Christmas moves on

Merry Christmas by Jimmy Cannon

There was a game the man played with himself Christmas week a year ago in the visitor's room on that floor of the hospital which looked down on the city, southward across Central Park. The man's right eye was infected and he couldn't read or watch television for two months. His vision was obscured by the medication the nurses dropped into his eye every hour around the clock. The sedatives handled most of the pain but not all of it.

So at dusk, led there by boredom, the man would go to the visitor's room. He closed both his eyes and then, slowly, opened the bad one. It was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen.

The lights of the city ran together, in a furry confusion. They didn't collide or sparkle but blended together in a glowing softness. The lights of the city were more like the petals of flowers strewn across the night which seemed to be made of silk. The colors of the night seemed to be dye that had flowed from a child's dream of Christmas.

The buildings lost their shape. They rippled and bulged, like a happy fat man's vest billowing with laughter. The sky was tender above them, more like a luminous moon-dappled sea. The stars lost their hard gleam. They shone, marvelously distorted, in fuzzy bursts, as though they were diamonds that had exploded into fluff. The moon melted into a wide bloated caricature of a man in the sky.

After a while the man strolled to the night nurse's desk to chat. They had sent most of the patients in the children's room home for Christmas. The ward was shut down. Three of the children had been brought to the floor where the man was to spend Christmas. One was Penelope.

There stood Penelope small and sedate in her maroon bathrobe. There she was, imbedded in her silence, proudly inquisitive, a child with russet hair, primly defiant. She came onto this floor of sick adults as an equal. Penelope was too stern, too poised, too serene for childhood.

This is Penelope, the nurse explained to the man, she is a little lady. She was, the nurse said, the perfect patient who had become accustomed to the routine of hospitals. It seemed logical for her to be there at Christmas time. The man thought it must be terrible for a child who has been in hospitals so much that she does not find them strange. The other children cried, the nurse said, but Penelope was brave and dignified and not even afraid of needles.

The flattery did not touch Penelope. She examined the man with a decent inquisitiveness. The dark glasses and his heavy beard did not startle her. In her childhood, spent in so many hospitals, all men had defects. No one was whole, only the doctors and the nurses. Penelope had a cleft palate. There had been a series of operations. One of the great surgeons had become interested in her case. It was slow but Penelope had been educated to wait.

Penelope, the nurse said with a sorrow that wasn't professional, refused to talk. The ridicule of other children had shut her up. The crippled voice had been imitated by bantering playmates. So Penelope spoke to no one.

The man, who is a bachelor, is clumsy with children. Always he has been an alien among them. They make him a stranger and he is uncomfortable in their presence. But this pretty child was not one of them but a tiny adult, experienced in pain and humility. The man leaned down and attempted to be casual.

My name is Jimmy, the man said. You're Penelope, aren't you? The blue eyes, clear and interested, were blank in their beauty. So the man asked about her dolls and her story books. He wanted to know what she wanted for Christmas. There was no reply, only that somberly interested look ...

He was dozing when the nurse knocked. With her was Penelope who held a picture book in one hand. The nurse said Penelope had been found wandering in the corridors, tapping on doors and calling the man's name in her tortured voice. It was, the nurse said, the first time she had heard the child speak.

The nurse left. The man, who finds all children strangers, sat on the bed and Penelope pretended to read from the book. The man will never forget that voice, struggling and grotesque, and he was very close to weeping. After that Penelope came every day and read to him. But she would not utter a sound if there was any one else in the room.

They spent part of Christmas together in his room. The man is everlastingly grateful to her. She gave him the most precious of all gifts when she allowed him to reach her. Never before had he felt the true meaning of this day until he heard Penelope say Merry Christmas.


Note: This tale appeared in a collection of articles by Jimmy Cannon in “Who Struck John?” Dial Press, 1956.

Ten random thoughts on the twentieth

--- When it comes to the sisters Bennett, I am in the Joan column.

--- Robert Ryan confronting the soldier in the bar in Odds Against Tomorrow is about as scary (and satisfying) as it gets.

--- Holmesian acquaintances wince when I tell them my favorite Sherlock Holmes on film is Robert Stephens in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

--- Rather than his directorial efforts, I prefer Martin Scorsese’s work as film enthusiast, preservationist, historian, and keeper of the flame.

--- I am investigating to find out if Dangerous Crossing with Jeanne Crain has been shown on Fox Movie Channel more times than Cunard’s original Queen Mary crossed the Atlantic.


--- Wandering around Leicester Square some years back, I heard an irate, thirtyish American wife raging at her husband “We did not travel to England to go to the movies.”

--- While my wife and I watched The Keys of the Kingdom last week, I thought of an English film critic, when reviewing a new film, stating that he could feel his fingernails growing.

--- Billy Wilder is my favorite (émigré) American director, but his delirium tremens scene in The Lost Weekend pales compared to that in Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge.

--- Where Danger Lives has astutely commented that Ella Raines’s beauty was rarely captured on film posters -- and it appears to me somewhat the same with her publicity stills.

--- Just once have I been the only person in a theatre -- a noon showing of the fiftieth anniversary edition of Casablanca at a downtown New York theatre toward the end of the run.



Note: “Random thoughts” pieces bring to mind the great Jimmy Cannon, whose “Nobody Asked Me, But” set the form. Any similarity stops there.

Patti LuPone, Steven Sondheim and Susan from Seattle

Once upon a time, my wife and I were acquired by Susan from Seattle in a legal matter resolved in a different galaxy in a bygone era. Susan is fond of saying that my wife and I “were part of the settlement.” But that is a tale best left for another day.

Before Seattle, Susan had lived in a diverse series of locations from the coal regions of Wilkes Barre (where we met), to Houston, to places certainly made no brighter by her departure. In recent times she has settled in Seattle.

Susan is a woman of exquisite taste, both in food and in wine. She has a curious mind, an appreciation of special films, good books and beguiling music. She is longtime aficionado of Steven Sondheim, and a fervent admirer of Patti LuPone (as are legions of others). Susan is currently relishing a passion for Mr. Sondheim's and James Lapine's Passion, with Donna Murphy.

The King’s spies being everywhere, I recently learned that, in distant Seattle, Susan has new Internet capabilities installed at her home. So it occurred to me to brighten her Sunday morning with an image that would please -- and which might lead her down whichever meandering path she chooses to follow today in her new environment.

Into the woods,
It's time to go,
I hate to leave,
I have to, though.
Into the woods --
It's time, and so
I must begin my journey.
Into the woods.

(Lyrics, of course, by Mr. Sondheim -- and they have been known to be used as a header phrase for the slumbering Poconotions.)

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Gladys Cooper


Elisabeth Risdon

Film Makers 6: Louis B. Mayer

Louis B. Mayer’s puritanical streak manifested itself in many aspects of his personal life and in the nature of his films at MGM. Scott Eyman in his Lion of Hollywood: the Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer uses a well-known comment to describe how L.B. reconciled his moral code with the flamboyant sexual conduct of some of his early stars. John Gilbert was a notorious womanizer; William Haines liked men and boys.

Eyman tells us: "Mayer’s feelings about sex were similar to those of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who made the famous remark about not caring what people did -- as long as they 'didn’t scare the horses'.”

Ten random thoughts on the tenth

--- I am frequently torn between my adoration of Julie Harris and my disregard of James Dean -- because of the conundrum of Julie having a high regard for Dean’s work.

--- I would relish an article on how the Turner Classic Movies monthly schedule is constructed. From one who knows. What is included? Which films play when and why?

--- Neither my wife nor I are overly committed fans of Olivia de Havilland, but every time The Heiress is televised (TCM this past Wednesday) we are hooked. Richardson is glorious; the property is foolproof. And Olivia is excellent.

--- It seems many of our female bloggers (particularly the younger) are partial to the suave: e.g., Franchot Tone, William Powell, and Warren William. Might this have to do with the look and style of the younger males to whom these bloggers come into everyday contact?

--- Finished reading Todd McCarthy’s Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. A very good book, which understandably seems to tail off as the author discusses Hawks’s later work.


--- My wife and I watched Ruth Chattterton in Female and spent the better part discussing who might have been a more appropriate lead (ignoring studio restrictions): Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell or Mary Astor?

--- How good was Virginia Weidler? Very. She seems to be omnipresent on Turner Classic Movies lately.

--- My wife and I finished watching the complete series of The Wire together (it took us about two months for the sixty episodes). It was her first viewing -- my fourth or fifth. She was taken with it.

--- Because it appears on television with some regularity, we watched a bit of Three Came Home again. It is a decent film with an aging star, later in her career, but it has such a cramped look. I know it is prison based -- but?

--- The anniversary of the shooting of John Lennon seems to have received much more Internet and television coverage this week than the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Note: “Random thoughts” pieces bring to mind the great Jimmy Cannon, whose “Nobody Asked Me, But” set the form. Any similarity stops there.

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Diana Lynn


Mona Freeman

Celebrating Julie Harris at 85 (Voices redux)

Some people hear voices when no one is there. In April 1972, I saw Voices, and there was certainly someone there: Julie Harris. The play ran for only eight performances at The Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. It was poorly reviewed but I enjoyed it.

The primary characters are a troubled couple caught in an old dark house trapped by a snowstorm. They hear voices, a ball bounces down a stairway, and ghosts may or may not be in attendance. I recall a plot twist at play’s end indicating that the two are actually the ghosts, having been killed in an automobile accident prior to their appearance at the house. Modern day summaries on theatre websites indicate otherwise.

Voices featured Julie Harris, a national treasure, and Richard Kiley some seven years after his success in jousting at Broadway windmills.

As to Julie Harris, I was enthralled. I could watch her play cards for three hours -- which I did some 25 years later in the Broadway revival of The Gin Game. As to Richard Kiley, windmills to the contrary notwithstanding, I carried a grudge. I could never, ever, forgive him for killing Moe in Pickup on South Street. Being a communist? Yes. Killing Moe? No.

But there is an epilogue to this story of Voices. One Miss Lisa Essary appeared as a child in the play. She was the stepdaughter of Mafia gangster Joey Gallo. After the April 6 performance, a Gallo entourage collected Lisa at the theatre, celebrated at the Copacabana, and in the wee hours of morning, went to Umberto’s Clam House for a repast. They were joined after a while by a group of assassins from a rival Mafia gang with weapons drawn. Some twenty shots were fired, and Joey Gallo’s life and celebrity ended under a restaurant table. It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold.

Young Lisa Essary and her newly widowed mother survived. It was the morning of April 7. After the April 8 performance, Voices closed. As far as I know, the play’s demise was not related to that of Mr. Gallo’s.

Voices. Voices and ghosts. Some from a stage, some from a restaurant in Little Italy, all from long ago.

Julie is at Cape Cod these days, but Richard Kiley died in 1999. Ms. Lisa Essary is a successful casting director.

An afterword: This, first posted in January 2010, is reissued in commemoration of Julie Harris's 85th birthday.

Miss Otis Regrets 6

She's unable to lunch today ...

Going and Coming: Eleven Days in 1941

Shanghai, China: November 28, 1941


Sixty-nine years ago today, members of the United States Marine Corps, Fourth Marine Regiment Band (with accompanying troops) left the International Settlement at Shanghai. This photo captures the moment. It was but ten days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II.

Shanghai, China: 8 December 1941


Ten days later, on December 8, the Japanese occupied the International Settlement. In a Hollywood retelling, an English boy is lost in the confusion in a harrowing scene from my favorite Steven Spielberg film.

Note: Fourth Marine Regiment Band photo courtesy of China Marines website.

Short Cuts 9: The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The Mystery of Edwin Drood: the book

In 1870, Charles Dickens lay dead; The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished. The secret of Edwin Drood had died with Dickens. The incomplete book on Drood was published posthumously. And "the most intricate literary problem in the English language" required a solution.

So it came to pass that a divergent group of scholars set about pondering the puzzle of Dickens's last plot. And for 140 years thereafter, scholars have discussed the deviltry or devotion of John Jasper, the identity of Dick Datchery, and the fate of Edwin Drood.

If, as we were taught in our early Latin classes, “All Gaul is divided into three parts;” then all Charles Dickens likely divides more-so. And within those divisions, that which relates to Drood is particularly susceptible to sub-sectioning. There are Dickensians, and among them Droodians or Droodists, or Drood-hunters, or as Chesterton was wont to call them: Druids. And within this sect there are Bazzardites, Landlessites and Tartarites, among others; the latter a minor sect we're told.

Those scholars were a boon to the Dickens fellowship, to the publishing industry, and to book collectors who extended a branch of the Dickensian tree to one of rather lengthy proportion. And so went this literary game for some sixty years until the Great Depression, when scholarly concentration on the criminous occurrence in the shadow of the cathedral appeared to ebb.

Yet evidence of the quest still surfaced occasionally and, in the heart of that Depression, in 1935, Universal Pictures produced a film version titled Mystery of Edwin Drood, directed by Stuart Walker. I remembered seeing the film on television long along but details had faded from memory.


Mystery of Edwin Drood: the film

I was reminded of the 1935 version this week as I came across Heather Angel playing a maid in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion. In Mystery of Edwin Drood, she plays Rosa Bud. The next day, I sought and watched the film on You Tube. Claude Rains stars as John Jasper and Valerie Hobson as Helena Landless. (In an early scene, Rosa Bud tells Helena Landless to call her "Rosebud” -- which I mention for those film purists inclined to stray off subject.)

Douglass Montgomery plays Neville Landless and David Manners is Edwin, called Ned. A fine sampling of Dickensian types supports, such as a reasonably slim Francis L. Sullivan, Walter Kingsford, and Forrester Harvey as Durdles. Oddly, as if escaped from some wagon train gone far astray, there are brief appearances by Walter Brennan and Will Geer.

The single propeller plane flies around the globe and the Universal Pictures logo lets us know we are in for Universal Studio atmospherics. From an opium den in London we move to the County of Kent, within which lies the cathedral town of Cloisterham (nee Rochester). European sets, more often reserved for vampires and other creatures of the night, serve as the mews, closes, and alleys surrounding the English cathedral. A perfect setting for a mid-Victorian malfeasance. And all because of “Rosebud.”

Three men are involved in the affections of one girl. One kills, and another dies, leaving the third to marry. There is an abundance of cobblestoned streets, church steeples, bells, tombs, crypts, graveyards and bedposts, that in dreams, morph into church spires. And the villagers gossip and suspect the wrong fellow for a while, but they are not the usual rambunctious European contingent with torches -- the English being masters of good form.

John Jasper is the obvious dispatcher of Edwin Drood, who sleeps with the quicklime. And the tempestuous Neville Landless’s return from Ceylon is rewarded as those cathedral bells ring. The film is a moody piece as was the unfinished original novel. The cast, and the source, and the Universal Studios look make the trip to Cloisterham in Kent worthwhile.

An afterthought on You Tube

You Tube is often the court of last resort. I recently purchased a 26 inch personal computer monitor for just such contingency (and for Netflix downloads). As of November 23, You Tube had the complete film in six sections and I watched it immediately. (One must do so with scarce materials in that environment.) Alas, the second half of the film has You Tube synchronization problems. But one suspects Claude Rains out of sync is clearer to the ear than most anyone else then, or now.

And an afterthought on wagon trains going astray

My friend Bob Wyatt of Wokingham once showed me the place where the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show played in Wokingham (Berkshire) but that was some thirty five years after poor Edwin went to rest in the quicklime. The show also played in Chatham, near Rochester, on August 28, 1903.

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Patricia Morison on the right


Gail Patrick on the left

True and False 1

Short Cuts 8: Around the World in Eighty Days: 53 years later

Around the World in Eighty Days: 53 years later.

It was a “big ticket” date -- a bit difficult to comprehend in these times, perhaps, but Around the World in Eighty Days at New York’s Rivoli Theater in early 1957 was a big ticket date -- and an event. It had opened in late 1956, yet tickets were still hard come by, particularly at a working class salary. But there were ways.

My date and I lived in the Bronx. I do not recall, but we certainly would have taken the Independent Line “D” train at Tremont Avenue downtown to the Times Square area. And we probably had something to eat – maybe at Al Muller’s German restaurant over by the old Madison Square Garden. Or, perhaps, the Howard Johnson’s in the photograph. And then the movie. We were young and in love.

Last night, more than nineteen thousand days after that date, my wife (she of the date) and I had the film on Turner Classic Movies in our kitchen while preparing a simple Saturday night supper. (We are accustomed to using overly familiar movies as kitchen background music as we go about our culinary endeavors.)

Occasionally, she or I would remark “there’s Melville Cooper” or “there’s Buster Keaton” and as I turned the oven to broil, and moved our plates to table: “there’s Marlene Dietrich.” (Thank heaven for small kindnesses when George Raft appears only in a cameo.)

The film made a nice travelogue in spots. We sat and ate somewhere between Shirley MacLaine and the elephants. And we finished the simple repast around the time that Phileas Fogg returned to the Reform Club (with Princess Aouda in tow), entered those sacred premises, and the Empire was announced to have fallen.

Last evening, we could not remember the theatre where we originally had seen Around the World in Eighty Days. An Internet search this morning turned up the Rivoli, stately as it was around the time we saw the film. Note the Lindy’s (famous as Runyon’s Mindy’s) to the left of the theatre, as well as the men in fedoras, and a New York policeman, of course. The Rivoli is long defunct, having succumbed to modern moviedom in 1984.

Last night was November 13, 2010. So it was Around the World in Eighty Days -- 53 years later. The movie has not held up. Nor did it have a chance in a kitchen with a humming refrigerator, the sounds of supper, and on a 26 inch television screen in lieu of that on which we first saw it: some 75 by 30 feet.

So, the memory of the “big ticket event” is cast in an odd mix of mental granite and smoke. The film was not nearly as good this time as the first time, nor was it likely very good then -- but that was long ago and far away -- and films seen in our distant past are often steeped in the magic of yesterdays.

Veterans Day 2010

Veterans

Veterans seemed omnipresent in my youth, in my teen years and well into my twenties and thirties. They are still among us but less in evidence, certainly less celebrated. As Rear Admiral Tarrant notably once said: “Where do we get such men?” The answer is as simple as it is complex: from our families, from those with whom we have worked and played, and from those with whom we may have served.

Veterans were my uncles: quiet men from Greenwich Village, Saugerties, and Catskill, who spent some time in the nineteen forties in North Africa, in Southern Italy and one of them -- just beyond the beach at Normandy in June 1944. (Gliders could land anywhere.)


Seven years after Al Stephenson, Fred Derry and Homer Parrish came home to Boone City after World War II, I went to work for a public utility in New York City as a messenger. After a year, I was moved to our IBM Tab Machine installation where I learned to operate the devices that preceded mainframe and personal computers (You often see Tab machines in forties movies showing FBI installations.)

I was trained by men some ten or more years older than I -- many were veterans of World War II. They had survived the war, some of them serving more than five years, where they helped save a nation at peril. (Arthur Hunt was a cook in the Ardennes when the Germans coveted Bastogne; Charlie Montag spent Easter Sunday 1945 off the coast of Okinawa.)


Most of these men came home unceremoniously, but at least, to a G.I. Bill that offered an education and the opportunity to buy modest homes on Long Island or other suburban areas. They were a good honest lot, with an occasional oddball. They were veterans.

Although I worked in Manhattan, I lived in the Bronx, the borough directly to the north. On evenings and weekends, I spent time at a lacklustre Bronx neighborhood bar – a poor American version of the Englishman’s local. A goodly number of its habitués were also veterans, who like those at work, had been similarly engaged during World War II. And they had formed a social group (The Mickey Jones Club) named after a neighborhood friend who had fallen in the Pacific. They were veterans.

In 1958 and 1959, because of the requirements of the Selective Service System, I found myself in Germany, a private in an Armor Group, a neophyte serving under men who had seen war in all its aspects.

Our Group Commander was Colonel Kane, a decorated hero of the Second World War. My section leader was Major Prichard -- who once whimsically reminisced that he had served under Patton in World War II and had, on occasion, told the General that he was going the wrong way.

Our officers were all armor men who had fought in World War II and in Korea and each had a subdued, fragmented tale to tell. S-3 was Operations. We had three captains: Leroy Lafayette Schaefer and two others. Sergeant First Class Campbell, my immediate superior, had been a prisoner of war in Germany. He told me of his experiences only once. These men, too, were veterans -- but still serving.

These warriors knew from reality and experience what we in the lower ranks knew only in the abstract, but could not truly comprehend. The situation is best summarized in the following, extracted from the American Cold War Veterans Internet site:

“No headlines, but just honest and faithful service — peacekeepers who stayed combat ready and willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. NATO had 21 divisions facing 175 soviet and Warsaw Pact divisions in 1955. Our troops stayed on alert, with their basic load of ammunition ready for war. Those troops in the Fulda gap had no illusions about their role — they would buy time for a counterstrike if and when war began.”


Those at work, those in my family, those in that neighborhood bar, and those under whom I served in Germany are all gone now. But I will think about them for a while today on Veterans Day -- close to sixty nine years after Japanese squadrons flew from the west, the north and the east -- past Diamond Head -- on their way to Pearl Harbor.

Where did we get such men?



An afterthought:

The tone of this reverie reflects days past and conflicts fading from modern sensibility. Yet each new generation produces its own veterans who move into that brotherhood.

Credits:

Artwork at the top is Barse Miller’s Waving Goodbye and Good Luck. Small town artwork is a Saugerties street (Partition at Montrose) by Edward Lazansky. Okinawa LST photograph is from WW2incolor.com. The soldier in the Fulda Gap region is from the Blackhorse Trooper website. The famed return to Boone City still is etched in most of our memories.

Short Cuts 7: "Stranglers’ Day"

Short Cuts 7: "Stranglers’ Day" at Fox Movie Channel and Turner Classic Movies (Saturday, November 6, 2010)

Yesterday might have been billed as “Stranglers’ Day” on Fox Movie Channel and Turner Classic Movies as my wife and I first watched The Boston Strangler (again), followed by Dial M for Murder (yet again) and finally Marlon Brando in Lewis Milestone’s Mutiny on the Bounty (never again).


The first had an excellent underplayed performance by Tony Curtis, who oddly does not appear for almost the first hour of the film. It was shot using a plethora of those unusual two, three and four segment split screens, a vogue which was popular in the 1960s and which revisits us sporadically. The Boston Strangler was directed by Richard Fleischer -- rightfully known for his terrific The Narrow Margin. We had not seen The Boston Strangler in some time, but Mr. Curtis was fresh in mind and a phrase Matthew Coniam recently used lingered: “fine work, in a wearily frenetic movie.” Matthew’s comment certainly well describes Curtis’s portrayal as well as that first non-Curtisian hour.

The second film was Hitchcock, but not really Hitchcock, rather a filmed play, rich in color. Both Hitchcock and Truffaut virtually ignore it on the Hitchcock/Truffaut tapes. (See the Charlie Parker site on Hitchcock/Truffaut if you have some 25 hours to spare.) Dial M is not quite a strangle movie, but a beautiful neck does come into play (endangered twice as it turns out), as does a pair of scissors, a Scotland Yard inspector, and some endless business about latchkeys. Truffaut and Hitchcock did not much care for the “too colorful” Inspector – but then again, Hitchcock did not care for Kim Novak in Vertigo either. But my wife and I enjoyed Dial M again none-the-less.


Finally, came Marlon Brando strangling (both on screen and off, reportedly) the oxygen, the warm Tahitian air and the credibility out of a sure-fire property. (The film, at least, looks very good.) I never thought I would feel sorry for Captain Bligh, but soon into the first reel, I was hoping someone would keelhaul Brando somewhere off the Isle of Wight. Never have I appreciated Clark Gable more.

“Strangler’s Day.” Saturday afternoon and evening on Fox Movie Channel and Turner Classic Movies.

Dial M photo by Icône

Film Makers 5: Henry Hathaway

Unless, of course ...

Film Makers 4: Hawks on Dirt

Amanda’s Cinema Survey (A Noodle in a Haystack)

Amanda’s Cinema Survey (A Noodle in a Haystack)

Amanda at A Noodle in a Haystack has posted a Cinema Survey, the questions of which are of particular interest and can be difficult because there are no correct answers. She has a diverse following, which makes for an entertaining kaleidoscope of preferences. And, as one would expect from her site, the discourse is civil and collegial. (I commented to Amanda that I think her survey questions tell us as much about her film tastes as her answers,)

I responded in Amanda’s Comment section, but am inclined also to post on this site. It provides an opportunity to append a few additional remarks and to reflect on a few comments Amanda received (including her own choices) which refreshed my memory. It also allows me to include photos of players past and players present to whom I am particularly partial.

1. What is your favorite movie starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, excluding all of The Thin Man films?

Manhattan Melodrama because of them and for the rare depiction of the General Slocum disaster. There is also the Dillinger connection that was used to good effect in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.

2. Name a screen team that appeared in only one film together but are still noteworthy for how well they complemented each other.


Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart: In a Lonely Place.

3. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' best film together?

Top Hat.

4. Your favorite actor named "Robert"?

Robert Montgomery

5. An actor/actress who, when you see one of their movies, you always wish that someone else was in his/her role?

Jack Nicholson.

6. An actor/actress that someone close to you really loves that you can't stand or vice versa?

None that fits “can’t stand”.

7. An actor/actress that you both agree on completely?

Bette Davis and James Cagney.

8. Complete this sentence: Virginia O'Brien is to Ethel Merman as...




Mrs. Danvers is to Bullwinkle.



9. What is your favorite film starring Ray Milland?

The Major and the Minor.

10. You had to have seen this one coming: what is your favorite movie of the 1960s?

Easier than I thought: Le samouraï. Mythical Monkey’s comment, however, reminded me of The Apartment. So I will include both and categorize one as favorite foreign and one as favorite American.

11. An actor/actress that you would take out of one film and put into a different movie that was released the same year?



Alan Curtis in Phantom Lady. Get him away from Ella Raines. There were four East Side Kids movies in 1944. Put him in one of those.

12. Who was your favorite of Robert Montgomery's leading ladies?

Audrey Totter.

13. You think it would have been a disaster if what movie starred the actor/actress who was originally asked to star in it?

Fredric March in the Cary Grant role in Bringing Up Baby. Oh God! Source: Todd McCarthy in Howard Hawks: the Grey Fox of Hollywood.

14. An actor/actress who you will watch in any or almost any movie?

Ethel Barrymore. Any. No almosts. Just going to the Broadway theatre named after her is splendor.



15. Your favorite Leslie Howard film and role?

The Scarlet Pimpernel (with ‘Pimpernel’ Smith as a chaser).

16. You have been asked to host a marathon of four Barbara Stanwyck films. Which ones do you choose?

Double Indemnity / Meet John Doe / Baby Face / Ball of Fire. I am a Sturges fan but had to leave something out.

17. What is, in your mind, the nearest to perfect comedy you have ever seen? Why?

Bringing Up Baby. On board were the following. One of our greatest actresses. One of our greatest actors. One of our finest American directors. And Dudley Nichols writing. Stellar supporting cast. Hawks thought a flaw was that there were no normal people in the movie – virtually all were screwballs. I think it matters not. He did, though, try to temper his next great comedy (His Girl Friday) with the introduction of the Ralph Bellamy character.

18. You will brook no criticism of what film?


I Know Where I'm Going!

19. Who is your favorite Irish actress?

Maureen. Inevitable.

20. Your favorite 1940s movie starring Ginger Rogers?

I’ll Be Seeing You. This is a very personal favorite. It is one of a quartet of films done by William Dieterle in a seven year period (1944-1950) all of which included Joseph Cottten. The other three are: Love Letters, Portrait of Jennie, and September Affair.

21. Do you enjoy silent movies?

Yes. But I came late. When younger, I had inexcusable and ill informed prejudices about silent films.

22. What is your favorite Bette Davis film?

Dark Victory.

23. Your favorite onscreen Hollywood couple?


Linda Darnell and Paul Douglas. Tough edges but perfect pairing. Only three films that I know.

24. This one is for the girls, but, of course, the guys are welcome to answer, too: who is your favorite Hollywood costume designer?

Orry-Kelly.

25. To even things out a bit, here's something the boys will enjoy: what is your favorite tough action film?

The Wild Bunch.

26. You are currently gaining a greater appreciation for which actor(s)/actress (es)?

Classic: Jean Harlow
Modern: Rebecca Pidgeon (realizing I am in a distinct minority)


27. Franchot Tone: yes or no?

Slightly enthusiastic yes. Just having been in Phantom Lady helps.

28. Which actors and/or actresses do you think are underrated?

Jean Hagen. Particularly in Asphalt Jungle. (Afterthought: Dawn’s mention of Spring Byington is perfect.)

29. Which actors and/or actresses do you think are overrated?

Jack Nicholson. Grimace and shout.

30. Favorite actor?

Joseph Cotten. He was in so many landmark films: Citizen Kane, The Third Man, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Shadow of a Doubt for starters. Then the four personal favorites as listed in my answer to Question 20. And so many more.

31. Favorite actress?

Bette Davis. There was a time when I thought it was Katharine Hepburn -- but then I found myself saying “I always think Kate is our best film actress – until I see another Bette Davis movie.”



32. Of those listed, who is the coolest: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, or Patrick Stewart?

Sorry -- but I must go off path. Elizabeth of “Oh by Jingo” enlightened me in the past with her choice of Hoagy Carmichael. Flawless choice.

33. What is your favorite movie from each of these genres:

Comedy: Bringing Up Baby.
Swashbuckler: The Mark of Zorro (Tyrone Power)
Film noir: Criss Cross
Musical: Gold Diggers of 1933 (I just love Aline MacMahon)
Holiday: It’s a Wonderful Life
Hitchcock: Vertigo



Amanda’s Cinema Survey (A Noodle in a Haystack)