'ere, now, wot's all this, then?

Picking on the knitters  - for shame!  From The Telegraph: 

9. Mother Clancy must have found the deal of the year at the Arran jumper shop: 'Buy one get three free'. 

I must admit, though, that's a lot of Aran knitting on those four boys. Hopefully some knitter was handsomely paid for all that cabling.

A Fine Idea for Clutzy Needleworkers

When my father died a few years ago, my mother wanted to have all the men in the family over to pick through his tools for what they wanted. No way! I cried. Why, I might want to build an airship! Or a Tesla coil! Or at least a Tesla induction motor...

In truth, I haven't even glued the leg back onto my pizzelle iron, simply due to laziness. But I did drag a few tools home, and they do come into good use, even when no construction is involved. For example:

This is one of those extending magnets for reaching icky areas and grabbing loose screws and bolts, and quite a powerful one at that.

And those safety pins? They are part of a box of 300 safety pins that spilled on the floor. Mr Extenda-Magnet was lying nearby when I spilled the box of pins - what, don't you leave tools lying around your house? Y'all are strange. I have a hammer next to my bathtub and a crowbar hanging on the bathroom doorknob.

Anyway, the magnet was lying on a bag of roving, so I grabbed it and used it to collect bunches of pins at a time.

It worked great! (Until I got to those evil little brass pins, consarn it!). It worked so well, brass pins excepted, that I vowed I'd use it next time I spilled a bunch of straight pins (which happens every five years whether I need it or not).

Plot Z-twists

The would-be pithy title is my half-assed attempt to make light of my excitement in discovering a film in which knitting is a plot device. Not much of one, admittedly – mostly serves as a red herring - but one that unexpectedly moves the story forward.

As you may have noticed, dear reader, I have a fondness for things vintage. I’ve a modest but well-loved collection of vintage knitting and crochet patterns. For over a decade the only new garments I wore were underwear and socks (put on a bit too much weight to stay vintage, unfortunately). And when I’d switch through the channels on TV, I’d stop anytime I saw something black and white.

So I was delighted to find a small collection of public domain movies available on the Internet Archive. I downloaded one immediately entitled “And Then There Were None”, directed by Rene Clair. The visuals of the film are quite wonderful, and there’s a light touch of humor brought to a grim Agatha Christie tale. (NB – the novel has a much nastier ending than the film.)

If you’ve never seen any versions of this story (most filmed under the title “10 Little Indians”) or read the book, it’s about a group of people who are invited to an isolated locale for a house party that turns out to be an opportunity for one of the characters to kill off all the others. The justification is that everyone in attendance has gotten away with some crime and deserves their fate.

Judith Anderson is one of the actors in this film version. Her character knits. And she sports a knitted stole for a sizable amount of her screen time. And in one sequence she is wearing what looks to be one of those lovely 1940’s hand knit jackets.

So I grabbed some screen shots – sorry they’re not better, but the print was not dvd quality – to share with everyone, along with a few of the more entertaining dialog quotes.

First photo is a seemingly gratuitous kitty photo. But it’s not gratuitous at all.


The next several are of Judith Anderson. She is sitting on a terrace, knitting her hard little heart out. She seems to be knitting a sweater (or jumper, as they would have said in 1940-something Britain) with what looks to be two to three inches of ribbing. Notice also her shawl and the jacket she is wearing.



Check out the knitting bag!


Large enough to hold her knitting and a pair of binoculars, as you'll see in the next two shots. You'll also see closeups of the sleeves of her jacket – I would have loved a clearer picture, but these were the best I could get. I'm pretty sure I've seen that design, or something similar, in one of my vintage books.



These photos show the design of her stole (which she also uses for a scarf). It’s a long rectangle, so shaping isn’t an issue.




Here’s Judith throwing her yarn, knitting English (just as I would expect). Nice to know that she and Dr Zoidberg share knitting techniques.


Next we see Dame Judith at the beach; note that here she’s using the stole as a head scarf.

Dame Anderson's character stops to pick up some seaweed. But why...?



She returns to the house with her find and says, “Such a pretty pattern - I thought I'd like to copy it for a shawl.”

At a knitting retreat, no one would think twice about that remark. However, since she's the only knitter at this house party of doom, they simply look at her as if she's insane.

The notion that her behaviour is irrational is seemingly supported by a brief conversation someone has with her in the kitchen, in which she makes (what I think) is a perfectly rational observation:

“Very stupid to kill the only servant in the house; now we don't even know where to find the marmalade.”

After breakfast (probably one without marmalade), the rest of the house party discusses Judith's oddness, with Walter Huston passing final judgment with this great line:

“No sane person would think of using seaweed as a pattern for a shawl!”

However, before they can get their pitchforks and torches together to go after the heartless, knitting-crazed witch, a ball of yarn drops down into the conversation. Our little kitty friend has chased it over the banister.

And here’s a gratuitous shot which does not do justice to Clair’s visual aesthetic – the light yarn against the dark floor, with an even darker shadow falling across it.

They follow the yarn into Judith’s room, where she’s obviously died like she lived, with her knitting in her hands (and probably on a chenille bedspread).

From Viviana's Mad Howls

I'll look through some of my knitting patterns to see if I can find one which matches her jacket. And I think the design for the stole should be fairly easy to reproduce - in the next few weeks I'll knit up some swatches and post the photos. I won't, however, be designing shawls based on seaweed just yet. Maybe later.

So, in summary, I rate this film "Mmmm...knitting."

Cross Post - Good Summer Reading (circa 1875)

He's dead, Jim!

I just finished reading the first half of that classic novel, "The Somnambulist and the Detective" by Allan Pinkerton. Yes, the Allan Pinkerton for whom the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was named. Allan moved here from Scotland with his bride, began as a private detective in Chicago in 1849 or 1850, eventually met up with some muck-a-mucks (click the link if you want details; I'm not going to repeat a Wikipedia article), popularized such detective tricks and shadowing (tailing, following) and what we would now consider undercover work, and eventually put his name on a series of fictionalized accounts of his career (rumor has it they were ghostwritten).

The story begins with a young bank clerk being killed and a bank robbed. This all takes place somewhere down south; most of the evidence is overlooked by the locals, since it leads to the best friend of the deceased because class matters in 1850 Mississippi, and the best friend, Mr Drysdale, is of the best of families. But ol' Pinky, who is called in as a last-chance attempt to catch the killer/robber, is a cranky Scot, he is, and he dinna care fer a man's standing in the community. After examining clews, weighing evidence, and sucking down mint juleps galore, he trots back to Chicago, and formulates a plan so cunning that you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel. A large, inefficient, clunky weasel.

Next we know, a widow (Mrs Potter), a man of means (Mr Andrews), and a young carpenter (Mr Green) descend upon this small town. All are operatives of ol' Pinky - oops, I should have said spoiler alert. Now y'all will know how the story ends.

Their job is to figure out how to get a confession from the murderer Drysdale. Mrs Potter (not her real name) befriends the innocent wife of the alleged murderer...

Hard-boiled female detective schmoozes up innocent housewife

...you can see the evidence for yourself. In fact, this heartless undercover agent fakes an injury to infiltrate their household - a shameful pretense of being dependent upon the kindness of strangers. Indeed!

"She's suffered severe trauma, Jim!"

Mrs P starts smearing blood all over their home in the middle of the night in order to freak out the suspect. Talk about the house guest from hell...

Meanwhile, Messers Andrew and Green (not their real names) plot to drive Drysdale insane, in case Mrs P's imitation of "The Shining" doesn't work. (Okay, okay, this book came before "The Shining".) Mr Green looks like the deceased, so they dress him up to look like, well, a zombie in order to freak out the suspect even more.

"He's undead, Jim!"

And it works - but only some of the time. Our alleged murderer gets up and wanders in the middle of the night to the locations where he has buried the stolen money, and doesn't notice the zombie during his late-night strolls.

"He's the living dead, Jim!"

At this point, I know, you're hoping for a zombie war, or perhaps a face-off between a zombie and, say, a nosferatu. No such luck, dear readers. If the title hasn't already given it away, he's sleepwalking! Yes, sleepwalking. Wow! And FYI, that's a large, flat rock that our sleepwalker is holding. He's not wrestling with an alien life form or anything. Sorry.

By now, Drysdale is in hysterics. No southern belle could out psychosomatic him at this point, and I mean it. For instance, every time he finds the blood smeared in his room, he faints and says that he is weak from loss of blood... but he hasn't really lost any blood. So why is weak and faint - hysteria? Nerves? Guilt? A secret opium habit we're never told about?

No matter. They've succeeded in making him crazy. And yet, he still won't confess.

From what I can tell, the operations of these three detectives has probably taken three to six months. Honestly, if all his cases were this labor-intensive and drawn out, there is no way Allan Pinkerton would have become the rich, worker-hating lawman that he became.

Anyway, Pinkterton returns to the south, and gets together with everyone to plan one last attempt to coerce a confession from this dude without using a waterboard or lynch laws. Mr Green gets into his zombie togs again, and hides in the bank - the scene of the original crime. They arrest Mr Drysdale and take him to the bank. (If you're like me, you feel like you're suddenly in an episode of "The Beverly Hillbillies", but you're not; hillbillies could not afford Pinkerton's fees back in 1856.) I'll let the lovely illustration show you the moment when they break the killer:

"Dammit, Jim, I'm a murderer, not a doctor!"

Ah yes, they just don't confess like this anymore. And look at Mr Sourface McMustache in the background (just to the left of Drysdale) - stern and judgmental. That's a level four glare of disapproval. If it had been a level five, Drysdale would be a heap of ashes or a puddle of goo on the floor.

Eh, I give the story a C, mostly for being brief and having some lovely illustrations. The plot was ridiculous - but not as ridiculous as "The Ghoul", a book which I will review in loving detail someday. If you're not going to be a realistic mystery, you should go all out for crazy, over-the-top thrills, which "The Ghoul" delivers. The second half of the Pinkerton book is a tale entitled, "The Murderer and the Fortune-teller". If it's any good - or if the drawings are the least bit entertaining - I'll let you know.