As much as I don't like (acknowledging) a certain connection between art and life, this is a well-made, and very troublesome, odious film. In 1951 (for Guitry, in France) the world was ugly and people were sad. #minute38, La poison.

Tie Xi Qu by #WangBing, #minute38 (x4). Cinema of immersion; #LavDiaz and WB's own The Ditch, though fiction, are for me primarily this, a narrative experienced rather than told. Herzog couldn't kill enough of himself (and Kinski) to move in that direction as far as he wanted.

"Many a fickle makes a fuckle!" says Anthony Blunt with Bennett's Yorkshire accent. Schlesinger lets Bennett's jokes ring all through the film, but this one has not made it into the play. Prunella 'Sybil' Scales as H.M.Q. is better than the whole of "The Crown" here. #minute38

Talking of doublettes, watch Vittorio de Seta (sic!) instead. Exquisitely beautiful if somewhat sententious. (For more suicidal looneys climbing things, see "Jean-Luc persecuté" by Goretta, "Goupi mains rouges" by Becker). #minute38 #VittorioDeSeta

There was this other guy also did films on such issues as love, death, faith and similar, but better. This film I missed twenty years ago and should have left it at that. #zanussi #minute38

Billy Wilder wanted a film about adultery but the Code axed it. But Billy had enough cheek to stick his tongue in and went and made a movie about Marilyn and the male gaze. My kid figured it out. Because the stooge in the film even says Marilyn Monroe is in his shower. #minute38

Never again mix up Jacques 'a notch below Hitch' Tourneur with Jacques 'on a par with Renoir' Becker. #minute38 #twojacqueses (Films: "Circle of Danger" (idiot plot), "Goupi Mains Rouges" (spoofy countryside noir)

"a sign of ...’s meager budget as well as his hard-edge aesthetic" (an insightful text, XXX University Press, 2018). What a profound correlation. Art-house likers, bask. #minute38