There are a few things that are useless about February, chief among them that it is Valentine's Day in it. Normally, I think it's a month best spent chiefly hiding in the blankets, but in California the climate conspires against you: It's been bright and sunny and often dry and windy, and no one has any sympathy at all for you if you've made up your mind to a little glumness.
I've been staving off post-holiday letdown by a little homeopathic English movie treatment of my own invention. MGM or someone must have recently acquired the Sidney Gilliat portfolio of films and they've all shown up on streaming video from Netflix. This is just the thing if you are pretending to be a spinster in a garret and need a little accompaniment while you work on your embroidery (that is, if you are spinster in a garret...with a computer).
First there was London Belongs to Me, also known as Dulcimer Street, starring a baby-faced Richard Attenborough: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040548/. Honestly a little strange in tone as it veers between comedy of manners as varying personalities rub along together in a boarding house, and kind of stressful gangster situation as there is an unsolved murder, and subsequent trial.
A complete winner, though, was Millions Like Us, produced during World War II, about a young woman, the slightly overlooked youngest sister in the family, who wants to be part of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, but is instead pressed into service at a manufacturing plant. There she meets an embryonic Gordon Jackson - remember him, Hudson the butler in Upstairs, Downstairs? http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0413561/ - and Romance Ensues. This had, for me, the all-important World War II in England trifecta:
1) Blackout preparations;
2) Discussion of rationing;
3) Knitting on film.
It's just enough to keep me going, here in my garret.
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