Because, by the time this report on the current pulse and fever chart of Broadway makes its appearance, the Old Vic Company will have, Arab-like, folded its tents and departed for its native London, and because, too, its skirmishes with the Muse have been so widely and comprehensively reported already, this department will make no detailed report of the many talents of the British tarriers at the Century Theater.
Overcoming the disadvantage of being housed in New York's most preposterously uncomfortable and evilly maintained playhouse, where the nightly battles between the patrons and the house staff transcend in fury and uncouth exchanges anything witnessed by the English knights at Crécy or Harfleur, the visiting English hung up such a record for sustained triumphs that any reappearance in future years is assured the status of a national institution. His appearance here in the opening stanzas of Shakespeare's English historical cycle, which will presumably continue into Henry VIII and its conclusion at some later date, combined with the release of his stupendous film of Henry V, probably have achieved for Laurence Olivier the position of ranking living Shakespearean.
Briefly: if, as, and when the Old Vic troupers return to these shores, Americans will be well advised to put them down as an absolute “must” in their book of expected futures.
By the time this issue of GOURMET achieves public utterance there will have been made available to filmgoers what has already been widely publicized in advance by Time and other agencies as one of the authentically great motion pictures of the era. The Theater Guild's presentation of Laurence Olivier's Henry V has already caused a great deal of trepidation in Hollywood and is certain to cause even more grief and local soul-searching when it is popularly released, if for no other reason than that the technique of its photography so far transcends anything ever done in color in this country as to make American color films by comparison the merest off-register comic supplements held up to the finest Powers color plates. Whether it is the patience of English genius, a photogenic quality of the Irish sunlight in which the battle scenes of Henry V were filmed, or chemical processes as yet unknown to the laboratories of Rochester and Los Angeles, this department does not pretend to know. The fact stands that never to date has any motion picture, American or foreign, been possessed of the richness, fidelity, and opulence of tone values which Henry V brings to the filming of the depiction of the Battle of Agincourt, the French court of the period, the Globe Theater of Shakespeare's London, or the entire tapestry of Middle Ages chivalry represented by the story.
Henry V was conceived by Mr. Olivier and the British authorities in the height of the wars as a noble and moving fragment of Commonwealth propaganda, a sort of spiritual oriflammed for the rallying of English loyalties everywhere in the tradition of an earlier Noel Coward Cavalcade. Released and witnessed in times of comparative peace, it is still the most authentic Shakespeare ever to have been filmed and a document of incomparable chivalry and beauty.
There is no opportunity here for any reviewing of the entirety of this most masterly two and a half hours of medieval pageantry, much of it filmed in twodimensional focus to achieve a brilliant verisimilitude of pre-Renaissance pictorial art. If there is any more profound symbolism to the cresting tide and its abatement at Agincourt of armored chivalry as represented by the mounted knights of France, it has been understated in the picture in favor of the sheer heroic cyclorama of war at the dawn of the age of gunpowder. The superlative shot of the mounted court of France drinking its battle toast against the lily banners a moment before the English archers ended forever the supremacy of individual chivalry is perhaps, in its achievement and its implications, the most stupendous scene ever recorded in motion pictures.
By the time this brief memorandum is available, Henry V will have become common currency over and above all the opposition of the embattled booking agencies for American films. There is no single Hollywood production since The Birth of a Nation that will not seem a shabby essay in cheap and meretricious romance by comparison.
MANHATTAN GLITTER: The exciting news to roaming gourmets that C. D. and Connie Stearns have again opened their celebrated Bird and Bottle Inn at Garrison, just off the Albany Post Road (and within handy seltzer squirt of Brown's Health Farm). This amiable outpost of the gustatory humanities boasts a classic cuisine and hand-picked cellars and, should the mood overcome you, you can spend the night on the premises and, in fact, stay around as long as your banker will advance you credit… The sight of the venerable Pat Rafferty, long king of the Plaza jehus and retired these past few years, back again on the box of his victoria, although he is past eighty and not what could be described as slender. He's one of the really old-time cabbies and not just a stable boy with a plug hat, and has known all the swells since the golden days of Bustanoby's and Rector's.… The intelligence from Charles H. Baker, Jr., a brother practitioner of gracious guzzling and inspired ingestion, that his Gentleman's Companion, a two-volume variorum guide to exotic eating and drinking, has sold to date 60,000 copies at a luxury price and is going into new printings all the time.… The wonderful Hawaiian pineapples standing two feet high in the window of the Madison Grocery and Hicks, symbols that trans-Pacific happy days are here again at least.… Luncheon these days at the Colony where, at one recent luncheon sitting, the observer could count eight monocles, two archdukes, two ambassadors, two ministers, and enough small fry—English titles, Powers models, and magazine executives—to fill Yankee Stadium.… The upper case military clientele any evening at the Del Bello Inn at Stony Point on the Hudson. It's a favorite with the plush West Point trade and its management was trained in magnificences at El Morocco under the incomparable Carino.… The renewed availability, after several years, of the most magnificent champagne of the living generation, Moët and Chandon's unsurpassable Dom Perignon Cuvée in a new bottling, 1928, which is the successor to the now almost vanished 1921 vintage which rocked the wine world on its heels, both literally and metaphorically. … The unanimous report of all local luxury hotel proprietors, wine stewards, and restaurateurs that the town is on the biggest champagne binge in the history of silver ice buckets.… “It doesn't make any difference how many hundred cases of what brand, what year, or what cuvée we get into the cellar,” reports Prince Serge Obolensky at the Plaza, “it is all sold before the steward is able to place his next order.”… At the Colony and Jack and Charlie's it is the same. “The reason we don't have printed wine cards any more is that we'd be out of any single bin of imported wine before we could get a printer to set it in type,” reports Gene Cavallero.… The same is pleasantly true of almost all luxury food and drink and the country has never before extended itself to such gustatory proportions of elegance as since the end of hostilities.… Incidentally, at the ever up and coming Plaza you can, if you are friends with the management, have at the same price as any other suite of rooms, one decorated by Lady Mendl or Cecil Beaton if it's not at the moment occupied.… Rolls Royce Motor Company plans include a stupendous comeback in the United States now that times have returned when so many potential customers think nothing of paying ＄18,000 for an automobile, and plenty of folk are in the market for cars by the half dozen!. …
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