Nosh 184: 'Harry Potter' (Revisited), Kirk Douglas & More

David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Harry Potter Revisited)

Back to a mythic past that has not aged, and which recently came back to me in a very pleasing way:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Revisited)

Some movies spawn much more than sequels. Definitive example: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Perfectly timed, it arrived as generous British balm two months after the trauma of 9-11-01. It also perfectly fit my family’s timetable. As Harry Potter’s movie adventures began at age 11, my daughter Sabrina was a year older, son Travis a year younger. Their adolescence would evolve in parallel sync with their movie heroes. Orphan Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), destiny’s tot, will eventually confront and confound destiny’s rot, the evil genius Lord Voldemort. New school pal Ron (Rupert Grint), a delightful rubber-faced worrier, will prove a warrior under pressure (and ace at chess). Classmate Hermione (Emma Watson), her prim Pekinese face under a bushel of hair crowning a superb brain, is the feminine elixir in the story potion. Raising a proud grind’s hand for every school question, preening her spells and witch’s wand (a rather Freudian challenge to soon-pubertal boys), she often serves as the saga’s mascot, guide and evaluator.

In a San Diego theater on Nov. 15, 2001, the glory started with a rescue, a train ride and Harry’s gaping arrival at the castle of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Scotland. Hogwarts, as packed as a Victorian fruitcake, is Harry’s providential such-muchness after lean years with his crazily mean foster family of muggles (non-magic folk). My kids, at heart never muggles, were eagerly mugged by the movie’s plenitude, and the bond with Harry and his pals was sealed for life. Potter fervor was kept bubbling by book purchase events, part of author J.K. Rowling’s growing empire. With mother Valerie’s guidance everyone was soon dutifully reading except … me. I knew the coming movies were honor-bound to tell the tale faithfully, and as a critic I waved one magic wand: free tickets. Never bothering to learn all the Britannic Talmudic intricacies, I simply enjoyed the brilliant, cascading entertainment with the happiest audience I had joined since the 1977 Christmas feast of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A month later the kids would be dazzled (if never so loyally) by the first Lord of the Rings, a visually impressive series but, to my mind, hurt by its almost metronomic tick-tock of big violence and plot palaver.

Onward with Harry! Six more Potters arrived, including two for the teased-out climax, each film imposingly offered and piously received, with loads of foreshadowing and nearly Wagnerian repetition. I worried that some nerve-gnawing scenes and creatures were too much for young children. But kids like danger, if safely screen-contained (and for many in this case, book-primed). In my prehistoric youth I survived the dog death of Old Yeller, a man consumed by army ants in The Naked Jungle and the freaky Martian death-rays of War of the Worlds. Now we feasted on Rowling’s Voldemort myth (finally revealed as bald, evil-grinning Ralph Fiennes) in a fairy weave of curses, spells, mutations and showdowns. We were in good hands, Sorcerer’s Stone directed with British high craft more than theme park tropes by an American, Chris Columbus (good name to launch a franchise!). There is a titanic troll (but stupid, thus funny). Some blood-draining of a dead unicorn, seen at a rather Disney distance. A gigantic chess match is paced by John Williams’s stirring score, Holst-like, with an Alice in Thunderland quality.

Nothing to come, however lavish or anticipated, could ever entirely match that first cornucopia, the revelation of 11-15-01: Santa-bearded headmaster Albus Dumbledore, most humane of wizards (parch-voiced but resonant Richard Harris, whose death after two Potters brought the role to stately Michael Gambon); the Hogwarts owls, flying fluffballs of mail delivery; immense oil portraits that speak and move; Hermione’s snippy tartness (“It’s Levi-ó-sa, not Levios-á”) masking a bookworm’s loneliness; the slashing Quidditch match of aerial combat on magic brooms; the kindly giant Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane), his very bulk a safe house; the great piggy awfulness of Richard Griffith’s Uncle Vernon; the stern but loving acerbity of Prof. McGonagall (Maggie Smith); Ron’s charming fretfulness, before he merges chess and courage; gnarly John Hurt as wand master Ollivander; the pure, simple marvel of train platform 9¾ in London. Any nits are barely zits, though I was surely not alone in finding Harry a bit generic, a wonder lad more Tom Sawyer than Huck Finn – but adorable, and deeply cherished.

For the Elliotts one figure stood out like a strange knave in a Gothic nave, the sexy and menacing, black-robed and raven-haired Professor Snape. Alan Rickman pours his shadow-crepe voice through ironclad diction, his every moody pause a gulf of mystery. The potions master knows more than he can tell, and polishes every sentence. “I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory and even put a stopper in death” was as near Shakespeare as any childhood classic need go. Rickman, who once purred “I have a love-hate relation with white silk,” made it through the series quite poignantly, then died in 2016. Far more than a villain, Snape is his marker of immortality.   

Inevitably the franchise, profit-gorged (total take now over $10 billion), would wobble some, resorting at last to a rather conventional battle crescendo. We remained as devout as sworn knights, and the binders of our fidelity were the central triple, the Hogwarts chums. The showmanship felt very wand-spun, more Arthurian than 21^st century (none of the groaning futurism of the Star Wars and Star Trek series). As Voldemort’s cold spirit became more visible, we bunkered more into the beneficent warmth of the Hogwarts spirit (an attack on the school is almost unbearable). To absorb this fantasy is to live it, and we were lucky. We were the first Potter generation.

On Jan. 31, 2020, it all came back, like a potion of nostalgic nectar. The grown “kids” provided Valerie and me with a concert hall viewing, the Eugene Symphony briskly hitting its orchestral marks below the screen, with music-stand lights twinkling up at Hogwarts. Looking around at the captivated crowd, often cheering or villain-booing, I knew that some fans were, like us, vets of the first-gen. And some had brought their children to discover the joy, for Harry Potter’s gold is not the billions earned but the many millions pleased. Once again a storm of imagination blessed our hopes, shivered our nerves, widened our eyes, gladdened our hearts, made magic seem not only real but everlasting.

SALAD (A List)

The Best Movies of Kirk Douglas (1916-2020)
Quite a man, well beyond movies. My choices (with director, year):

Paths of Glory (Kubrick 1957), The Bad and the Beautiful (Minnelli 1952), Lust for Life (Minnelli 1966), Spartacus (Kubrick 1960), Out of the Past (Tourneur 1947), Strangers When We Meet (Quine 1960), Ace in the Hole (Wilder 1951), Seven Days in May (Frankenheimer 1961), Champion (Robson 1949), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Fleischer 1954), The Juggler (Dmytryk 1953), In Harm’s Way (Preminger 1965), Detective Story (Wyler 1951), The Fury (De Palma, 1978), Lonely Are the Brave (Miller 1962) and The Vikings (Fleischer 1958).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Devoted liberal Kirk Douglas was not hounded by the McCarthyite Red hunters, but he helped end the terror when he hired blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to write Spartacus (photo above, with Douglas and Jean Simmons). Orson Welles dealt with the trauma 18 years earlier, when the Hearst press and the American Legion smeared him as a Party member. Welles fired back: “William Randolph Hearst is conducting a series of brutal attacks on me. It seems he doesn’t like my picture Citizen Kane. I understand he hasn’t seen it … I am not a Communist. I am grateful for our constitutional form of government, and I rejoice in our great American tradition of democracy. Needless to say, it is not necessarily unpatriotic to agree with Mr. Hearst … If it weren’t sad, it would be silly. William Randolph Hearst is piqued with Orson Welles. The rest is camouflage.”  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As an art-mad  boy I “fell hard for Hollywood’s gospel of art. John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952) iconized Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956) enshrined Vincent van Gogh. Lautrec was José Ferrer, with a voice like burning brandy. Van Gogh was Kirk Douglas, flame-haired volcano. Art lover Vincent Price would call Lust ‘the most moving moving picture I ever saw.” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.) 

DESSERT (An Image)

One of the longest surviving stars from Hollywood’s classic studio era, Kirk Douglas died on Feb. 5 at age 103. As an architect, his secret, hopeless romance with Kim Novak in Strangers When We Meet featured one of his more sensitive performances (Columbia Pictures 1960; director Richard Quine, d.p. Charles Lang).

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