Over a distance of ground

So no sooner was I inundated by public grief over the suicide of one actor came news of the peaceful death of another:

"A gutsy broad who rode her life and its hardships with self-effacing dignity: “You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with. The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing,” she said."

What I remember about Betty Joan Perske - better known as Lauren Bacall - was that when I was a young man, living in the world when young men and young women had very little style and bearing (not that young people have ever had much of either, regardless of their times) she seemed the ideal combination of gutty, sensuous, and confident style and mature, intelligent bearing.

That was pretty much the sum of what she did on screen; in a sense she wasn't a "star" or an "actor" but a character actor whose character was so compelling that she became a star without really having to do more than act the same character in whatever part she was cast.

But, damn, was that character terrific. As that character she was the woman you wanted to fall for, the one you wanted to fall for you, the one who was so desireable, so terrific, that the two of you together would be more than you were as individuals.

And - not an altogether unimportant thing for a young man - Bacall's character introduced me to the idea that men and women could flirt intently and intelligently, that an adult relationship could be much more than just what they showed in "adult" films. Here's a great example, from The Big Sleep:



If that's not one of the sexist goddamn scenes ever filmed I can't think of many others.

I don't want to use this to get maudlin about Betty Joan's - Lauren's - death. I didn't know her or anyone who did. So far as I can tell she had a rich, full life and died full of years and honors, and I can't think of a better way to leave this world, and from what little I know it appears that she covered that distance of ground very well.

Her passing simply reminds me of the affection I will always have for the character she played, now preserved forever in silver salts and black to beguile, I hope, other young men as they venture into the unknown lands beyond their childhoods.

Greetings, Programs

The past and the present collide in peculiar ways.

For example, a friend of mine posted to Facebook that she is planning a "Tron party" to celebrate the release of the new installment, "Tron: Legacy"(I'm unsure - IS it a new installment? The trailers I've seen have been bafflingly incoherent. I'm honestly not sure whether this ia a remake of the 1982 original or a "sequel" or what. Whatever, it apparently sucks pipe, at least according to the critics collected over at "Rotten Tomatoes".) Meghan, creative lady that she is, is sure to have some cool blacklight/glow stick gimmicks and cool pop-culture riffs on the original flick.

Which brings me back to the past; specifically, to 1982, when my buddies Alfie and Woodus and I had a Friday evening without dates, or plans, other than to get ripshit and go watch the original Tron down at the Alvin C. York Theater on post.

Now let me begin by saying that drunken GIs were probably not the target audience for Disney's product. But even drunken and in rude company, I'm typically pretty capturable. Twenty-eight years later I was as delighted by "Tangled" as my four-and-a-half-year-old; I tend to suspend disbelief fairly willingly when the house lights go down. So it was probably not a good sign for Disney that twenty minutes into the old Tron I was looking for distraction because the film, well, "sucked" would be the concise way of putting it.

Distraction came in the form of actress Cindy Morganin a light-up spandex leotard. I'm sorry to say that the three of us spent most of the rest of the film shouting lurid and suggestive computer-related abuse at the screen. We were mightily impressed with our hilarity - the mere mention of the term "floppy disk" nearly sent us into convulsions. We were also fortunate that we were perhaps half of the entire audience that Friday, and that none of the other viewers (perhaps as bored by the non-tale being not-told on the screen as we were) objected to our humor. Or perhaps they were even entertained; the spectacle of a high-school-drunk medic shouting "I love you, sweetheart! Let me put my hard disk in your floppy drive!" was probably about as diverting as the flick, from what I recall of it...So a raucous evening was enjoyed by our three heroes mocking the pioneer computer-graphic-image film, and it was only in researching the long-forgotten name of the actress who was the recipient of our rude behavior that I discovered that Ms. Morgan

"whose father fought in World War II, is passionate about supporting the US military and helping to alleviate the financial hardship felt by those who have been called upon to serve in the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. She was director of the Caddyshack Reunion Golf Tournament in 2006, which reunited some of the cast of Caddyshack (Morgan included), along with other celebrities. Subtitled "Playing For The Home Team" and hosted at Willow Crest Golf Club in Oak Brook, Illinois, the tournament raised funds (and awareness) to benefit the Illinois Military Family Relief Fund, an organization that helps the families of National Guard members and reservists on active duty."

Oh. Oops.

Well, now I feel kinda small. Nothing like abusing someone who has done nothing but help you and others like you. GIs, I swear - we shouldn't be allowed out in public without a keeper.

So Cindy Morgan is helping GIs, and Meghan is having fun kidding on Tron, and I'm still a the sort of dope who gets pie-eyed and shouts at films, except now I have little kiddos to make me more responsible; thus does the present repair the failings of the past.

"I just happen to think people are pretty wonderful"

I fell a little in love with you the first time I saw "Anchors Aweigh".Now sleep well; you've earned your immortality.

The Lady Eve, or, You Can't Get A Man With A Foot...or can you..?

As I was looking for Barbara Stanwyck pictures for the preceding post, I noticed a curious thing; there are a surprisingly large number of pictures of the lady in the same or a similar pose: reclining or sitting with a man holding her foot.I don't know if it's because she had exceptionally pretty feet, or her directors had foot fetishes, or whether she just had several scenes where her feet or her shoes were a plot device: the above still is from "Ball of Fire", where Henry Fonda as the professor of music falls for Babs as "Sugarpuss" O'Shea, an itinerant songstress and dancer (and mistress of gangstas...), so the idea of her feet as entertainment is fairly congruent with the plot.And here she is giving Fred MacMurray a little nudge with her tempting toes in "Double Indemnity", a terrific thriller and one of her best performances.

And below is perhaps her most sultry foot-catching scenes, with Henry Fonda in "The Lady Eve", a terrific Preston Sturges flick in which she catches Henry, loses him, re-catches him, pretty much slaps him in the face by laying down just how skanky she's been in the past (she was a con artist when they meet in the film taking him for a mark) and STILL re-re-catches him.Can't say I blame him; I'd have gone for Babs if she'd been the daughter of the regiment. Her movie persona was just that smart. And sexy. And funny.

Whatever the reason, the lady's feet never changed in one respect; they were fast, and could think on them.

Dis manibus, Barbara; I hope that you're being smart, and funny, and sexy, somewhere where the audience never tires of you.

Chocolat

After Missy was in bed last night, Mojo and I snuggled in with the Peeper to introduce him to one of the world's truly offbeat pleasures: "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"It's been some years since I watched this film last, and I had honestly forgotten:

1) What an appalling drip the part of Charlie Bucket is. He's the saintly Little Princess who loves his mom, gives all his money to charity, does his homework and exactly what the teacher says. He's the kid at school who always made you want to rub snot in his hair. The child actor, Peter Ostrum, who plays him in the movie, isn't bad, exactly, but the part is so diabetic-coma-inducing that you can't help wanting to strangle the angelic little Bubbles.

2) The number of truly awful songs, hitting rock bottom with "Cheer Up, Charlie", where the curly-headed little Snoogums' Mom reminds him that no matter how much his life sucks which, in this case, it does like a gigantic industrial shopvac, it's still terrific to be YOU!. Eeegah. That said, there are also several treats, but most of them related to the real heart of the flick.

Which is, simply stated, Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka.

Frankly, it's a tossup whether it's worth watching the first third of the film at all. You miss the setup where you're shoved to stand in the "Charlie the Great" corner, but you also miss the craptacular songs and all the nobility of the ingratiating little fellow Charlie. The movie begins for me when Gene totters out of the factory door, does his forward roll and comes up as, well, Gene-as-Willy-Wonka.
The wonderful thing about the performance is that you're never quite sure if the enigmatic candymaker is really quite mad or just playful and eccentric. My personal take, BTW, has been for mad and bad - perhaps one of the most delightfully sinister sequences in moviedom is the "Pure Imagination" scene, where Gene leads the greedy little group of visitors into his magic kingdom singing about how your imagination can lead you to paradise (while the Bad Children race about filling their pieholes knowing that they're going to shop Wonka's imagination to his rival Slugworth - except for Noble Charlie, of course). Everything about the scene is a fight between the innocent words of the song and the candyland set and Wilder's interpretation of them, from the curious minor key he sings to the herky-jerky dance down the stairsteps, where he puzzles and disconcerts the group with his odd stop-and-start and the sudden slashing of his cane. It's maaahvelous.

Wilder is simply a joy throughout, a completely unrestrained id in kinetic motion, a force of Nature, quoting Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Keats and Shakespeare while his inventions dispose of the Nasty Children in cleverly appropriate ways (at one point, Wilder turns to the survivors and coos: "Two greedy, bad little children gone, three sweet, good children left..."). He gives you the combinaton of delight and frightening power that comes from pure creative intelligence. He IS the movie, and while he's center stage it's a hell of a lot of fun.

It's far from a perfect flick: it does violence to the Dahl book, which is a worthy kid's classic; Wilder is WAY too young for the part, and both the dreary first portion and the odd little ending, where the whole adventure turns out to be a setup for making Charlie the Next Willy Wonka (am I the only person who thought this the most impossible thing in a movie full of flying elevators and chocolate-colored dwarves? Noble Charlie succeeding Mad Scientist Willy? Never happen...) are drags.

But - ignore all that and you can concentrate on enjoying one of the great performances in Western acting - Gene Wilder as the Greatest Madboy Evah.