Silent movies - The Oyster Princess

Do you belong to the many people who have watched "Downton Abbey"? Then you know that the Earl of Grantham originally married his American wife Cora to save his estate with her money.
That wasn't unusual at all. Quite a lot of so-called "dollar princesses" married into titled families, most of them from Great Britain. Those needed the money and the families of the young ladies, often belonging to the "nouveau riche" (meaning "new money"), gained social standing. A win-win situation, right? Well, not always if the couple didn't fall in love like the Granthams did.

Today's silent movie is about such a dollar princess. It's Ernst Lubitsch's "The Oyster Princess" from 1919.

I present to you - the plot. With spoilers.
Be prepared, this movie is subtitled "a grotesque comedy".

First we meet Mr. Quaker, the American oyster king.
He's so obscenely rich that he has more servants than you can count, four of them just to hold his ridiculously huge cigar, blow his nose, put the coffee cup to his mouth, and comb his hair.
Mr. Quaker has one daughter, Ossi. She's so spoilt that she throws a tantrum breaking vases when a fellow debutant marries an Earl.

"I'll buy you a prince." Said and done, Dad orders Ossi
one from the matchmaker via letter.

The matchmaker chooses the impoverished Prince Nucki, but Nucki tells him his friend Josef with whom he's sharing his place will have a look at the lady first.
When Josef arrives at the Quaker palace (awesome production design!), he's asked for his card and presents one Nucki's card because he doesn't have one of its own. After waiting forever for Ossi to get ready to see him, she hardly says hello before dragging him off to the wedding - performed through a window, no time to lose.

No need to ask him to say "I do", Ossi decides
"Prince Nucki" doesn't have a say in this matter, anyway.
On the way home he even has to sit in the back of the carriage.

And as it was such a quick wedding, the celebration is really small, too.

One servant per course per guest, can it get any smaller?
Of course there are a few more people in the kitchen ...

While "Prince Nucki" enjoys the food and drink, the real prince is torn away from his pickled herring by his friends and joins them for a bender.
Still drunk in the morning, he gets picked up and taken to the "Association of Billionaires' Daughters for the Prevention of Dipsomania" where he catches Ossi's eye. She's not the only one interested in him, so the only solution is of course a boxing match between all of them - unsurprisingly she wins it.

Nucki is overwhelmed by so much womanpower.
I'm overwhelmed by that amazing outfit.

Ossi and Nucki are attracted to one another right away, but there's the little matter of Ossi being married to Josef ... or is she?

Here's looking at you, kid.

Just when they break out in tears about their hopeless love, Josef comes into the room and tells them that everything is alright because he got married under Nucki's name! Not sure what the priest would have to say about that (although there have been royal weddings with a stand-in for the bridegroom in the olden days), but they have their happy ending now!
As I said, this is labeled as a grotesque comedy and therefore the plot itself isn't really as important as the individual jokes, so we can ignore little things as the quick wedding with the wrong man under the right name.

The whole movie is like a whirlwind blowing us from one situation to the next one and I thoroughly enjoyed it which is weird because if you looked at it rationally, you probably wouldn't approve of any of the main characters.

Mr. Quaker is so rich that nothing can impress him anymore. Wherever he goes, a crowd of servants follows him. When Ossi says that the Shoe Polish King's daughter has married an Earl, Mr. Quaker writes to the matchmaker that obviously oysters are better than shoe polish, so he'll need a prince. He's not much interested in the wedding itself, though, as long as the bridegroom's family tree is suitable.

Ossi is so spoilt that she needs about 20 maids just to take a bath and get dressed. She marries the fake Prince Nucki just for the title.

Prince Nucki doesn't have anything but his title, but when the matchmaker visits, he's still trying to keep up appearances by sitting on the most ridiculous "throne", with Josef standing by his side.
He even has to borrow the money for the night out with his friends.

Josef, well, for a bit I wondered how they would solve that because Josef doesn't just enjoy the opulent meal, but he wouldn't even say no to a night with his new bride under false pretenses. What a friend.
At least he's loyal to Nucki at the end.

Lubitsch is really poking fun in all directions, not just at the nouveau riche, but just as much at the aristocrats who would do anything to have some money again.
And for some reason it works. I didn't really dislike any of them although they would have deserved it.
My favorite was Ossi. Ossi Oswalda - the "German Mary Pickford" - played the brat with such energy and charm that she was simply cute. It's hard to describe it. There are a few really fun scenes, such as Ossi's attempt at caring for a "baby", but also the sudden outbreak of a "foxtrot epidemic" which makes the whole house dance including the staff. As Josef is still busy eating, Ossi just asks a servant in the hallway if he can dance the foxtrot and off they go.
The foxtrot scene is really hilarious, they all just get swept away by the music.

With a band leader like that - what could go wrong?
He was in it with heart and soul ... and body!
Made me laugh so hard.

I had heard of the movie before and really wasn't disappointed by this early Lubitsch comedy which he called (according to the German "Lexikon des internationalen Films") his "first comedy with a definite style", the step "from comedy to satire".
Definitely one for the re-watch list!


Sources:

1. Fritzi Kramer: The Oyster Princess (1919) - A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, March 15, 2013
2. Jim Tudor: The Oyster Princess / Meyer from Berlin (1919). On: Zekefilm, July 11, 2023
3. Vor 100 Jahren: Uraufführung von "Die Austernprinzessin". On: Stummfilm-Magazin, June 12, 2019 (in German)

So it begins ... Lego Art WIP

Ten days ago, I told you about my Lego "collection" whose pieces so far all have been gifts (so far because I found out about a minor, but really dumb mistake which required immediate retail therapy, so I bought Lego for myself for the first time). 

In that post, I mentioned my Lego Art set of "The Beatles" and how I've had it around for a few years because I couldn't even decide which Beatle to make. Well, on the day the post went live, I chose George because I just liked his picture best.

What even is Lego Art?
According to Wikipedia which has a load of quotes for articles on the topic, the theme was introduced in 2020 (which I think was also the year my friend gave me my set in order to make self-isolating easier, but being used to working on Lego projects together with him, I didn't see the appeal at the time).
The product line started with four mosaics, one of them "The Beatles", and didn't use 3D bricks, but 2D 1x1 studs. Later items also featured bigger tiles.

The sets depict iconic personalities or art, for example Warhol's Marilyn Monroe or Hokusai's The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.
During our Crafternoon - a Zoom meeting of bloggers coming together to chat and craft - I started working on the first square.
There are nine squares and fifteen different colors of studs and also tiles for the "frame".
The squares get attached to each other to form the whole picture.

Now I had to make another decision about how to work on the squares. Should I do one color after the other which means I would have to concentrate on counting or should I lay out all the colors I need for a square and do it spot by spot either horizontally or vertically?

As most of the first square was just black and dark grey, I went for the counting. I did the grey first, then filled up the gaps with black and did the few colors in the end.
I don't know yet if that will be a good idea once there are more colors on a square. If I had enough empty bead cups, I could set them all up like beads for beading or bead looming. Or I could use a bead tray if I had one, but that's not how I bead. We'll see.

Usually, when I started something like this, I kept going until I had finished. My pal and I spent hours chatting, laughing, and bricking, but these days I simply can't sit for that long anymore.
Ponder and later Gundel loved to help out.

Just checking if you left some of the bricks in
the shipping box.

Let me sort this out for you, Mom,
before I lose any interest at all forever.

During Crafternoon, I found out that der Dekan does NOT make a good Lego helper. The studs were too tempting and I'm too old to crawl around on the floor and look for little colored dots everywhere. Not only did he go for the ones I had taken out of the bags - very few at a time because I had expected that - but he also tried to rip out the studs on the plate, both with claws and teeth!
Possibly it would have helped to have my pal around because der Dekan is strictly a family guy meaning he usually retreats to the top of the wardrobe if non-family comes around.
My goal was to make one square a day, at least on the weekend. Yeah, that didn't happen. I finished the first one during Crafternoon on a Saturday and the next one on the Thursday after that.

Well, and now it's Tuesday and this is as far as I have come until Sunday afternoon (of course I'll have to take the one square off again because I have to finish the whole row so I can attach it).
And der Dekan helped after all. We found a way. The next time we didn't. Then we did again, but in the end he fell off the table because he had rolled around in the open lid of the box too wildly. We'll keep working on it.

I am not affiliated with Lego in any way, except playing with it every, now and then.

From my children's book cabinet - Privatdetektiv Tiegelmann

As a kid, I really wanted a "North Pole". Like the one in the Teffan Tiegelmann story.
Confused?
If you are old enough and English speaking, you might know Teffan Tiegelmann as Tam Sventon. If you are Swedish, you know him as Ture Sventon.
Of course I'm talking about the older German translations of this Swedish children's book series because those are the ones in my book cabinet, therefore I will be using the German names from here on (in later translations they kept the Swedish names). As my Swedish is non-existent, I can't say how close the translations are to the original, and it was a bit more difficult than usual for me to put everything together.
The books were translated into several languages, by the way.

Collection of the first three books,
our childhood copy has lost its spine
a long time ago, but I found this
good copy at a fleamarket.

Teffan Tiegelmann is a private detective in the capital. Very capable, but unfortunately no one but himself knows that because no one ever hires him.
So he's waiting while his secretary is knitting in the other room, and they eat "Tahnentörtchen" he gets on credit from the "Konditorei Roda" (Rota's Café) all year round.
He was born as Stephan Siegelmann (Sture Svensson in the original and Sam Svensson in English, there are also other names in other languages), but he has changed his name officially to fit it to his lisp (he doesn't always lisp, probably because that would make the books rather awkward to read). Tahnentörtchen are really Sahnentörtchen (which I always imagined to be German Windbeutel, a sort of cream puff; in the original it's temlor (semlor), in English hot cross buns) and the café belongs to Rosa of course.

One day, two extraordinary things happen.

First, Tiegelmann gets a case. An elderly lady has come to the capital from her little town to look for a private detective, and as luck has it, she notices Tiegelmann's sign.
Friederike and Friedlinde Friedborn are two sisters living in a villa. In summer, they invite some children from the family to stay with them for a while. Everything is quite idyllic until a man appears in town who is more than rude to the children - they call him "Ochse" (oxen) because he's so big - and a letter arrives with the threat of the villa getting blown up if the sisters don't put money in the old oak.
Tiegelmann recognizes the signature of Wilhelm Wiesel (Swedish "Ville Vessla", English "Willie the Weasel") in the letter, an elusive criminal who is said to have escaped through a keyhole before.
Tiegelmann agrees to come and help the sisters.

Second, Tiegelmann gets a visit from Mr. Omar who wants to sell him a carpet. Not just any carpet - a flying one!
Luckily, Tiegelmann's aunt lends him the money to buy it, so he can use it to travel to the town where the Friedborns live.

Off for a test drive, uhm, flight!

Of course, Tiegelmann solves the case which gains him the attention he has always been waiting for and leads to more cases.
To be precise, there are nine books in the series written by Åke Holmberg and published between 1948 and 1973 - the German books were published individually, but there are also two special collections of book 1 to 3 and 4 to 6 (from the Tosa-Verlag Vienna) which are the ones I have ("Private Detective Tiegelmann" and "Private Detective Tiegelmann's New Adventures). Tosa often made special editions like that. I wish they had done the last three books as a collection as well, I'm weird about book series whose volumes don't match, but that can't be helped 😉

Collection of the books 4 to 6

The German titles vary a little depending on the edition. Mine are called (translated to English) "Private Detective Tiegelmann", "Detective Tiegelmann in the Desert", "Detective Tiegelmann in London", "Detective Tiegelmann and Isabella", "Detective Tiegelmann in Stockholm", "Detective Tiegelmann in Paris", "Private Detective Tiegelmann in the Haunted House", "Private Detective Tiegelmann in the Department Store", and "Private Detective Tiegelmann in Venice".

The German editions have been long out of print, but in Sweden Tiegelmann is still a classic, both printed and as e-book. Of course, the books are aged in some regards, though.
The figures, for example, are a bit stereotypical, there's Tiegelmann in his many disguises, the children are smart and adventurous, and the villains are bad, but by no means a match for the detective. It rather feels as if Holmberg intended this to be a fun read rather than a serious crime story for kids, unlike the Blyton books, to name just one example. And you know what, I'm absolutely fine with that.

Tiegelmann's ingenious disguise
as a cleaning lady, who 
wouldn't fall for this one?

Otherwise we'd hardly have a flying carpet or the "North Pole" which is part of the second book, a fridge that shrinks food you put inside which solves a lot of storage problems, for example when Tiegelmann has to fly his carpet to the desert to help out his friend Omar and find a stolen camel. You wouldn't have expected him to travel without a load of "Tahnentörtchen", would you?

There are several catchphrases as well, a favorite being "Die Pitolen nur im Notfall anwenden!" (Originally "Använd bara pitolerna i nödfall!", in English "Only use the guns in an emergenty!"). There's even a Swedish book about Ture Sventon and his creator with this title.

Tiegelmann in another of his disguises, this time
as a child. As you can tell this is an emergenty ...
although actually he didn't even know the gun
from the Thirty Years' War was still loaded!

There is more, though.
1. The books' main illustrator, Sven Hemmel, made some comics based on the books. They first appeared in the children's magazine "Kamratposten" and then also as albums. If you search for "Ture Sventon" in the Grand Comics Database, you can find some of them and have a look at the covers.
2. The first book was available as an audio play on LP and cassette (the good old times).
3. There were also some radio plays (there's even something available online).
4. The fact that there were several adaptations for film or TV shows between 1972 and 2023 (with plans for another one) shows that our detective is still popular in Sweden today (you can find two of the adaptations on YouTube at the moment, they are in Swedish, but you can have the Swedish subtitles auto-translated into other languages, I don't know yet how good those will be).
One of the TV shows was the 1989 Julkalender of the Swedish TV channel SVT consisting of 24 episodes for each day of this "advent calendar" which has been existing since 1960.

Have you ever heard of Ture Sventon, whatever name he may have in your country?
If not, I hope you enjoyed this small glimpse into a Swedish children book classic!


Sources:

1. Ture Sventon on Swedish Wikipedia (in Swedish which means I had to use Firefox's auto-translate)
2. Kurt Schäfer: Åke Holmberg | Privatdetektiv Tiegelmann. On: Kaliber .17 (in German)
3. Tam Sventon. On: TV Tropes

Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot - Week 127

Welcome!
As you can see, I joined the hostess crew for the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot.
My posts for the link up will go live on Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. EDT or, if you live in the future like I do, on Fridays at 3:30 a.m. CE(S)T.

Has fall reached you yet (if you are in the Northern hemisphere)?
My household has decided that we should really start our hibernation training because temperatures are supposed to go down. Unfortunately, one in this household still has to work for a few weeks before being on vacation. Little hint - it's not der Dekan who's already on the best way to a hibernation world cup win.

Luckily, it's weekend, so I can join him and Gundel!

As part of the reboot, we will be featuring a different blog every week.
How about stopping by and saying hello? Let them know we sent you.

This week, our spotlight is on ... oh my ... it's Ponder - the Cat.
Being a bit of an insider in this particular case, I can tell you that Ponder started this blog, but now it's in Gundel's capable (and sometimes a bit lazy, after all she's a cat) paws.

You can find Gundel and her stories here.


Now let me introduce your hostess crew for the Weekend Traffic Jam.

Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!

Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household - The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!

Lisa from Boondock Ramblings shares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.

Cat from Cat's Wire has what she calls a jumping spider brain. She has many interests and will blog about whatever catches her attention - crafts, books, old movies, collectibles or random things.

Rena from Fine Whatever Blog writes about style, midlife, and the "fine whatever" moments that make life both meaningful and fun. Since 2015, she's been celebrating creativity, confidence, and finding joy in the everyday.


Here are some of my picks from last week's link up.

Have you ever thought about visiting Finland? Soma's post may just be what you need to convince you.

Ann had a great idea for a spooky Halloween decoration.

I hadn't heard of the picture book creator Pamela Allen before I read Lydia's post about the exhibition she visited.

Mireille is keeping it real with fashion photo bloopers!


Let's link up!

You can add links to specific blog posts of yours, but not just to your blog itself. The posts can be new or older and cover any topic you can think of - books, movies, fashion, crafting, thrifting, travel, art ... but only family friendly, please!
Have a look around, visit some of the other blogs and leave a few comments. You might discover something new and exciting!
Thank you for linking up with us!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Silent movies - Destiny

It's high time for a Fritz Lang movie and no, it's not "Metropolis" which has patiently been waiting in my DVD collection for many years.
Instead I have "Der müde Tod" (literally "The Weary Death") from 1921 for you, in English called "Destiny".

Let's start with the plot (with spoilers) as usual.

A young couple is riding in a carriage whose driver also picks up a stranger.
Having arrived in a small town, that stranger buys a plot next to the cemetery and builds a huge wall without a visible door around it.
Later, the young couple meets him again at the tavern. While the woman goes to the kitchen, her lover and the stranger disappear and she goes searching for them. When she comes to the wall, a group of ghosts walks through her and the wall into the realm of Death, one of them her lover.
She confronts the stranger who is of course Death himself, begging him to give back her lover because love is stronger than death.
He tells her that he is weary of seeing the struggle and earning hate for obeyeing God's orders, so he would be glad for her to conquer him. He shows her three flickering candles and says that he will revive her lover if she can save one of these lives.

Each of the stories of the three lights are told with the young couple as the lovers in different roles.
The first one is about Zobeide, the Caliph's sister, who's in love with a Frank. He is caught by the guards and sentenced to death by the Caliph. Zobeide is not able to save him and Death claims his life.
The second one is about Monna Fiametta in Venice. She's engaged with one of the Council of Fourteen, Girolamo, but she hates him. Her lover is Gianfrancesco whom Girolamo wants to have executed. Monna's plan to invite and then kill Girolama goes awry when he sees through her ploy and Gianfrancesco dies instead. The second light burns out.
The third one tells the story of a magician's assistants, Tiao Tsien, who catches the Emperor's attention, and her lover Liang. They try to escape, but the Emperor's archer catches up with them and kills Liang.

Although she hasn't been able to save any of the three lives, Death has pity with the young woman and offers her the life of her lover if she manages to find a soul to replace his within the next hour.
Several of the old people in town refuse to give her their lives.

When a building catches fire, everyone can escape, but a small baby is still in the house. The young woman sees her chance and runs inside, but when Death comes to claim the baby's soul and she sees the desperate mother through the window, she can't give it to him. She lowers the baby out of the window and offers Death her own soul instead, happy to be reunited with her lover in death.

Let's get to the elephant in the room first (not the actual one in the movie) to have that out of the way.
As you can imagine for a movie of that time, the stories of the first and third light felt awkward, not for the plot, but the stereotypes of the cultures depicted, the third one more than the first one.

It's a pity because I really liked the movie itself.
It's said to have been inspired by the Indian tale of Savitri and Fritz Lang's experience when he was sick with a fever as a child, but I can easily see this in a fairy tale from another country as well.
Actually Lang called it "ein deutsches Volkslied in sechs Versen" (a German folk song in six verses).

If you know fairy tales, especially original versions instead of the cleaned up ones, the ending may not even be that surprising. I know I read more than one that didn't have a happy ending for everyone. That might be something very German, more so at the time if you keep in mind that World War I had not been over for that long and still influenced everyday life.
However, the movie wasn't well received by German critics at first for not being "German" enough because of all the foreign settings. In the USA where it was released three years later, the intertitles had been changed in a way that suggested the young woman was to blame for her lover's death in all verses which was not the intention of the creators, so it wasn't successful there as well. It was better received in France which then also brought it more acclaim in Germany.

To me, this expressionist movie had a great mood, but it wasn't dark throughout. There was the scene in the carriage or the depiction of the town's elders which definitely showed humor.
I was really impressed by Death, beautifully played by Bernhard Goetzke, a reaper who was not just grim, but also kind and weary of the heavy burden he had to carry eternally.
He was also the reason why I loved the main story itself more than those of the three lights.

A surprising turn for me was the young woman searching for a soul she could give to Death for that of her lover. To be honest, I had expected her to sacrifice herself earlier which is something you know from many other stories. She, however, rather boldly begs several old people in town to give up their lives, but they refuse "Not a single day, not a single hour, not a single breath".
She's tempted until the last second when she storms into the burning house and has almost handed the baby to Death already. Now that would have been very selfish.

There were some nice special effects too which worked well, for example the double exposures, the flying carpet or the dancing scroll.

Will this movie end up on my rewatch list? A clear yes from me.


Sources:

1. Daniel Lammin: Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921). On: Senses of Cinema, June 2018
2. David Vining: Destiny. On: David Vining, Author. August 5, 2022
3. Jay Weissberg: Destiny. Essay. On: San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2016

Cats, cats, cats, and more cats, part 3

Did you think we were done yet with the random cats around my house? Well, we aren't.
If you are interested, you can find part 1 and 2 here and here in which I said "I have quite a few around the place, some because I fell in love with them myself, others because for some weird reason people think I like cats and have given me a lot of items over the years. Really strange, I know. Why would they think something like that? 😂"

If you seen some of my posts about the beaded doll outfits, you may also have noticed the wooden cats in the background.
There was a time when these cats were really popular meaning they were everywhere, mostly the small ones. Most of mine (there are more, including a doorstopper) were gifts, but I bought the biggest one myself. I had to get picked up from the shop called "Katze und Kunst" ("Cat and Art") because it is so heavy that it was impossible for me to get it home on the train.
The shop was fun to browse, they had cat related items from figures, pictures, cards, and books to scratching posts and cat food. Unfortunately it doesn't exist anymore.
If you think they are in the way on those stairs, they really aren't because these are the "Stairs to Nowhere", another one of those things that are weird about me, but that's a longer story. The big ones have also done a great job at guarding the Christmas tree when I still put it in that spot. The big ones are so heavy that they held it in place perfectly when Ponder creeped into the "cave" under the tree. They were even enough for des Dekan's first Christmas.

You always wondered how der Dekan got here? He's a veritable Pinocchio turning from a wooden cat into a real one!
Yeah, not really, but I still think this picture is funny (usually you see the cat under the vintage hat).

Let's go from wooden figures to stone.
A long time ago, the ex had got a small malachite Bastet cat for me. When our personnel admin retired, I asked him if it was okay for me to pass it on to her. I had trained under her when she had still been leader of one of the acquisition teams and I really liked her and also knew how much she loved cats. 
The ex then got me this one as a replacement, much bigger and definitely no natural stone, but still pretty. It has found its perfect spot in the cat book cabinet between two books. Actually, most of the little figures I got over the years are in there.

Talking about Bastet reminded me of this bead loomed pendant I designed. I made one for my sister and a slightly different one for myself.
The body was inspired by a typical Bastet silhouette and I added the golden collar with the jewel and the golden earring after seeing something similar on an ancient Egyptian figure. Lapislazuli being such a popular stone in ancient Egypt, I added two beads to the chain ends.

The cat mat was a Christmas gift from my friend.

The cat sat on the mat, a stereotype or a classic? Whatever the answer, Ponder didn't take long to claim this one.
It has never managed to work its charm on Gundel or dem Dekan, though.

Ruscha was a ceramic factory founded in 1905. In 1996, they were taken over by the Scheurich company which used the name Ruscha until 2006.
Beside vases, flower pots and so on, Ruscha was known for their decorative wall plates, especially in the 50s, which came in many different designs, sometimes scratched into the clay, sometimes partially glazed. A lot of them showed animals, among them cats.
Cats were for example part of the "Paris" design which never looked exactly the same, also because the plates were handcrafted. Often there was a young lady at the lamp pole, sometimes with a young man wearing a beret, there was a trash can around the corner or houses in the background.
With its four inch, my little plate was probably too small for more than the cat.

I don't remember who gave those bookends to me, but they do a fine job of holding - cat books, what else?
Bonus cats in the picture are a wooden ring holder cat (with a long tail) and a little amber cat.

As I wrote in this post a few months ago, "I was one of "those" kids ... the kids who never found her name on a mug, on a keychain or on a sticker." So it always had to be custom pieces, like this "Frühstücksbrettchen" (literally "little breakfast board" ("Frühstück" literally means "early piece", by the way)) which people often use for bread instead of a plate, not just for breakfast, but also "Abendbrot" (literally "evening bread"). This one was a gift.
I think those are enough parentheses and quotation marks for one paragraph.

That's it for today.
See you next time - yes, I think there will be more ...

Random Saturday - To brick or not to brick

Lego was the topic of another random Saturday seven years ago, but back then I only spoke about and showed my London bus.

You've also seen a picture of my Lego Snowglobe as part of my hallway Christmas decoration.

There's more. Not much. Lego is and always has been very much a matter of money and space both of which I prefer to spend on other things, no matter how tempting some of the projects may look like (I'm just saying cat).
There are stories, however. Of course there are, after all this is random Saturday. Old ones, new ones.

I couldn't tell you the exact age at which I got my first Legos. Back then, all of us siblings got one basic set which consisted of one baseplate - still the thicker ones then - and a bunch of bricks. We threw everything together in order to have more options for bigger projects. Basic set also meant basic bricks which we named after the number of bumps on each one (no idea if that was some official naming, but we added the Swabian diminutive -le to the numbers, so maybe not).
What I remember best was building tiny house models with limited wall height and no roof, tiny because the baseplates were small and because we didn't have that many bricks. Also no roof meant we could play in them by using the smallest bricks for the people living in the house.

Years later, my little brother had five boxes (four of them had been a lottery prize, size A to D) of Märklin's (the company is known among model train collectors and is located in my town) own brick version - the so-called Minex bricks (Märklin used the name Minex for several products, also metal construction sets or trains). You could do a lot with five boxes and the bricks were much easier to take apart which could be both an advantage and a disadvantage, but I remember having a lot of fun with those.

Afterwards, bricking (as I've heard it being called in Germany) wasn't really a topic for me anymore for many years - until one year my pal gave me the Yellow Submarine from the Beatles movie to cheer me up in a weltschmerz phase.
We spent a few evenings both working on our projects, having something to eat and drink, laughing a lot, always under the strict supervision of Ponder.
It was a lot of fun although it's amazing how many mistakes you can make on a piece that doesn't even look that difficult on the outside.

For my next birthday, he gave me the London Bus.
That really brought back memories of my first London visit (unfortunately there were only two) together with a friend and her five year old daughter. On the first day, we did bus hopping, randomly changing buses seeing where they would take us.

Again we started to work on our projects together, but then life happened and we finished them on our own. That's when I found that I wasn't made to be a lonely bricker. I gave up eventually and had to motivate myself hard to finally pick it up again. That's why it took me five months to get it finished! It's so cool.

Two more projects we did together again was the living room from The Big Bang Theory and the Santa Snowglobe (the weirdest snowglobe ever) which had been an extra gift with an order.

There's one more piece that has been waiting for me to work on it. It has been around for several years and I think it's really time to get started on it - the Lego Art set "The Beatles". With the box content you can make one of the four portraits and my first problem was to decide which one to make because, let's get this clear, if I make one I'm not going to rip it out again to make a different one.
To be honest, I wish the portraits were old black and white ones, but that can't be helped, can it?

Once I decide, I might turn this project into small WIP posts to motivate myself, so I won't give it up.
Which portrait would you choose IF you like The Beatles at all?

I am not affiliated with Lego in any way, except playing with it every, now and then.

Silent movies - The Last Command

My choice of silent movies sometimes is quite random, but this one may have been the most random so far. I got here when I looked up something else on my favorite silent movie blog and got distracted by the link to a post about the myth that silent movie performers lost their job because of their voices when the talkies became big. In the post, William Powell was mentioned, so I looked up a silent film with him and ended up here, without a clue if that was a good idea or not. Let's see, shall we?

Public domain

The movie is "The Last Command" from 1928 by Josef von Sternberg. You probably won't remember, but I sure had my problems with the only other Sternberg movie I know so far, "The Scarlet Empress" about Catherine the Great.
This one is set in a time a little closer to ours, though. We jump between the beginning of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and in 1928 Hollywood.

The plot, as usual with spoilers.

Lev Andreyev, a Russian director in Hollywood, is going through a stack of photos of actors for his next movie. When he comes to the photo of Sergius Alexander, who claims to be the Czar's cousin and a former commanding general, he tells his assistant to cast the man and fit him into a general's uniform. You get the idea that these two men have a common history.
Alexander arrives for work. In makeup, the actor next to him complains about his shaking head and Alexander says it's the result of a great shock. His mind goes back to Imperial Russia in 1917.

Grand Duke Sergius Alexander, a general of the Russian Army, arrives for an inspection of the troops. He's told that the revolutionists have intercepted most of the supplies.
Two of those revolutionists watch Alexander from a window above, Lev Andreyev and Natalie Dobrova. "Let him strut a little longer! His days are numbered!" Lev tells Natalie.

Then they are called in for a passport examination the next day. Alexander questions them personally because he's taken with Natalie's looks. When he doubts Lev's courage, Lev talks back. Alexander hits him in the face with his whip and has him locked up. Natalie, however, gets invited to Headquarters because the general has clearly fallen for her.
Before a dinner, he even presents her with a pearl necklace while his officers eavesdrop at the door.

During dinner, Alexander gets a call. The Czar wants to visit the front and see an offensive, but the general declines sacrificing soldiers for the Czar's entertainment, much to the surprise of everyone at the table.
Meanwhile, we see a soldier in prison turn on the other soldiers and enabling Lev and the other prisoners to escape.

After dinner, Natalie invites the general to her room for coffee. She intends to shoot him, but she can't go through with it. When he asks why she didn't shoot him, she replies that she couldn't kill anyone who loves Russia as much as he does. Alexander declares her his prisoner of war ... and prisoner of love (I'll admit that I cringed reading that).

Next the general, his men, and Natalie board a train. They don't know that the engineers are Bolsheviks. They stop in the next town and the train is taken over.
Natalie turns against the general and demands that he should stoke the train to Petrograd where he will be hanged.

When there's a chance, though, she slips him the pearl necklace, so he will be able to leave the country, and when a revolutionary wakes up - there has been a lot of vodka -, she embraces him, so he won't see Alexander escaping. The man thinks she's telling him that she loves him, but her looks go to the general.
He smacks the fireman with the coal shovel and jumps off the train.
Before his eyes, the train derails on the bridge and falls into the icy river, taking his love with it. This was the great shock that caused his head shaking.

Back to Hollywood.
Lev is determined to have his revenge and humiliate Alexander. He gives him a whip and a coat that looks much like the one he wore years earlier and puts him in a trench setting.  Then he orders the crew to play the Russian National Anthem.
Beforehand, he has instructed an extra to yell at the general that the soldiers are sick of fighting.
"You have given your last command! A new day is here! Down with your Russia!"
In this moment, madness takes over. Alexander whips the extra and grabs the flag. His mind is showing him the memories of the revolutionaries.
"The command is forward - - to victory - Long live Russia!"
Then he grabs his chest and falls over.
Held by Lev, he asks "Have we won?" which Lev affirms before Alexander dies in his arms.

When Lev's assistant says he was a great actor, the director replies "He was more than a great actor - he was a great man."

Soooo. Was it a good idea to watch then film?
If I wanted to see mainly William Powell, not that much probably because he didn't have that many scenes.
Also I'm not a fan of movies with war and military content, but somehow I had expected a bit less 1917 and a bit more 1928. I was definitely wrong about that.

The plot was inspired by a real life story that director Ernst Lubitsch told a newspaper columnist. It was about a Russian general he knew who fled the revolution and opened a restaurant, but was forced then to work as an extra in Hollywood to survive.

The movie was very dramatic, not just because of the plot, but also because of Jannings. I had expected that from reading about him, but had only seen him in a comedy before.
At the time, he was said to be the best actor in the world and he got an Oscar for this movie (and another movie that is lost).
Although he was a bit much for me, it was still impressive how he portrayed the general before and after, and the ending was amazing.

Nevertheless, I had a problem with the love story. I don't want to sound superficial saying that I can't imagine a young woman like Natalie falling in love with an older man. What I can't really imagine, though, is just how quickly she fell for the enemy because he did one thing right by declining the Czar's request. In that moment everything else he had done was forgotten? Sorry, but I didn't really buy that. Also the general was fine with her contemplating assassination just a moment ago? He had seen the badly hidden pistol, how could he be so sure she wouldn't shoot him?
And not only did she love him, but she loved him so much that she risked her own life by helping him to escape? Cos, you know, I don't think her comrades would have taken it so lightly if they had found out. Luckily, though, they never got a chance to because they all drowned. Oh wait, that isn't any better. Maybe someone should have taken the engineer's vodka, so he wouldn't have fallen asleep.

Not saying the middle part was all bad, but it was still too much and too long for my liking. Everyone was very passionate, there was loud laughing, dramatic crying, a lot of yelling, and a lot of either broody or glaring looks.
I could have done with a little less of that and a little more background instead. How did Lev make it to the USA and land a job as a director (maybe connections as he had been a theater director in Russia?)? Had he left the country immediately after breaking free from prison? Why didn't it try to get back to the revolution? How did Alexander make it to the USA and how did he get to be a low-paid actor?

Oh, and why exactly did Lev call the general a great man at the end? What had he done that Lev suddenly forgave it all? Sorry, it didn't make sense to me. I'm fine with him not gloating over his death, I would understand a certain amount of pity over his downfall and end from someone who was luckier, but from "I need some kind of revenge" to "he was a great man"?

Part of the movie is a satire of Hollywood at the time, the crowds of actors waiting outside the gate for their chance, the way the outfits are handed out from piles of clothes, boots, rifles, but as mentioned it's a rather small part of it.
I'm not quite sure what the other part is. Are we supposed to be on the Czarist side? Times were not very nice under his rule either, if you didn't belong to the Russian aristocracy.
Or is it simply about Alexander as a man? A man we don't really know that much about, definitely not enough to call him a great one.

Again, was it a good idea to watch the movie?
Yes. I might not love it, but I also didn't hate it, and it was undoubtedly a experience worth making.


Sources:

1. Fritzi Kramer: The Last Command (1928) - A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, July 28, 2015
2. Scott Nye: Scott Reviews Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command [Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray]. On: CriterionCast, August 12, 2016
3. Alistair Nunn: The Last Command (1928). On: Movie Musings, November 9, 2023