Quote of the Day (Kenneth Branagh, on Creating Hercule Poirot’s Mustache)

“We had nine months of preparation that started from something that was a slither of what Charlie Chaplin might have had, passed through Hitler, went via Errol Flynn, turned the other side of Kurt Russell in Tombstone and landed in a world that tried to justify Christie’s description of his mustache as having a ‘tortured splendor.’”—Actor-director Sir Kenneth Branagh, on finding the perfect mustache for iconic sleuth Hercule Poirot, quoted by Alex Ritman, “Man and Mustache: Kenneth Branagh Takes on Agatha Christie’s Poirot,” The Hollywood Reporter, Oct. 18, 2017

After so much time creating such a look, it would be a waste never to use it again, wouldn’t it?

That’s the most likely explanation I can think of why, after spending so much time crafting this famous bit of facial hair for Murder on the Orient Express, Sir Kenneth Branagh came back to this look for Death on the Nile and the just-premiered A Haunting in Venice.

That, and the fact that the first two films were either somewhat successful at the box office or they didn’t lose a fortune. Because the only crime Hollywood studios will never forgive a filmmaker is a box-office bomb.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Belfast,’ Revealing the Transatlantic Impact of Raquel Welch)

[Young Buddy and his parents momentarily escape from Ulster’s Troubles in the late 1960s by going to a movie theater to see One Million Years B.C. Early on, a shot of a young, buxom actress in skimpy prehistoric garb fills the screen.]

Ma [played by Caitríona Balfe]: “No wonder you brought us to this.”

Pa [played by Jamie Dornan]: “It's educational for the boys.”

Ma: “Aye. Raquel Welch is hell bent on education.”—Belfast (2021), written and directed by Kenneth Branagh

When I saw Belfast several weeks ago, I guffawed during this scene. Someone else who did, I have good reason to think, provided the “education” alluded to here: Raquel Welch.

When Ms. Welch heard that actor-hyphenate Kenneth Branagh had loved the film that catapulted her to stardom when he was growing up, the Sixties bombshell sent him a glossy signed, "To the boy from Belfast, from the girl in the fur bikini," according to Branagh’s commentary for the DVD of his Oscar-winning movie.

(BTW, the management of this blog decided it was best not to reproduce the image of the actress in that particular garb with this post. We cannot be responsible for baby-boomer males experiencing cardiac arrest at this flashback to their impressionable youth.)

Time is “indifferent in a week/To a beautiful physique,” the poet W. H. Auden observed somberly. 

Still, it came as something of a shock when I heard that Ms. Welch had died this week at age 82. Illness, decline, and death are not supposed to happen to film legends whose natural good looks are already magnified to fill the big screen.

Chances are, the desired career path of many Hollywood starlets is to begin as a sex symbol before transitioning to more challenging dramatic fare, as Sophia Loren, Ann-Margret and Jessica Lange did.  Ms. Welch did not travel all the way on that trajectory, though her time in the industry was substantial.

You will not find an argument here that Ms. Welch was an unappreciated or even underestimated acting talent. But she achieved something as remarkable in its way as critical acclaim would have been: success on her terms, not those of filmdom’s male power brokers.

For one thing, she risked being labeled "difficult" by standing up for her right, beginning with her adamant refusal to perform nude onscreen, despite intense pressure to do so. 

According to Anita Gates’ obituary of the actress in The New York Times, even art-house darlings Ismail Merchant and James Ivory resorted to that tactic while making The Wild Party. Ivory had no trouble bad-mouthing her in later years for what he depicted as unprofessional behavior on the set, but he had surely squandered much of the respect she might have given him by pressing her for intimate scenes.

She also dared to take on a major studio in court—and won. 

After being fired from Cannery Row in 1982, she braved MGM’s characterization of her as an aging star out to score a big payday, with her attorneys convincing the jury that the studio had only fired her after their original choice for her role, Debra Winger, became available.

Second, she stretched her talents whenever she had the opportunity. Most notably, she filled in very capably for Lauren Bacall in the Broadway musical adaptation of Woman of the Year, by many accounts winning over theatergoers with her own take on the role.

Finally, she had an irreverent, even self-deprecating sense of humor. That not only enabled her to survive the vicissitudes of an exploitative industry, but led her towards roles where the right director could make use of her wry instincts. Many will fondly remember her featured roles in the likes of Tortilla Soup, Legally Blonde, and a hilarious Seinfeld episode where she appeared as herself.  

“She was elegant, professional and glamorous beyond belief,” tweeted her Legally Blonde costar, Reese Witherspoon. “Simply stunning. May all her angels carry her home."

Quote of the Day (Kenneth Branagh, on Overcoming Reverses)

“That [Samuel] Beckett phrase of ‘fail, fail again, fail better’[from Worstward Ho] is maybe one to bear in mind. But who pretends that life is one slowly ascending curve of human development? Most of the time you have to smash into something: the death, the broken relationship, the horrible career moment. Then you think, Well, what matters to me? What do I enjoy? Or even just, I’m still here.”—Actor-director Sir Kenneth Branagh quoted in David Marchese, “Talk: Kenneth Branagh Is Finally Processing His Childhood Trauma,” The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 7, 2021

(The accompanying photo of Kenneth Branagh was taken on July 10, 2009, at the Roma Fiction Fest that year, by Giorgia Meschini.)

Quote of the Day (Kenneth Branagh, on Moving Out of Ulster During ‘The Troubles’)

“That rupture was the most significant event in my personal life. There was a sense that before that mob came up the street [i.e., a riot he witnessed as a child in Belfast in August 1969], I knew who I was and that I was at peace. From that point onward, a whole series of identities and masks was constructed. What I wanted to do [in his new film Belfast] was peel some of those away. To do some self-remembering without indulgence, simply trying to open what had been covered up. Because there’s so much of who I am that was formed in that period up to 8 years old and before that riot occurred. But from that moment there was a guardedness, there was an inability to roll with things in the way that one had done before.”—Actor-director Sir Kenneth Branagh quoted in David Marchese, “Talk: Kenneth Branagh Is Finally Processing His Childhood Trauma,” The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 7, 2021

Nearly 30 years ago, while still married to Kenneth Branagh, actress Emma Thompson told an interviewer that, because of the sectarian unrest he had witnessed during his Ulster boyhood, the sight of a church left her husband almost physically ill as an adult.

Now, in Belfast, Branagh immerses moviegoers in a semi-autobiographical recreation of that traumatic childhood. 

I have been following the actor’s career off and on since he first attracted wide notice here in the U.S. with his Oscar-nominated performance in Henry V. But, as an Irish-American, I am especially interested in how he treats this particularly intense chapter in the tangled British-Irish relationship in his critically acclaimed new movie.

A move away from all the friends, places and other certainties one has known to date can be difficult for any child. The decision by Branagh’s parents to relocate to England as a result of the wrenching violence that erupted in Northern Ireland in 1969 must have been far worse.

Fans of film and theater should be glad that he and his family survived. It should never be forgotten that far too many others died—physically, emotionally or spiritually—during the three-decade period that ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

One can only hope that the Protestants and Roman Catholics of Ulster’s six counties will be able to work out on their own a future of justice, peace, opportunity and equal rights for all, without the specter of the gun ever darkening their lives or the history of that region again.

(The accompanying photo of Kenneth Branagh was taken on July 10, 2009, at the Roma Fiction Fest that year, by Giorgia Meschini. For a fine short piece from six years ago, hailing Branagh’s “diversity of work” while centering on his abundant productions of The Bard, I urge you to check out this this post from “The Shakespeare Blog” by Sylvia Morris.)

Quote of the Day (Kenneth Branagh, on the Positive Side of Ambition)

“Ambition can give us a sense of purpose, meaning and determination. And I think that ambition need not be ruthless. Ambition begets adventure, a process that teaches us that the journey is potentially more enjoyable than the arrival. Ambition has given me tremendous energy and a way of looking at the world. What I’ve learned about ambition is to share it, that it need not always be about you, that it works best quietly but insistently and can indeed be healthy.” —Actor-director (Henry V, Cinderella) Kenneth Branagh quoted in “Soapbox: The Columnists, WSJ. Asks Six Luminaries to Weigh in on a Single Topic. This Month: Ambition,” WSJ.com, March 2015 issue

This Day in Exploration History (Scott Loses Race to South Pole, Then His Life)

January 17, 1912—Captain Robert Falcon Scott, reached one of the last Holy Grails of the Age of Exploration, the South Pole, only to find it a hollow victory. Not only had Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen beaten him in the race to the Pole, but now the 43-old British explorer and his crew found themselves in the vast reaches of the desolate Antarctic facing bitter weather that was worsening—and dwindling supplies.

“Great God!” Scott wrote in his journal. “This is an awful place, and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

Two and a half months later, Scott and his men would perish. If he hadn’t achieved the goal to which he had committed the last dozen years of his life, though, he had won a place in the hearts of his countrymen, with his posthumously published journal acclaimed as an example of the kind of stiff-upper-lip resolve that had given truth to the line that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”

In his last log entry, the explorer wrote: “Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman."

In 1948, the film world produced its own account of his last voyage, Scott of the Antarctic, with Scott‘s log and personal effects of his crew loaned by the British Museum to enhance the near-documentary feeling of the movie. Ralph Vaughan Williams’ intense score only added to the mood of impending tragedy.

Nearly four decades later, Masterpiece Theatre would offer a rather less romanticized take on the expedition in The Last Place on Earth. The PBS miniseries, based on a comparative account of the Amundsen and Scott expeditions by Roland Huntford, presented a much less idealized version of the British explorer. Amundsen’s meticulousness in planning every detail was contrasted with Scott’s style of winging it, and the Norwegian’s willingness to learn from native peoples of the polar regions on proper clothing and the best animal to use for the polar push (hardy sled dogs) with Scott, so caught up in national chauvinism to appreciate these same insights.

Even Scott’s onetime crew member (on the 1901-04 Discovery expedition) and later polar rival, Ernest Shackleton, is coming in for greater respect now. Which one is getting the TV hero treatment? (See Kenneth Branagh in Shackleton.) Which is having papers written about him at Wharton, and even becoming the subject of extended learning plans on leadership? Which is being voted the greater polar explorer in a BBC poll?

Scott, even despite the compliment paid to him in the following quote from another British explorer, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, would have bristled at the conclusion: “For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.”