Dirty Cookie
Now Playing: Fela Anikulapo-Kuti--"Just Like That"
I was once called the above by one of my all-time favorite co-workers, in response to my characterizing the appearance of an autumn spice cookie as "pert." I'll always treasure that moment.

Charles Laughton probably knew the secret shame of a dirty cookie's life, at least on the silver screen. I decided to stay in most of Sunday and watch a few movies, the most memorable being Jamaica Inn (1938). Set amid the sea-girt terrors of early nineteenth century Cornwall, it was apparently Hitchcock's last major flick before coming to America, and features the hot young Maureen O'Hara as a woman trying to unravel the mystery surrounding her sweaty, hirsute uncle (an unusually rough-edged Leslie Banks, so dapper in The Most Dangerous Game, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Sanders of the River) and a local gang of smugglers. It's unexpectedly gripping and evocative, with a nightmarish beginning that seems rather violent for a movie made in the late thirties, and good performances, especially from O'Hara. It's Laughton's movie, though--as the corpulent squire, he manages to embody unctuous creepiness and possible lunacy with such skill that he actually seemed scary, and he certainly didn't do me that way in an officially "scary" role as Dr. Moreau in Island of Lost Souls (1933). The guy was a genius. Strangely, Jamaica Inn somehow made it into Harry Medved's Fifty Worst Films of All Time (not so shocking in retrospect; so did Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible Part II), which I worshipped in high school. No matter how spurious some of the choices now seem, I'll always remember that one still of Laughton with an unspeakably smug, self-satisfied smirk on his face captioned "Sir Humphrey Pengallon (Charles Laughton) looks on in abject terror."