Silent movies - The Lodger: A Story From the London Fog

Today we are going to jump to yet another genre within my silent movie "project" - crime.
The movie is "The Lodger: A Story From the London Fog" from 1927 which, despite being Alfred Hitchcock's third film, is regarded as the first one that's truly Hitchcockian.
I watched it on YouTube here.

"The Lodger" is based on the 1913 novel with the same title written by Marie Belloc Lowndes and inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.

Public domain via Wikimedia

The film starts with a young blonde woman screaming.
Next you see an advertisement for a show called "Golden Curls" before you see the woman on the ground, murdered, a note pinned to her coat saying "The Avenger" in a triangle.
A witness describes the murderer she has seen, tall, the lower half of his face hidden by a scarf.
The woman has become the seventh blonde victim of the serial killer who always strikes on a Tuesday.

Next we go to the house of the Buntings and their daughter Daisy, a mannequin. Joe, the policeman who's in love with Daisy, is visiting.
Then a mysterious looking man hiding half of his face under a scarf is turning up at the door asking to rent a room. When shown to the room, he insists on the portraits of blonde ladies to be taken off the wall as they "get on his nerves".

Over time, the lodger seems more and more suspicious to the Buntings and Joe who has been assigned to "The Avenger" case, but can't prevent the eighth murder.
Mrs. Bunting's reason is the lodger going out late at night and another victim being found the next day, also he has locked a cabinet in his room. Mr. Bunting gets nervous when he buys a dress for Daisy as a gift and Joe can't stand the lodger and Daisy obviously being drawn to one another.
So they try to keep Daisy away from the lodger, but she won't have that and goes on a late night date with him which is interrupted by Joe whom she then tells she never wants to see him again.

When they are home again, Joe turns up with some colleagues to search the lodger's room. In the locked cabinet they find a gun, newspaper clippings about "The Avenger", a map of the murder sites, and the portrait of a blonde girl.
The lodger explains that it's his murdered sister, but Joe arrests him, anyway. The lodger escapes, handcuffed, and when Daisy finds him, he tells her the story of his sister and how his mother urged him on her deathbed to not rest until justice is done.
Daisy takes him to a pub and gives him brandy to warm him up, but his hands being hidden raise suspicion, even more so after they leave and Joe comes in to call the station to tell them about the escape. An angry mob forms hunting after the lodger and beating him despite Daisy and Joe, who has been given the information that "The Avenger" has been arrested, trying to defend him. Only when a paper boy turns up with the news, the mob lets go of him and he falls into Daisy's arms.

In the end, we see the lodger, Daisy, and her parents at his grand house, living happily ever after, no doubt.

I think I wanted to like the movie more than I actually did because so many people praise its brilliance. It might have had to do with my watching it while being sick. Although it's not extremely long, I couldn't even make it through in one go, possibly because I didn't feel good, possibly because I found some scenes to be too long for my liking and not very relatable.
If I thought my lodger could be a serial killer with a blonde girl obsession, would I want him to live in my house where my blonde daughter lives as well?
Where does Daisy take that blind faith in him from? Why is she so sure he's innocent? On the other hand, I feel Joe - whom I didn't like much throughout the movie - only arrests the lodger out of jealousy. The gun, map, newspaper clippings or even the portrait don't prove much, he could just be a person obsessed with true crime like all the others greedily waiting for news on the case. If his sister was the first victim, was he never mentioned in the case files or didn't Joe even read those?
Why didn't the lodger go to the police instead of insisting to bring the killer down himself? I'm sure his mother would have been okay with that.

Someone wrote that the "second part felt more like a romance than a mystery or thriller" and I agree.
The lodger looked very soulful and haunted and I wasn't even surprised that he wasn't the murderer in the end. To me, it would have been more of a plot twist if he had been.
It is said that Hitchcock had actually planned the lodger to be the murderer, but that the studio thought that Ivor Novello, who was a matinee idol, couldn't possibly be. There couldn't even be an ambiguous ending and to be honest, I found the happy ending a bit flat although I should have been happy for the young lovers, I guess.

What I liked were the use of light and shadow, angles, and effects which Hitchcock brought to perfection throughout his career, but for me they weren't enough to support the plot.

A note on the score for the version I watched. It was commissioned for the restored movie and is by Nitin Sawhney. I found it worked very well in some scenes, but an absolute no go for me was the singing in two scenes, that just didn't fit in there.

I don't know, maybe I would feel different watching it with a clear head a second time. I'll let you know if I try again.

Sources:
1. Matt Buchholz: Week 28: The Lodger (1927), Contradicting Myself, and Sound. On: Hitchcock 52, July 15, 2016
2. Christina Wehner: The Lodger (1927). On: Christina Wehner - Classic movies, musicals, old books, and the Great American Songbook, August, 13, 2018
3. Sam Wigley: Then and now: The Lodger reviewed. On: British Film Institute - Features, August 10, 2012
4. Philip Kemp: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog: The first true Hitchcock movie. On: The Criterion Collection - Essay, June 27, 2017

Mrs. 'arris Goes to Paris

First of all, let me admit that I'm cheating twice with this post. It's inspired by the Springtime in Paris event that Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and Lisa from Boondock Ramblings have on their blogs this spring.
Not all of the movies are available to me, though. For tomorrow, Erin and Lisa have planned to watch the 2022 movie "Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris" with Lesley Manville. I've seen some of that on TV, but not the whole movie, and I can't really remember all the details.
So, instead I went back 30 years before that movie and watched the TV movie "Mrs. 'arris Goes to Paris" (notice the tiny difference?) with the wonderful Angela Lansbury.
Being the rebel I am, I also don't post this on the same day as Thursday is my silent movie day, and being weird the way I am, I don't like to post twice on one day, I'm here today.

"Mrs. 'arris Goes to Paris" is based on Paul Gallico's book of the same title, at least in the USA. In the UK, the title was changed to "Flowers for Mrs Harris". I couldn't find out why although both titles make sense, also not why the apostrophe was dropped which referred to Mrs. Harris' dialect. I found the book on the Internet Archive and gave it a quick read as it is only 157 pages.
You can find the movie on YouTube, not the best quality, but watchable.

So, who is Mrs. Harris and why does she go to Paris?
Ada Harris is a hardworking London charwoman with a circle of wealthy clients.

After a short introduction of her and her friend Vi, also a char, on the bus, you see her arriving at Lady Dant's house where she finds two Dior gowns hanging on the wardrobe from which Lady Dant wants to choose one for the new Queen's coronation ball.
Mrs. Harris is blown away and asks how much a gown like that costs and is told it's £450 (I did a little check, in 1953 that would have been around $1260 which may give you an idea).
From now on Mrs. Harris is obsessed by the idea to own a dress by Dior. After winning the football pools, not the jackpot unfortunately, she feels she's off to a good start and begins scrimping and saving, denying herself pleasures like going to the movies or the pub.
It takes her three years to save up. Her plan is to fly to Paris, buy a dress and fly back the same evening.
She makes it to Dior and gets rejected by the manageress Madame Colbert, but her tears make Madame change her mind and she gets her a seat at the afternoon show, much to the resentment of the director and a wealthy customer. Her seat neighbor is a Marquis who's enchanted by her (being reminded of the kind char at the English school he attended when he was young) and who approves of Madame's refusal to remove her when the director demands it.
Mrs. Harris chooses an opulent pink dress shown by head model Natasha, but is devastated upon hearing that it will take a week to make it because she doesn't have the money to stay in Paris. Mme Colbert and Natasha convince André, the house's accountant who happens to be in love with Natasha, to let her stay with him.
However, the fittings have to be done in secret to avoid the director.
From there on, Mrs. Harris has an impact on all of her new friends' lives. She brings the Marquis and his daughter and granddaughter together again, she helps Natasha and André find their love for each other, and with the help of the Marquis she achieves acknowledgement for Mme Colbert's husband who died in the war as a member of the French resistance.
When the dress is ready, though, the director catches them out and orders her to leave and the dress to be destroyed.
Of course, her friends at Dior don't let her down and contact the Marquis who then goes to Christian Dior himself.
The last problem is that no one told Mrs. Harris about customs for which she of course doesn't have the money, but they also find a solution for that by advising her to simply tell the truth. Instead of a Dior carton, they put the dress in a cheap suitcase, and when Mrs. Harris tells the customs agent she has a Dior dress in there, he doesn't believe her and therefore doesn't even open the suitcase.
In the end, you see her hanging up the dress in her flat remembering Paris and the party her friends gave her - even if Vi doesn't believe her.

I have always loved Angela Lansbury (despite only having seen about two episodes of "Murder, She Wrote") and I think she was great for this part.
This isn't a deep movie, this is a bowl of comforting hot soup on a cold day, it celebrates kindness generating kindness, and for that I really like it.

You know there's a but now, don't you?
Let's compare it to the book and you will see that the movie strays here and there.
- In the book, Mrs. Harris goes to the dog races after winning the pools and puts £50 on a dog called "Haute Couture" which she regards as a sign. She loses, but shortly after she finds a diamond pin and gets a reward of £25, and that is a sign for her to keep saving, but not depend on luck. In the movie, there's just the diamond pin.
- In the book, there's no director whom they have to hide from.
- Madame Colbert's husband isn't dead. He works for the Foreign Office and never gets a promotion despite his good work. Mrs. Harris tells the Marquis about it and he can help with that.
- The Marquis mentions children who are "scattered and far removed". You don't get to see any of them, there is no reuniting scene. He and Mrs. Harris do talk about her love to flowers, especially geraniums, though.
- In the movie, Natasha has an abusive rich boyfriend who gets punched by André when he insults Natasha which then makes her realize she loves André. In the book, there's no boyfriend. André is in love with Natasha and she falls in love with him quickly, but they both think it's not mutual and don't dare saying anything until Mrs. Harris comes right out with it.
- The dress is completely different (in each movie I have seen, by the way). It is mentioned that it is a dress meant for a much younger woman, but it doesn't have Cinderella quality. In the book it's not puffy and it's from black velvet with jet beads - which I'm a sucker for, so I would really have liked to see that! - with the top being a froth of cream, pink and white chiffon, tulle, and lace.
- The biggest difference, however, in this movie is the happy ending. In the book (and other movies), Mrs. Harris lends the dress to one of her clients for one night, a budding actress who wants to impress a producer. Huge mistake. There's an accident and the dress gets burned badly. The actress goes off for a week without even leaving a real apology or any compensation.
Mrs. Harris goes home, hides the dress away in the suitcase because she can't bear looking at it longer and weeps until she gets disturbed by the insistent ringing of her doorbell. She opens the door to a messenger who brings her loads of boxes full of beautiful flowers (that's why I said both titles make sense) sent by her friends from Paris.
That's when she decides not having the dress repaired because what she has gained is not a dress, it's friendship, memories, experience, adventure, and love - and no one can take that from her.

So yeah, all of that is missing from this movie and maybe Angela Lansbury could have been a bit rougher around the edges, a bit grittier, a bit less glamorous looking at the end, but hey, sometimes a bowl of hot soup is just the thing you need.
Not deep, no big moral, just a bit of joy for everyone.

Nadine's private island

You may not know that I'm a huge fan of David Zinn. If you are on Facebook or Instagram, YouTube or TikTok, I'm quite sure you have come across his work before.

A little warning or apology now. I love David's art so much, but I don't know if I will be able to find the right words to explain that. Sometimes I'm full of words, but not the right ones come out. Please also keep in mind I'm not a native speaker. Both of that together may be leading to something that totally makes sense in my head, but not so much written down.

This is from David's website:
"Now, thanks to the temptations of a box of sidewalk chalk on an unusually sunny day, Mr. Zinn is known all over the world for the art he creates under his feet. David's temporary street drawings are composed entirely of chalk, charcoal and found objects, and are always improvised on location through a process known (to almost no one) as "ephemeral pareidolic anamorphosis."
According to his TEDx talk, this isn't what he calls capital A Art, but small a art.
It's art that doesn't last for long, art that requires you to look at it from a certain angle to get the picture right, art that is inspired by detecting a meaning or picture in something that originally has nothing to do with it, like seeing something in a cloud that makes sense to your mind, a cow or a car.

We all know the last one. I regularly see faces, dragon heads, and more in my bathroom tiles and it doesn't worry me as long as they don't start talking to me out loud.
What I have never done, however, is work with that pareidolia and use cracks, lines, chewing gum spots, leaves, bushes or metal covers in the street to create something funny, whimsical, heartwarming. I have made a few jewelry pieces that started as a kind of doodle, for example a piece of bent wire, and turned into something recognizable, but not that often. I play, but the results are mostly abstract.

David, however, is sharing a world of creatures with us - like Sluggo, the green monster with the stalk eyes, or Philomena, the flying pig, gnomes and trolls, bunnies and dinosaurs, dragons and hamsters. All of them are adorable, even the grumpy ones, often their fears and joys and quirks are very relatable, and sometimes I feel like wanting to hug or talk to a piece of street art. I know I'm not alone in this because although I try to follow my own advice to never read the comments on social media, there are posts where I know the comments won't be a dumpster on fire and they show how much these little creatures speak to people.

One of my regrets is that I will never see one in person. David shares not only his art in pictures, but also does videos of how his creatures come to life, and there are books, prints, calendars as well which is wonderful, but no matter how good a picture is, I don't think you get the exact same feeling from them.
Of course one point is the idea of stumbling upon it unexpectedly. In one of his books, David says that usually only a few dozen people get to see his original art, festivals or events obviously being an exception to that. That's no surprise if you see people running along without looking around them, myself included, no doubt (except for the running part, my walking slowly should give me a slightly better chance).
There was a time when I consciously looked up on my way home and noticed stained glass windows, initials on houses, even mosaics that I hadn't seen before. I don't think, however, that I look at the ground too consciously while walking but only if I'm sitting somewhere, and of course these days I don't get around much, anyway.
So how big would my chances be to even notice art that doesn't jump right out at me like a big wall full of graffiti, for example?
The other point is that in the pictures you mostly get the right angle from the start and you don't have to discover it yourself. Would I even recognize what I'm looking at?
Would I see Nadine?

Yes, we're finally getting to Nadine.
She is my all time favorite, a small mouse in a blue dress (here you can find just a few pictures of her). David calls her "a mouse of adventure".
Nadine makes friends without reservations, like cats, big frogs, sheep, Sluggo, and even dragons and the Chalk Ness Monster.
She likes adventure, but she also enjoys quiet and solitary times with a book or a nice cuppa.
She tends to plants, she uses a crystal ball, she dances, and she seems to be living very much in the moment, enjoying what she's doing.
I'm a grumpy old cat lady ... and I think I envy her a little for getting to be Nadine 😉

I couldn't get this picture of her out of my head from the first time I saw it.

"Nadine's Private Island"
With permission of David Zinn

This isn't the only time I have seen Nadine with a book, but this is a really private spot compared to the hammock or the tree.
Don't we all want our own private island sometimes? Especially nowadays? A spot where the world can't touch us at least for a little while? No phone (although my cell phone is hardly ever on, my landline is still going strong), no technology, no neighbors, no noisy cars, just us and a book. I hope there were no annoying boats coming by, but knowing Nadine she probably would have been ready for that, too.

Anyhow, I started getting this nagging feeling of a need and a challenge.
The need was wanting to turn this into fan art. The challenge was the decision what exactly to do and how and it wasn't that easy. In the end only embroidery seemed right.
So I grabbed a 9 cm embroidery hoop - as Nadine is a small mouse - and spent a few fun days embroidering.

My palm tree isn't quite as high and I couldn't fit the whole island on, but Nadine doesn't seem to mind.
The leaves were a bit of a problem at first because I had never tried stumpwork before and struggled with the small size. After four or five attempts I finally called defeat and went back to familiar terrain meaning I beaded the leaves instead (taking the artistic license of making them lighter in color because I didn't have enough dark green beads left).

Unfortunately my brass frames are a bit too small to work with the beaded leaves and my wooden frames are too dark for this scene.
I'll find something eventually.

When I was done in the middle of the night, I took a quick and not very good picture, and before I could start overthinking it as usual and chicken out, I sent an email to David asking him for permission to share this piece publicly.
Can you imagine how I felt when I got a reply the next day already? Of course I had hoped for one, but I wasn't sure at all and definitely didn't expect such a quick one. And as you can obviously tell from this post, it was a yes which really meant a lot to me.
To use David's words from the TEDx talk when he told the story of the earless Mickey, I was "childishly happy".

This is just for myself, a little reminder to try and perhaps be more like Nadine sometimes. I'll let you know how it goes 😉
Also I'm sure I will never not smile looking at her.

Silent movies - The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

After two rather long movies I needed something a bit shorter for my silent movie "project" this time.
We had a fairy tale and an adventure movie, both with happy endings. How about trying something very different? I brought you a horror movie today, actually what has been called the first true horror movie - "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" from 1920 which you can watch on YouTube here.
I'm not a big fan of horror movies because I'm a coward. I get nightmares which makes den Dekan jumpy and Gundel shake her head at me. So if I watch one, I don't do it before going to sleep. Will Dr. Caligari follow me in my sleep, though? As in is he still scary today?

Let's start with the plot as usual.
Two men are sitting in a garden. A lady in white is walking by, looking as if in trance. The younger man says "That is my fiancée." and begins telling a story.

We are in the German town of Holstenwall and there's a fair. A young man, Alan, persuades his friend Franzis (the narrator) to go there with him.
Next you see an older gentleman going to the town clerk, who is really rude to him, to ask for a permit to present his showpiece at the fair - a somnambulist. His card says Dr. Caligari.
That night, the town clerk is murdered.
At the fair, Dr. Caligari introduces Cesare, the somnambulist who, according to him, has been sleeping day and night in a cabinet reminding of a casket for 23 years. He orders him to wake up and tells the audience - among them Alan and Franzis - to ask Cesare a question as he "knows the past and sees the future".

Despite Franzis trying to hold him back, Alan goes to the stage and asks how long he will be living. Cesare tells him he has until the break of dawn.
After leaving the fair, Alan is understandably distressed, even more so when they see a poster about the murder. Then they meet Jane in the street, a young lady they are both in love with. They agree to let her choose and remain friends no matter what.
Unfortunately, Alan is brutally stabbed that night. Franzis goes to the police and has an investigation started. Afterwards he goes to Jane to give her the terrible news, then he meets up with Jane's father to tell him he suspects Cesare to be the murderer.
Meanwhile, a criminal tries to kill a woman in the same way, but when he's caught, he claims he just wanted to divert the blame and has nothing to do with the first two murders.
Jane who doesn't know that Franzis and her father are at the police starts worrying and goes to the fairground. She asks Caligari if he has seen them and he pulls her into the tent and shows her Cesare.
After Alan's funeral, Franzis goes to Caligari's wagon and finds him and Cesare both sleeping.
At that moment, however, Cesare is walking through town (my favorite scene because of the way he seems to dance along the wall).

He enters Jane's room and tries to kill her, but he can't get himself to do it. Instead he abducts her.

He's followed by a group of men and drops Jane, escaping barely himself and falling over dead. Or is he?
Franzis can't believe what has happened because he has stayed in front of the wagon all night, but when they take a closer look at the cabinet, they find that's there's just a doll in there looking like Cesare.

Caligari escapes into the mental asylum. Franzis follows him and discovers that he really is the asylum's director. Franzis manages to convince several doctors to go through Caligari's office while he's sleeping, and they find a book about somnambulism with a story called "The cabinet of Dr. Caligari" about a mystic travelling fairs with a somnambulist called Cesare whom he hypnotized to make him commit crimes.
When a somnambulist is admitted to the asylum, the director gets obsessed with the idea of becoming Caligari himself and finding out if such a thing is really possible.
After the doctors have read this, Cesare is brought to the director who has a breakdown when he sees him. He's put in a straitjacket "and from that day on, the madman never again left his cell".

The movie now goes back to the garden, you see the Franzis and the other man get up and enter the hall of the asylum where you see different people.
Jane is there, sitting on what looks a throne, declining Franzis' request to marry him. Cesare is there, awake, smiling and holding flowers.
When the director comes into the hall, looking completely normal compared to what he looked like in the story, Franzis has an outburst of rage claiming that not he is insane, but the director who is Caligari. Franzis is put in a straitjacket and the director says he now understands the source of his insanity and knows a way to cure him.
What is real? What isn't?

From what I read there are different theories about different components of the film - the plot, the deeper meaning, the frame story, the set, the lighting.
Some interpretations were developed years later, people told different versions of stories, maybe adapted memories to what seemed to fit.
There are enough sources out there where you can read about all of that and I will add some at the end of the post, but I'm neither a film historian nor critic, and while I read through the articles, I don't feel it would make sense for me to try and add my two cents about theories of authority, schizophrenia, or the way Germans felt after the First World War.

Instead I will just tell how I saw and liked the movie.
What obviously catches your eye first is the set. Almost from the start, when you see the painting of the town as a background, you know that nothing in this film is going to be straight or ordinary. Windows, walls, and streets are crooked and have strange angles, stools are ridiculously high (and look very uncomfortable), shadows are painted on, everything seems to be part of a bizarre and twisted dream in which the characters move.
Even the intertitles are artistic with their stylized letters and geometric shapes and scribbles.
The costumes are a strange mix of time periods, some seem abstract (I'm especially fascinated by the policeman's hat).
All of that adds to the expressionist feeling of the film.

Even if you expect the characters to provide the horror, you may get surprised. This is no movie that makes you jump in your seat, there's no obvious gore, hardly any fights - this is a movie that creeps up on you, dark and grotesque.
It lives through the characters, Franzis who is so determined to solve this puzzle, Jane who mostly seems to float through the movie, Caligari whose movements are emphasized by his strange walk, but also the expression on his face, and of course Cesare although he hardly seems human through most of the film. I love the scene he enters Jane's room and you can imagine many vampires to be based on this scene.

The linked version comes with a score that was commissioned by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation and the TV channels ZDF and ARTE and composed by students of the Freiburg University of Music.
It's - different. I admit I'm not particularly adventurous in regards to contemporary music - which aims "to bring historical film events into the present" - and at first I had to turn down the volume because again (like in "The Lost World") it was a bit overwhelming. After a while, however, I had got used to it, I guess, or maybe the movie captured me so much that it faded into the background.

Now back to my question - does Caligari manage to scare me?
Could be that scare isn't the right word. It made me feel uneasy and it felt creepy and will stay with me for a while. Maybe I will be trying to make up my mind about the ending or what meaning I see in the movie or maybe I will just remember the overall feeling of it.
I honestly can't say at the moment, but I know I recommend watching it at least once if only for the influence it had on films coming after it.

Sources:
1. Sean Fallon: Away From The Hype: The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari. On: Film Inquiry, June 16, 2023
2. Fritzi Kramer: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). A silent film review. On: Movies Silently, May 12, 2013
3. Alex Barrett: 100 years of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: why we're still living in its shadows. On: British Film Institute. Feature, February 25, 2020
4. Robert Horton: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. An expressionist masterpiece. On: Goethe-Institut USA
5. Roger Ebert: A world slanted at sharp angles. On: RogerEbert.com, Reviews, June 3, 2009
6. Chris Vognar: Lasting Fright: The Staying Power of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. On: RogerEbert.com, Features, November 5, 2020

Nostalgia - PEZ

Some years ago when I still did the "Finds of the week" posts, I had some called "I'm a collector" in which I shared vintage items. Over time my collections have mostly stopped growing due to different reasons, but they are still there and still loved. I also have vintage items, some inherited, some gifts, some from fleamarkets, some more interesting than others. So I thought it could be fun to share some of them every, now and then and tell their story.

The other day a friend shared on Facebook that PEZ had been invented as an alternative to smoking. By now you may have noticed that I can't resist a new good trivia story, so of course I had to check that right away. It's true.

Did Ponder think the PEZ lady pointed at the ceiling?

PEZ takes me back to my childhood - once again, sorry, but that's why this is a nostalgia and no random Saturday post - to the "Totoladen" (we just called it "Toto" for short), to be precise.
I grew up in a residential area that nevertheless had (almost) everything you needed. Two pubs, a grocery store, a small café, a bakery, two butchers, a shoemaker, two different banks, a small shop where you could get office supplies, a post office, a pharmacy, a dry cleaner, two auto supply shops (they belonged together and also had other stuff like decorative tape), a playground, and the "Totoladen", named that way because not only did they sell unpacked candy, "miracle bags" (surprise bags with chewing gum and little figures inside), newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, and office supplies, they were also a lottery agency (TOTO is a soccer lottery). Outside they had a gum ball and a PEZ vending machine on the wall.
I loved vending machines or gum ball machines which had a mix of chewing gum (which I never liked) and little toys and it was probably a good thing I didn't have much money available. It was a tough choice, though, between getting something from the PEZ machine or try out for the miniature lighters and cheap rings in the gum ball machine.

Anyhow, PEZ.
The name PEZ is an abbreviation of the German word for peppermint - "PfeffErminZ" - because it is an Austrian brand. Eduard Haas III invented the peppermint drop as a healthy alternative to smoking. Originally the drops were round, but quickly changed to the compressed brick shape. They were available in little tins, but Haas wanted to cater to the elegant society and therefore looked for an equally elegant way of dispensing the drops.
So engineer Oskar Uxa invented the first PEZ dispenser which resembled a slim golden lighter, then colorful "regulars" followed. From 1955, the first special shapes arrived - such a space guns - and the first dispensers got their heads.
You can look up all the designs by year in the PEZ dispenser archive.

In the late 50s, Haas came up with the idea of the PEZ Ladies as a marketing strategy, young ladies dressed in PEZ uniforms with a pillbox hat who drove around in PEZ-branded trucks and handed out free samples.
Graphic artist Gerhard Brause designed the advertising figure based on the style of US pin-ups and dressed in a bellhop inspired costume, to be used on signs, vending machines, posters, etc. such as the following replica items.

According to the PEZ site, there were 36,000 vending machines in circulation through Germany and Austria from the 50s to the 80s - one of them in our neighborhood.
Now I have a confession to make. I never was a big friend of PEZ, there was candy I liked a lot better, but I was a huge fan of the vending machines or vintage vending machines in general.
So I may only have three dispensers two of which were a buy in an American thrift shop (one of which has disappeared, you can guess whom I'm blaming, he's small and fuzzy), the other one was a gift, but I also have - this worn little beauty, with a more modern PEZ lady, probably from the 70s or 80s.

There had to be made changes to the machines when prices were increased and you had to put in three instead of two coins because the chute where the coins were collected had to be bigger.
As you can see the "2x10pf" (pf for "pfennig") was scratched out and a new slot with "3x10 PF" imprinted on it attached.

Not all machines had the same candy available.
For example, you can see in the picture above five kinds, the "orange" and "citron" (why not the German word "Zitrone"?), the "peppermint", the chewing gum, the dextrose (which "creates power"), and the Tomby "cream caramels".
I have seen the same vending machine with five kinds, but if you look at the actual selection of mine, you see you can choose the double pack "orange/citron", the dextrose, a double pack chewing gum/spearmint gum, and the Tomby. No peppermint.
It makes the machine look asymmetrical, too. I wonder how that was decided. Or did it have to do with the bigger chute?

PEZ vending machines disappeared when the Euro was introduced.
This one was still out in the wild until at least 1991. I know that because "Jürgen" and "Siggi" from the little town of Beselich decided to mark the date of, well, whatever - is Siggi a girl and they didn't find a tree to carve their names into or was it just a spontaneous idea - almost exactly 34 years ago!

Sources:
1. Theresa Machemer: How PEZ Evolved From an Anti-Smoking Tool to a Beloved Collector's Item. On: Smithsonian Magazine - Innovation, December 15, 2020
2. PEZ international Site - Iconic
3. PEZ USA - The History of PEZ
4. PEZ international site - Presse (German)

Die drei ???

The what??? (See what I did there? 😁)
"Die drei ???" = "Die drei Fragezeichen" = "The Three Investigators".
"The Three Investigators" had been a big part of my life until I moved out from home.
At first, I got the books from the local library as a kid, but soon afterwards the scourge of my life made its way into my room, or should I say his way. I shared a room with my big brother, you know, and when he had moved out, I had to share with my little brother.
Why I call him the scourge of my life, you want to know?
Try listening to the same audio play several times in a row and repeat that evening after evening after evening ... and you too might be ready to try and sell your little brother 🤣
I'll have to explain that.

The book series around "The Three Investigators" was created by Robert Arthur Jr. who wrote the first nine and the eleventh book. After his death in 1969, other authors took over.
Arthur had worked with Alfred Hitchcock before and licensed the use of his name for the series until his death in 1980. Hitchcock never worked on any of the books himself, also not on "his" introductions, even if he is on the covers of the older editions.
The original series ran from 1964 to 1987, with a short revamp in 1989/90 called "Crimebuster Series". Legal disagreements prevented the publication of more books.
I hadn't even been aware of this before because that's not a problem we have in Germany where the Franckh-KOSMOS publishing house, just KOSMOS since 1997, holds license rights to the series. So when the original series was discontinued, a team of Austrian and German authors took over and there's no end in sight (although there were some rocky times, also over rights).

Who are "The Three Investigators"?
There's Jupiter Jones who lives with his uncle and aunt who own a salvage yard and have two helpers, Kenneth and Patrick. He's smart and very logical.
Peter Crenshaw is the sportsman among the three and not a fan of the dangerous situations Jupiter gets them into.
Bob Andrews is responsible for records and research, firstly because he's hindered by a leg brace in the early adventures, but also because he works part-time in a library (I loved those parts even as a kid which is also why Bob was always my favorite).
Their age is never mentioned, but from the contest they are probably around 13 or 14.

They have installed their detective office with workshop, darkroom, telephone, and more inside a house trailer in the salvage yard, meticulously hidden by scrap and accessible via multiple secret entries.
Their cases - with the first one being the search for a haunted house for Alfred Hitchcock - are solved with logic and research, no matter how mysterious or even supernatural they may seem at first.
I still own a few books myself, among them the first one "The Secret of Terror Castle" which is my favorite one as it explains the beginnings of the detective agency.

Now let's get back to the "scourge".
Germany didn't just have the books since 1968, you know. In 1979, the label EUROPA started a series of audio plays based on the books. My little brother loved them. Germany loved them. Germany loved them so much in fact that - except for a time period when there were, you probably guessed it, legal disagreements - the popularity of the plays has surpassed that of the books.
There have been live performances before thousands of people with the same radio actors who also still perform in the plays now, after more than 40 years!
The radio plays are published as cassettes (!), CDs, MP3, they can be streamed, but nothing feels like the old vinyl albums my little brother played until they almost fell apart.
If you wonder now who the audience for those is, well, many of them are people who have grown up with the books and plays.
Also there's so much more now, spin-offs like "Die drei ???" Kids for a younger audience or "Die drei !!!" with girl detectives, gadgets like experiment boxes for finger printing etc., graphic novels, computer games, audiobooks without cuts to the text, movies, even a few of the German books translated to English for those who want to practice.
I stopped at the "classics" myself and hadn't read any in a while. Only thanks to Liz who has several reviews of "The Three Investigators" books on her blog, I thought I could do some nostalgic reading and that's how I found out about differences between the American and the German versions for the first time.

Let's start with the names.
I don't know what the reason was in this case, but it's not unusual for characters in books, movies or comics to have different names in different countries. The same goes for "The Three Investigators", not just in Germany, but also other countries where the series was published.
Here Jupiter "Jupe" Jones became Justus "Just" Jonas, Peter "Pete" Crenshaw was Peter Shaw, and Bob Andrews was allowed to keep his name.
The chauffeur Worthington who's driving the boys around in a Rolls-Royce (temporarily after winning a contest, then permanently thanks to a grateful client) if they can't take their bikes is Morton in German.
The boys' nemesis E. Skinner "Skinny" Norris is simply Skinny Norris here.
The helpers at the salvage yard are Bavarian in the English books and are called Hans and Konrad, in the German books they are Irish and named Kenneth and Patrick.

Not just names have been changed, the German translator also changed other things, like adding snippets "written by Alfred Hitchcock" which are not in the US books, here and there she leaves something out or translates it quite freely - I checked that on the first book in German and English and for some reason in the German book it's never mentioned if someone is British, Worthington/Morton for example (although he mentions having worked in an English castle). That's just one example.
Also in Germany the color assigned to Bob's question mark is red, not green as in the US, as you might have noticed on the cover. Also it's in the wrong spot.

Mentioning the cover is a nice bridge to something else that is different in the German editions.
On one fan page it said they thought getting rid of the internal illustrations was one reason for US readers losing interest. We never even had any illustrations in Germany except for Hitchcock's face with the snippets mentioned above, so I'm not sure if I can agree. I think it's that the stories, like so often in long running series, just didn't get better.
Also the German covers are completely different. In each country where "The Three Investigators" were published, the covers showed the three boys. Not here.
The first two covers were done by Jochen Bartsch and the books were not very successful. That's when graphic artist Aiga Rasch approached the publisher with a design of her own saying she didn't want payment if the layout failed. It didn't fail.
Before her death, Rasch designed 88 covers for the regular books and also covers for some special volumes. Black covers for middle grade or YA books were unusual as such, but the biggest difference is that the often stylized images didn't show the boys at all. Rasch aimed for the reader to develop their own image of our main characters. Instead the covers hint at the plots without spoiling them.
Rasch's covers are wonderful and iconic, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who wouldn't be able to imagine "Die drei ???" without her style which is also why I wouldn't want to own other editions. I can be stubborn about things like that.
Anyhow, at least the publisher has been trying to stay true to her style.

While the fan base in Germany has always been going strong, it seems that interest in the USA has been growing again in the 2000s.
Actually, Robert Arthur's daughter Elizabeth has announced 26 new books written by her and her husband the first of which are to be published soon!

There would be so much more to tell, but the fan pages have done that much better already, I'm sure.

I think I'm going to stick to the classics myself and read one of those every, now and then. Maybe I'm even going to get myself one of the audio plays and relive old times. I doubt I'll be getting the same feeling from it, though, if my little brother isn't there 😉

Sources:
1. The Three Investigators ??? U.S. Editions Collector site
2. The Three Investigators on Wikipedia (there's a lot about the legal issues there)
3. The Salvage Yard - Elizabeth Arthur's Substack

Random Saturday - What's in a name?

I was one of "those" kids ... the kids who never found her name on a mug, on a keychain or on a sticker.
The story of my name - Catrin - goes like this. My sisters' names start with A and B which was coincidence, but with the third girl arriving a name with C sounded practically obligatory. My mother said she didn't want one of the usual names with C that were popular at the time, though.
A natural assumption would her having been influenced by Caterina Valente who was quite the star in Germany and was sometimes also called Catrin or Kathrin, the second being one of the common spellings back (the other was Katrin), but she said she wasn't. Maybe it was subconscious.

Anyhow, I always liked my name. Of all the Catrins I have met over the years, I was the oldest and it always felt a bit special although that of course doesn't mean I was the first one.
Yeah, so I had to correct people all the time and spell my name all the time (no problem, there are also different ways to spell my last name, so I had to do that, anyway). I really didn't mind.

All the forms of the name with C or K, with h or without, come from Katharina which is said to mean "The Pure" from the Ancient Greek "katharos" = "pure". Now I've seen pages saying the Romans misinterpreted the name as being derived from that word. I don't really mind one or the other way.
It was funny to read comments by women or girls with any spelling of the name, some older ones saying "it felt like a collective term for girls because there were so many" - not something I have experienced myself at all - others saying it sounds too hard or that people pronounced it incorrectly as Katren - again not something I have ever experienced. Some are very happy with it, some dislike it.

An American page informs me Catrin with C is commonly used in Germany and Wales and has a connection to ancient goddess Hekate (the only page claiming that, by the way) while German pages tell me that the C is rare in Germany and the name as such has been much more popular in the 60s and 70s than it is today.

But hey, wait, Wales? Actually I knew that and found out by way of a cataloging class - for a new system - at work many years ago. My class partner with whom I shared the computer put in my name as a joke and we were both very surprised to find the book "Catrin in Wales".
Being the kid who never saw her name anywhere unless it was a custom piece like the engraved pen my father gave me when I started school or the glass my friend had engraved when she visited Zwiesel and its glass makers, it was really weird to see my name printed like this, so I bought the book eventually. There's a happy ending, by the way.

Yes, Catrin is a name that has even been in the top 100 in Wales in 2010, and guess what, Ancestry tells me it derives from the Welsh language meaning "pure". What happened to the Greeks? Also most pages say it was originally a German name. In case of Ancestry, it could, however, have to do with "some content ... generated by an artificial intelligence model ...".
You want to know something else? Catrin has also been around in Sweden since the 60s although it seems they pronounce it differently.

Well, when I first got into Kontakt with Americans - no, that's no typo, the German-American Friendship Club in town was called Kontakt - I quickly became a Cat, a nickname I was absolutely fine with as I'm obviously still today 😉
Germans don't usually call me that, though, and also don't use a nickname for me (my family does every, now and then).
There were some in the olden days a long, long time ago, but even then they were hardly used.
My father called me Caeterle which is a Swabian diminutive, very few brave ones called me Catrinchen which is the High German diminutive, usually just to annoy me. Only two people ever called me Catinka and I forgave them because I liked them, but I was glad no one else did because I don't think it fits me.

How about you?
Do you have a story about how you got your name, how you like it, write it, where it comes from? I'd love to hear from you!