rosebette

Oscar Levant steals every scene in this one, and that's saying something with two giants like John Garfield and Joan Crawford. Oh, for those days when people wrote great dialogue! And of course, there's the great Second City take-off of this one, with Katherine O'Hara and the football player sized shoulder pads.

I have the CD of that Kiss Me Kate album. What a talented woman! There is an interview on youtube about her experience of working on the Holmes film. She really enjoyed working with Rathbone and Bruce.

No, but several inventors and geniuses may have had some other idiosyncracies. As I recall, Howard Hughes had quite a few. These incidents also happened much later, and mental illness may have been involved.

I'm not saying that Lamarr was at the same level as Thomas Edison, just responding to the argument that to be an inventor, someone must have an advanced degree.

Does one need an advanced degree to be capable of understanding technical or mechanical concepts or creating inventions? Thomas Edison didn't have an advanced degree either. I happen to teach English at an institution that has an enormous engineering department. I have students who were already building their own computers in high school. My husband is a software engineer who is now in his 50s. He dropped out of college to work on computers because he liked them and picked up a few things in a work study job. His current partner in business never finished college and does most of the R&D for the company. If Hedy was a male working with a male collaborator, would she be accused of sleeping with him or getting credit for someone else's ideas?

I've read Hedy's Folly, which is one of the sources for the documentary, and also saw a one-woman show at UMass Lowell (which has a huge engineering and computer sci department) on Hedy. It's my belief that she did have a hand in those inventions. Her fascination with inventions dated from her early childhood (and her close relationship with her father), and it's well-documented that she was always working on various inventions in her home. Do we still need to believe that she got the credit because she slept with someone just because she was a beautiful woman? Certainly the woman interviewed on those tapes was no dumb bunny.

The Five Little Pepper and How They Grew -- I must have read this book half a dozen times when I was between the ages of 10 and 12, and I adored it and wanted to be like Polly. The book was written around the turn of the century, but of course, the film is set in the Depression. I thought it was charming, and the kids were very natural. Little Phronsie was a real scene-stealer. I thought the subsequent entries in the series less strong, and the butler sleeping with kids was actually kind of creepy.

This movie was not that well-received when it was released, but viewing it today, it has one of Flynn's more nuanced performances.

The difference between the Miriam Hopkins' character is that in Old Maid, I want to scratch here eyes out, and in Old Acquaintance, I want to shake her even harder than Bette does, maybe until her teeth start to fall out.

So sorry to see the end of Michael Curtiz Wednesdays. We also watched many of the films on our new 50" screen TV and got more of an actual movie viewing experience.

That scene in the forest is one of the most frightening ever. I took my kids to see it when they were between 4 and 7 (I had 3 less than 2 years apart) because I had such fond memories, and that scene scared the bejesus out of them. I also enjoy the parody of "Whistle While You Work" in Enchanted with Amy Adams.

The Breaking Point (1950) - Compact, emotional, gritty, and sensitive, this film is apparently more faithful to Hemingway's original conception of To Have and Have Not. One of Garfield's finest performances, and I'd rate it among Michael Curtiz's top five. The ending is powerful and haunting. It's hard to believe this little masterpiece came from the same man who directed Casablanca and The Adventures of Robin Hood. I also ended up catching The Proud Rebel and Young Man with a Horn. It's as if Curtiz learned how to work within a more intimate landscape in his later years. These are the films that are true classics of the director's later years, not the over-rated White Christmas which is just a technicolor rehash of Holiday Inn.

I just watched Call the Midwife last night. I must admit, Sr. Monica has reduced me to tears on more than one occasion.

Actually, I'm a fan of both The Jewel and Indian Summer. I think The Jewel is a much better written series and explores in more depth the complexities of Anglo-Indian relations.

Yeah, hubby and I were saying she ought to get arrested for stealing the picture.

The Rains Came(1939) -- we weren't going to watch this one because it started too late, but ended up getting hooked. Rather amazed that Myrna Loy plays a woman who probably qualifies as an upper-class s**** and yet somehow manages to be charming and sympathetic. George Brent was pretty good, too. Tyrone Power was knock out gorgeous and had that proper spiritual/mystical quality as the Indian doctor. Yes, his eyelashes were longer than either of the leading ladies' (and they were probably wearing false ones or lots of mascara). Despite the statue of Queen Victoria, I was rather surprised that the portrait of colonial India was not that rah-rah British Empire; the English were depicted as rather greedy and corrupt (Nigel Bruce, Myrna Loy, the social-climbing missionary parents of Brenda Joyce), rather like Indian Summer on PBS last year, but without the sex (although there is definitely implied sex with Loy's character). The special effects were astounding, well-deserving of the Academy Award.

Fred does light up a cigarette after the Night and Day number in the Gay Divorcee.

Didn't Crosby have a few extramarital affairs himself or was the relationship with Grace Kelly just a rumor?

One of my dad's favorite stories was of the day his father took him downtown to see The Adventures of Robin Hood and then to a diner to have what he described the best hamburger he ever had. He described feeling like a king as his dad held his hand on the way to the theater. He said every Saturday, when he smelled shoe polish (because his dad would shine his shoes before going downtown), he would angle and hint that he wanted to tag along, so that he could walk by a theater and persuade his dad to take him to Dodge City or The Sea Hawk, or whatever the latest Flynn pic was. Yes, it's hard not to forgive someone who brought such joy to a young boy, and later to an old man.

The main dynamic of sexual harassment is power. Because males usually had all the power in the film industry in the past, they were also the harassers, using that power and position to intimidate women into "putting out" sexually, often with the promise (sometimes a false one) of a promotion or part within the industry. With male-on-male harassment, the harasser is often also someone older and more powerful.

I just went on a pre-code jag, watching Millie with Helen Twelvetrees, followed by Born to Love, with Constance Bennett and Joel McCrea. This must have been the "women are treated like s***" in divorce cases theme night. Millie was OK, but had some interesting support from Joan Blondell (adorable) and Frank McHugh. A young Anita Louise was gorgeous as Twelvetrees' daughter. I was rather appalled that in the storyline, she wasn't given a decent living or allowed to keep her child, even though her husband was unfaithful, and therefore the reason for her divorce. Born to Love surprised me and actually unexpectedly moved me. Constance Bennett was outstanding; I had never thought of her as a really dramatic actress, as I had mostly seen her as a clotheshorse in comedies. Joel McCrea was some good eye candy -- wow. I don't want to give too much of the storyline, as there are some shocking twists at the end, but Bennett also ends up in a divorce situation in which she loses custody of her own child. Maybe I was just in an angry and morose feminist kind of mood, but by the end of this one, I had gone from precode jag to crying jag at the injustice of it all. The last 10 minutes is a 4 hankie job. Unlike "postcode" movies, there is no condemnation from the film's perspective of the female character for having sex or a child out of wedlock; we're seeing a system in which the legal system favors wealth and males and women are treated very unfairly.

Actually, there was a stage musical based on Gone with the Wind - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(musical)

On the other hand, I think "misdeeds" by women, such as Ingrid Bergman, would not be viewed as harshly today. I don't think she'd be ostracized from Hollywood, and even the U.S., for having an extramarital affair or an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, since such things are quite commonplace now. There's a big difference between violating "norms" (which in this case, are based on sexist expectations of women's behavior), which have changed, and engaging in behavior that is criminal or harmful. It's pretty well known, for example, that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were having an affair while he was still married to Jennifer Anniston, but no one stopped going to Angelina's movies or felt that she should stay out of the U.S.

My own feeling is that if the Flynn rape trial happened today, even if he were acquitted, he would probably never work in Hollywood again. I believe that the rape scandal did scar Flynn's career in the way he was perceived by Hollywood and the media and his own self-perception, which led him to the path of self-destruction, but that might have been a path he was already traveling, since the events around the alleged rapes probably involved excessive drinking and rash behavior. At the time, the events were probably interpreted as celebrity partying gone too far. However, if these events had happened on a 21st century college campus and the perpretator was a frat boy, we would now say that it was a violation of consent or "date rape." My dad was a great fan of Flynn's early swashbuckler films and Westerns, which he had grown up with as a boy, and he told me how crestfallen he and many of his peers felt during the rape scandal. However, Dad still enjoyed Flynn's films and his performances; for him, there could be no other Robin Hood. Because all these events happened so long ago, and Flynn's screen image is so magical, I was somehow able to separate what I saw on the screen from those events. For the longest time, I've had an edition of Now Playing with Flynn's picture by my computer (something I found in my Dad's room after Dad passed) to brighten my day because Flynn was probably the most beautiful man I've ever seen and I could somehow separate the scandal from that perfect Robin Hood, Captain Blood, or Gentleman Jim. With the #Metoo movement, I chose to put that picture away, but I miss it, shame on my bad feminist heart.

I think Groucho should have been charged for stealing the spotlight from Beverly! What a cut-up that guy was. I must admit, although she comes off as quite young, I wouldn't take her for 15 or 16.