December, 2014 | Cary Grant Won't Eat You

Turning My Sister into a Classic Movie Fan, Bout 1: Rachel 1, Me 0

12/28/2014 by leah@carygrantwonteatyou.com 8 Comments

Christmas night I made my sister watch Body and Soul (1947), her first viewing in fulfillment of our bet (if she watches 10 classic films, I will watch Breaking Bad). During the movie, she alternately complained about the music, stared blankly, and dozed off. Afterward, she said, “Well the acting wasn’t good,” and when I asked that she at least subtract my beloved John Garfield from that assessment, said, “He was fine. But it’s not like he’s Robert De Niro. You don’t actually think he’s that good, do you?”

Deflated. It’s a good word, isn’t it? Maybe I should have considered Rachel’s crankiness first: it was late, and she had just lost at Scene It; my sister does not take movie trivia loss well.

You might ask why I care that my sister won’t give classic movies a chance. I have, after all, plenty of others to convince. But Rachel and I otherwise share a movie brain, at least with dramas. I text Rachel right after I leave a theater with my commentary, and will go see almost every film she recommends, which is why she occasionally messes with me, sending me to a movie she knows is lousy so that she can call and say, “Yeah, awful, right? Thought you’d agree.”

I hadn’t viewed Body and Soul first (a risky move), but it came highly recommended, it was a sports movie, it was Garfield, and it was good—not as neatly edited or as intriguing as The Set-Up, but with similar themes and a dark mood she couldn’t dismiss as cheesy. I had hoped it would chisel a bit into her seemingly implacable beliefs about classic film: acting is better now, production quality is better now, any sequel would therefore be better than the originals, so why bother?

The film had no effect on her whatsoever, though she was intrigued by Garfield’s blacklisting. But in the interest of others who haven’t seen it, I’ll share a few things about the film, which my sister should have appreciated:

Good Supporting Characters
The story revolves around Charley’s (John Garfield’s) treatment of friends and family, and how that echoes his own deeper entanglement into the shady underworld of boxing.

He gets into the sport at the urging of his quick-talking friend, Shorty (Joseph Pevney). Disappointed he won’t pursue an education instead, his mother reassures herself he’s at least honest and has good taste in women, preferring a sweet artist, Peg (Lilli Palmer), to a bombshell (Hazel Brooks). Of course, he quickly succumbs to the temptations that have already sunk his one-time-rival, now trainer, Ben (Canada Lee).

I agree with Rachel that most of the women didn’t add much to the film; neither Palmer’s nor Brooks’s acting was notable, but neither subtracted from the film, and Peg’s independent spirit made her character a surprising one. How many boxers do we see—in any generation—courting an aspiring painter? She’s far more interesting than this supporting player in another boxing film Rachel likes better:

And while the other two actresses were solid, but not deserving of any accolades, no one can beat Anne Revere (another blacklist victim) when expressing disappointment in a son.

Even Rachel praised Shorty (Pevney), the friend who helps broker the deal to get Charley into the business, and then comes to regret it due to Charley’s dealings with the immoral Roberts (Lloyd Gough). Shorty’s lively presence added much-needed humor to the proceedings, and his later absence from the film definitely hurt it.

An Intriguing Sparring Partner
But far more interesting than any of these other relationships is Charley’s with his rival, the champ, Ben (Canada Lee), who has a medical issue Charley isn’t told about before their first bout. Ben later befriends the newcomer, and starts to train Charley instead of fighting himself.

Ben comforting Charlie before a fight

This made me wonder, as I’m not in on the usual trends of the boxing world. Is this, we-fight-to-the-death, now we train together a thing?

Interestingly, Charley seems to be unfazed by Roberts’ treatment of others, but his boss’s continued harshness toward Ben (racism? or just his usual cold-bloodedness?) begins to finally erode his nonchalance about his own complicity in the corruption, especially after Roberts asks him to be in on a fix.

Lee’s part in the film should have been greater, as the movie’s start makes it clear just how important he is to Charley. But even what we get is interesting, and Lee captures both the pathetic nature of an older fighter, and his impressive inner strength; Ben is the representative of the soul that Charley has been abandoning in the pursuit of the perfect body, and foreshadows Charley’s likely future.

The Fights
There should have been more to the fights, which is my usual complaint. (Don’t even get me started on the lack of boxing scenes in the dreadful Million Dollar Baby). But I like how Body and Soul, which can go overboard with sentimental music, suddenly becomes silent in the last bout, enabling viewers to more fully take in the brutality.

As I watched, I kept hearing Rocky’s soundtrack, and realized the music in that later film had in many ways numbed me to the violence, counteracted it in some way by suggesting a possible victory. But here, I could feel the impact on the skin, the muscles, the bones.

In Conclusion….
I can hear my sister asking me—which she actually didn’t—do you actually think this is better than Rocky? I didn’t. But I don’t think that’s the point. The film had something else to say, and I liked how it said it, and found Garfield as riveting as I usually do.

“I can’t decide,” Rachel said at one point, “if he’s good looking.”

“He’s attractive,” I answered, “not really handsome.” Her comment made me smile because you can’t stop asking yourself that when you watch him; you can’t keep your eyes off the guy. So something, at least, sank in.

As for our bet, I fear that at best my sister will regard any of the 10 movies she likes as exceptions to her classic-movies-suck rule, rather than as proof she’s wrong about them. But it’ll make her see some just the same, which is good in itself.

There was one moment of consolation, as I watched my sister’s disappointing response to Body and Soul. I’d shared a Miranda Lambert song with my mom earlier that week, and to my horror, heard her playing Rachel the video, urging her to like it too. My sister is a Beatles fanatic and has performed rock music since the age of five or so. She has ALWAYS despised country. My sister’s outraged response to my mom was as comic as I would have anticipated, and far more animated than her objections to my film choice. I could hear her spitting “twang” and “seriously?” and “that loser Blake Shelton” from the other side of the house.

So at least I’m not trying to convince her into country.

Bout 1: Rachel 1, Me 0, Country Music -1

The Moment I Fell for Eve Arden

12/18/2014 by leah@carygrantwonteatyou.com 4 Comments

In the early eighties, all the girls I knew pined for large hoop earrings, curly hair, and tight pants just like the changed Sandy in Grease. We piped “You’re the One that I Want,” with its requisite “oooh, oooh, ooohs,” imagining we could lure Danny into the sky with us.

Grease had a staying power thanks to the number of times it was replayed on TV. Although my attention was drawn to all of the figures who rocked leather, one of the administrators made an impression too. Something about those ringing tones of Principal McGee’s (Eve Arden’s) reached me. Her combination of idealism, exasperation, and cynicism echoed adults I knew as she alternately disciplined and inspired Rydell High’s seniors. In a throwaway part, this actress had developed a fully realized character, one for whom I could imagine a history of victories and frustrations with students. She made an impact even on the beauty-enthralled kid that I was.

I didn’t make the connection years later when I listened to Eve Arden’s verbal wizardry in Mildred Pierce (1945). But I looked her up on IMDB, hoping to find her elsewhere, and knew then why Principal McGee had affected me. This was Eve Arden, people, the master of the one liner, the woman who could annihilate a victim with one breath of her scathing tongue. Of course she could match wits with teenagers. Of course they couldn’t fool her and thus convert her into another of the anonymous adults in teen flicks. She was humoring them. She was holding back. She was—dare I say it—so much cooler than they were.

Take the scene when Sonny (Michael Tucci) decides he’s going to stand up to her when he inevitably lands back in her office. “This year she’s gonna wish she’s never seen me,” he tells his buddy. “I just ain’t gonna take any of her crap, that’s all, I don’t take no crap from nobody.”

“Sonny?” she interrupts.

“Hello, ma’am,” he says, all bluster gone.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in homeroom right now?”

“I was just going for a walk.”

“You were just dawdling, weren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Even funnier are her remarks and reactions to her incompetent and slightly insane assistant, Blanche (Dody Goodman). Her resignation when Blanche overreacts to the coach’s pre-game enthusiasm is just one example of her understated genius.

Like any good comedian, Arden knows just how to give words emphasis, just how to raise that eyebrow, just how to make what could have been a passing moment snap. Oh, how I love the woman.

I think I fell for her from the start of Mildred Pierce, but I didn’t realize I had until near the end of the film.

She plays Ida, the business manager for the restaurant owner (Joan Crawford) who repeatedly sacrifices all of her money, time, and hope for her spawn-of-Satan daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth).

Ida’s humor is evident from the start, as when she agrees to give Mildred a job as a waitress just after she separates from her husband. “Kind of a nervous gal, aren’t you?” Ida observes. “Well, you wanna watch that, it’s tough on dishes.”

Ida is the ultimate sarcastic sidekick; her dry delivery is a great foil to Crawford’s sentimental, feminine performance. “When men get around me, they get allergic to wedding rings,” Ida explains when asked about her single status. “You know, big sister type. Good old Ida, you can talk it over with her man to man.”

“I hate all women,” Mildred’s business partner, Wally (Jack Carson), says to Ida after Mildred rejects his romantic overtures. “Thank goodness you’re not one of them.”

Ida smirks. “Laughing boy seems slightly burned at the edges,” she observes to Mildred. “What’s eating him?” In fact, every scene between Carson and Arden makes me wish for more, as when Ida gives Wally orchids to put away, saying, “Here, muscle.”

Ida’s critiques of Mildred’s boyfriend, Monty, are always amusing too, even though the man (and actor) is no match for her. When the aristocratic Monty says, “Oh, I wish I could get that interested in work,” Ida drawls, “You were probably frightened by a callus at an early age.” Later, after he’s been milking Mildred and expresses surprise that she might have business problems, Ida retorts, “Don’t look now, but you’ve got canary feathers all over your face.”

But she reserves her greatest slam for Mildred’s parasitic daughter. “Why don’t you forget about her?” she asks Mildred after watching the abusive pattern between the two for years.

Mildred babbles about what a daughter means to a mother, leading Ida to this classic response: “Personally, Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.”

I’m not sure why it took me that long, but that’s when I knew for sure I’d found an actress I’d never tire of watching—and more importantly, hearing. I think we can all be thankful Arden was never a huge star, as it meant she would wring everything she could from each line, each expression, and never stop making us laugh.

Lucille Ball and Arden hilarious in Stage Door

A Film Celebrating Bad Cooks: Christmas in Connecticut

12/13/2014 by leah@carygrantwonteatyou.com 2 Comments

I come from a long line of bad cooks. My mother was way ahead of her peers with the natural foods craze, but, like a new vegan, she never learned to substitute anything for the bacon grease she’d been raised with; everything she made was bland. When we visited my maternal grandmother’s, all of our cousins would drop by with food. I remember the day I discovered why, when I witnessed Grandmother putting mayonnaise in macaroni and cheese. My fraternal grandmother supposedly was a good baker before her illness set in, but the only real meal I remember from the Williams family recipes was courtesy of an in-law.

For some women, this deficiency would be a source of shame, but it wasn’t for my grandmother, who bragged about her recipes as she put ketchup in her ratatouille, knowing no one was bold enough to contradict her. As for my mom, she took Greek salad to every holiday potluck, shrugged at all the better fare, and returned to her studies afterward. Who cared about culinary proficiency, when she could be mastering Aristotle? I’ve followed my family’s example, neither worrying about my lack of ability, nor feeling an impulse to remedy it.

With these tendencies and antecedents, it’s perhaps unsurprising that one of the few domestic comedies I find relatable is Christmas in Connecticut (1945), starring Barbara Stanwyck as Elizabeth Lane, a food writer who can’t cook. The publisher of her magazine (Sydney Greenstreet) wants to please a hero who craves good eating and satisfy his own stomach in the bargain. He invites the sailor—and himself—to Christmas dinner at the columnist’s country home, forcing her to quickly accede to a friend’s proposal and thus be able to pretend owning the home—and baby—she’s been writing about for years instead of the actual tiny New York apartment she lives in as she spins stories about rocking chairs and fireplaces and pet cows.

A view Lane pretends to be “the broad front lawns of our farm, like a lovely picture postcard of wintry New England”

A view Lane pretends to be “the…front lawns of our farm”

The premise is absurd, of course, but with Stanywck as the faux-Martha Stewart, Greenstreet as the busybody, and S.Z. Sakall as Felix (the enterprising buddy whose recipes she’s been using for her articles), this film is a lot of fun. When Lane falls for the sailor (Dennis Morgan), she plots to avoid the promised marriage to her stuffy friend, John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner). She boldly flirts with the handsome hero, Jefferson Jones (Morgan), freed by his engagement and her own supposed marriage.

Even more entertaining than their flirtation is the treatment of Lane’s poor cooking as she pretends to be Mrs. Sloan. When he hears Felix will be handling dinner, the publisher complains, “…I won’t feel quite the same as if you’d cooked it, Mrs. Sloan.”

“Believe me,” quips Felix, “you will feel much better.”

In a famous scene, Felix teaches Lane to flip a flapjack, which she’s described in great detail in her writing. Repeatedly, she screws up, hitting the ceiling with the batter.

Lane, viewing the pan like it’s a tarantula

While she dodges having to display her bad aim at first, she’s finally put on the spot, and her shocked face when she succeeds—by a sheer fluke—is priceless.

**spoilers below, for anyone who still thinks it’s possible to spoil a predictable romantic comedy***

She may be a poor pancake maker, but Lane’s courage and quick wit are worth witnessing when she finally confronts her bullying publisher, who tries to convince her and her faux-husband Sloan that they should reproduce again for the good of the magazine’s circulation. Once he discovers the deception, the publisher urges her to marry the “bore” (Sloan) and proceed quickly to child bearing. Even though she’ll likely lose her job and a promised raise, Lane still decides to have her say: “Listen to me. I’m tired of being pushed around, tired of being told what to do, tired of writing your galldarned articles, tired of dancing to everybody else’s tune, tired of being told whom to marry. In short, I’m tired.”

Of course, this exchange sets Lane up for becoming the housewife she’s been pretending to be, but in feminist fashion, it’s a choice, not a default—and quitting is in her case an act of liberation. I like to think of her using that big imagination to write the next great American novel while Jones, who already likes washing babies, tends to the children. (She knows what she’s doing, falling for this sensitive type.)

Surprisingly, the film is no more judgmental about her culinary failures than I would be. “Well, young man, I spose you know what you’re doing,” the publisher says to Jones once it’s clear the two are altar bound. “But I warn you, she can’t cook.”

Jones asks her if it’s true. “No, I can’t cook,” Lane admits, without a trace of embarrassment.

“She can’t cook,” Felix repeats. Then he adds for all of us who’ve fallen for her during the film, “But what a wife!”

Please Keep the Hair: Keri Russell, Rita Hayworth, and Veronica Lake

12/07/2014 by leah@carygrantwonteatyou.com 4 Comments

All the wig-switching in the KGB thriller The Americans has me thinking about hair. Of course, my musings must be rooted in the show’s star, Keri Russell, she of the infamous haircut that made Felicity stars everywhere wish her beautician Sweeney Todd.

But Russell was not the only star blamed for tanking a production with her shorn tresses. I’m thinking, of course, of The Love Goddess herself, Rita Hayworth, who made not one, but two hairy decisions in that barber chair. After all, her fans had fallen for her after this famous hair-flip in Gilda (1946), later celebrated in The Shawshank Redemption (1994):

Audiences liked their WWII pinup just the way she was. But given that Hayworth’s former experiments at a stylist’s hands—a hairline move and a red dye job—had led to her fame to begin with, it’s not surprising she was willing to make a change to help her soon-to-be-ex Orson Welles with his noir, The Lady from Shanghai (1947). She changed the hue of her beloved hair, as seen in its usual glory in Cover Girl (1944):

And she also, like Russell after her, chopped it off. The bizarre results: a platinum dye job was blamed for low ticket sales. (Brunettes everywhere, take note: it did happen once.)

It’s true that Hayworth looks better as a redhead, but the film still features one of her sexiest performances. Admittedly, this woman could probably have pulled off a mullet.

Of course, of all the hair-disaster stories, my favorite is Veronica Lake’s. She was known for that peek-a-boo, hair-in-front-of-eye sexy look models have been attempting since.

This hairstyle was so popular that it even reached spoof status. One of my favorite moments in The Major and the Minor (1942) is when a cadet mocks the girls at a nearby school: “May as well warn you, there’s an epidemic at Mrs. Shackleford’s school…[T]hey all think they’re Veronica Lake.” The film’s heroine (Ginger Rogers) tries to repress her smile when she sees what he means:

In a bizarre twist of fate, Lake undid the do in the interest of national public safety during WWII—all of those fool imitators getting their hair stuck in factories’ machinery. (Check out this staged photo warning her wannabes.). And—not surprisingly—Lake lost her star status soon after the change (though there were other, perhaps more likely reasons for her decline, as there were for the poor box office receipts of Hayworth’s film and lower ratings of Russell’s show).

I know more rational folks would claim that these outcries over hair are outrageous and silly, but having suffered the pains of fine, limp hair all my life, I do get a bit annoyed when a woman with a thick, luscious mane doesn’t appreciate what she has. Sure, if it’s too much for your delicate face, à la Audrey Hepburn, hack away. But if not, don’t pain all of us with wilted mops by throwing your riches away. Have a little pity. At least let us envy from afar.

Cary Grant Won't Eat You

Classic movies for phobics

Month: December 2014

Turning My Sister into a Classic Movie Fan, Bout 1: Rachel 1, Me 0

The Moment I Fell for Eve Arden

A Film Celebrating Bad Cooks: Christmas in Connecticut

Please Keep the Hair: Keri Russell, Rita Hayworth, and Veronica Lake