Judy Tuesday brings you weird sporting wear from 1879! It’s highly doubtful anyone in 1879 ever wore anything so gaudy unless they were in the circus or doing burlesque, but if we think of Chasemore’s designs as poking fun of trends in fashion, who knows what hideous thing in Paris might have inspired either of these pajama-looking atrocities. Of course, to a modern eye they’re probably not so awful (or at least not shocking in any way).
Either way the Ladies’ Football costume strikes me as especially hideous with that crazy mix of patterns. I can only imagine Chasemore was also visually commenting on how ridiculous women in sports were by suggesting such an eyesore getup.
One more plate from this volume next week and then we leap forward (appropriately since this is a Leap Year and it’s Leap Month) to Volume 29!
As usual, to find all the plates in this series (and the dolls themselves) click on the Judy tag down below.
[Click this link or the image to download a printable .pdf of these costumes]
It occurs to me that I’ve never shared any of Chasemore’s original art throughout the Judy series and I wanted to take a moment to recognize that in some small way. My renditions of the costumes are pretty accurate, but nowhere near as charming, and to see the costumes in context of the pages on which they appeared may give you some idea of the artist’s sense of marginalia-like whimsy.
This is the typical layout of the page on which the fashions usual appear toward the back of the periodical. On this page each week, there’s usually an editorial “Our Weekly One”, sometimes overflow text from a story, and often some other collection of vignettes and humorous drawings, one of which is the “Fashion of the Week”. The series began as a doodle off in the corners of the page (clearly as filler), but you can see by Vol. 25, the feature had gained prominence. This particular page shows an unusually large image compared to others in the same volume, but this scale is to become the norm within the next few years, as “Fashion of the Week” assumed the focal point of the page in terms of the art. It clearly must have appealed to the readers of Judy.
Let’s get one thing clear: I really am okay with adaptation as its own art form. I’m sorely disappointed that this movie veered so far from the actual history of the Essex and from Nathaniel Philbrick’s telling of that tale, but I can put that aside. It’s not the movie we got, so dredging up the comparisons is academic.
And how about that gloriously wasted cast?
Benjaman Walker plays Captain Pollard and does a nice job embodying an inexperienced sailor fighting to maintain authority that’s been given to him, unearned. But the script has the character make spectacularly obvious bad choices (even the audience knows they’re bad). It undercuts any chance of realism, and makes him a bit of a dolt.
Poor Cillian Murphy plays the bland childhood pal of Owen Chase, Matthew Joy. It’s a bloody crime that Howard made this actor suffer under extreme filming conditions for a role that consisted of a man twice refusing a drink and then saying goodbye to Chase. That’s literally all he gets to do here. Why, Howard? Why? You cast an actor of this caliber to do nothing.
Brenden Gleason and Ben Whishaw play Old Tom Nickerson and Herman Melville, respectively. This is the narrative framework that just didn’t need to be there. It interrupts the action and doesn’t really serve as anything but expository filler and a lot of wink-winking and nudge-nudging about Moby Dick to come. Everything in the framework feels like Howard doesn’t trust us to “get it” unless it’s all spelled out.
Tom Holland plays Young Tom Nickerson. This kid has serious acting chops and he does well in the role, but his arc is really weird. If we’re to believe he becomes crotchety Old Tom Nickerson, he certainly shows no signs of the terrible trauma of this voyage in his closing moments with Owen Chase. He suffers well on the voyage, but how it scarred him so deeply to become silent and reclusive on the matter is glossed over.
Finally, I want to say something about Frank Dillane’s Henry Coffin (rechristened Henry since his real name was also Owen–we can’t have that in a movie where everyone should be called by last names anyway). I think Howard was trying to make this character antagonistic, but it never plays out. Yeah, he says snotty and ominous things, but he’s also treated negligently by both Pollard and Chase. His flipping out after the sinking is plain weird and his subsequent sacrifice powerless because we have to assume all the feelings he has for his cousin from one brief scene in which he gets turned out like a dog. Is his sacrifice heroic or is it cowardice? For me, this is the high tide of what men do to survive and it just doesn’t work. No fault on Dillane; he’s just not given enough to work with.
