#*slaps scene* This baby can fit so much melodrama into it | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bellatrixobsessed1 · 3 years ago

Text

When A Bird Dies

Pair: Alcina/Mia

Summary: After Mother Miranda’s death, Alcina feels lost. She uses wine to cope and Mia tries to help her find a purpose.

AN: This one shot was inspired by Rosegarden Funeral Party’s Once In A While. It’s my first time writing Mia so apologies if it’s somewhat OOC. Ngl I was kind of just typing here and hoping for the best xD

Sometimes when she gets insecure, she gets drunk. And the lady is a woefully sloppy and unrefined drunk. Sometimes she drinks when she is sad. Mia doesn’t understand why she does this, the drinks only heighten her sorrow and leave her a sobbing mess.

On these nights, Mia wishes that she could carry the lady to bed. Lift her right off her feet and tuck her in. Perhaps rub her back until she comes back to herself. Her poised and fierce self. Back to the Alcina who speaks of skinning men alive and tasting their delectable blood.

But sometimes, the woman curled up and sobbing on the floor isn’t of any intrigue to Mia. She is a pitiful thing. And sometimes a disgusting sniveling thing. Really, Mia thinks that she ought to take the woman’s wine from her. Sometimes she grows tired of what it can reduce Dimitrescu to.

“You would do this in front of your daughters?” Mia asks.

“My daughters aren’t here.”

“Yes, they’re off fetching and bedding maidens.” She comments dryly. Sometimes bitterness gets the best of her. Sometimes she finds herself slipping and lapsing into something that she isn’t proud of, not even slightly. Maybe the woman in front of her is wearing off on her. Maybe it is this village infecting her just as swiftly as the mold.

“How dare you?” Lady Dimitrescu growls. She wipes her eyes, smearing mascara and foundation. Her face is twisted into a furious, almost feral snarl. Double so with crimson of blood-wine staining her teeth. “Talk about my daughters like that…” she slurs. “I’ve never said an ill word of that Rose.”

She could slap the woman. She very well should. Dimitrescu knows well that Rose is a subject not to be spoken of. Even years later it still stings to think of having to let the baby go. To think of having to let Ethan go. To have watched them make their way out of the village with only a glance back.

To know that the mold has infected and warped her so beyond repair that she had to let the two of them go and remain here amid the other freaks and monsters. And only this one, this sorry drunk had taken pity on her. Mia supposes that calling her a drunk is a bit of a stretch. She only drinks when she thinks. And lately she has been doing a lot of thinking. She says that she thinks until her head hurts. Undoubtedly she misses Mother Miranda, the wretched beast.

Without Mother Miranda she is both stronger and weaker. She is bolder, freer. Bolder, freer, and sadder. Though sometimes Mia thinks that it is merely a melodrama, that the mutant just wants attention. And with nothing better to do, Mia gives it to the woman. Most of the time she only dimly recalls having received any affection at all.

And maybe it is her maternal side that does the talking and moving. Her maternal side that compels her to help the tall lady to her unsteady feet. “You’re going to have to stop this.” Mia sighs. “You’re a lot stronger than this.”

.oOo.

Alcina shakes her head. These days she doesn’t feel much like that. Between Mother Miranda’s great fall and her own at the hands of Ethan Winters, she has found herself feeling rather inadequate.

Her weakness now runs so deep that she can’t even bring herself to go through with her vengeance. To drive a claw through one end of Mia and out the other and deliver the corpse straight to her husband and his wretched daughter.

Right now her head hurts too much to stand, let alone skewer a woman. And even if she had the ability she is coming to find that she has quite a soft spot for Mia. To think that she has fallen so low that she finds herself fancying a human. She is lucky that her daughters aren’t here to see this. She resents it with a fury, but Mia is right. She needs to get herself together.

“Sit with me?” She pats a spot on her lap. The woman hesitates. “Sit with me.” She still hesitates but climbs into her lap all the same. “You know that I was thinking of bleeding you out? I was going to chain you to the ceiling just the way I did your husband.” She pauses, trying to detect fear or hatred on the woman’s face. It remains blank. Impassive and unphased. “I was going to taste your blood on my tongue, surely it tastes better than your husband’s. Woman…” she leans closer, hovers her lips over Mia’s exposed neck. “Women taste better. Sweeter, richer. They aren’t so dirty and stale.”

“And how does your blood taste, Lady Dimitrescu?”

She furrows her brows, admittedly, the question has thrown her. “My blood…”

“I don’t bleed.”

“Everyone bleeds, Lady Dimitrescu.” Mia seems to study her face. “You just bleed differently. I imagine that your blood tastes like wine. You drink enough of it.”

Her face colors. It helps her case very little that she is already quite tipsy. Tipsy and absurdly emotional. She understands why Mia isn’t quite so intimidated by her today. “I do not bleed.” She repeats again.

“You would hemorrhage if your daughters died. Mother Miranda died and look at you...you’re bleeding all over the place.” She reaches up and wipes a tear from Alcina’s eye. “It’s depressing and fascinating to watch.” She pauses. “I’ve looked after a mutant before. Eveline. The infected definitely bleed. The hurt and cry just the way we do. You wouldn’t even know that some of them are mutated.”

Alcina cringes, “don’t you dare compare me to…”

“Humans?” Mia asks. “You were human once.”

“That...that was a very long time ago.” And there is not one part of her that wishes to return to that feeble, delicate state. “You’d do well not to bring it up again.” Where did she put the wine bottle? But the words have already well and settled upon her, she doesn’t think that more wine can drive them out this time.

Evidently she isn’t sure what to do. Isn’t sure that she has a purpose at all anymore. Donna has her dolls and Karl has his machines. She never thought that she would find herself near the same level as Salvatore--confused and lost.

She could continue to export her wines, she supposes. But that has lost its charm now that Mother Miranda won’t be around to stop in for a taste. To dully express a fondness for the drinks.

She has her girls but they have their own lives to live and now that the weather is warming, they are out and about more often.

“What shall I do, Mia?” She murmurs.

Mia’s face softens and the woman brings a hand to her cheek. Her hand is somewhat cold but the gesture has a warmth to make up for it. “About what? Your startling bloodlust?”

“What shall I do now that Mother Miranda is gone?”

“First you can put down the bottle.” She takes it right from Alcina’s hands and puts it aside. “And then you can start living your own life again. Your way.”

She isn’t sure that she remembers how.

“You used to enjoy jazz, yes?”

“Quite well.” She nods. And she still enjoys digging out an old record every now and then.

“Well, why don’t you put a record on, we can have dinner, and discuss how to get you back into the music industry.”

“I don’t believe that I fit into the scene anymore.” And she means it most literally.

“That’s what we’ll be talking about. I’d love to get out of this village every now and again. Perhaps you can do the singing and I can do some lip syncing?”

It isn’t such a horrid plan. If nothing else, it gives her something to fantasize about. Something to look forward to. And perhaps if she doesn’t kill the woman or corrode her soul completely--they might make a fine duo.

Mia casts a smile over her shoulder.

Sometimes, Alcina loses herself. At least this time she may have help finding herself.

#Alcina Dimitrescu #Lady Dimitrescu #Resident Evil #Alcina/Mia

18 notes · View notes

chiseler · 7 years ago

Text

IT’S QUARTER TO THREE... IDA LUPINO SINGS

“I have a lovely voice. I sang ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ five times. He was loaded.” Thus Ida Lupino explains how she came by a $50 tip in Private Hell 36, the last, leanest, and in many ways best of three films in which she played nightclub singers—canaries very much at home in the coal mine of noir. She makes a perfect 3 a.m. saloon singer, with a sound that brings its own dim lighting and haze of nicotine. She sings for the lonely, for the losers, but without a trace of tears or sentiment. That lovely voice is so dry it could be used to salt sidewalks. It belongs to a woman who has no more pity for others than she does for herself.

Girlishly slight, with big widely spaced eyes, Ida Lupino played a lot of hard-luck waifs with bruised hearts and faces. As Warner Brothers’ backup for Bette Davis she played a lot of glamorous sufferers and scenery-chewing neurotics. But playing women who sing for their supper, Lupino settled into another character: the wised-up, independent dame who more than holds her own in a man’s world ruled by muscles, money and guns.

In The Man I Love (Raoul Walsh, 1947), Lupino’s singing was dubbed by Peg La Centra. Her throaty contralto is fairly plausible coming from Lupino’s mouth, but it’s a rather glossy, weepy sound—a fitting sound for the rather glossy, weepy melodrama this turns out to be. Nonetheless, there is much to enjoy in the tale of a nightclub singer named Petey who visits her family in Los Angeles for Christmas, sorts out their problems (a wartime tsimmes of shell-shocked husbands, straying wives, and kid brothers falling in with bad company), while fending off a lecherous nightclub owner and smiling through an unhappy love affair.

Petey is a standard tough-on-the-outside, soft-in-the-center woman’s-movie heroine, who can easily stand up to a grief-crazed gunman (she simply steps in and beats the stuffing out of the would-be assassin, sending both him and his intended victim home with their tails between their legs) but who self-punishingly devotes herself to a man who treats her badly. She falls for San (Bruce Bennett), a once-promising pianist who has been stewing in booze and self-pity ever since being given the brush by his socialite wife. San is mopey and churlish, and he plays the kind of pretentious symphonic jazz that Hollywood took for high art, but we just have to buy that she loves him. Part of the problem, of course, is that he’s played by Bruce Bennett, who is adequate but lacks the dark appeal and tortured charisma that someone like Robert Ryan or John Garfield—both of whom had terrific chemistry with Lupino—could have supplied.

The real music in the film is not Lupino’s singing but her dialogue. The lines aren’t really so brilliant, as you realize if you try to quote them, but the quick, casual way she tosses them off creates the impression of someone so sharp, so with-it, that she can’t help herself. Take her marvelous exchange with a cab driver who spouts corny old saws; she responds with an off-hand, half-amused, half-annoyed teasing that goes completely over his head. A huge hit that marked Lupino’s peak as a popular star, The Man I Love illustrates two sides of her screen persona: one high-strung and emotional, the other wisecracking and deadpan—a “strong, aged-in-the-wood woman,” to borrow from another Gershwin tune.

Just such a dame takes the spotlight in Road House (Jean Negulesco, 1948). Eyeing her in a bar, a man remarks admiringly, “She reminds me of the first woman who ever slapped my face.”

This time Lupino does her own singing, thank you very much. The script gives her cover with a story about how she studied opera in her youth, was pushed too hard and lost her voice; and with the back-handed compliment delivered by Celeste Holm, “She does more without a voice than anyone I ever heard!” It also gives her terrific songs to sing and excellent, bluesy piano arrangements. Lupino was highly musical (it was in her blood—she was descended from a long line of English music-hall entertainers), and her delivery and sense of rhythm, conveyed as much by her naked shoulders as by her face or voice, make her entirely convincing as a professional. But that voice—hoarse, spent, like the sound of someone who gargles with cheap Scotch—needs no excuses. It’s not pretty or melodic, but it sounds the way a good drink makes you feel: dry, self-possessed, casting a calm and amused eye on its own depth of feeling. Lupino stakes a solid claim to the great Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer standard “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” which was written for Fred Astaire and claimed by Frank Sinatra. (It is interesting to note that the other essential saloon song, “Angel Eyes,” was introduced in the Lupino vehicle Jennifer, though she doesn’t sing it.) She makes “Again,” an alluring but potentially sappy tune, into an elegant vermouth concoction. And she really gets hot with the boogie-woogie number “The Right Kind,” standing up at the piano and giving way, just once, to uncomplicated enjoyment.

Like The Man I Love, Road House introduces Lupino as a tough cookie and then feels obliged to dunk her in a pretty soggy plot. Her early scenes are priceless: playing solitaire with her shoes off and her legs propped up on the desk of a man she’s never met; setting her cigarettes down on the edge of the piano while she plays, so they leave a row of burn marks like the notches on a gunfighter’s piece; slapping Cornel Wilde hard across the face and then crooning mockingly, “Silly boy.” She’s Lily Stevens, an entertainer from Chicago hired by the smitten Jefty (Richard Widmark) for his road house in the woods near the Canadian border. She’s magnificently jaded, with a bored mask of a face that dares you to judge her blonde hairdo rather silly; an air all the time of being detached, preoccupied, yet never missing a trick.

It might be credible that Lily would—out of sheer boredom in this wholesome one-horse town—decide to toy with Pete (Cornel Wilde), Jefty’s hostile, sulky right-hand man. But that she would find true love with this chiseled block of wood, who teaches her to bowl and takes her swimming in the lake, is not something one wants, at any rate, to believe. Halfway through, the movie shifts gears to become the story of an innocent couple persecuted by an obsessively jealous lunatic. Richard Widmark takes over, giving his fans what they want—maniacal giggles, spine-chilling cackles, and twisted streaks of pathos—but the story devolves into an overheated drama played out in a very fake sound-stage forest flooded by an overactive fog-machine.

Finally, in Private Hell 36 (1954), Lupino plays a canary who’s not required to trade her wry quips for damp hankies. By now the aging-in-wood process is complete. No smoke gets in her eyes, though there is plenty in her voice. Tears in her baby blues would be as out of place as rain-clouds in the Sahara, and her heart is now as bone-dry as her pipes. The one song she favors us with, more talked than sung, is a warning—or taunt—to any suitor that she won’t fall in love, she’s not like other women—“Didn’t you know?” The man she sings it to falls for her like a ton of bricks.

Her name is Lilli Marlowe, and when a cop who comes to question her suggests that sounds a little phony, she doesn’t deny it, but claims it’s so long since she used her real one that she can’t remember it. Bored with the interrogation, she quips, “You know, I’ve seen all this on Dragnet,” which hints at the movie’s attitude towards the genre conventions of the police procedural.

It starts like any standard-issue policier, with a robbery and murder that will spark the plot when some of the stolen money turns up in Los Angeles. A pair of detective sergeants, Cal (Steve Cochran) and Jack (Howard Duff), are assigned to track down the hot bills, which is how they wind up in a nightclub in the sleepy afternoon hours, pitching questions at the house chanteuse while she sits between them, giving nothing away except an endless supply of evasive, needling wisecracks.

Directed by Don Siegel and co-written by Lupino, Private Hell 36 was a production of The Filmmakers, the production company she formed with her then-husband Collier Young in 1948. Her original desire was to make socially conscious films about ordinary people: her early efforts cast a compassionate eye on unwed mothers (Not Wanted) and the handicapped (Never Fear). When these earnest films predictably failed to catch fire at the box office the company turned to crime, releasing tough, stripped-down gems like Lewis R. Foster’s Crashout and Lupino’s own masterpiece, The Hitch-Hiker. There was more pulp melodrama behind the scenes at The Filmmakers than in front of the camera. Lupino divorced Young but continued their business partnership; she married frequent co-star Howard Duff, though you would never guess there was anything between them from watching Private Hell 36, in which he shares a bed with Dorothy Malone while she plays sexy scenes with Steve Cochran. Collier Young would go on to marry Joan Fontaine, whom Lupino cast as her fellow wife in The Bigamist. One can only imagine what the mood was like on the sets of these films.

The central relationship in Private Hell 36 is between the two cops, longtime partners and friends but near opposites. Cal, introduced through a realistically violent brawl in which he shoots a would-be robber, is quickly established as glib, vain and callous. When Jack, a straight-arrow who has a wife and baby, mourns the death of a fellow cop, Cal shrugs, “Stop taking it so hard. He wasn’t your brother.” But the men have an easy, fraternal rapport; when Cal complains that the attempted robbery has made him late for a date, Jack suggests, “Tell her you’re sorry, you had to shoot a man. If she loves you she’ll understand.”

When the two finally track down the original thief and find a suitcase full of cash, Cal pockets some of it, urging his partner to “relax” and “take it easy.” Jack is horrified, and objects—yet he goes along with the theft, even as guilt poisons his life. Does he do it out of greed, out of loyalty to Cal, or out of fear of exposing his initial lapse? It’s hard to say, but his combination of righteous talk and weak will makes Jack hard to like, while the unscrupulous Cal grows more sympathetic as he falls for Lilli.

Their scenes together are the high point of the film. At first, they share that brand of hostile banter that film noir took over from screwball comedy, slowed down and left to simmer on the back burner. “If you’ve got time to kill, why don’t you blow your whistle and arrest somebody?” Lilli sneers when Cal shows up at her door. She doesn’t like cops. Cal pretends he’s come to follow up on the questioning about the man who gave her the $50; when he asks how long she’s known him, Lilli responds with bright bitterness, “All my life. Ever since I was a little girl I dreamed I’d meet a drunken slob in a bar who’d give me fifty bucks and we’d live happily ever after.” She takes most of the conversational tricks, but Cal can talk her language. When she sarcastically says she doesn’t know how to thank him, he leers, “I bet you do.”

If only life were like this.

Without the tiniest trace of effort, Lupino gives us a woman of the world; only the perfection of her jaded poise suggests how hard it was won. How old is she? Lupino was 36, but Lilli Marlowe is both ancient and ageless. She has heard all the questions and knows all the answers—to quote Barbara Stanwyck in The Purchase Price (1933), another world-weary nightclub singer who can’t sing worth a damn. Lilli is always tired; it always seems to be 3 a.m., and her feet hurt and her shoulders are sore and she’s seen it all and she’s sick of cops and drunks in bars who want you to sing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” while they cry in their beer. She lives in a drab hall bedroom with a small Scottie dog named Murgatroyd. But she hasn’t given up hoping—for a diamond bracelet, for a trip to Acapulco, for the right man to come along. More than any of these things, though, she wants her independence; to go where she wants and do as she pleases. When Cal starts getting too possessive, she tries to ditch him and head to Las Vegas.

Steve Cochran is on Lupino’s wavelength in a way that Howard Duff, onscreen, never was. Handsome and swarthy, Cochran played a lot of slick, cruel, egotistical gangsters like Big Ed in White Heat, probably his best-known role. But he was capable of much more, as he proved in Tomorrow is Another Day, an unusually delicate and character-rich B noir, and in Antonioni’s bleak, melancholy Il Grido. Cochran had a strangely sweet smile and an unexpectedly light voice; both could contribute to his icy menace, but they could also suggest a gentle soul under the macho exterior. As Cal, he portrays a shallow, selfish man who is nonetheless capable of tenderness and deep feeling; his love for Lilli is the one true thing in his grabby, amoral life.

Like so many noirs, Private Hell 36 (the number is that of the trailer Cal rents to stash their stolen loot) is about the corrupting force of money. Even Jack is not immune; when they spend time at the racetrack searching for a criminal, he speaks with bitter awe about the sight of so much money being tossed around like confetti, while he works hard for a modest living. Lilli is always talking about her desire for money and the things it buys, not so subtly implying that a man who wants her had better have the dough to afford her. Cal is acutely susceptible to this pitch, eager to dazzle her with his ill-gotten gains. She quickly intuits what he must have done and doesn’t blame him, but in the end she suddenly realizes that perhaps they don’t need the money; perhaps their love is enough.

Alas, this mature, intelligent, tough-minded film is badly marred by its ending. It’s a typically moralizing, simplifying, Code-imposed conclusion, made much worse by being far too abrupt, sketchy, and dependent on events that have happened off-screen. And it does not, as it should, give the last word to Lilli, though we can easily imagine how she will shrug her shoulders and keep going, not missing a beat. If she had the last word she would say: well, that’s how it goes. There’s no cure except to move on, so you might as well have one more for the road.

by Imogen Sara Smith

#Imogen Sara Smith #Ida Lupino #The Chiseler #noir #Private Hell 36

2 notes · View notes