I love the Chiaroscuro effect of this illustration. It’s one of my favourites for colours and contrast. It’s the only one left and it’s now half price…

https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/151834179/super-sale-bazaar-russia-magazine-cover

FILM 1893: K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER

FILM 1893: K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER

TRIVIA: Upon reading the film's script, the surviving crew members were so incensed that they sent an open letter to Harrison Ford, Producer/Director Kathryn Bigelow, and Producers Christine Whitaker and Steven-Charles Jaffe, expressing their dismay. Among the less-than-credible details they objected to were profane language, the animosity between the two highest-ranking commanding officers, insubordination among the crew, drunk crew members, the attempted mutiny, the guns (which are kept under seal in a secret location) and the handcuffs (which were only used by and available to cops).

The director and producers of K-19 were the first Western civilians ever allowed inside the Russian naval base at the Kola Peninsula.

The movie set of the sub was identical in size to the actual K-19 sub, thanks to the K-19 blueprints that were available to the producers. Since the sub's corridors were very narrow, the filming camera rolled along a rail system implemented on the ceiling. The rails were painted so they would blend with the sub's interiors.

The blue glow inside the nuclear reactor is known as the Cherenkov effect. In order to simulate it, the crew poured seven hundred two-liter bottles of Canada Dry tonic water and illuminated the reactor with ultraviolet light. The tonic water contains quinine, which emits a bluish glow in the presence of ultraviolet light.

According to Jacob Pitts, during one scene, the Director of Photography was having trouble getting Harrison Ford's eye line. When he asked Ford where he was looking, Ford replied that he was looking into his soul. When the DP asked him where his soul was, he replied, "Under a pile of money."

The meter used in the scene where the ships doctor is checking the radiation dosimeters by inserting them into a dosimeter reader is not actually a reader at all. It is a modified Hewlett Packard (now Agilent) HP3555A/B Transmission Level/Noise test set used by telephone and communications technicians. This actual meter was not developed by HP until several years after the K19 incident. The method for reading dosimeters at the time was to look through them (like you would a telescope) and read the progression of an indicator on a ruler like scale.

Natalya Vintilova has the only female speaking role in the whole movie.

FILM 1793: THE EQUALIZER

FILM 1793: THE EQUALIZER

TRIVIA: The script originally has no back story about Robert, so Denzel Washington contributed much to the character's background and back story, including Robert having obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In addition to his daily physical and fight training before filming, Washington met and interviewed several real-life OCD people as to gain insights of how to play that disorder correctly.

Slavi refers to Robert as "dedushka" when they meet at the restaurant. This is Russian for "grandfather".

Teri was originally written for an older actress, but Chloë Grace Moretz impressed director Antoine Fuqua so much, he made the role younger.

Based on the classic television series starring Edward Woodward.

When McCall contacts the FBI after he takes over the money room and then leaves Detective Masters for the Boston PD, he asks for Agent Mosely. This is an easter egg to the Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin movie Midnight Run (1988). FBI Agent Mosely was played by Yaphet Kotto.

The book that McCall is reading after 'The Old Man & the Sea' is most likely 'Don Quijote de La Mancha', written by Miguel de Cervantes and published in 1605.

At the beginning, in Robert's home, when the bookcase is shown, there are leather bound books. These appear to be from the Franklin Library/Franklin Mint, these were offered as a set back in the '80s.

At the end of this film macall puts down a book the invisible man the star of this is edward Woodward The original equilizer

BOOK 145: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. It is the second of Dostoyevsky's full-length novels following his return from 10 years of exile in Siberia. Crime and Punishment is considered the first great novel of his "mature" period of writing.

Dostoyevsky conceived the idea of Crime and Punishment in the summer of 1865. At the time the author owed large sums of money to creditors, and was trying to help the family of his brother Mikhail, who had died in early 1864. Projected under the title The Drunkards, it was to deal "with the present question of drunkness ... [in] all its ramifications, especially the picture of a family and the bringing up of children in these circumstances, etc., etc." Once Dostoyevsky conceived Raskolnikov and his crime, now inspired by the case of Pierre François Lacenaire, this theme became ancillary, centering on the story of the Marmeladov family.

Despite its title, the novel does not so much deal with the crime and its formal punishment, as with Raskolnikov's internal struggle (the book shows that his punishment results more from his conscience than from the law). Believing society would be better for it, Raskolnikov commits murder with the idea that he possessed enough intellectual and emotional fortitude to deal with the ramifications, [based on his paper/thesis, "On Crime", that he is a Napoleon], but his sense of guilt soon overwhelms him to the point of psychological and somatic illness. It is only in the epilogue that he realizes his formal punishment, having decided to confess and end his alienation from society.

TRIVIA: When Crime and Punishment came up in an interview, Alfred Hitchcock told French director Francois Truffaut that he would never consider filming it. Hitchcock explained that he could make a great film out of a good book, and even (or especially) a mediocre book, but never a great book, because the film would always suffer by comparison.

FILM 1455: STALAG 17

TRIVIA: William Holden did not like the part of Sefton at all as written in the script, thinking him too selfish. He kept asking Billy Wilder to make Sefton nicer and Wilder refused. Holden actually refused the role but was forced to do it by the studio.

To improve the chances for commercial success in West Germany (at that time already an important market for Hollywood) a Paramount executive suggested to Billy Wilder that he should make the camp guards Poles rather than Germans. Wilder, whose mother and stepfather had died in the concentration camps, furiously refused and demanded an apology from the executive. When it didn't come, Wilder did not extend his contract at Paramount

Otto Preminger always claimed that, as a director, he would only shout at actors if they were late or if they did not know their lines. Employed solely as an actor in this film, he told Billy Wilder at the start of filming that if he ever forgot his lines, he would present Wilder with a jar of caviar. Wilder later told interviewers that he soon had dozens of such jars.

William Holden's acceptance speech for Best Actor was the shortest in Academy history up until that time. He said only two words: "Thank You." Holden hadn't meant to be so brief, but the televised TV broadcast of the Academy Awards ceremony was running long, and was about to be cut off the air. Holden later took out an ad in the Hollywood trade publications thanking the people he had intended to thank in his speech. The briefness of Holden's speech was later surpassed by Alfred Hitchcock (who accepted his Irving Thalberg Award in 1967 with a simple "Thanks.") and by John Mills, who after playing a mute character in Ryan's Daughter (1970), accepted his 1971 Best Supporting Actor award with a simple smile and a thankful nod of the head.

According to the Virgin Film Guide, Otto Preminger's POW Camp Commandant character Colonel von Scherbach in this film is reminiscent of Erich von Stroheim's similar character, prison camp commandant Captain von Rauffenstein in Jean Renoir's, La Grande Illusion (1937). Although Preminger played a Nazi officer, in real life he was Jewish, as was Erich von Stroheim.

Normally the German military assigned staff officers to command oflags (prison camps for enemy officers), while captains, or the equivalent outside the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, commanded stalags for enlisted enemy soldiers. It was quite unusual, therefore, for Stalag 17 to have been commanded by a colonel such as Von Scherbach.

BOOK 115: INVITATION TO A BEHEADING: VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Invitation to a Beheading is a novel by Russian American author Vladimir Nabokov. It was originally published in Russian in 1935-1936 as a serial in Contemporary Notes (Sovremennye zapiski), a highly respected Russian émigré magazine. In 1938 the work was published in Paris, with an English translation following in 1959. The English version was translated by Nabokov's son, Dmitri Nabokov, under the author's supervision.

The novel is often described as "Kafkaesque," but Nabokov claimed that at the time he wrote the book, he was unfamiliar with German and "completely ignorant" of Kafka's work. Nabokov interrupted his work on The Gift in order to write Invitation, describing the creation of the first draft as "one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration." Some scholars have argued that the central plot of Invitation has its roots in Chernyshevski, a character from The Gift.

While Nabokov stated in an interview that of all his novels he held the greatest affection for Lolita, it was Invitation to a Beheading that he held in the greatest esteem.

MY VERDICT: I found this book a little hard to read.  It seemed lacking in something to me and I feel like it could be the fault of the translation.  I know Nabokov to be an astounding writer and Lolita is proof of this but there seemed to be something less tangible, easy to grasp, in this novel.  I didn’t dislike it completely, there were still little hints of the unique visual descriptions that I admire Nabokov for, but they are a few precious jewels in an otherwise hard to look at scene.  This is just my opinion, some believe it’s a great book maybe even his best.  Lolita will always be the one for me.  I think it’s because Humbert Humbert is so human and Cinncinnatus (the protagonist in this novel) is almost the very opposite, he is indifferent and wholly unlikeable (which seems to be why he ended up in prison in the first place) but I didn’t really care for him and so I was not particularly concerned about the outcome of the book.

FILM 1174: STALKER

TRIVIA: According the film's Sound Designer, Vladimir Sharun, at least 3 members of the crew (including the director) died as a result of chemical contamination encountered on location in Estonia.

The original negatives were destroyed (by a processing error at the laboratory) and part of the film had to be shot again from scratch with a new director of photography.

The Zone of the film was inspired by a nuclear accident that took place near Chelyabinsk in 1957. Several hundred square kilometers were polluted by fallout and abandoned; of course there was no official mention of this forbidden zone at the time.

Tarkovsky built long film processing vat which had different temperatures along the way, allowing him to change the color tone over a long strip of film, over an extended take.

It is said that the rushes of the first version of the film were kept by editor Lyudmila Feyginova in her home for years. They were destroyed by fire, that also claimed her life.

Towards the end of the movie, the Stalker's wife smokes cigarettes from a carton that bears the same AT (Andrei Tarkovsky) insignia as the policeman's helmet.

When the Stalker is referred to as 'Chingachgook' and 'Leatherstocking', these are references to characters in James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans".

The scenes of the girl moving the object with her mind on the table at the end of the film, was honored in the video Bed Time Stories from Madonna.

Like Tarkovsky's other films, Stalker relies on long takes with slow, subtle camera movement, rejecting the use of rapid montage. The film contains 142 shots in 163 minutes, with an average shot length of more than one minute and many shots lasting for more than four minutes.