Some years ago, I ventured to make a few attempts to emulate the elaborate punmanship of the great Irish humourist Flann O'Brien's Keats & Chapman stories. This was my favourite of these efforts.
Keats and Chapman, continuing their warm but occasionally fractious companionship into the 1930s, are discussing the recent phenomenal success of the film 'King Kong'. Keats, brimming as ever with the enthusiasm of youth, is eager to go and see the film, but the older Chapman is wary of the huge crowds at the cinema. Also, more generally, he decries the crude populism of the film's producers, which, he feels, is sullying the artistic potential of the promising new medium - or, as he puts it, "Odi profanum vulgus, et RKO."
[For the benefit of Moonrat, perpetually perplexed by puns, and of any other readers who were denied the delights of a Classical education, "Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo" (pronounced 'RKO') is a famous opening line of one of the Odes (III.i) of the Roman poet Horace, meaning something like "I disdain the unholy mob, and fence it out." RKO Radio Pictures was the company which produced the first - and best - King Kong in 1933.]
5 comments:
What an awful pun. Which, of course, in the world of punmanship means it's truly splendid. Congratulations again!
I saw a documentary recently on "Hollywood's greatest year," as 1939 is known by common (if not universal) agreement. They pointed out that RKO's own output in 1939 (Gunga Din, Laughton's Hunchback) would possibly have qualified it as the top studio... if only certain other studios hadn't utterly trumped RKO.
(Personally, I think RKO's own 1939 was actually 1940, but that probably says more about my film snobbery than about RKO.)
Ooh, you naughty man! Now I've got to go Googling and IMDB-ing to remind myself what RKO - and the other studios - put out each year through the later '30s and early '40s.
Was it 1940 or 1941 that was the year of Gone With The Wind, The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane?
Darn - how did that happen?
Just put a comment in here when it should have gone somewhere else! I hate it when that happens.
GWTW and Oz were both 1939; Kane was the year after.
I know -- think I know -- you're a Kane admirer, too. Which is one of the reasons I've been reluctant to blog about it so far, because I'm certain you'll catch anything I've got wrong even if you might be too polite to point it out. :)
Ah, I wouldn't worry about that. My cinema trivia is extremely rusty - as just shown in the comment above.
I thought I recalled from somewhere that Kane and Oz at least were up for Oscars in the same year.
I'd love to see a post from you on Kane.
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