Why we love Baby Jane

A night of sheer TERRA!

Time travel: theory or fact? Here's the proof

Could it be? Or have I been watching too much of the Big Bang Theory and Sheldon's endless theorizing about the possibility of time travel?

I have - maybe you've noticed - this little habit of making gifs out of YouTube videos - the shorter the better (which is why some of the gorgeous ones I made tonight wouldn't post - they were probably way too long). I found some stunning footage taken in London around 1900, in an era where the horse was the main mode of transportation, women wore corsets and skirts to the ground, and men were always properly attired in dark suits, overcoats and bowler hats (top hats for more formal occasions).

The uniformity of dress is one of the more remarkable aspects of these tiny visual time machines (along with the eerie three-dimensional quality of the ancient film: how did they ever achieve such an effect, or was it somehow pulled out of the depths of the antique silver nitrate by digital restoration and HD?). The aspect of the people, their facial expressions and formal bodily postures, reveal how very different these times were. Again and again I see women wearing a sort of uniform: a white blouse, often with puffy sleeves,which they called a shirtwaist, and a long dark skirt. The waist is so small that it's plain it didn't get that way on its own. Hair is piled atop the head with pins, and going without a hat is simply unthinkable.

Men are similarly hatted. Even poor blokes could afford an old battered one. A straw boater didn't cost you much, did it? To go about hatless - well, it was simply disrespectful, almost criminal. At the very least, it was suspicious.

As this three-second snippet of time on Blackfriars Bridge (first gif) endlessly repeats itself, we see carriages going by in a kind of dreamy haze, and people walking along the bridge - a woman all in black, a widow perhaps, walking in that stiff-spined way corseted women were forced to walk. Behind her is a couple so properly attired that they could have been cut out of a magazine.

 But who's this out front? Who's this bloke, not very visible at first because he's walking beside the carriage (wagon?) - the one pulling his left hand out of his pocket and looking right at the camera (bloody sauce!)? He's wearing a fine enough coat, and he walks as if he owns the bridge, with a sort of swaggering stride.

Where's he going, then, that he should be walking (hatless!) with such an important air? Who does he think he is?

I'll tell you who *I* think he is.

He is not of his time.

He's from Somewhere Else. More specifically, he's from Now. Whether he projected himself into the past (meaning he's in two places at once: hey, quantum physics tells us it's a cinch, and the saints have been managing it for centuries) or just jumped, bodily, with his whole being, I KNOW this guy did not belong in Edwardian England striding, bareheaded and insouciant, across Blackfriars bloody Bridge back in 1896.

Looking more closely - and it's too bad I can't get a tight closeup of such a grainy figure - it may be that he isn't even wearing a tie. No one went without a tie unless they were in hospital - in a lunatic asylum, I mean. He just sort of flaps along without a care, so informal as to alarm the passersby.

If you plucked out any of the other figures and plunked them down in modern society, we'd think, oh, how lovely, there must be an Edwardian exhibition at the museum. Or something. If you plunked HIM down,  no one would pay him any notice.

BECAUSE HE IS NOT OF HIS TIME. 

He is not of 1896, he is of "now", which means that he knows things. Why do you think progress accelerated so wildly in the 20th century? Was it seeded by these blokes from the future (their future, I mean - this time shit is full of slippery concepts and paradox).

What shall we call him? Roger? How did he get back there? Is he from OUR future, when time travel  really does exist? Why don't we see time travellers walking around in the here and now? The only ones I've ever met believe in conspiracy theories and wear hats made of tin foil.

Roger will ever remain a mystery, breezing along the bridge 117 years ago. Not one atom of him would remain - not in a normal time-line, I mean. In truth, Roger may be walking around right now. The other Roger, the parallel one? My brain aches - a drowsy numbness pains my sense - and it's definitely time to go to bed.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Some day, when I'm awfully low

"Never Gonna Dance" music by Jerome Kern and words by Dorothy Fields

Though I'm left without a penny,
The wolf was discreet.
He left me my feet.
And so, I put them down on anything
But the la belle,
La perfectly swell romance.








Never gonna dance.
Never gonna dance.
Only gonna love.
Never gonna dance.





Have I a heart that acts like a heart,
Or is it a crazy drum,
Beating the weird tattoos
Of the St. Louis Blues?





Have I two eyes to see your two eyes
Or see myself on my toes
Dancing to radios
Or Major Edward Bowes?





Though I'm left without a penny,
The wolf was discreet.
He left me my feet.
And so, I put them down on anything
But the la belle,
La perfectly swell romance.





Never gonna dance.
Never gonna dance.
Only gonna love.
Never gonna dance.





I'll put my shoes on beautiful trees.
I'll give my rhythm back to the breeze.
My dinner clothes may dine where they please,
For all I really want is you.





And to Groucho Marx I give my cravat.
To Harpo goes my shiny silk hat.
And to heaven, I give a vow
To adore you. I'm starting now
To be much more positive.
That....

Though I'm left without my Penny,
The wolf was not smart.
He left me my heart.
And so, I cannot go for anything
But the la belle,
La perfectly swell romance.





Never gonna dance.
Never gonna dance.
Only gonna love you.
Never gonna dance.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Sex and cigarettes

How is it that when certain movies come on TV, you drop what you're doing and watch them even if you don't like them very much? Or, at least, when said movies are seriously flawed.

This happens with Now, Voyager - EVERY time. Though I know it's nothing more than a semi-intelligent soaper with pretensions of a Heroic Journey (circa 1942), there's just something about Miz Charlotte and her travail (tra-Vale?) that sucks me in every time.

Speaking of suck. From the beginning of this thing, even before Charlotte Vale the sad little rich girl metamorphoses into Charlotte Vale the sad little rich WOMAN (having been screwed  in the tropics by Gerry, the biggest asshole to come down the turnpike since Jimmy Cagney shoved the grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face), there is smoking. Lots and lots of smoking. Charlotte the repressed spinster smokes in her room, and it's a wonder she doesn't set the whole place on fire by being so secretive with her butts.

Suck, suck, suck. Just picture all those cancer cells forming deep down in the lungs. Yet in that era, sex and seduction were all intertwined with cigarettes. In this movie, smoking is more ritualized than in any other I can think of. Gerry (a carnivorous bastard happily juggling two women, neither of which can actually have him) has a charming habit of shoving two cigarettes in his face, lighting them both in a great livid explosion, then handing one of them to Charlotte like she's being granted her last wish before being executed.

Ah, those smoldering looks. He can afford to smolder because he has no goddamn responsibilities whatsoever. This is one of several things that bother the hell out me about this movie - that, and the way he is portrayed as some sort of saint when he's really just busy cattin' around from woman to woman  and blowing lots of smoke. The other thing that sets my teeth on edge is that daughter of his, Tina, a whiny, clingy sort of lamprey whom Charlotte fastens on to as a DEVICE (no less) to force Gerry to stay in her life and not chase the next piece of tail that comes down the turnpike.

Ahhhh! Gerry in that tent or wherever-the-fuck they are! Out somewhere. Anyway, they're all bundled up talking (smoking, too, I think) and there's this big fire in the fireplace, and then the fire burns down real low and the camera pans back to them and it looks like she's wearing his pajamas. This means they must have had sex. Charlotte keeps referring to it over and over again in the most coy manner possible, i. e. telling her fiance (whom she rejects, maybe because he's too nice or doesn't smoke enough) that she "must sound depraved", which she does. But when you think about it, screwing around with a married man IS a form of moral turpitude and can't really be defended, even if Charlotte takes on the noble, selfless role of Tina's quasi-mother to save Gerry's family/keep him on the string. 

But ya gotta wonder. . . are these guys smokin', or tokin'?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Haunted by Harold

OK, then. I've told you all about Lloyd synchronicity, and in case you don't remember what it is, it's examples of the name Lloyd coming up over and over and over again through the course of a single day.

It happens and happens, and has been happening for months and maybe even years. I've had as many as five a day, and once I had four in a single movie (a little British comedy called The Wrong Box), but the ones that really make my scalp prickle aren't just things like seeing the name Lloyd on the side of a train or on a street sign or a realtor's sign or TV credits or a dog's ID tag. . . they're examples of actually SEEING Harold Lloyd, usually when I least expect it.

It happens fairly frequently on Turner Classic Movies, and this isn't so very unusual because they have championed the re-release of many of his magnificent silent comedies. But tonight. Oh God. I was minding my own business watching William Shatner's Weird or What? (one of my favorite educational programs) when an ad break came on, and. . .

And there was this woman dangling from the hands of a huge clock.

A Safety Last! clock. An ICONIC clock. WTF? Have I fallen into the freaking Fourth Dimension or something?

Not only was the ad in black and white, it had little lines running down it to make it look like an old movie. She wasn't dressed like Harold Lloyd, but still, the derivation was obvious.

A Harold Lloydian, Safety-Lastian, clock-dangling, cliff-hanging, danger-defying, "high and dizzy" thrill-picture scene in a goddamn Cover Girl cosmetics ad!

Listen, ever since I started researching my novel The Glass Character, and all through the writing of it, and even now, long post-Lloyd, this has been happening. It seems to come in waves, and now I'm in some sort of a bizarre tidal wave.

When I fell in with Harold Lloyd and his legend, I fell into enchantment. A state not so easy to enter, or, for that matter, to escape. I wish somebody would tell me what it all means.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

You were temptation

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

Tahiti Trot: the twisted genius of Marlon Brando

Oh boy, Marlon Brando dancing in tight pants. I wouldn't even be on this subject at all today, were it not for Turner Classics and their insidious habit of showing movies that drag back whole chunks of your emotional history.

I don't want to think about this even now, because for a while there the musical score of this movie haunted me every damn minute, to the point that I had to purposely force myself to remember the William Tell Overture to drown it out.  The movie is On the Waterfront, and every few years I watch it, almost against my will. It's the movie for my life, and every time I see it I tell myself, "THIS time I won't cry. I know what's going to happen. I won't get caught up in it."

"This" time, I sobbed my guts out and didn't even know why, any more than I'd known all the other times. It had embedded itself in me: or has it ever NOT been embedded in me since the first time I saw it?

I was thirteen years old and "sleeping in the den", a special treat: I got to sleep on a creaky, lumpy pull-out sofa with brutal cold hardware on the sides, so I could stay up and watch a movie (or movies, depending on how long I could stay awake). This movie, this On the Waterfront just came on, and after a while my brother Arthur came in from wherever he'd been - out drinking, I think. We watched it together, and I recorded the sound track on an old Webcor reel-to-reel.

Is this why it became so embedded in my brain stem, because I listened to the sound track so many times? Is this why the glorious, ferocious Leonard Bernstein score still thunders through my brain whether I want it to or not? Or is it the fact that Arthur died in 1980, and this is one of the few fragments I have left of him? I remember we did a highly disrespectful satire of the movie, the two of us playing all the roles (I was Edie, Charlie and the priest) and recorded it on the Webcor. But I am sure it wasn't just a sendup. The movie had gotten to both of us.

I don't want to go into the details of the story, except to say it's the classic good-versus-evil struggle, integrity versus an almost cartoonish oppression. Brando plays Terry Malloy, a washed-up prizefighter ("I coulda had class! I coulda been a contend-ah! I coulda been somebody.") singlehandedly taking on savagely corrupt waterfront powerbrokers and winning. But not before a lot of compelling scenes with the virginal Eva Marie Saint, and a thunderous performance by Karl Malden as a renegade priest. "Boys: this IS my church!"

Somehow it comes around again, mysteriously, like a season. I've forced friends of mine to watch it with me over the years just to show them how it's the best movie ever made, even though I am sure they don't get it ("Look, look, there's a cross on the roof! An unintential cross! It means Charlie is going to be sacrificed, you know?"). Instead of losing intensity, as it probably should, its power seems to accumulate so that it now has the capacity to completely mow me down.

At thirteen, I found myself in a Marlon Brando phase. On the Waterfront came out in 1954, so it was as old as I was, and it was a little disappointing to discover that Brando was not the same man. Already he had turned very strange, had started to lose his astonishing good looks and charisma and gain a distressing amount of weight around his middle (later to transform him into a literal square, broad as he was long). He was hanging around with all these Tahitian women and having a whole lot of children with them. All this I had to find out at the library, in old books. Some movie mags had scandalous stories about him. But that was nothing to what came later.

I don't know what it is about the brilliantly talented, why they are so fucked up and so spookily gifted at throwing all their advantages away. For decades, actors and directors thought it was the greatest opportunity in the world to work with Brando, even as his reputation for being completely unprofessional and even nasty to his fellow actors had become legendary. That, and his alarming tendency to split his pants when he bent over. In a 1000-page biography by Peter Manso which is almost as heavy as Brando himself, one wardrobe mistress claimed that she had made him seventeen pairs of pants for a single movie, One-Eyed Jacks. I'm not buying it, but you get the idea.

When I recently watched On the Waterfront again, when I saw Brando eerily foreshadowing his own decline playing the slouching, seedy ex-boxer oppressed by forces he didn't understand, I saw an almost religious surrender, a willingness or even a need to lay open his own chest: "They got Charlie," he murmurs when he finds his brother (crucifixion-like!) hanging dead on a longshoreman's hook. It's more of a statement than a lament. Then comes a muted wail of grief: "I'm gonna take it out on their skulls." No other actor in history could pronounce a line like that, not even aware of what he was doing. When technique dissolves and an actor so astonishingly "becomes", there is simply no name for it.

Brando died a number of years ago, a huge man holed up in a mansion on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, Citizen Kane-like in his isolation and bizarre self-destructive habits. Supposedly on a strict diet, he bribed delivery boys from McDonalds to throw bags of burgers over the wall of his fortress-like home. He went a strange kind of crazy, and I won't even get into the horrors of his family, the madness, the murder, craziness and death of every kind. He even told one interviewer that he had nine children, when in truth he barely had eight (some of them the stepchildren of divorce). And at least one of them was sired with his Mexican maid.

But there is something about the cab scene in On the Waterfront - the scene sometimes called the most compelling and perfect in all of movie history - the way his brother Charlie pulls the gun on him, and Brando's response - almost gently pushing the barrel of the gun away from him and breathing in a kind of tender disbelief: "Wow, Charlie." In that moment he realizes (and somehow spookily telegraphs to us) that his brother is already dead, or, perhaps, has never really been alive.

We will never understand such genius and its frightening, illuminating, appalling ways.

This is one of those nights when I can't stop laughing

Is it just me, or is this the funniest shit I've seen in years? It isn't what they do, I guess, but the way they do it, and their characters, so hopelessly inept we all feel just a little bit better about ourselves. As the poet says, this is "an ecstasy of fumbling". 

I couldn't stop laughing myself teary-eyed all the way through this, and my husband came in and asked me if I had gone nuts, and I said, no, but you HAVE to see this, so I didn't delete it off the PVR but I don't know if he'll watch it or if he'll find it funny. Maybe you hadda be there.

I've always loved L & H, in their simple little low-budget Hal Roach early talkies with the same music playing in a continuous loop in the background (the same music as in the Our Gang comedies, I might add, which I also slavishly watched as a kid, though for some reason we called them the Little Rascals.) 

After seeing the condor flailing around on the ice, I was already prepared for an ecstasy of fumbling.

Skate! Skate! Skate!

 

 

 

 

 

Levant and his "honeysuckle"

This is a bad version of a good clip. The clip I used to have (of the same song) mysteriously shrank, filling about 1/4 of the screen, which is too bad because THIS one leaves out a few seconds before and after the song which are completely charming. But this is a good example of Oscar's strange seductiveness, which does seem to apply to men as well as women. I mean. . . calling a man "Honeysuckle" is just a little too much, isn't it? Any nickname that has "suck" in it is suspicious to me.

Painted Doll: the magic of the early talkies

The Wedding Of The Painted Doll

It's a holiday today
The Wedding of the Painted Doll
It's a jolly day
The news is spreading
All around the hall

Red Riding Hood & Buster Brown
The Jumping Jack Jumped into town
From far and near they're coming here
Church bells ringing, bringing

All the little dollies from the follies
With the painted cheeks
Little Mama doll has fussed around
For weeks and weeks

Shoo the blues
No time to lose
Rice and shoes
Will spread the news
That it's a holiday
Today's the Wedding of the little Painted Doll

Here come the bridesmaids
Look at them in their places
Look at the fancy laces
Look at them as they smile
All sorrow away

Here comes the bride now
Look at the little cutie
Look at the little beauty
Look at the little doll
It's her wedding day

Here's the preacher and all look
As he takes his little book
He is sure he knows his stuff
'Cause he's done it oft'n enough

Here comes the bride groom
Ready for the service
Just a little nervous
Now the preacher says,
"You're married to stay"

It's a holiday today
The Wedding of the little Painted Doll


Arthur Freed (W) & Nacio Herb Brown (M)
from the 1929 movie, "Broadway Melody"

I finally found a YouTube clip of one of my favorite Hollywood production numbers. It's one of my favorites because it's just about the first Hollywood production number ever, from the 1929 curiosity Broadway Melody. Then of course you know what happened. It was taken down due to one of those silly rules, such as the law against theft.

So I put up the closest thing I could find, which is grainy still pictures, but the music is good.

The days of early sound must have been heady and terrifying: everything was dumped upside-down. Theatres had to scramble to convert all their equipment, careers were shattered, others sprang up full-blown like Athena from the head of Zeus. (Sorry, I used that metaphor a few posts ago, but it was too good not to repeat. This Oscar Levant stuff is getting to me.) It wasn't so much actors with "good voices" who were able to make the switch, but actors who were able to adapt their style to something more fluid, more subtle, with no more fluttering eyelashes or jabbing, full-body gestures.

Try something here, if you will: look at some silent films, both dramas and comedies (and turn off the wretched music that usually goes with them: when I say silent, I mean silent). Then watch some black-and-white movies from ten years later, with the sound off. Observe carefully. It's a whole 'nother ball game, like comparing stage acting to screen acting. The old large gestures won't play. Often, one murmur will do.

This doesn't mean sound films are "better", but they do seem to be from another planet. Much as I'm intrigued by them, I find silent pictures hard to follow. I'm one of those auditory types, and seeing lips moving with title cards strains my imagination.  Except for Harold Lloyd comedies, the pace of silent film seems much slower, and I was raised as a vid-kid on television that, by comparison, moved at light speed.

So, with the release of that awful non-talkie The Jazz Singer (featuring Al Jolson, the most repulsive performer who ever lived), everything changed. Garbo walked in and mowed everyone down with a voice that was heavily accented, "foreign", and far too deep and gruff to match her ethereal beauty. Something about it worked, it snagged people, grabbed them viscerally. Comedians such as W. C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy, who already had a loyal following in silent pictures, exploded overnight into international stars: and need I tell you why?

So anyway, this Broadway Melody, which I have watched on Turner Classics (bailing halfway through the first time because the non-musical part of it is just so awful) is a fine example of the partial transformation that audiences gobbled up at the time. It's a sort of cliche of early talkies that everyone had to cluster around a microphone hidden behind a potted palm, but it actually is true that these movies had a peculiarly static quality. Nobody knew how to deal with a microphone, which to the actors (mimes, by our standards) must have seemed like a voice-sucking monster. That explains why they had to include frenetic production numbers like this one, to keep rigor mortis from setting in.

This is the strangest one ever, with girls being spun around like compasses, a preacher with Harold Lloyd glasses and rubber legs who appears to fall down the stairs, cartwheels and splits galore, girls with a pompom attached to one ankle (??), and precious lyrics sung by one of those young men with a falsetto voice. I also note a bit of '20s choreography I've seen before: the girls stand on one foot, the other leg extended, hold on to the extended ankle, and hop up and down.


The whole thing is so beautiful to look at: not "black and white", but silver and shine. The music has that charming, optimistic "oom-cha, oom-cha" quality that was so popular before the Depression brought it all crashing down. Soon would come a leap in sophistication:  better songs, real plots instead of stilted novelty-driven dialogue ("Take. . . him. . . for. . . a. . . ride"), Fred and Ginger. If you look at pictures from 1929, then pictures from 1931, you will be astounded at the transformation.

In the interim was a mad scramble, studded with quirky little sparklers like this one.

Thanks for the Memory

This clip is nothing less than a piece of film history: Bob Hope and Shirley Ross singing "Thanks for the Memory" (NOT "memories!") in a movie called The Big Broadcast of 1938.

I first saw this movie while sleeping in the den (a special privilege granted only on a non-school night) in about 1964. The pullout bed was excruciating, but that was all part of the experience: I'd watch a Cleveland creature-feature show called Hoolihan and Big Chuck (and, incredibly, the same Big Chuck still hosts that show after all these years), re-re-re-reruns of shows like Topper and Love That Bob, and, sometimes, a gem like this one.

There was something of a W. C. Fields revival going on at that time. Before I'd even seen one of his movies, my Dad would boom on and on in his gusty, Bushmills-inspired way about Fields, and even quote from some of his monologues: the "Ethiopian in the fuel supply," "where will you be at noon tonight?" and "I cut a path through a solid wall of human flesh" (from another Fields gem, Mississipi, with a startlingly young, almost effeminate Bing Crosby).

I can't say as we really believed what my Dad was saying until this Fields festival began. We saw Mississipi, The Bank Dick, You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, and My Little Chickadee (where Fields and Mae West basically cancelled each other out).

But then came The Big Broadcast, probably at about 2 a.m. At some point my older brother stumbled in from a dance, likely tanked, and we began to record the sound track of the movie on an old Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder with a fan-shaped microphone that weighed 47 pounds.

The movie was about a race between two ocean liners, the Colossal and the Gigantic. Fields is supposed to be in charge but ends up on the wrong boat (after his golf cart becomes airborne and lands on the deck), wreaking havoc throughout. To see him perform both his golf routine and his pool routine in one movie makes it worth the price of admission.

But the movie is also pretty excruciating. Bob Hope is the emcee (with the running gag that he can't get a laugh from the audience)for a dreary assortment of yesterday's performers: Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm Orchestra (a kind of clumsy forerunner of Lawrence Welk), the very gay-looking Latin lover Tito Guizarre, and (shudder) the infamous Nazi sympathizer Kirsten Flagstad, who sings Brunhilde's Battle Cry from (Lohengrin? Whatever.)

Then comes this song, fairly near the end. Obviously, the two of them have had a tempestuous marriage that finally blew apart. But watch Shirley Ross as she registers each tart, tender line (Hope basically just sits there, his eyes like the dots on dice). There are many extra verses here that you will never find if you look up the lyrics anywhere. The song is evocative and never corny. It took me forever to figure out the subtle code of these lines:

"Letters with sweet little secrets
That couldn't be put in a daywire
Too bad it all had to go haywire
That's life, I guess
I love. . . your dress."

The song ends with the haunting lines:

"Strictly entre-nous, darling, how are you
And how are all those little dreams that never did come true. . . "

"Little dreams." "Sweet little secrets." In spite of trying, they never did have a child. He went on to get married three or four more times. He's a cad, and she knows it. He has a sort of surface charm, a slickness. But he's a great straight man for Ross' brilliance, and he does not try to out-react or out-shine her. Perhaps he made the right decision after all.

The song stuck to him for the rest of his life (well over 100 years), always misquoted as "Thanks for the Memories". But here is where it started, and, as far as I am concerned, ended too.