’t find a still from the movie showing the foie gras eating scene, but I did find this still of the real Alfred Hitchcock with a goose.  The master of suspense indeed.

I also found this image of Alma, a fridge and Hitchcock’s wax head.  There’s definitely one, and maybe two cans of foie gras in that fridge.

CLUB COPS

And while I'm in the mood, there's this:

RING A DING DING, INDEED

I’m still officially out to lunch (writing, y'know) but this is too good and psycho to pass up.  A book has just been published, titled Frank Sinatra and Me: the Very Good Years by one Tony Consiglio, who was Sinatra’s old pal from the ‘hood.  That's the two of them above. Since Sinatra died in 1998 and Consiglio died in 2008, the book can’t exactly be thought of as hot news but there is some good stuff in there.

The “best” story features some anonymous “broad” who was “dating” Sinatra and expressed political views that differed from his.  She went off to her hotel room to change into something more comfortable, and Sinatra ordered Consiglio to go up to the room, and when she opened the door hit her in the face with a plate of spareribs, which he duly did, and then apologized profusely.

What a couple of pantywaists.  I guess you could understand why Consiglio did it: if you said no to Sinatra you might fear ending up in the choppy waters off of Hoboken.  It’s Sinatra who comes off as the complete tool.  He couldn’t even handle his own food fights.  Of course I might not have said this quite so glibly pre-1998.

At least Ava Gardner got back at him.  Here’s Lauren Bacall in her memoir By Myself.  “The day before I was to leave for London, Frank Sinatra called to ask if I’d mind carrying a coconut cake to Ava Gardner, who was in the film with Bogie  … On the morning of my departure from New York the cake was delivered to me in a large white box - unpackable, of course, so I took off with the coconut cake permanently attached to my hand to keep it from getting crushed. I stayed a night in London, and then Bogie was at the Rome airport to greet me. He took me and my cake box to the Excelsior Hotel and I asked him to tell Ava Gardner I had brought it. He told her - she did nothing about it - so two days later I decided to take it to her before it rotted. I didn’t know her and felt awkward about it -  who knows what happened between a man and a woman when it goes sour? I took the damn cake to the studio and knocked on her dressing room door. After I had identified myself, the door opened. I felt like an idiot standing there with the bloody box - there were assorted people in the room and I was introduced to none of them. I said ‘I brought this cake for you - Frank sent it to me in New York, he thought you’d like it.’  She couldn’t have cared less.”  Hurrah for Ava!

The picture above shows Gardner and Sinatra in, as they say, happier times with a quite different cake.  The picture below, just conceivably, shows Lauren Bacall holding said cakebox.

RITA EATS A SANDWICH

And is that a monkey on the towel? Or something even more sinister?

PLASTERED WITH THE PRES.

So America has a new, or actually the same old, president, elected by very, very slightly more than fifty per cent of the country’s voters.  Democracy!  “The worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried,” - Winston Churchill.

 Shortly before the election Barak Obama was seen in public with a beer in his hand, not for the first time, but since it was in a sports bar in Orlando and he seems to have been surrounded by children you have to assume it was a carefully thought out photo op.  Also in the picture below it does look as though he might be lunging for somebody else’s beer, but surely that can’t be the case.

 Today’s politicians seek the popular touch whether it’s natural to them or not.  Ronald Reagan, embracing his Irish ancestry, seems to have been photographed in any number of bars, looking like he’s actually enjoying it, though he was, of course, an actor.

 But sometimes the populism can go too far.  Is there really any need for a president to be seen bottle of Bud in hand with his arm around some sweaty tattooed bare-chested guy?

I think we can safely say that FDR wouldn’t have done it.  Equally I think we can safely say that today’s electorate would never choose a man who smoked using a cigarette holder.

In Britain we tend to assume that most of our leaders are boozed up most of the time, and in the case of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher it was a pretty fair assumption.  Even Tony Blair admitted he used alcohol as a “prop.”  This was one of the few things that made him likeable.

The reason we like drinking politicians?  Because it makes us feel they’re just like us.  And that’s one of the reasons David Cameron is so thoroughly despised.  He’s regularly seen with a pint of beer in hand, trying and completely failing to establish that he’s one of the lads.  We know he doesn’t mean it.  We know he’s not one of us, and everyone would be much happier if he just admitted it.