Movies - Frances Langford again

 I had bookmarked Girl Rush (1944) a while ago because it stars the obscure comedy duo of  Wally Brown and Alan Carney, but when I realized it also features Frances Langford I decided I'd better download it and get it watched.  Well, it's pretty terrible, combining a mediocre Gay Nineties music hall story with a flat RKO western and the Brown-Carney duo seems to me to be justly forgotten.

 Langford's hair is again an enormous superstructure some five or six inches high, perched atop her head like a Venusian Brain Bat but with sausage curls added in the back for that Gay Nineties look. To be fair, most of the girls in the movie have the same sort of hairstyle but hers is far and away the most huge and imposing. The movie is mercifully short, and other than feeding my temporary Langfordmania its only really notable moment is during the scene we see below - Robert Mitchum in drag.

As I was sitting in the sauna at the health club today, pondering the mystery of Frances Langford's immense hairdo, I recalled this scene from Dixie Jamboree, where she takes the wheel of the riverboat in a cartoonishly enormous captain's hat.  It was then that I figured it all out.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, it was cute to be little.  There was nothing more charming than a chest-high jazz-baby gazing up at her big strong man and a sweet little gold-digger like Joan Blondell could wrap any man around her little finger just by acting helpless.  In the '40s small women were not hep.  It wasn't cute any more to be little except in a juvenile role or as comedy relief, probably because the war effort demanded more of women and they were, temporarily at least, taking on a more autonomous and self-determining role in society.  Frances Langford was five feet one inch tall. Like the even more diminutive Carmen Miranda she was tricked out in high heels and big hats, and her colossal coiffure, to make her more acceptably large.  It really is a terribly unflattering style for her, and I find her much more human looking (and her vocal style more interesting) in this clip from the 1930s.

Somethinging Someone (or something)

At the end of the 20th century a movie titling trend emerged which I call somethinging someone. It's a verb in, correct me if I am wrong, the present active tense, followed by a noun - usually the name of a person. Before the late 20th century, somethinging someone titles rarely appear. Now they pop up a couple of times a year. I can see their appeal - they indicate the nature of the story by saying what happens and who or what it happens to, indicating an activity or pursuit of a goal. There is a lot of saving, being and becoming. A few of them are puns based on common phrases, or may simply be a phrase or term with the same structure. Sometimes the second word, up for instance, is not a noun. So what. I do not differentiate. I write them down when I see them and have accumulated this list.

Waltzing Matilda - 33

Eating Raoul - 82

Educating Rita - 83

Stalking Laura - 93

Boxing Helena - 93

Guarding Tess - 94

Deconstructing Sarah - 94

Stealing Beauty - 96

Chasing Amy - 97

Deconstructing Harry - 97

Finding Forrester - 00

Hanging Up - 00

Saving Grace - 00

Saving Silverman - 01

Kissing Jessica Stein - 01

Avenging Angelo - 02

Missing Allen - 02

Owning Mahowney - 03

Saving Face - 04

Being Julia - 04

Finding Neverland - 04

Following Sean - 05

Keeping Mum - 05

Nearing Grace - 05
Fetching Cody - 05

Copying Beethoven - 06

Finding Dawn - 06

Becoming Jane - 07

Closing Escrow - 07

Touching Home - 08

Finding Amanda - 08

Hatching Pete - 09

Passing Strange - 09

Taking Woodstock - 09
Loving Leah - 09

Erasing David - 10

Becoming Chaz - 11

Killing Bono - 11

BONUS! Somethinging someone with two names, a title, or in one case, an article.

Driving Miss Daisy - 89

Saving Private Ryan - 98

Waking Ned Devine - 98

Teaching Mrs. Tingle - 99

Being John Malkovich - 99

Raising Victor Vargas - 02

Seducing Dr. Lewis - 03

Capturing The Friedmans - 03

Hating Alison Ashley - 05

Forgiving Dr. Mengele - 06

Forgetting Sarah Marshall - 08

Movies - or more properly Hair

Dixie Jamboree (1942) is a bit substandard even for poverty row's Producer's Releasing Corporation (PRC), a Mississippi showboat story with Guy Kibbee as the captain, Lyle Talbot the heavy, and lightweight Eddie Quillen as the closest thing to a romantic lead they could come up with. The real interest in this for me is Frances Langford, or more exactly, the thing on her head. This review is not so much of this half-assed movie, but of a hair style.

That's Eddie Quillen, warily eyeing the immobile hair sculpture, or at least the tiny face buried within it. I recently reviewed the Eleanor Powell/Jimmy Stewart film Born to Dance in which Langford does not stand out at all because her head is not crowned by a gigantic immobile hair sculpture like this. She had a pretty good voice, and seems to have done well opposite Don Ameche in the Bickersons radio program, but as a screen actress she leaves much to be desired. Such as personality. Her lack of personality is more obvious when she is ostensibly the star of the film, and when she has a gigantic immobile hair structure perched upon her head, making her small round face seem even tinier and less appealing.

Here she is in Career Girl, another PRC cheapie made around the same time (greatly enhanced by the participation of Iris Adrian - really the only reason to watch it), with her hair sculpture even more gigantic and frightening. 1944 was not a good time for hair, or design in general. There was a trend in set design for musical films to create huge empty apartments or night-clubs dominated by one large baroque motif, isolated and enlarged like a piece chipped off an old picture frame and expanded a thousand times, and this sort of paralyzed upswept head encrustation appears to spring from the same puzzling source. Betty Grable's lack of appeal for me I attribute to her participation in this unappealing trend which makes a round face rounder and a blank face blanker. Her 1945 film The Dolly Sisters is a relentless assault of these frozen squiggly head sculptures, each one more freakish and unnatural than the last. They have the same visual impact on me as a baroque settee with tufted satin upholstery - too much detail creating a kind of nausea, see-sickness as it were. I am still forming theories on the sociocultural basis of this late-wartime design trend but at present it baffles and sickens me.

SKYLIGHT REMOVAL - The End

Too tired to do anything but post this picture of the finished roof. I need to go up again tomorrow morning and put in the replacement for the support block, which Barron kindly cut for me to match the original, and to clean out the gutter. I decided to buy a couple of tubes of roofing cement and use a caulking gun to squirt a line of black goo along under the lower edge of each tab so if we do get a good wind there will be less likelihood of it getting under and ripping them off. I also found that bare feet are much better than shoes for roofing, but next time I may try a pair of cheap "water socks," flexible shoe thingies with a grippy rubber sole.

As for the investigative aspect of the project, I found that the cost came out to about the same as using pre-cut shingles would be. I spent about $30 more total for roll roofing than I would for shingles, but have half a roll left. This house will have to be re-roofed before I die unless I die in the next year or so, in which case it is not my problem. If I do it within two years the shingles will still be in good enough shape I can just put the new ones over them. If I wait much more than that, they will get warped and curly enough that they will have to be stripped off and replaced, which would just about triple the work involved. It takes about an hour and a half to cut a whole roll of roofing into these two tab hex shingles, which covers about 50 - 60 square feet. I will see how this holds up over the winter and if it doesn't suffer any major failure I will probably use this technique in the future. About half of the roof is not visible from the street so I would use uncut roll roofing, but for the visible areas I would like to do something interesting and I think a two or three color treatment of this would be pretty cool.

SKYLIGHT REMOVAL PART THREE - interlude

Here is my secret - everything I know about roofing comes from this article in volume 4 of the Popular Mechanics Illustrated Home Handyman Encyclopedia & Guide. Since I had to re-shingle part of the roof I wanted to take this opportunity to experiment with an old shingle design from this book. It is the second one down in the diagram on the right, the 2-tab hex shingle. I mulled it over in my mind a lot for the past week or so to come up with the best way of laying out and cutting the shingles.

Here are some tools I thought I might need today. I used the meter stick, iron square, chalk, triangle and linoleum cutter to lay out the pattern for my master shingle and used it as the template to cut the rest. I was having so much fun I forgot to take a picture of my setup for cutting the roll roofing into shingles. I got to work under the tree in the back yard a few feet away from the bird bath and feeders, and enjoyed the company of a pair of nuthatches for a few minutes as I worked. I will take a photo when the time comes to start cutting the second roll.

Here's the concept. I don't know if this will ultimately end up being much cheaper than using standard shingles, though roll roofing only costs about half as much as pre-cut. I have to cover 130 square feet and three packs of shingles will cover 100 square feet, ideally, at $25+ per pack. I figure I would have to buy at least five packs. I bought two rolls of roofing at $49 each and will see how it goes. Standard shingles have a line of tar applied to the back that seals the lower edge down to keep them from blowing off, and I will probably apply some roofing tar under the lower corners. I found a gallon can of roofing tar in the shed when we moved in and have been using it ever since. What I would really like to do is use two or three colors, but I am just going to see how this goes. Imagine it in white, brown and green. That would be amazing.

This is what I cut the shingles with, a nice looking old linoleum cutter I found in the street one day while biking. I cut from the back side and the angle of the blade is just right for that purpose. By the time I got done cutting one roll it was almost noon and almost 80 degrees with the sun just starting to hit the west side of the roof. I start to wilt when it gets over 70 and I am sure not going on the roof at this point. I'd really like a couple of overcast days on Monday and Tuesday to get this done so I could work longer.

Here's all the stuff for the job - uniform size shingles and odds and ends will all be used. I got a new piece of flashing for that vent pipe - the silver thing with the black rubber circle. To the left is the roofing felt which you put down first to help keep things watertight. I have been using the shorter one for years since I got it to re-roof after removing the other skylight. The longer roll is another thing that was lying in the street one day. I strapped it on the back of my bike and brought it home. Tomorrow I want to go out early and get some blackberries, then Zombie Croquet at the Mystery Hole in the afternoon. Have a nice weekend!

SKYLIGHT REMOVAL PART TWO

Yesterday I pried the skylight off and lowered it inside. It was stuck down with a whole lot of transparent silicon adhesive and a whole lot of caulking that I had put on to try to keep it from leaking. The adhesive along the upper edge was entirely covered with roofing grit that had washed in over the years.

Better replace this doohickey while I am at it. The rubber seal is split and will let water in.

This is the edge of the hole as seen from inside. The outer layer is sheathing plywood on top of the old horizontal boards the original wooden shingles were nailed to. The thin innermost layer is a decorative application of thin cedar which must have been really expensive. Behind that is a surprise - the sloping ceiling is covered with horizontal tongue-in-groove boards, the original early 1900s building technique. The room below also has a couple of walls of this. The opposite side of the room had been re-done with sheetrock and I had assumed I would find that under the cedar. I would then fill in the hole with a scrap of sheetrock and paint it all. I will figure out something else now.

Open to the world. The cedar is attractive, but a white ceiling would be a lot better.

Seen from outside - I have put 2x2 around the edge to screw the patch onto.

The patch ready to go, cut to fit. Thanks to Barron for this scrap and for cutting it to size for me. I pre-drilled and stuck screws in, and pulled it up from the outside, laid it in place and drove the screws in with my cordless drill. I was too tired to take a thrilling picture of the patched hole for you. I have about four good hours of work in me per day, plus another hour of not so good work, and the roof at 2 p.m. is not a good place for me to be, with half a headache and the sun beating down. Next comes re-roofing.

SKYLIGHT REMOVAL PART ONE - a photographic essay

First an historical diagram. This house is so weirdly complex it is hard to grasp its structure, even for me, and I have been in every place a person can get into here. In red is the original structure. Yellow is the first expansion, raising the roof and building a new stairway on the east side. The little yellow section on the east side is where they raised the roof for the top of the stairs, and there was a time when it stuck out alone, before the blue section was added. The original stairs were at the back of the house, to the north. The various blue tones followed - I don't know what came when, and the porch may have been added when the roof was raised and the basement was expanded. I know the wing on the east side, which contains the upstairs bathroom, came after the stairs were added, because in the attic there is a weird little area where the yellow, blue and red zones meet, and I found exterior siding on the north side of the area which comprises the top of the stairs. The green square is what interests us today.

This is how it has been for years. When I uncovered it today the overcast light of morning was so nice I almost forgot why I have kept it covered and looked forward with eagerness to the day I would get rid of it. Then I remembered that a foot-wide beam of sunlight creeping across the workbench does not help at all, nor does having things get dripped on and mopping up under a hole in the roof all winter.

Moss on the outside, mold on the inside. I tried many times to seal it from inside and outside but never succeeded until I just stapled a sheet of plastic over it.

Tools for today's work - climbing harness and rope, belt bag for nails, and demolition bar. The rubber mallet was not needed.

Here it is. As you see, the plastic skylight is much larger than the opening, overlapping it on all four sides. It is glued on, and held down with strap iron that is nailed to the side of the box.

Here is how I remove the shingles. Safety apparatus in foreground. I thought I might salvage some shingles but they are too old to re-use, but I like to be orderly. Unlike professional roofers who have a crew of five and a drop box to throw everything in, I can't just scrape the shingles off with a shovel and dump them off the roof. I remove the nails and put them in my leather belt bag, and try to drop the shingles so they don't get all crunched up in a heap.

Maybe this was why it leaked. You are supposed to layer those pieces of metal flashing (that's what they call it, flashing) so they match the layers of shingles. It comes in a roll, 8 inches wide by 10 feet long. I know because one piece had the sticker on it. If I were doing it, I would cut them all the same size and add one with each layer of shingles, to ensure that water rolled off and down the roof, instead of seeping in and wrecking somebody's bookbinding supplies.

And what the hell is this sticking out? There is one on the other side too. The skylight is made of two sheets of plastic spaced about half an inch apart, with these sort of gas vent things similar to a tire inner tube filler. The knurled cap screws off and there is some mechanism inside. It looks like this was actually built as a window of some kind, to be filled with an inert gas, but it was probably picked up as salvage and used on our house. The skylight at the front of the house, which I replaced years ago, was also two layers but more obviously faked up than this. Note the sophisticated attachment technique with the strap iron. That will keep it on.
Another interesting feature at the top of the house where the newer structure meets the original wall. This cannot be blamed on the skylight builders. Here the flashing should be fitted to the siding, slid up under each piece of siding and fitted to the roof to prevent water getting into the crack. You really don't need that under an 18 inch overlap because it would take a hurricane to get water back there, so maybe that is why they just crapped it up with a bunch of pieces at random like that. You can see a spot of bare wood on the underside of that beam, indicating that there was once a support piece resting on the roof ridge below. I painted the green parts and you can see where I stopped, because you actually have to be right where I was when I took the picture to see it.
Here is another thing farther down. Only about half of this support block is left, and I will have to cut a new one. It was pretty loose and only nailed to the roof. Nothing will collapse without it but I don't want to walk on that overhang until it is replaced. You can also see this in the first exterior photo of the skylight, above.
Today's mission accomplished. Most of the shingles are stripped off except for the ones behind the skylight and under the overhang, which I can't get to until I remove the skylight.

Here are the shingles stacked up. I will have to figure out how to dispose of them. Next step - demolition of the skylight.

Movies

Words and Music (1949) is, as they say, inspired by the lives of the composing team of Rodgers and Hart. Composer bio-fics are a good chance to see some swell musical numbers if you are willing to sit through a lot of faked up melodrama, but in this case they thoughtfully kept the wait between songs a lot shorter than, for example, the Kern (Til the Clouds Roll By) and Ruby/Kalmar (Three Little Words) films. There isn't a lot of excitement in two guys standing by a piano, and in the case of Lorenz Hart there was a lot of material they couldn't use - they had to invent a doomed youthful romance to explain why he lived with his mother and vanished on mysterious long-term binges of some sort. By the time it drags down to his ignominious and forcedly melodramatic end, it is more absurd than pathetic, and they made the final moment of his life purely laughable. Being played by Mickey Rooney doesn't help to take him seriously. A real shame. They dumped a truckload of money on each of the huge soundstage sets (there must be less than two minutes of the film shot outdoors) and it is nice to see a film made at the pinnacle of studio technicolor excess. They did their best to prove their claim that it was the BIGGEST musical. I completely enjoyed only about a third of the songs - the big stage productions were great and Garland's two songs are brightly delivered but ones I don't care for that much. For my money the best number is Betty Garrett's intimate rendition of A Small Hotel early in the film. Perry Como is the primary male singer here, unfortunately. I have always found his voice too blurred and mushy for my liking. Gene Kelly and Vera Ellen do a Slaughter on Tenth Avenue number that seemed way too familiar - possibly he did it or something very similar a couple of other times. I think the biggest challenge they had in the entire picture was making Janet Leigh look like an adult at the end. They did this by having her wear her hair up and dressing her in brown for the last third of the film. It didn't work. She looks 21 when she is supposed to be 18, and 18 when she is supposed to be 30+. Gowns by Helen Rose are a big plus - nobody ever did skirts the way she did, and here her focus is on multicolor layers of petticoats that push the skirt out into a swinging, swirling torrent and flash an intense contrast to the surface color, with a transparent veiling layer over a sharply delineated bustier type of thing above. I had never paid much attention to Rodgers and Hart because I attached the schlockiness of Rodgers and Hammerstein retroactively, but Hart's lyrics are every bit as snappy, playful and inventive as Gershwin or Porter, and Rodgers' melodies are more complex and sophisticated than I expected. Overall not a huge success for me, but it has its moments, mostly in the first half. 6/10

IT HAD TO BE DONE

Some statements cannot go unchallenged. A local crank seems to have discovered that all circuses are nothing but a platform for the perpetuation of shocking animal cruelty and it can be rectified by going on a flyer-posting spree. Which is fine with me. I just wanted to help out.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

In my never-ending search for the perfect SUNDAY WEBCOMIC I sometimes encounter "artcomics" - something vaguely in the form of a webcomic which is all loose and artisticky kind of like Handling Doom. It really isn't a satisfactory experience in any way, and the one interesting thing is that it makes as much sense in chronological order as it does the other way.

Since today's theme seems to be Unsatisfactory, here is one of the most perfunctory attempts at a webcomic I have yet encountered, called A Baker's Dozen. Another example of what happens when a person wants to do a webcomic.

Movies

I got a set of mostly pre-war Bing Crosby movies from the library and bailed out of Waikiki Wedding (1937) in the middle of his first rendition of Blue Hawaii. I just couldn't take all that phony hawaiianity (and Martha Rae), even with Grady Sutton as occasional relief. In Double or Nothing (1937), Bing, Bill Frawley, Martha Rae and Andy Devine are honest strangers brought into an Eccentric Will to compete against the machinations of greedy relatives and win the million dollar inheritance. Rae is invariably repellent to me - if she would keep her mouth shut and take her clothes off more often she wouldn't be so bad. Bing's aggressive pursuit of a young woman is supposed to be cute I guess but I found it rather disgusting. The real interest in this for me was a series of bizarre vaudeville specialty acts ranging from hand shadows to knockabout dancers, and a spectacularly literal deus ex machina finale. 5/10

Goodbye Love (1933) is a short bill-filler in which Charlie Ruggles is a rich man's valet who masquerades as a wealthy big game hunter while his employer languishes in Alimony Jail, a sort of men's club where victims of the alimony scam bemoan the loss of their happy homes to unscrupulous gold-diggers. Since alimony is just a con game villainous women use to rob decent men, it is okay to plot a stock swindle and crash the market to get out of paying it. Of interest mostly for this skewed world view - there is not much depth to any of it and the marcelled vamps are rather frightening. Hattie McDaniel appears. Better than not watching a movie. 5/10

Rat Story

There have always been rats in this neighborhood. Shortly after we moved in a rat mummy mysteriously appeared in the middle of our back yard, curled in a circle with its tail gently gripped between its teeth. I still have it on the book shelf over there. Mostly they don't make themselves very apparent though when they do appear it is sometimes rather horrible. I built a shallow ground-level bird bath that we can see from our breakfast table to watch the birds splashing around, and one morning I came out to find it A SEA OF BLOOD with a gnawed rat corpse floating in it. I assume it was a raccoon that found or caught a rat and brought it to wash off and chew on the head and tail for a while. Neighbors started keeping ducks a couple of years ago and that coincided with an increase in rat action. Perhaps the greater abundance of edible material caused them to settle in the locale, mostly under our shed which is between our compost bin and the duck area. I would find tunnel openings in the compost, and I trapped a few in there. The ducks have gone but the rats remain. When the young ones started wandering around the back yard a few months ago and foraging under our bird feeders I had to take steps. I brought the orange cat from across the street into the back yard to see what would happen and he vanished into the shrubbery, and I chanced to see him a half hour later striding proudly home with a gift for his family. He would come over a couple of times a week and I suppose he was getting a few of them, but he recently moved away so I had to become more serious about trapping. I hate emptying the traps. I hate seeing their black eyes and crushed necks. I hate it when they didn't get killed right away but got a bad whack on the head and crawled a foot away and died bleeding from the mouth, nose and ears. I hate killing them at all and I apologize to every one of them and put them in a rat graveyard with a stone on every grave. But it has to be done. A couple of weeks ago I set a trap in an obvious rat runway and when I checked the next day it had vanished. Never saw it again. I didn't know if it had caught one part way and it dragged it off into a hole or if a predator of some sort came and got it, or what, but I got two more traps and put screw eyes into the end of each of them with long wires to attach them to something so they wouldn't get as far. The weather had been warm enough to sleep with the windows open, and my studio windows are at the back of the house, facing the compost heap and wildlife zone. I woke one night thinking I was hearing a cat meowing, not the long lowing night time meow of a wanderer beneath the moon, but the short querying sounds a cat makes when faced with a closed door it wants to be open. As I came more awake I started thinking it might be the feed me sound of a young crow, but I could see it was still dark out, too dark for birds to be active. Just before I fell asleep again the sounds seemed to be a strange squeaking like two animals communicating. When I woke with the day I remembered those sounds and dreaded what I might find, and I found what I dreaded. A trap pulled to the end of its wire, with most of a rat in it. All but the back third. I don't know if possums will eat a rat but I wouldn't put it past them. I have seen possums here far more frequently than raccoons, but I know there are some of both around. I hate having to kill rats or anything else. I hate checking the traps in the morning whether they are empty or full, and I really hate finding PART of a rat, but it has to be done. Rats aren't squirrels - I think they get a bad rap for that whole plague thing but they don't have any sense of restraint. If they get into the house they will really be a problem so I have to deal with them as well as I can before it comes to that. That is my rat story and it is done.

History Lesson

I occasionally encounter a type of phony nostalgia for "a time when a family could live comfortably and send their kids to college on a single paycheck." This is then followed by a laying of blame on a person or political event supposed to have brought that golden age to an abrupt end. I am here to tell you that never happened. I don't play "back when I was a kid" very often but it seems people are getting their knowledge of the 20th century from cable TV soap operas now instead of actual fact, so I am going to tell you a few things I know are true because I saw them.

Sending your kids to college was not considered a necessity for the working class, and the middle class often had to choose one child to send to college while the rest found jobs. Middle class people who did go to college often went to learn a trade such as engineering or animal husbandry, or to obtain a teacher's certificate, not business administration, and a liberal arts degree was a bit of a joke for anyone who wasn't an heir killing time while waiting for someone to die. People who owned and operated businesses often built them up themselves or inherited them from someone who did. Home economics was not just a name of a class but a way of life and a necessity - living on a budget was a matter for serious consideration. There were no credit cards so if you had a good job and a good reputation you could take out a bank loan for a car or house, and you could put a refrigerator or washing machine on layaway so when you finished paying for it they would deliver it to you. Living on credit was frowned upon, and most people actually had to have the money to buy something before they could buy it. People saved up for things and put money aside to buy things they wanted in the future. Most people didn't have two cars, or even two televisions, and if their television broke down they didn't buy another one, they had it fixed. Disposability was not invented until the 1970s. People didn't have vast assortments of clothing to choose from and if you only owned two suits you had them cleaned or repaired. Mothers patched jeans and darned socks - I learned to darn socks myself - so you didn't throw something away just because it had a little hole in it. There were very few prepared meals you could buy and they were pretty lousy. Cooking and keeping house well were a matter of pride and peer pressure, something to show off to others to impress them. Going out to eat was an uncommon occurrence because making a sandwich cost less than buying a hamburger, just the same as today. "Keeping up with the Joneses" was a term applied to foolish people who bought things they didn't need, just to show off. I am not sure whether the term conspicuous consumption had even been invented yet. The only thing in the house that needed batteries was the flashlight, and products or tools that required continued expenditure or maintenance were not considered worth buying. Living on one paycheck was not easy, and people didn't often live comfortably. Sending kids to college was something that required long-range planning and monetary sacrifice. Norman Rockwell wasn't painting things that really happened, but things he created in his studio - fantasies and ideals - and the Norman Rockwell and Leave It To Beaver world NEVER EXISTED. I know not many people will read this but those of you who do may be able to cry bullshit on some of the phony crap that passes without comment these days from one ignoramus to another. I encourage everyone to educate themselves on the facts about what life was really like for their parents and grandparents, and not swallow the fantastic guff about a dreamworld that never happened.

Movies

Lady Be Good (1941) stars Ann Sothern and Robert Young as a songwriting team with an off again on again marriage, providing an excuse for some excellent Gershwin brothers tunes to be played a bit too much. I grew up with Young on Father Knows Best but never cared much for him in serious roles - here he is just right as the knucklehead whose idiocy keeps estranging his longsuffering wife. I have been listening to Sothern's radio shows The Adventures of Maisie, and have seen the first of her Maisie series of films so am glad to see her as a different character. I would like to see her in something really serious to see how she handles it. (Note - on My Mother the Car, she played the car. It seems I have seen her in A Letter to Three Wives but that was quite a while ago and I don't remember a thing about it.) This is probably one of the last movies to feature divorce in such a light story as the soon-to-arrive war made marriage hideously sacred for the following twenty years. Busby Berkeley was intended to direct this but was retained only for the outstanding musical numbers - the extended Fascinating Rhythm number at the end is less elaborate than his earlier work but is as precise and dynamic as anything he ever did. There is a great musical montage with growing stacks of records, and sheet music flashing across store counters, and Sothern's rendition of The Last Time I Saw Paris, though it doesn't really fit into the story, is restrained and quite moving. The real mystery is how Eleanor Powell came to be top-billed on this in all the credits and publicity material. She is never anything but the Cheerful Chum (I just coined that the other day - pretty good, huh?) who connives to get the two actual leads back together and only appears in one major scene through the first 2/3 of the film. The good thing is that her two dance numbers, one spare and tight in an apartment - with a highly talented dancing dog! - and the other the socko Fascinating Rhythm number (along with the Berry brothers, a black tap trio not as flashy and sharp as the Nicholas brothers but with loads of pep) have all the dynamic qualities lacking in Born To Dance. The routines are exactly fitted in timing and dynamics to the music and are extremely impressive every moment, truly deserving of her reputation. She is very exciting to see, and really burns up the floor. It is a very good thing that she is kept a chirpy secondary character in an Iris Adrian/Una Merkel role and brought to the fore only to dance. The story itself is not super great and as I noted before some of the songs are overplayed but the production numbers are for the most part real killers and very much worth seeing. Red Skelton and novelty songstress Virginia O'Brien are shoehorned in for entertainment value, he mercifully brief but she sadly so. Comes in a two disc "Eleanor Powell" set with Born to Dance. 7/10

Movies

I am starting to miss having the opportunity to display my erudition on obscure cinematic topics so I will try to review a few more movies occasionally, starting with Born to Dance (1936). Eleanor Powell and Jimmy Stewart are the wide-eyed grinning boy and girl in this film which is most notable for its weaknesses. The songs by Cole Porter include the standards Easy To Love and I've Got You Under My Skin, and some pretty good show tunes such as Rap Tap On Wood (the best number in the film) and Hey Babe Hey, but the story is weak and hackneyed, and the presentation is a series of set-pieces. At times it seems as if much of the story elements were cut out, as singer Frances Langford is arbitrarily paired with Buddy Ebsen without having her character really introduced, and Virginia Bruce as the Other Woman/Temperamental Star who has to be put out of the way for the sake of Powell's success and happiness never develops her character at all - she abruptly goes from fairly likeable to a complete monster just because the plot requires it. A few of the numbers are well-choreographed but mostly they don't seem to hold together or, like Powell and Stewart's sweet duet of Easy To Love which is brought to a halt by an irrelevant novelty bit by a walk-on character, are flawed or ill-constructed. Virginia Bruce's treatment of Under My Skin is aloof and unconvincing, with a few of the lines delivered with back to Stewart and the camera, not like a woman barely able to keep from crawling all over him as the song suggests. Ebsen is sometimes fun to see but here is kind of squinty and repulsive, and of all the secondary characters only Una Merkel as the Cheerful Chum is consistently appealing. Jimmy Stewart shows he is as good a singer as Powell is an actress - they must have been trying him out as an all-around leading man but they should have had someone dub his songs as they did Powell's since his voice is as weak and reedy as you might expect. She is an outstanding dancer when she gets the chance and some of her work here is remarkable, but the choreography is flat and archaic without much real connection between the action and the music, and the director seems unaware of the Berkeleyan technique of inserting a shot of other performers to disguise a break in the routine. Though it seems a bit advanced over other musicals of that period, mostly because of the high quality music and big, bright, open sets, it is a jumpy and poorly contrived movie overall. Director Roy Del Ruth has a lot of better movies to his credit and I imagine that many of the failings of this one came out of the front office and the editing room, not the soundstage. 5/10

Her most startling move.

Recently I also saw Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), a lush technicolor melodrama inspired by the early days of Hollywood and specifically the miscued non-romance of Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand. Don Ameche had to play some real boobs at times, and this is one of his boobiest - he's the jerk so obsessed with making movies that he doesn't see Alice Faye flinging herself at his feet every damn day. Sadly, there are no songs, but it is pretty entertaining with a few cameos by silent stars and an amusing pie-flinging sequence with Buster Keaton. It's Hollywood's love song to itself and as such is cloying and contrived, but it was brightly colored and well-made. 6/10

This is what I liked best.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

As is often the case, today's SUNDAY WEBCOMICS have something in common. I am not sure what it is. Just a general feeling of somethingness.

The New Sporadic and Erratic Adventures of Pinocchio and Foot appears at first to be mercifully brief at 4 pages, until you go to the bottom or top of the page and click "archives" which gives you the opportunity to see how it all began in 1972 in ballpoint pen on the back of discarded letterhead from the Westgate Adjustments Company Inc.

Webby the Internet (Editorial?) Comic also has a scribbly sort of origin, and too many words on the page. What it does differently is to go in all kinds of crazy directions that make telling what is happening part of the fun.

Enjoy.