Tone Poem

She hurries out of the crowded Underground at the Charing Cross Station, the crowds of people bustling through the fog and smoke, the strap of her knapsack cutting a bright line across the pitch black of her uniform overcoat. The black of her coat, her cap and the inky night make the porcelain white of her eager face stand out even more. She's coming to meet her lover, the man she'd only met a few weeks earlier, the man who has asked her to marry him. He only has this one night before he must go away, so she leaves her army camp and comes to the city, to sit in the Charing Cross Station ("below the big clock," she says excitedly on the phone, repeating his directions back to him). She waits, an expectant look on her face, as the camera dollies in for a soft-focus close-up. Waiting for a man who will not come...

I skipped the Veep debate tonight and instead watched This Above All (1942), and boy, did I make the right choice. Anatole Litvak's wartime melodrama, starring Joan Fontaine and Tyrone Power, is spectacular-- the actors are superb, and Litvak's shadowy mise-en-scene and poetic mobile framings make the movie unfold like a tone poem, or a Surrealist vision of wartime love.

More later (I'm still processing it), but for now, I'll leave you with the haunting image of the woman on the train station bench...