Just a little preview of Alberto Bontempi’s wonderful art for Hope & Glory…
Four from Hope & Glory
Category Archives: My Projects
The Barbarian, 1933
“In the older days, they’d have built the Nile for you. Nowadays, films have become travelogues and actors, stuntmen.”
(Bette Davis, while filming “Death on the Nile”, 1978)
And so, on Christmas night, I went and watched The Barbarian, also known as A Night in Cairo. Not exactly a Christmas movie, as we’ll see. The movie features Myrna Loy and Ramon Novarro, and was directed by Sam Wood in 1933.
While the name might not ring any bell, Wood was the man behind the camera for A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Raffles, and The Pride of the Yankees, For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Not an amateur, in other words.
The movie is a remake of a previous, silent film, called The Arab (1915), and based on a play of the same title.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I wanted to see the movie because of the reconstruction of the Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. Because, true to the Bette Davis quote above, this pre-Code movie was really shot in a time in which the studios recreated whole chunks of exotic locations in their backlot. Continue reading
The Curse of Fantomah
This is a strange story.
It connects a pulp bad guy from 1929, a Japanese superhero from 1931, an American superhero from 1940, and an Italian master criminal from 1964.
The lot, because of my idea of doing something new with Fantomah.
Fantomah, as you’ll remember, was the jungle queen/daughter of the pharaohs created in 1940 by Fletcher Hanks,later variously re-imagined, and currently on the public domain. In her original incarnation she was a statuesque blonde that turned into a gray-blue skinned, skull-faced super-witch.
Now here’s my idea: in AMARNA1, one of the characters is a pulp magazine reader. He always carries a folded pulp mag in his back pocket. So, I thought I’ll make him read my stories about Fantomah, as published by Spicy Oriental Adventures (a title that, as far as I know, never existed). The idea, in other words, is to write and publish a serial-within-the serial. Short 3000-words episodes presenting my own take on Fantomah, as explained in a previous post.
It sounded easy, it sounded fun.
I would call this serial-within-a-serial The Curse of Fantomah.
Then, I started thinking about Fantaman, and my project started spiraling out of control. Continue reading
A Christmas’ Eve adventure
It was a bit of Indiana Jones stuff, you see…
OK, let’s start from the beginning.
Yesterday being Christmas’ Eve, my brother and I decided to treat ourselves with a hearty French onion soup. Nothing too complicated, but good and healthy, and unusual enough on our table that it feels like a festive dish.
We had the ingredients and the recipe down to pat, but we still faced a problem: finding two decent-sized bowls in which to cook the soup in the oven, and then serve it. So I started digging in the cupboards, looking for some fitting container.
No luck.
I moved to our father’s wine cellar, where we do not go normally now that our father’s not with us anymore, neither of us being a wine-drinker. Continue reading
Glass Houses for Christmas
Get yourself a copy of Glass Houses , the first Hope & Glory novella, free on DriveThruRPG.
And Merry Christmas!
C. Aubrey Smith
This is very very circuitous.
I was looking for details about A Night in Cairo, a 1933 movie better known as The Barbarian – a pre-Code movie that features Ramon Novarro and Myrna Loy.
The reason is simply explained.
First, of course, there is my veneration for Myrna Loy, especially in her younger roles. And second, the movie is set in a Cairo hotel that is a pretty close reconstruction of the Shephaerd’s Hotel… that is the place in which the first episode of AMARNA opens.
So, research, and Myrna Loy – and her famous bath-tub and rose petals scene…
While I was looking for more details about The Barbarian, I checked out the cast listing, and I found a name that’s well known to lovers of old movies: C. Aubrey Smith.
And I thought, what the heck, I might as well do a post about the old chap. Continue reading
Karavansara 