Bilbo Baggins has Sailed into the West

I was sorry to hear of the death of Sir Ian Holm, aged 88. His death was related to Parkinson's disease.

For me he was the perfect Frodo Baggins, in the BBC radio series of Lord of the Rings, and he was also the perfect Bilbo Baggins in the Peter Jackson films.
But there was far more to his career than that - I think I first became aware of him as an actor in Jesus of Nazareth in the mid 1970s, where he played one of the Sadducees.
He also had a busy and varied film career. He played Ash in the first Alien film, Jonathan Pryce's boss in Brazil, King John in Robin and Marion, and many more. His last film role was as the older Bilbo in The Battle of Five Armies, in 2014.
He did a lot of Shakespeare on stage and on film, including Polonius in Mel Gibson's film of Hamlet and Fluellen in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V.
He was knighted in 1998 for his services to drama.
He was married four times, and had five children.

Bell, Book and Candle

I've seen a lot of James Stewart films over the years, but this one seems to have passed me by until now. I saw it mentioned in a blog about classic films (I forget which one), thought it looked interesting, and sent off for it - and what great fun it is!
James Stewart had already starred alongside Kim Novak earlier in 1958, in Vertigo - this film is a lot more light hearted, with Kim Novak playing a witch who decides to seduce the batchelor who lives upstairs - James Stewart. To add interest, he's about to marry someone she detested at college. The film also has good roles for Elsa Lanchester as Kim Novak's auntie who lives upstairs (also a witch), Hermoine Gingold (another witch) and Jack Lemmon (Kim Novak's brother, and a warlock).
James Stewart is a publisher, so a further complication to the plot is a writer who is writing a book about the magical scene in Manhattan, aided and abetted by Jack Lemmon.
And then there's Pyewacket, the Siamese cat who assists with Kim Novak's magic - and has to do some pretty complicated things onscreen (apparently there were several cats in the role).
The cinematography is by James Wong Howe, so the film always looks gorgeous.
It's fairly obvious that James Stewart and Kim Novak are having hot sex from their very first encounter, but the only onscreen indication of this is a variety of passionate and fully clothed kisses, and one scene where they are sitting together on a couch, fully clothed, with their bare feet entwined.

Pimpernel Smith

I happened to catch the second half of a new dramatization of The Scarlet Pimpernel on Radio 4 over Christmas.
It was a bit odd, to be honest. Marguerite and Chauvelin had Northern accents - I suppose to indicate that they were lower class French people - and Sir Percy sounded more French than either of them! But it did remind me of the original film Pimpernel, Leslie Howard, and his 1941 anti-Nazi propaganda film Pimpernel Smith, which I remembered with some fondness.
So I sent off for a DVD.
There is, of course, a scene of horrendous sexism at the beginning of the film, where Professor Smith insults the women archaeology students so that they leave the lecture hall, so that he can offer a trip to Germany for a summer dig only to the young men. This is a cover for the activities of the mysterious man who has been spiriting intellectuals out of Germany from under the noses of the Gestapo - the year is 1939. The mysterious man is, obviously, Professor Smith, who is not the typical absentminded professor of archaeology that he appears.
The film was obviously made on a very tight budget, but they disguise it well, especially in the scene at the party in the British Embassy in Berlin, with the wide, sweeping staircase.
In the original Scarlet Pimpernel story, Chauvelin is trying to discover the identity of the Pimpernel at a ball, and is blackmailing Marguerite to help him because her brother is imprisoned in France. In this case, it is General von Graum who is trying to discover the identity of the mysterious rescuer of intellectuals, with the help of Ludmilla, the daughter of a Polish newspaper editor who he has imprisoned.
She makes a very bad secret agent, though the young American archaeology student (I assume he was there to encourage the United States to join the war on the Allied side) pretty much gives the whole game away when he talks to her. Von Graum manipulates her quite easily, but he can't just arrest an Englishman - he has to have the proof that he's helping Germans to escape.
There's a fair bit of comedy as the Nazis try to work out what the tune is that the mysterious rescuer whistles, and a running joke about the identity of Shakespeare, as well as von Graum trying to get to grips with English humour: "'T'was brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe' - is that funny?" he demands.
Meanwhile, there's a romantic sub-plot as Professor Smith changes from a man besotted with the statue of Aphrodite he discovered twenty years before, who says that he deplores the presence of women students at the university, into someone who has romantic feelings for Ludmilla, who he goes back to rescue when the rest of the party crosses the frontier.
As in the original story, the Scarlet Pimpernel and Chauvelin talk at the end of the story, with Chauvelin anticipating the Pimpernel's death by firing squad very shortly, so Professor Smith and von Graum come face to face at a railway station on the frontier, where Professor Smith gives a fine speech opposing Nazism, before escaping with the words: "I'll be back.... We'll all be back."
Those speeches opposing Nazism are still relevant today - sadly.

So, though it's an old and somewhat creaky film, I think it's still worth rewatching.
And without Pimpernel Smith, there might not have been an Indiana Jones....