Me and my Girl was a hit musical of 1937, a mistaken-identity dancehall comedy about a Cockney bloke named Bill Snibson who discovers he is the heir to a noble title. The show’s hit tune was “The Lambeth Walk”, whose strutting rhythm and “OI!” singalong became a national craze. It inspired an eponymous 1939 film, from which this clip is taken.
The song eventually spread to the US…and Germany, where a member of the Nazi party denounced it as “Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping”.
A wag at the British Ministry of Information named Charles Ridley took this as an opportunity to assemble a clip, edited from bits of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will,made to appear as if the Nazis were goose-stepping to “The Lambeth Walk”.
Goebbels was reportedly extremely displeased with the clip.
Me and my Girl was given a makeover in the 1980s (including a revised book by Stephen Fry), sufficiently altering it to earn Tony and Olivier awards for Best Musical. Check out Robert Lindsay and a young and endearingly gawky Emma Thompson in this 1984 video.
The Russian Pammie Lee, sometimes called Winona, Lubachka, or Paula, is, I think it’s fair to say, a dusky little treat. Her mixed-race looks make her something of a novelty in the world of internet cheesecake. For as much as we like to pretend that our tastes are as sensitive and as forward looking as our good intentions, the reality is that the chicks you see in porn remain a very pale lot. Not Pammie, though; she’s a beautiful light coffee color.
Of course, it’d be crude and incredibly shallow to appreciate her for her skin color alone. So let’s be magnanimous and pay tribute to some of her more substantive qualities, like those tits. They’re just about perfect, no? I like her bush, too. A commenter at theNUDEeu refers to it as a “dark animal of a pussy.” Rawr! And she sure knows how to execute a scintillating pose. She’s got that Bernini’s-St.-Teresa look down pat.
(The MND page actually lists her ethnicity as “Quarteron.” Porn: The last refuge of political incorrectness. Or is Russia its last refuge? I can’t decide . . .)
Bushy Quarteron below the fold. Have a great weekend.
One of the many quasi-horror films released in the wake of Universal’s “Dracula” and “Frankenstein,” this RKO production from 1932 offers the intriguing spectacle of Myrna Loy playing an archvillainess. Her character, Ursula Georgi, is a sort of lesbo femme fatale; she’s out to destroy all the girls who ignored her in finishing school. She doesn’t kill them herself. Rather, she persuades others to do it for her. This she accomplishes using her two secret weapons: her Oriental powers of suggestion and lots and lots of eyeliner.
The screenplay assumes Urusula’s behavior is natural because she’s “half Japanese, half Hindu . . . or something.” Whatever she is, Loy is a lot of fun to watch as she slinks around, mewls, and stares at people without blinking. (The performance makes you wish she’d been around to play Cat Woman.) Her Deco-inspired outfits and the architectural way in which she’s shot make her appear to tower over Irene Dunne, who, in the sort of matronly role that Loy would later make her own, has the pathetic uselessness of a prey animal. Less successful is Ricardo Cortez as a tough-talking cop: His lunky brand of flamboyance is over-emphasized, and it distracts from the theme of female-on-female predation.
The picture is thin and rather haphazard (cuts were made to appease the censors), and it ends too abruptly, but its patchiness lends it a sort of dream logic. And its unfussy moodiness, largely a product of Leo Tover’s photography, anticipates the Val Lewton-produced RKO pictures of the 1940s.
Ursula is eventually banished from the bourgie L.A. into which she so malevolently slithered. Like Theda Bara before her, she’s a threat to normalcy, to sanity. Not one to go quietly, she exits with a monologue in which she blames it all on racial discrimination. Today she’d be the heroine. Directed by George Archainbaud. It’s on Warner Archive Instant.
Related
Loy was nearly typecast as an evil Asian. Her other horror role of 1932 includes this memorable bit of sadism:
XTC is caught here at the moment when their early hyperactive pop-punk began to give way to the softer, kinder sound that would debut on “English Settlement” (their peak in my view) and achieve full-bodied form on “Mummer.” But here we’ve still got the ranting anger and resentment that made that early stuff great, but with a sheen of maturing instrumental, ensemble and song writing skill.
Some fun lines in this song:
Sunday church and they look fetching Saturday night saw him retching over our fence Bang the wall for me to turn down I can see them with their stern frown as they dispense The kind of look that says they’re perfect
Of course we who visit this blog are far too awesome to let our brains and tastes, let alone our self-images, be influenced by media imagery, but … Well, say that we were. What would we be taking our fashion industry to be telling us about masculinity today?
Some reminders of the examples of maleness that used to appear in American ads:
She never got the press or fame of Maria Callas, whom she famously replaced in a Rome Norma in 1958. She only made two official recordings, both for Decca: an aria recital and a complete La Gioconda. She retired at the unheard-of age of 30, when most opera singers are just about getting going.
And yet, her legendary status among opera fanatics is, well, legendary. Prior to the advent of YouTube, pirated tapes of her live recordings were swapped like precious jewels. Debates about the relative merits of Cerquetti vs Olivero got even more heated than those of Callas vs Tebaldi. Like Mozart, James Dean, or Buddy Holly, the “What If?” chatter made for delicious, catty speculation. What exactly, was the nature of the “health problems” that sent her into retirement?
Her fame was esoteric enough that her death has not attracted a single English-language obituary that I can locate in four pages of Google News results, major newspapers or any of the classical music magazines, opera sites, or blogs that I haunt.
Fall in love with the burnished-velvet beauty of Cerquetti’s tone in this 1958 recording of “Casta Diva” from Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, and notice how the vibrato is close and even from bottom to top. This might, just might, be the definitive version of this infamously difficult aria.
More Anita, you say? Here you go. “Ebben, ne andrò lontana” from Catalani’s La Wally. The opera itself is rarely done anymore, but the aria is a soprano staple. Can you tell that Cerquetti’s pianissimo is almost not really a piano, in a strictly dynamic sense of quieter, but rather just closer and more intimate? Strange and indescribable, but I find I don’t mind.
“La mamma morta” from Andrea Chénier…in my opinion, superior vocally to the Callas version that famously reduced Tom Hanks to tears in Philadelphia. Dramatically…we can quibble about that. You might have noticed that Cerquetti was a lady of operatic proportions, physically, but you really shouldn’t care about that at all when your ears are being treated like this.
And holy cow, her Verdi was demented. Listen to this clip of Cerquetti singing the beginning of Act 3 of Un ballo in maschera…with the bonus appearance of another standard-setting Italian singer, baritone Ettore Bastianini.
It seems appropriate to end with her “O patria mia” from that dramatic-soprano touchstone, Aida. Somehow it manages to be plaintive and heartrending and blow the roof off the place…her opening note at 1:54 will give you goosebumps, guaranteed.
Related
Carlo Bergonzi, another Italian singer of the Golden Age.
Bugged and annoyed by Errol Morris’s recent movie about Donald Rumsfeld (which Fabrizio dealt with thoroughly here), I just caught up with “The Fog of War,” Morris’ 2003 visit with Robert S. McNamara, the former Ford Motors “whiz kid” who, as Secretary of Defense, implemented a lot of JFK and LBJ’s Vietnam War policies. Morris’ fans find the film much more satisfying than “The Unknown Known.” Would I too?
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
