Jumpin' Jesus: I think I've figured it out!

Just when I think I've seen it all. 

I. 

Find.

Another.

One.

ANOTHER photo of Harold Lloyd that unsettles me, both thrills and makes me a little bit uneasy, because in that gaze, that gaze I've tried so hard to capture in my novel The Glass Character, there is that slightly unmoored quality, the compelling, disconcerting eyebeam/high-beam of a genius.

And other things. Lloyd telegraphed superbly with his eyes. Hurt. Seduction. Goddamn ferocious intelligence. And in this one, it, yes, I confirmed something I've denied for a very long time, something I've seen and seen in his lovely gorgeous movies, something I cannot deny now and which undoubtedly added to his cockeyed charm:

He's cross-eyed.

Well, only a little. Half a bubble off plumb, he might call it, with his wonderful earthy Midwestern way of expressing himself. Just a tinch, but enough to give him that quality. Can't even describe it. That, and the hair, are what make him so devastating. The hair, well, I don't mean when the hair stood up, magnetized by some sort of electric charge (imagine electrocuting your lead actor just for a gag!) -  it's the uncontrollable bushyness of it, the forest. In many of the early ones he's slicked it back with half a pound of pomade, as men did then, but when there's a chase scene or a rough scene or even a love scene of any note, his hair springs out into wild black waves, and we then see the other side of him.

The side I wrote about the other day, that fierce erotic clinch with Jobyna Ralston, that - who knows what to call it! When lions make love, which they do for days on end, the male lion grasps the female by the back of the neck and holds her there. Not that she tries to get away, but if she tried, she probably couldn't. It's no doubt like the grasp a mother lion would use on her cubs to carry them around - not meant to draw blood, but still, firm enough that they can't escape.

So what's the point of all this? God if I know, but I do know I am captured, perhaps for good.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Harold and Charlie and Doug: oh, my!

For reasons I don't need to explain to you, this is a very famous picture of three incredibly famous men.

From left to right: Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks: Senior, not the Junior many of us came to know later on.

Three gods, just casually basking in the sun, sitting cross-legged, perhaps asked to pose that way by someone who happened to have a camera. Three extremely good-looking middle-aged men whose fame had already peaked: but supernova fame like that does not ever really die. As the love song says, "But after you have gone/There's still some stardust on my sleeve".

But soft! what's this? It's not the same photo! This is an apparent outtake from the same session which I have never seen before.

Take a good look. It's quite different. Harold, probably already bored, has changed position (revealing saddle shoes to die for) and is eyeballing the camera lens, causing it to melt. Charlie is looking up wistfully like some waif, and Fairbanks is cracking up about something that apparently does not particularly amuse the others.

And, oh my heart, here's another one! It's not quite as good technically as the others - Fairbanks' face is in shade and his expression isn't clear, though he appears to be saying something to Charlie.  The trellis on the left takes something away from the pristine whites in the shot. Harold looks like a bird (a falcon, maybe?) gathering itself up to take wing, and Chaplin is unusually serious. Though it's hard to tell, it looks like he has no shoes on.

Probably they were all playing golf together, perhaps at Harold's massive Greenacres estate. The sunlight seems to bless them, to fall lightly on their shoulders like some solar mantle of greatness.  At the same time, they could be getting ready to play a game of marbles in the grass. Never were there three more childlike men, boy geniuses of the screen whose like we will never see again. 

To die for.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm