Luckless Lupino – seemingly the girl most likely to find
herself in a throat-hold – was really A Player in 1950s Hollywood, adding writer,
director and producer credits to her acting roles. Ida’s position of strength
is echoed today in Nigella’s show-making, deal-clinching status in foodie TV both
for the BBC and now ABC (as seen in the new, piping hot show, The Taste).
Meanwhile her husband, Charles
Saatchi – the ex-adman-turned-art-collector who’s never alone because he always
has a cigarette to hold hands with, is such a dyed-in the-wool smoker he too might
be described as taking a leaf out of the noir
pack.
Yet for all the smoke signals of the past, the mise en scene has moved on from the
1950s. No more chiaroscuro; instead
of a monochrome contrast between light and dark, the current scene offers a full spectrum of
colour and texture.
Partly decorative, partly a screen to make the protagonists’
faces more elusive, more alluring, the restaurant is woven with pistachio green
plants set against the incandescent copper-and-glass tubing which serves to
warm this Mayfair terrace on an unseasonably cold day in June.
The tubing is smooth; so too is the suede of the villain’s
shoes, but in a different way – one hairless, the other furry. And, somewhere in
between, his immaculate, clinically white shirt made of the softest cotton: material
that says ‘touch me’ even though you know you’re only ever going to see it on
someone you don't.
The consensus is that he shouldn’t have touched her like
that. But the suburban ‘movie theater’ audiences who served as the
test-bed for 1950s Hollywood product,
would not have thought to demand a new ending in which Kirk and Robert or
Robert and Jack had to be investigated by the police for having placed their
hands around a woman’s neck. Only if he killed her afterwards; not if the two
of them were back on speaking terms a few hours later.
Perhaps all those people who set so much store by this latest scene,
who insist it says something so important that they themselves just have to say
something too, should bear in mind that whatever they say matters no more than
the guinea pigs of half-a-century-ago responding to Hollywood’s
latest offering.
It’s a spectacle, right? And we’re all spectators now.
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