Pamela's niteThai take-out
Oswald Morris papers via University of Exeter:
Oswald (‘Ossie’) Morris (1915- ), cinematographer, OBE, BSC, was born on 22 November in Middlesex. One of the most significant cameramen of the post-war era, Ossie began his career working as a projectionist during his school holidays. In 1932, he left school to become an apprentice in the film industry, with his first job as a clapperboy on After Dark (1932) at Associated Sound Film Industries, Wembley. During WWII, Morris served as a bomber pilot for the Royal Air Force, and returned to the film industry when the war ended. After some experience as an operator at Pinewood in 1946, he was given his first film to light in 1950.
His career took off properly in 1952 when he was asked to take over the photography of the film Moulin Rouge, which was to become a milestone in Technicolour photography. He continued to develop new trends in colour cinematography in Moby Dick (1956). He was also equally at home in black and white, working with Vittorio De Sica on Selznick’s Stazione Termini (1953). His first feature film as photographer was Look Back in Anger (1959), with well-known classics such as The Guns of Navarone (1961), Lolita (1961), The Hill (1965), Oliver! (1968) (nominated for an Oscar in 1968) and Goodbye Mr Chips (1969) following in quick succession. Pumpkin Eater (1964) won a BAFTA for Best Black and White Cinematography in 1964. He then won an Oscar in 1971 for Fiddler on the Roof (1971), which was shot through a brown silk stocking in order to portray the colours of the Yugoslavian landscape on screen. Other 1970s films include Sleuth (1972), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Man who would be King (1975) and The Wiz (1978) (nominated for an Oscar in 1978), a re-make of The Wizard of Oz. Prior to his retirement in 1982, Morris photographed The Great Muppet Caper (1981) and The Dark Crystal (1982) with Jim Henson. In 1997 he was awarded an OBE, and was a Recipient of a Fenton Medal, Royal Photographic Society in 2001.
Henri de Tolouse-Lautrec via
Wikipedia:
At ages 13 and 14, Henri fractured his left and right
thigh bones, respectively. The breaks did not heal properly (modern physicians attibute this to an unknown
genetic disorder along the lines of
osteoporosis or
osteogenesis imperfecta), and his legs ceased to grow, so that as an adult he was only 4'6" (1.4m) tall, having developed an adult-sized torso but retained his child-sized legs.
Physically unable to participate in most of the activities typically enjoyed by men his age, Toulouse-Lautrec immersed himself in his art. He became an important post-Impressionist painter, art nouveau illustrator, and lithographer and recorded in his works many details of the late-19th century bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec also contributed a number of illustrations to the magazine Le Rire during the mid-1890s.
He was declared to be "the soul of Montmartre", the Parisian quarter where he made his home. His paintings portray life at the Moulin Rouge and other Montmartre and Parisian cabaret and theaters, and in the brothels that he frequented (and where he perhaps contracted syphilis). 
Two of the well-known people he portrayed were singer Yvette Guilbert, and Louise Weber, known as the outrageous La Goulue, a dancer who created the "French Can-Can."
Toulouse-Lautrec gave painting lessons to Suzanne Valadon, one of his models (and, by all accounts, probably his mistress as well, from whom he is believed to have contracted syphilis).
An alcoholic for most of his adult life, he was placed in a sanatorium shortly before his death. He died from complications due to alcoholism and syphilis just before his 37th birthday, at the family estate in Malromé; he is buried in Verdelais, Gironde, a few kilometres from his birthplace. His last words were reportedly "Vieil imbécile!" ("Old fool"), in reference to his father, who was present at the scene.
After his death, his mother, the Comtesse Adèle Toulouse-Lautrec, and Maurice Joyant, his art dealer, promoted his art. His mother contributed funds for a museum to be built in Albi, his birthplace, to house his works. As of 2005, his paintings had sold for as much as $14.5 million.
Stuart's NiteDespite a highly talkative (and rustically profane) script by Rudolph Wurlitzer, it’s a nearly plotless movie that — at its best — communicates its points indirectly, in shadowy bits of irony that constantly redouble on each other. It’s a film almost baroque in its unevenness, with the warring blood between Peckinpah and Wurlitzer, his producers and himself leading to sundry lapses of judgment and care: a main character who’s more Rorschach test than flesh and blood; a woozy, anxious turn by an untrained leading actor; pages of overripe dialogue; downright toxic performances from a cadre of supporting players; and a Bob Dylan score that often works against the grain of what’s happening up on the screen. To cap it all off Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was never authoritatively “finished,” with the optimal available version — the so-called “director’s cut” — still falling miserably short of a fine cut and missing a key scene to boot. As problematic Westerns go, it makes The Searchers look like a cakewalk.
Rudolph Wurlitzer built his screenplay around the happily elastic fact that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid knew each other in some capacity before Garrett became a lawman,* but it would take a major assist from Peckinpah for a story whose foregone conclusion is its very point to take on dramatic shape, and thus solve a problem that’s led so many directors of Christ-figure epics around by the nose.
The Stations of the Cross here are splayed out across a lunar New Mexican landscape, and consist of vignettes, most of them formed as parables or mood-poems, that often end in an act of violence that redirects the principals in some way, with each reorientation bringing the two men that much closer to their final meeting. If not for its bloodletting the movie might play more like opera bouffe than existential drama: Garrett spends his time resolutely avoiding Billy’s hideout, choosing instead to share a few words with seemingly every man, woman and child in Lincoln County before he’s finally moved to finish the job.
In Pat Garrett’s world character is often revealed through inaction, leading to a movie about, in producer Gordon Carroll’s unbeatable description, “a man who doesn’t want to run … being pursued by a man who doesn’t want to catch him.”
Wurlitzer had sold the screenplay on the strength of his script for Two-Lane Blacktop, another existential scarecrow, but while his new Western was much admired, its two main characters didn’t come together until the climax. Recognizing that a more clearly defined conflict was needed, Peckinpah added the scene at the beginning in which Garrett visits the Kid at Fort Sumner and gives him five days to leave the territory. It’s a beautifully modulated exchange, rife with the undercurrents of a nettled friendship, as Garrett — mindful of the ear-shot proximity of Billy’s gang — tersely delivers his message to Billy, who, tenderly, and at times almost pathetically, tosses up reminders of their shared past.
Peckinpah also added the movie’s most inspired stroke, the stark black-and-white prologue set some 30 years in the future that shows Garrett being bushwhacked for reasons rooted in his dealings with the Kid. The sequence, completed in the editing room, is a marvel of implication, as first Billy and his gang, and then Garrett himself, are seen in 1881 firing a fusillade of bullets into the Garrett of 1909, bringing home how tightly woven the deterministic web is that binds the two men. The sequence’s visceral power comes from the interplay between the gang’s unwittingly callous by-play — “Damn near perfect” one of them opines as a slug tears out yet another chunk of the old man’s body — with the off-kilter angles and oddly-timed freeze-frames depriving Garrett of any of the majesty that graced Joel McCrea in his descent to the bottom of the frame in Ride the High Country. This brutal opening, one of Peckinpah’s finest set pieces outside of The Wild Bunch, puts its audience on instant notice that nothing pretty is coming its way.
