Introduction

Welcome.

I was very tempted to add Serge Gainsbourg, just playing in the background, to this blog. But I've restrained myself. Nobody likes internet pages that play music to you. New age assessments are dangerous for the easily distracted, I'm afraid, as I believe the entire look of this thing demonstrates. If you can't gain some idea of my nature from that, I'm afraid no introductory note that I might write could hope to do more.

As regards the Cornell film:

Both the white morning coats and broad cut linen trousers were hugely impressive. Why is it that no one wears linen in Australia? Period films: new insight into the death of natural fibres. Of course, no one but a turbaned Raj type could really pull that particular look off, and certainly not anywhere but a country 'east of Borneo'; but it has a wonderfully '30s Subcontinental Cambridge Man feel to it.

Did anybody else have an indefinable sense that she must be English? It was hardly established from the film, but she just seemed so very British. Perhaps that, again, was the proliferation of white morning coats, determining my reactions.

Her dialogue with the monkey was very endearing. Prior to that, I didn't have any particular interpretation of her character at all. Animals are very humanising.

Was she considering seducing the Prince, while taking off that dressing gown? How far would she go to rescue her husband? Or, indeed, since we hadn't particularly seen the husband, perhaps she just felt that wearing a woollen dressing gown in a tropical climate was uncomfortable. Maybe the removal of all context induces us to indulge our judgemental natures.

Trance or inattention? Are they the same thing?