The pace continues to be a bit more double-time. And what better way to get the blood jumping than to show horses racing and jumping? The Brits positively love this.
Thus, we have Lady Mary insisting she ride side-saddle over the jumps. To fully go astride a horse would send her granny into convulsions. Lady Mary underestimates her granny's strength. Nevertheless, at the start of the Lady Mary-Mabel Lane Fox heat we start to think there's going to be a bit of NASCAR action in the pit lanes, as Mary and Mabel, two women, one man, square off at the flag. It doesn't happen, but Mary does best Miss Mabel, despite having the far more difficult posture atop a horse jumping over fences.
A neglected character is sick. This of course is the dog Isis. Despite the rumors that the producers are going to "86" Isis because of the similarity in name to Islamic State in Syria, the dog is still with us. But for how long?
It's not the dog's fault that she's cursed with a name that in 2015 means something wholly different than being the namesake of the first daughter of Geb, God of earth, and Nut, the Goddess of the sky. In 1924, Lawrence of Arabia was making inroads to creating Islamic states separate from Turkey.
Lord G. has settled down and gotten over his jealous tiff with his wife. She reminds him of flirtations, and didn't he once, like Katy Perry, "Kiss a Girl?" (the maid) in a prior episode? Robert's back in the big boy bed.
Carson and Mrs. Hughes are tip-toeing around considering a little cottage rental 401-K of their own, like Mrs. Patmore, and Daisy is full steam ahead for academic glory.
Thomas the under-butler gets some sound advice from Dr. Clarkson that magazine ads aren't going to change his sexual orientation. And Bates and Anna have a heart-to-heart that looks as if all suspicion should be off Bates for Mr. Green's demise. Or, have we still not seen the end of this?
Dame Violet and Prince Kuragin play out a scene straight from 'Gigi,' but without the music: he, Maurice Chevalier and she, Hermione Gingold, as they reminisce about their long ago love. Ah yes, they remember it well. Lerner and Lowe did a better job, but then that was a musical. The daylight can't even find its way into that cell that the Prince now lives in. Russians are always so much more tragic than Frenchmen.
But the whole episode really belongs to Lady Mary and Lady Edith. I always watch the Brit stuff with close-captioning turned on because it is often hard to understand what the hell they're saying. And then there's the stray topical reference to something that I may not know anything about. The close-captioning allows me to zero in on spellings for later lookups.
No need this time. When Lady Mary comes down to dinner with her arresting new hairdo, cat- walking into the sitting room and hears Cousin Isobel declare that Pola Negri has entered, how many people know who Pola Negri was? How many people went to school in her repurposed Beechhurst (Queens, NY) mansion? My hand goes up twice.
Pola Negri was a stunning silent film and golden age of talkies star. Black hair, green eyes and porcelain white skin, she was on the arm of Charlie Chaplin, Rudolf Valentino, and I think also on my father's mind. When it was decided to send me to a small Greek language based school in Beechhurst, the school turned out to be housed in Ms. Negri's old mansion on 11th Avenue. The school was small and the house was large, although lacking in any leftover elements of luxury. A nice staircase, perhaps.
Many of the film stars of the 1920s lived on the north shore of Queens, not far from the Astoria studios where the movies were made. It was the early Beverly Hills. If I heard it once, I heard it many times that the repurposed Negri house was now where I went to school. My later guess was that some of my father's dimes went to seeing some of her movies.
And then of course there's Lady Edith. Poor, honk-nosed Lady Edith, always being upstaged by her sister Mary. There's poor Edith, decked out in mourning black because the death of the father of her child is now confirmed, almost certainly caused by the activities of "Herr Hitler." And here's Mary, showing off frocks and hairdos. What's a poor girl to do?
Seek a change of venue, which is of course what Edith does, scooping little Marigold up from the well-meaning farming Drewe family. Lady Edith has now inherited a publishing house, despite not being married to Gregson. Champagne and ice cream are on tap from room service. If this were TV, she'd pull into the parking lot at Mel's Diner. But this is 1924 England, and Lady Edith is not destined to be supervised by a sweaty Mel in a t-shirt waving a spatula.
Always more to follow. Cousin Violet and Lord Merton to tie a knot? Nothing like a wedding in a soap opera to keep the wardrobe people busy.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment