This Hitchcock-directed adaptation of the popular adventure novel (reviewed here) retains some plot elements and the basic idea of a hero (Robert Donat) pursued from London to Scotland and back by the police and foreign spies, but it’s otherwise quite different and adds a new major character, an intelligent and self-possessed heroine (Madeleine Carroll), which I thought a major improvement. It had a relatively high budget for a British film of the time, since the studio was hoping it would be successful in the American market as well as at home, and it was.
Some later scenes involving Carroll are slightly naughty for 1935, but Hitchcock knew the censor, who was blind in one eye, and sat on his good side during the screening so he could say things at key moments in order to get the official to look away from the screen.
Besides suspense, mystery, and romance, there’s a good deal of humor and some serious material as well, notably a brief but poignant look into the unhappy marriage of a Scottish woman who helps the hero.
The film has a dated feel, but I enjoyed it. A high point is the scene at a political meeting in which the hero, mistaken for someone else, is forced to extemporize a speech despite having no idea which side his audience is on, and what he says is so brilliantly generic it earns thunderous applause.
This was the first and best known of a series of adventure novels featuring a Scot named Richard Hannay. Buchan said he filled them with improbable events that readers could only just believe might happen. I’m reminded of The Adventures of Brisco County Jr, a television series whose writing staff said they aimed for just under over the top.
The novel opens with Hannay living in London after having recently made his fortune in South Africa. He’s rather bored until he finds himself framed for murder and on the run from both the police and mysterious foreign spies. This alleviates his boredom wonderfully.
The novel is fast-moving, brief, and occasionally cynical and funny, and is supposed to have been one of the first to use the now-commonplace plot device of a hero on the run from everybody. There’s a lot stuffed into just over 40,000 words, including some (fortunately very brief) examples of the racism common to the era. It’s a reasonable amount of fun but not terribly memorable despite its enduring popularity.
The title was reportedly inspired by something Buchan’s six-year-old daughter said while he was recuperating from an illness in a seaside nursing home. She had just learned to count and one day happily reported that there were 39 steps on the stairway leading down to the beach.
Like his protagonist, Buchan was a Scot who’d spent time in southern Africa, though he’d been there as a government official rather than a seeker of fortune. Buchan wrote a great deal besides fiction, including propaganda for the British government during World War I. He was later elected to Parliament to represent the Combined Scottish Universities, and after being created the first Baron Tweedsmuir he spent his last years (1935-1940) as Royal Governor-General of Canada.
The book is out of copyright in the U.S. and can be found on line, for example at Project Gutenberg.
In a recent post I passed on a recommendation to prefer the name “Daesh” to others for the self-styled “Islamic state” (which is neither). Another good reason can be found in a November 27 article (link) in The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia:
Illawarra mother Heather Taylor is becoming accustomed to the odd looks, gasps and uncomfortable silences that accompany the mention of her daughter’s name. Now she has suffered perhaps the ultimate indignity – being denied a personalised jar of Nutella.
Ms Taylor’s sister tried to buy five personalised jars – which are labelled with the recipient’s name – for her nephew Odhinn and her niece Isis from a Myer department store in Shellharbour.
Ms Taylor said both names were initially flagged as problematic by a computer. After some negotiation, Odhinn was deemed acceptable – but the store manager drew the line at Isis, an acronym commonly used to denote Islamic State.
…
Ms Taylor, 43, named her five-year-old daughter after the Egyptian goddess Isis, revered as a matriarch and friend of the disadvantaged. Her son Odhinn, 8, was named after a god in Nordic mythology.
…
“This is an acronym that is used incorrectly by the media that Nutella are supporting,” Ms Taylor said. “We need to be calling the Daesh death cult by their name, Daesh.”
A related point: I’ve actually heard some people (televangelist Pat Robertson for one) complain that Daesh/ISIL isn’t being called “Islamic” often enough, and that this avoidance is an example of “political correctness.” That is unmitigated drivel. Daesh desperately to be taken seriously as the “Islamic state” and a legitimate representative of Islam. Calling them what they want to be called amounts to giving respect and aid and comfort to them. They deserve nothing but contempt. For just one reason why, see this post from January about 3,500 women being kept in slavery and regularly raped.
A 4-year-old girl named Sophie drives a radio-controlled full-size Volvo truck. The video (which runs a bit over two minutes) gets better and better as it goes along. It’s actually an ad for Volvo to show how tough the truck is, and I have to say it appears to be pretty tough. You don’t want to mess with Sophie either.
This vaguely reminds me of YouTuber personality Boogie2988 playing the Goat Simulator computer game, which I include here for reference. (Caution: naughty language below.)
Finally, continuing the free-association, apparently goats must start their training early with a coach to learn how to perform these stunts. Here’s a 30-second example:
I think the master of suspense would have approved of this short film assembled from bits and pieces of Hitchcock movies, trailers, and assorted bits and pieces in order to depict Hitchcock himself as a killer pursued by police. It runs a bit under 10 minutes. Click on the symbol just to the left of Vimeo at the bottom of the frame to see it full screen.
A little over two years ago I posted something (link) about research showing that white American women without a high school diploma were experiencing falling life expectancy, though comparable members of other races were not. Note that this should not be misinterpreted to mean that lack of education directly leads to health problems. The mortality increase might result from whatever life circumstances caused someone to drop out of high school, or from low income in adulthood, or from both, or from other factors that happen to be correlated. The mystery is why these same factors would specifically affect white women, leaving them with an even lower life expectancy than black women with similar levels of education.
More recent research has amplified on this, most notably a paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton University entitled “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white
non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century” forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (link). Quoting from the abstract:
This paper documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Although all education groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings, and an overall increase in external cause mortality, those with less
education saw the most marked increases.
Case and Deaton’s methodology has been criticized for failing to take into account variation in the size of age cohorts over time, but even after adjusting for that, the basic results hold true: Middle-aged white Americans, and in particular middle-aged American women (considered as a whole, not just those without high school diplomas) are dying at a rising rate. And a major reason for this, it appears, is a rise in self-damaging behavior such as smoking, drinking, and drug abuse. Meanwhile members of other ethnic groups don’t exhibit the same rise in mortality and morbidity (i.e., sickness rates). Here are charts I swiped from the Talking Points Memo website (link below):
The blue lines are for men, the red ones for women. The vertical axis shows the death rate relative to 1999 for the indicated group. That is, the lines show whether things are getting better (a falling line) or worse (a rising one) for the group in question.
(Note that this means that it the charts say nothing about the absolute rate of mortality for a given group, only for the change over time for that specific group. Also, individuals who were in the 45-55 group in 2000 weren’t in that same age cohort ten years later unless they’ve figured out a trick I wish they’d share with me.)
Incidentally, a more detailed examination of the data by geographic region shows that the rise in mortality and morbidity for middle-aged whites appears to be worst in the South and least in the Northeast, whatever that might imply about the causes.
For more discussion of this see these blog posts from December 1 and December 2 by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.
Kevin Drum wrote a response to Marshall (link) saying in essence that while the negative consequences are most obvious among middle-aged whites, they affect other age groups as well.
Finally, it may be worth stating for the record that this research doesn’t mean that we white people are now suddenly disadvantaged. For the most part it still pays to be a white guy in the U.S.
The British newspaper The Daily Mail has an entertaining collection of photos of dogs invading the personal space of humans, cats, and other dogs. Click this link to see the page. Here’s just one example:
I just the other day had a friendly dog decide to walk across me without regard for my anatomy, so I sympathize with the victims pictured.
An Englishman named Charles Babbage created the first design for a general-purpose programmable digital computer, which he called an “analytical engine,” in 1834. He never finished building it (the full machine would have been huge), but at a party he described the project to a young mathematician who was the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron and the wife of the Earl of Lovelace.
She was Lord Byron’s only child born in wedlock, but her parents divorced when she was still very young. Her mother, believing Byron mad, sought to save her daughter from any hereditary tendency in that direction by having her educated in mathematics from an early age, something unusual for girls.
Ada Lovelace was fascinated with Babbage’s idea and for years the two of them carried on an extensive correspondence. When an Italian published on article in French about the proposed analytical engine, it was Byron’s daughter who not only translated it into English but added her own extensive notes, longer than the article itself, to explain the invention more clearly and give examples of how it could be programmed to do useful and important computations. These were the first computer programs ever published.
Tragically, 163 years ago today, 1852 November 27, Ada Lovelace died just under two weeks short of her 37th birthday.
Thirteen days from now, December 10, will be the 200th anniversary of her birth.
The following video shows her resting place and tells a little of her life and importance.
As the video suggests, her position in the aristocracy helped Ada Lovelace achieve things, such as studying mathematics, that were out of bounds for most women of her time, but it’s possible that her gender, as well as her early death, prevented what she wrote about the analytics engine from being taken more seriously. Babbage’s own writings were more descriptive and did not so clearly lay out why a programmable computers would be an important advance. Had the possibilities been more fully grasped at the time, it’s possible others would have contributed to the development of Babbage’s invention, as some alternate-history steampunk science fiction has suggested.
Here’s another video about Babbage’s analytical engine:
Finally, a note in passing to anyone who might think that Ada Lovelace’s short lifespan was typical for her era: It was not. The misconception that it was comes from a misinterpretation of the fact that life expectancy at the time was probably around 40 (estimates differ). But “life expectancy” simply means the average age of death, and in the mid-19th century vast numbers died in infancy and childhood, bringing down that average. The single biggest factors increasing life expectancy are improved sanitation, pediatric medical care, and especially early vaccination. The greatest reduction in mortality has been for those under the age of five. All these developments, plus a reduction in violence and fewer deaths of women in childbirth, have benefited adults as well, but less dramatically. Remember that even the 90th Psalm speaks of a typical lifespan (at least for those not struck down early in life) as 70 or 80 years.
I’ve touched on misconceptions about life expectancy in previous posts, but this page by Geoff Canyon has one of the better succinct explanations I’ve yet run across, and here’s another good one that mentions the long lives of many historical figures of the 18th and 19th centuries. Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, and Ben Franklin all lived into their 80s, for example, and John Adams died at the age of 90.
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