Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: I Heard You Like Swords

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: I Heard You Like Swords

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The Sword and the Rose (Walt Disney, 1953)

What? Has Lawrence run out of theme ideas? Has the well gone dry at last? Perish the thought! I was just looking at my list and saw there were several movies with “Sword” in the title that we hadn’t covered yet, and they’re all worth discussing, so here we are.

The Sword and the Rose

Rating: ***
Origin: UK/USA, 1953
Director: Ken Annakin
Source: Walt Disney Home Video

This is based on the popular 1898 novel When Knighthood Was in Flower by Charles Major, a Victorian historical romance that had been filmed twice before in the silent era, and has just enough swashbuckling in it for inclusion here. Despite its title, it’s not set in medieval times but during the early reign of King Henry VIII, telling the story of his sister, Princess Mary Tudor, and her (largely unhistorical) love for Charles Brandon, a mere captain of the guard. Brandon is played by Disney’s chosen leading man of the time, Richard Todd, in perhaps his best performance, though he was better known for Dam Busters (1955). Princess Mary is played by Glynis Johns, who has the impossible task of making her willful and selfish character seem adorable, but she’s so good she almost pulls it off. The leads are supported by a cast of fine British actors that includes James Robertson Justice as King Henry, Michael Gough as the Duke of Buckingham, and Rosalie Crutchley as Queen Katherine, all benefiting from a strong script with a lot of cutting gibes and haughty rejoinders.

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New Treasures: Glow by Tim Jordan

New Treasures: Glow by Tim Jordan

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Glow by Tim Jordan (Angry Robot, February 23, 2021). Cover by Glen Wilkins

I always enjoy finding a reliable new reviewer. Even more than that, I enjoy a reviewer who’s concise — one who can package a synopsis and recommendation in a single punchy, well written paragraph. John the Librarian, one of my recent discoveries, definitely has the knack. Here’s his review of Glow, Tim Jordan’s debut novel from Angry Robot, released in February, which features a young man on the run from drug liches and an unstoppable assassin in a near-future dystopia….

Just as humankind was on the brink of reaching the stars, fueled by new biotechnology that conveys near-immortality, the Earth was almost destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. Now, a once-great corporation is clinging to power from its orbiting stations, an Earth-side alliance seeks to overthrow it, and a new kind of artificial life lurks in the dark, where nothing is as it seems. Rex is an addict of Glow — a nanotech drug — who can’t remember who he is. When he’s taken in by a sect of nuns who promise salvation, he finds himself in a conflict that could destroy all he holds dear, hunted by something not of this world… In Jordan’s impressive fiction debut, the action and pacing are taut, the characters well drawn, the conflict compelling, and the world he creates is fascinating and immersive in its detail. His world building is reminiscent of the best space opera mixed with the gritty, violent dystopia of cyberpunk.

Glow was published by Angry Robot on February 23, 2021. It is 400 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback, and $6.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Glen Wilkins. Read the first three chapters (22 pages) at Issuu.com.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Brilliant Poirot (No, not Suchet this time)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Brilliant Poirot (No, not Suchet this time)

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I have a somewhat odd relationship with works of Agatha Christie. When I started down my life-long Sherlock Holmes path as a boy, I also read a Hercule Poirot book by Christie. Didn’t care for it. My voracious reading habit grew, but I never felt impelled to try her again. The movies didn’t interest me at all. I discovered Nero Wolfe around age thirty (I think), but still never bothered with Christie.

It was the A&E television series starring Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton that got me interested in Wolfe. Similarly, I watched an episode of the British series starring David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, and I liked it. In fact, I thought that it was brilliant. On a par with the Wolfe series, and also Granada’s terrific Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett.

I bought a collection of the Poirot short stories, and my mind’s eye saw the images of the actors from the Suchet show. And I liked reading Poirot. I find the novels a little too long-winded, but they’re still not bad. And picturing Suchet always works. I didn’t mind the Kenneth Branagh movie, though I didn’t really like Peter Ustinov’s portrayal. And Tony Randall was as much Poirot as Warren William was Sam Spade (if you haven’t seen the latter: not at all).

I hear Clive Merrison’s voice when I write Sherlock Holmes stories. And I see Maury Chaykin when I write Nero Wolfe. And it absolutely is David Suchet who constitutes my depiction of Hercule Poirot. But there’s a second voice I also hear. John Moffatt (1922-2012) worked in both theater and film, and excelled on radio and reading audio books.

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The Art of Things to Come, Part 3: 1961-1963

The Art of Things to Come, Part 3: 1961-1963

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Science Fiction Book Club brochure (1961)

As I related in the first two installments of this series (Part One: 1953-1957, and Part Two: 1958-1960), like tens of thousands of science fiction fans before and after me, I was at one time a member of the Science Fiction Book Club (or SFBC for short). I joined just as I entered my teen years, in the fall of 1976, shortly after I’d discovered their ads in the SF digests.

The bulletin of the SFBC, Things to Come – which announced the featured selections available and alternates – sometimes just reproduced the dust jacket art for the books in question. During the first couple of decades of Things to Come, however, those occasions were rare. In most cases during that period, the art was created solely for the bulletin, and was not used in the book or anywhere else.

Since nearly all of the art for the first 20 years of Things to Come is exclusive to that bulletin, it hasn’t been seen by many SF fans. In this series, I’ll reproduce some of that art, chosen by virtue of the art, the story that it illustrates or the author of the story. The first installment featured art from 1957 and earlier, while the second installment covered 1958-1960. In this third installment I’ll look at the years 1961-1963, presented chronologically.

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Vintage Treasures: Year’s Finest Fantasy edited by Terry Carr

Vintage Treasures: Year’s Finest Fantasy edited by Terry Carr

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Year’s Finest Fantasy (Berkley Books, 1978). Cover by Carl Lundgren

The first Year Best volume I ever read was Terry Carr’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year #6, published in paperback by Del Rey in 1977 and filled with stories that blew my 13-year old mind, including the fascinating gadget tale “I See You” by Damon Knight,  John Varley’s futuristic murder mystery “The Phantom of Kansas,” the raunchy and bizarre “Meathouse Man” by George R. R. Martin, and Isaac Asimov’s classic “The Bicentennial Man.”

I kept an eye out for Terry Carr’s anthologies after that. The next one I spotted was Year’s Finest Fantasy, published by Berkley in July 1987. It was a fine demonstration of Carr’s far-ranging and discerning eye, for it included names both expected — Avram Davidson, Stephen King, a Dying Earth tale by Jack Vance, and Harlan Ellison with one of his finest stories, “Jeffty Is Five” — and unexpected, including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Woody Allen, and a horror novella by Robert Aickmanm. It also contained Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop’s Frankenstein story, “Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole,” and an long novella from a virtual unknown, Julian Reid, his only known fantasy work, originally published in Universe 7.

Year’s Finest Fantasy was successful enough to kick off a series that lasted for five volumes, changing name to Fantasy Annual with #3. Terry Carr, a fine writer in his own right, provided a thoughtful introduction to the first volume, arguing convincingly that “contemporary fantasy tells us more truly of the nature of humanity than any collection of “realistic” stories could.” 43 years after I first read them, I find Carr’s words still resonate strongly.

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Video game history: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for Intellivison

Video game history: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for Intellivison

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To those of us old enough to remember, there is little doubt the king of home video game consoles in the early 1980s was the Atari 2600. However, Atari had stiff competition from Mattel Electronics in the form of the Intellivision. First released to the public in 1979, the Intellivison console was perhaps ahead of its time. The Intellivision didn’t even have a proper joystick, something almost unheard of at the time, but came with controllers that used a directional pad and a numeral keyboard. Also, the Intellivision had far superior graphics to any other consoles available when it first hit stores, and it was the first home system to utilize a 16-bit processor.

More importantly, however, was the fact the Intellivision had some darn good games. One of those games was titled Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Mattel had received a license to make AD&D video games from TSR Inc., then the owners of all things D&D, and Mattel wasted little time in bringing such games to the public. The first console game, of course, was titled Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which would be renamed a year later to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain when a sequel game was released.

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A Book Most Extraordinary: Once on a Time by A.A. Milne

A Book Most Extraordinary: Once on a Time by A.A. Milne

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King Merriwig of Euralia sat at breakfast on his castle walls. He lifted the gold cover from the gold dish in front of him, selected a trout and conveyed it carefully to his gold plate. He was a man of simple tastes, but when you have an aunt with the newly acquired gift of turning anything she touches to gold, you must let her practise sometimes. In another age it might have been fretwork.

So begins Once on a Time (1917), A. A. Milne‘s charming and funny fairy tale sendup. In it, a war is started over one king leaping over another king’s land in his seven-league boots, a bad wish is wished (as well as a good one), lovers meet, and a slightly wicked countess plots to steal the kingdom’s wealth. It is a book that had me laughing aloud one minute and forcing my wife to listen to me read pages aloud the next.

Next to the gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar legacy that is Winnie-the-Pooh, it is quite easy to miss that Milne was an author of several adult novels, among them The Red House Mystery, a classic of Golden Age detective fiction. A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he became a columnist for the satirical magazine, Punch, played cricket on teams with P.G. Wodehouse, J.M. Barrie, and Arthur Conan Doyle, and served in the army during WW I. He was wounded at the Somme and spent the last two years of the war writing propaganda. After the war, his son Christopher Robin was born, acquired some stuffed animals, and inspired Milne to write the two books that would be his greatest legacy: Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), and The House at Pooh Corner (1928).

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So, I Accidentally Wrote a Novella

So, I Accidentally Wrote a Novella

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The Woman in the Coffin by Nathan Long (Oolong Books, February 18 2021)

So, I accidentally wrote a novella.

When I told him about it, John O’Neill congratulated me on my sagacity for following the current trend in novellas, but that was never my intention. I’m so out of the loop I didn’t even know there was such a trend. What I had set out to do was to entertain my friend Elizabeth Watasin by writing a serial adventure set in her Dark Victorian world and sending her a chapter every week. It just so happened when I put all the chapters together they turned out to be novella length and not too terrible, so there you go. And, yes, as you have already deduced, not only is it a novella, it’s a fan-fic novella. I so fell in love with the swooniness of Elizabeth’s world and characters that I was inspired to write a Watasin-adjacent story of my own. And, to add to its other sins, it’s very possible I won’t write a follow up.

Given all that (fan-fic, runtish length, no ‘long tail’) what the hell am I doing making The Woman in the Coffin the first thing I self-publish? Honestly, I don’t know. I have two finished full length novels in the trunk that would only require a copy-edit and a cover to put up on Amazon, but did I publish those? No. I picked the thing that requires half a page of mea culpa to explain, and which I had to ask Elizabeth’s permission to publish.

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Goth Chick News: Finally – The Girls Get to Howl…

Goth Chick News: Finally – The Girls Get to Howl…

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All the wonderful film fests in the US and Canada have been forced to go virtual over the last year, but that hasn’t stopped them from showcasing a very creative run of new films; and this one might be my favorite.

Fantastic Fest, which normally takes place in Austin, TX, is the largest genre film festival in the US. Specializing in horror, fantasy, sci-fi and action movies from around the globe, the festival is dedicated to showcasing challenging and though-provoking cinema from new voices in the industry. Like other film fests, the best of the movies which premier here, get picked up for wider distribution.

The virtual version of Fantastic Fest 2020 was home to a new werewolf movie, written by Wendy Hill-Tout along with her daughter, Elizabeth Lowell Boland, known by stage name Lowell, a Canadian singer, songwriter and producer. Admittedly, I had never heard of Lowell until now, though she has released two full-length albums, and her song Palm Trees featured as soundtrack in EA Sports game, FIFA 15. I wish I could say differently about her Mom, Hill-Tout, but alas, I cannot. She has primarily been a producer throughout her career, according to IMDB. But as a writing team, Hill-Tout and Lowell seem to have created cinematic magic in the form of the film Bloodthirsty.

Newbie director Amelia Moses of course gets credit here, as does the acting of star Lauren Beatty (Jigsaw), but to me, all really great monster movies start with a great script. And this one is a doozy.

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Three Things That Scared Me When I Was A Kid

Three Things That Scared Me When I Was A Kid

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Frame from Tim Burton’s 1996 Mars Attacks!

I’ve written a few articles for Black Gate about the films and novels of my childhood that inspired me to write fiction, and today I’m once again taking a walk down Memory Lane to visit the old Nostalgia Nook.

First, let me say it’s a safe bet that we all grew up with dinosaurs, aliens, mythological creatures, and certainly the film genres of horror, fantasy science fiction, and monster films. I think it’s safe to say that most of us identified with the monsters when we were kids. Who didn’t relate and empathize with Frankenstein and the Wolfman? Who didn’t feel sorry for King Kong? These monsters didn’t scare me. No, they were my friends. I was rarely scared or creeped out by monster and horror flicks when I was a kid, and I was in kindergarten when I first came into contact with Frankenstein, King Kong, the Wolfman, Dracula, the Mummy, and so many others. However, there were three instances where I was frightened by things I had seen and read, things which gave me nightmares and made me wary of things that lurked in the shadows. What’s weird about this, what sticks in my mind is that these three instances all occurred at roughly the same time.

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