httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj0u0jkYWHw

Bob Denham provided us a month or so ago with a list of movies that Frye either recorded seeing or referred to in some context (posted in the Denham Library here).  We’re going to put up as many of them as we can find.  Tonight it’s The Ghost Train, which Frye describes in his July 28th, 1942 diary entry:

Hot weather.  Went to show, an English mystery, “Ghost Train.”  Swell.  One of the things that interested me about it was the way the English can put the most typically English frozen-faced sourpussed jerks into the picture and preserve intact all their stupid stereotypes, & then when you’re just about to curse them for being such god-damned English jerks you suddenly realize the English have put them there.  It’s known, well-known in fact, as the “English Ability to Laugh at Themselves.”  I only hope it doesn’t breed a self-conscious paralysis the way the discovery of the ability to muddle through did. (CW 8, 17)