Coffeecup
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I am so very sad and broken to write this to you:
My darling dad died last night from complications from surgery.
I am in agony right now, and stupid with it.
Voiceover, I am so sorry. My prayers are going out to you and your family.
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Voiceover, I'm happy to hear the good news about your father. I hope that there will be more good news on Friday.
Watched "Grey Gardens" tonight. It was fascinating. Sad too, when you look at it as an observation of the tensions in a caregiver relationship between elderly mother and middle-aged daughter. Big Edie was not as mean to Little Edie as I expected, from the articles I read about the documentary before seeing it. For example, the TCM article said the film "explores a relationship that alternates between extremes of love and hate," but I really didn't see any hatred.
The dilapidated condition of the once-elegant house was distressing when you consider that the family was very wealthy and this was a house in the exclusive Hamptons. Since Big Edie and Little Edie seemed to be hermits, somebody on the outside must have been paying the utility bills and arranging for the groceries to be delivered. Lawyer? Accountant? Some family member? I kept wondering why the family didn't pay for a housecleaning service, grounds service and caregivers to come in and help Little Edie. I guess the Bouvier and Kennedy families were just too embarrassed by these two women to go out of their way to help them.
Robert's guest, documentary film maker Barbara Kopple, said that after Big Edie died, Little Edie sold the house to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in 1979. He and his wife, journalist Sally Quinn, restored the house. It took a huge amount of work. Here is a 2014 article about the restoration.
http://curbed.com/archives/2014/10/23/ben-bradlee-sally-quinn-grey-gardens-restoration.php
Re my comment above about the family not helping the two Edies, the Curbed article said that Jackie Kennedy Onassis did send in a work crew in the early 1970s and had the house cleaned up (JKO was reacting to the bad publicity about the squalor the women were living in), but by the time the documentary film was made, the Edies had let it get dirty and run-down again.
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A somewhat heady New York Times piece on the therapeutic value of TCM:
I thnk we can all somewhat relate. :-)
I disagree about Eve Arden too; I love her.
But I agree with him about the authenticity of old movies -- no green-screening, no CGI crowds of extras. The old movies had real sets and real live extras. "Cast of thousands!" I love seeing actors with real bodies too, in the days before breast implants and six-pack abs. Women and men looked natural in the old films, or as natural as you could look with makeup and wigs. I remember reading an article about the trouble producers had recently when casting a movie about Andy Warhol and the nightclubs of the 60s. They needed people who were not well-toned gym rats and didn't have implants. In the 60s few people went to gyms, and (I think) breast implants hadn't been invented yet. Nobody had puffy fake blowfish lips either.
He's also right about the value of escapism. It can be very calming to sit down and watch TCM for a few hours when you are under stress. I think this is why I prefer pre-1980s movies on TCM. The more recent movies tend to be about characters with problems I face in my everyday life. It's better escapism to watch movies from the 30s through the early 70s. Maybe this depends on your age. I was an adult in the 70s, so many of the 70s-90s storylines feel too contemporary for me to relax and "escape" while watching the films.
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John Wayne. I love him in WWII movies and Westerns, except for "The Alamo." I just didn't like that movie at all. Also I didn't enjoy watching him play detectives in "McQ" and "Brannigan." He seemed too rough and blustering as a modern-day detective.
I didn't like Gary Cooper in "Along Came Jones" (with Loretta Young), although I usually love him in Westerns. I guess I was too used to seeing him playing strong heroic characters. In "Along Came Jones," which was a comedy, his character was a bumbling cowboy, sort of a weakling.
Love Peter Lorre too, but I just can't watch him again in "M." It's a great film and he did a marvelous acting job, but the subject matter (his character was a serial killer of children) just gave me the creeps too much.
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I'm not sure I've ever seen more than a few minutes of it. I'm not generally a fan of musicals; I can count on one hand the movie musicals I've seen and loved (Chicago, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and Love Me Tonight), could count those I've seen and either disliked or, more often, had very little reaction to on both hands, and then there's the lengthy list of those I've never cared to watch. It's just hard for me to get past people randomly bursting into song, and dance numbers generally bore me, so ... yeah, not my thing.
Now, it is on my list of films to watch some day to see how I feel about it since it's such a classic, but I have yet to be in the mood.
Try the 1955 movie musical "Oklahoma." Most of it is corny, but the dream sequence with the ballet is fantastic. In the dream ballet, the heroine Laury falls asleep and has a nightmare. She's in her wedding dress, about to marry her true love Curly, when bad guy Jud (who lusts after her) appears, attacks Curly and kills him, and drags Laury off for his own dark purposes. Professional ballet dancers who resemble the actors perform the sequence, except for Rod Steiger, who appears as Jud. Surprisingly, Rod the non-dancer blended in beautifully with the dancers. The choreography was perfect, and very effective emotionally.
The cast of this movie: Shirley Jones as Laury (very young and very beautiful), Gordon MacRae as Curly, and Rod Steiger as Jud, with fine supporting actors including Gloria Grahame, Charlotte Greenwood, Eddie Albert and James Whitmore.
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Hair color addict here. I can't stand my gray hair (over 50% gray now) so I color it medium brown. I use drugstore box color, L'Oreal Preference, because I can't afford salon coloring treatments. I can usually find a coupon for $1 or $2 off the box of L'Oreal, so it costs me less than $20 a month. I mix up half the solution at a time because that's all I need for the root touchups. If I just need a small quick touchup on the trouble spots, like the temples, I use Just For Men mustache and beard color. Very easy to mix up tiny amounts, so a box lasts you three or four uses. It's good for coloring gray eyebrows too. JFM doesn't last anywhere near as long as the L'Oreal color, but sometimes I just can't get around to doing the one-hour L'Oreal job. (Instructions say 30 minutes, but the advice I've gotten is to leave it on one hour for color-resistant, stubborn gray, which is what I have.) You only leave JFM on five minutes.
I admit that my hair would probably look better if I had it colored at a salon, but the expense would just be way too high for my budget. I keep waiting for all these science research nerds to come up with a way to reactivate the pigment in hair follicles. They discovered what causes hair to turn gray -- it's a natural bleach your body produces, and as you age, the bleach overwhelms the pigment and fades it out -- but they haven't developed a product to solve the problem yet.
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But the older Fonda delivered some original, startling performances too. Like his villain-to-end-them-all in Once Upon a Time in the West.
Agree! Fonda was so different in that role that I could hardly believe it was him. That was an outstanding example of how casting against type can result in a great performance. Fonda, usually the hero, made a totally convincing villain.
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I've had a great time watching the Judy Garland holiday-themed movies this Christmas season -- "Meet Me in St. Louis," "In the Good Old Summertime," (which was set mostly at Christmastime), and "Love Finds Andy Hardy." Judy was so good!
Just have one little quibble about "Summertime." In one of her musical numbers, "I Don't Care," her costume was completely out of line with the rest of the movie. The story was set in the early 1900s, and everybody wore period costumes. But in this number, she wore a very modern-looking bright red dress and red heels. (Classic, simple style dress -- you could wear it today and look fine.) I wonder whose idea that was? A friend watching the movie with me said Judy must have insisted on wearing that dress, but I don't think she had any control over her wardrobe. The costume designer for the women in that movie was Irene. (Last name Lentz, but she didn't use it professionally.)
Robert Osborne said in his introduction to the movie that Judy was a last-minute replacement for June Allyson, who was unable to complete work on another movie in time to do Summertime. He said Judy had had some problems that made the studio wary of casting her, so she was determined to prove to them that she could do a good job (which she did). In that kind of situation, I don't think Judy would have been making any diva demands about her wardrobe.
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For those who didn't know: this evening TCM will present "Treasures from the Disney Vault," co-hosted by Leonard Maltin, something they plan to do occasionally, concentrating on seldom-seen items. Tonight will start with cartoon shorts including the first Chip&Dale, then an hour from the original Disneyland show, The Reluctant Dragon (the "how animation is done" feature from 1941 with embedded cartoons), Davy Crockett, a True-Life Adventure, Third Man on the Mountain and then the behind-the-scenes episode about making it.
This was a great Nostalgia Night for me! I was a little kid in the 1950s and I loved watching Disney programs. I was a big Davy Crockett fan, had the coonskin cap and all. I've remembered the DC theme song all my life. Enjoyed watching the movie. I had forgotten how they had the group of singers doing voiceover narrations of the plot. Tonight I started bursting into laughter every time the singers chimed in. They sounded like a goofy Greek chorus.
I got so interested that I watched the next two Disney movies, "The Vanishing Prairie" documentary and "Third Man on the Mountain." The Prairie movie was one of the Disney wildlife movies I always loved to watch. This one featured prairie dogs in their natural habitat, along with other critters such as burrowing owls, ferrets, coyotes, buffalo and a rattlesnake. The music score sounds schmaltzy to me as an adult, but it sounded perfectly fitting back in the 50s. The man who narrated the show, Winston Hibler, was very kid-friendly, saying things a child could laugh at while still getting educational material across about the animals. (He was also one of the screenplay writers.) I looked up information on this movie later (on IMDB) and found that it won the Oscar for "Best Documentary, Features" in 1955.
I had never seen Third Man on the Mountain and don't remember even hearing about it as a child. The star was a very young James McArthur. The story, set in a Swiss village, was about James' longing to climb the Matterhorn (called The Citadel in the movie) as a personal challenge because his father, a climber, had been killed trying to reach the summit. A kind Englishman (Michael Rennie) becomes his friend and helps him achieve his dream, against the wishes of his family. I am not even interested in rock climbing, but I sat there fascinated watching them (stunt men, in many scenes) performing incredible, dangerous climbing feats. TCM showed a documentary on the making of the film afterwards. You could see how dangerous it really was. Leonard Maltin, commenting on the movie, said it was an outstanding achievement considering that all the action was real, not computer-generated or trick-filmed with actors on a blank soundstage with the outdoor background "photoshopped" in later, as movies are made today.
Incidentally, when I was reading the article about the Davy Crockett movie on the TCM website, they said that Fess Parker was disappointed that he became typecast as Crockett and never could develop his career in a more serious direction. The producers of the Western "The Searchers" wanted him, but he was under contract to Disney, and Disney refused to loan him out. That was a very interesting bit of information. I wonder what role he was offered -- the John Wayne role, Ethan Edwards, or the Jeffrey Hunter role, Martin Pawley. He would have been good in either role. Although none of us Searchers fans can imagine anyone being better than Wayne as Ethan, it's fascinating to think what Fess could have done with the role. Fess had a subtle brooding quality that would have fit the Ethan character perfectly.
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A tip I once read in Harper's Bazaar and have applied ever since: after 40, whatever you put on your face, put on your hands. And it's been worth it!
Agree 1,000%! Never neglect your hands. They will show your age more than anything else.
I want to do whatever Joan Rivers did to her hands. Whenever I watched her do presentations on QVC, I was always amazed at how young her hands looked. No liver spots, dark veins or ropey tendons. I heard she had fat injections in the hands.
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Has anybody seen the 1934 Cleopatra (the Cecil B. DeMille production), with Claudette Colbert starring? Henry Wilcoxon played Marc Anthony and Warren William played Julius Caesar. I'm not a big Claudette fan, but I thought she did an excellent job as Cleopatra. She played the character as a brilliant schemer. She also expressed the authority and sense of responsibility of a queen. I liked Vivien Leigh as Cleopatra but I never got a sense of authority from her. Claudette's portrayal was deeper.
The 1934 film was beautiful to watch, even in black and white. I love DeMille's big spectacular sets. That elaborate barge slowly gliding down the Nile, when Cleopatra seduces Marc Anthony --- just gorgeous.
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I have used most of LRP's Antihelios line in the higher ranges, they go up to SPF60. They have lightweight and fluid versions for face and/or body. It's still not as matte as the Korean/Japanese ones, but it's my one of favourites from the Western chemical sunscreens. I also like their Antihelios-Dermo Kids (SPF45) too; I think it has less alcohol than the adult version. I don't recommend their spray though.
I have pure argan oil. I use it mainly for my eye area, but I always mix it with another oil such as sweet almond or jojoba oil. It needs another oil to help absorb in. I don't think I'll repurchase. If other people like argan oil, they should definitely shop around since the Josie Maran brand is way overpriced for what it is.
I can recommend Anthelios too. I use Anthelios XL 50, which is apparently the lightest and least oily sunscreen in the line. (Anybody know there's also a Posthelios, for after-sun care? I didn't now until I got a free sample.) I have oily skin and I can't stand adding any more oil on the surface. Even with Anthelios, I still have to powder it down to get rid of the shine. I am going to try the Korean sunscreen, if it's more matte.
For cheap sunscreen to wear while doing yardwork, I use Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Dry Touch 100. Despite the "dry" name it's still too greasy for me, and it makes my skin feel gummy. It will leave white powdery marks on your clothing, leather furniture and car upholstery if you lean your elbows on your knees or armrests. But the oiliness and marks don't matter for summer yardwork, when I'm dripping sweat within a few minutes anyway and wearing grubby clothes.
A better quality oily sunscreen is L'Oreal Ombrelle, though of course it's much more expensive than Neutrogena. I order my L'Oreal sunscreens from a specialty salon in New York. I also buy them on eBay sometimes, since they aren't available in most U.S. stores. Just checked Amazon and they have some of the high protection Anthelios sunscreens with Mexoryl too. I had thought the U.S. government refused to allow sunscreens with Mexoryl to be sold here in any formulation higher than SPF 15. However, it's available in high strength from various Internet sites.
Just a word of caution: be careful what jewelry you wear when you're covered in sunscreen. Soft gems like pearls and turquoise might get stained. Wash the jewelry items gently with mild soap after wearing them on skin with sunscreen (or any other lotion).
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How could you leave out Kaa from The Jungle Book?
I enjoyed last night's Robert-convo w/ Rory [daughter of Errol] Flynn. Her father is one of my faves. He died when she was 12, and I really felt it when she said, she wished she'd known him as an adult.
I enjoyed the interview with Rory too. I watched two of the Errol Flynn movies last night, "Objective, Burma" and "Rocky Mountain." In both movies Flynn played a tough, smart leader. They weren't like the glamorous matinee idol roles he so often played.
I had seen "Objective, Burma" before but had never seen "Rocky Mountain." Don't know how I missed that one all these years, because I love Westerns. RM had many features I enjoy in the genre: lots of horses, exciting chase scenes, cavalry charges, solider/Indian fights, and the stark beautiful desert scenery (New Mexico). This is a black-and-white film, but I love b&w, and the scenery looked just about as beautiful as it would have in color. The supporting cast was very strong, especially Slim Pickens. I was surprised to see on the TCM listing of RM that reviewer Leonard Maltin gave RM only two and a half stars. I would have given it three and a half stars. Not a profound film, but a good solid Western, and Flynn did a wonderful job.
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Ironically, Bette Davis also starred in a remake of "The Letter" which was the other sound movie Jeanne Eagels did and for which she received a posthumous Oscar nomination. That also had a different ending also due to the Production Code.
I think the version of "The Letter" with Bette Davis was superior. Maybe it was the combined acting skills of the entire cast; maybe it was the haunting, startling opening scene; maybe it was the suspense at the end, when you knew what was going to happen and you wanted to scream at Bette, "Don't go out there!"... whatever it was, I prefer the second one.
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Has anybody read the biography of Bette Davis, "Dark Victory" by Ed Sikov? I got it from Amazon earlier this year. Chapter 16 has a few pages about Deception. The author said that according to Paul Henreid's memoirs, they were forced to change the ending of the movie because the Production Code Administration demanded that Bette's character be punished for having an affair with Claude. Henreid said the PCA imposed the violent ending, and he said it was "a thoroughly unbelievable situation, and the entire picture suffered from it." Bette blamed the PCA too. She is quoted: "Deception was completely ruined by censorship. We wrote the last scene, in which I had to confess my crime, ten thousand ways, but they were all so phony we never did get a solution." (Since there's a rule here about spoilers, I won't say what her crime was... it involved her getting even with Claude.)
I didn't know until I researched it today that this film was the second version. It was originally a 1928 play called "Jealousy," (also called "Obsession,") and was an English language adaptation of the French play "Monsieur Lambertheir." It was filmed by Paramount in 1929 with the title "Jealousy." The director was Jean de Limur. Jeanne Eagels, Frederic March and Halliwell Hobbes were the stars. Their characters' names were Yvonne, Pierre and Rigaud, respectively. (Character names for the 1946 version were Christine, Karel and Alexander.) This was one of only two sound pictures Jeanne Eagels made, and it was her last role; she died that year. According to Wikipedia, "No known prints of Jealousy are known to exist and it is now considered lost." That's a shame. I would have liked to see it.
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It's kind of comic to me how hot he is in Notorious and even more, in Deception. Even in Casablanca, in the back of my mind I keep thinking that if that young girl has to bang him to get passage out of Casablanca - that her big problem would be that she'd never go back to her fiance after banging Claude Rains.
Oooh, yessss! He was hot in Deception. (For those who don't know the movie: )In Deception, Claude played an arrogant conductor. I wonder if his character was based on one of the great conductors of the day; they tended to be very imperious. For example, Leopold Stokowski was known as a "showman" with "a flair for the theatrical," (according to his Wikipedia bio), which sounds a lot like Claude's character Alexander Hollenius. In Deception, Claude had been having an affair with Bette Davis. He had been buying her lavish gifts too. But Bette dropped Claude when she got back in touch with cellist Paul Henreid. She thought he had died in WWII Europe. She married Paul, making Claude very jealous, and refused to ever tell Paul she'd been Claude's lover. She concealed from Paul that she remained in touch with Claude. The rest of the movie consisted of Bette hovering over Paul and being mawkishly devoted to him, even secretly talking Claude into letting Paul play a concerto with his orchestra. (Not going to give away the ending, will just say that Bette sacrificed herself for Paul and his music career.)
I spent the whole movie wondering why Bette didn't just stick with Claude! He was egotistical, but brilliant and handsome, plus he gave her mink coats and other nice gifts. What an ungrateful girlfriend she was, lol, and a bit two-faced as well. She didn't want to be Claude's lover again, but she still wanted him to do favors for her and her new husband. I like Paul Henreid, but his character was bland and boring, just too nice and too noble, compared to the wicked, charming and sexy Claude.
Just read in Wikipedia that Claude was married six times. Sounds like he must have been a real-life hottie.
Prican58, thanks for the link to the Claude Rains biography. I want to get that book.
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Ratgirlagogo and prican58, so happy to find some other Westerns fans!
I too thought Cooper looked inexperienced in "The Winning of Barbara Worth." Well, actually he WAS pretty green at the time. Ronald Coleman was amazing. He totally owned the screen in each of his scenes. I couldn't look away from him. That's true charisma. Cooper was like that later, but in this movie it was Coleman who mesmerized me.
About Marion Davies: after I discovered her on TCM, I couldn't understand the unkind caricature of her that Orson Welles and his collaborators did in "Citizen Kane." They cast an actress named Dorothy Comingore as Susan Alexander, which everyone now understands was a represenatation of Marion as William Randolph Hearst's mistress. The Susan character was presented as a woman of only average looks, with a squeaky nasal voice, an exaggerated lower class accent, and no talent. That was worlds away from Marion, who was truly beautiful and did have considerable talent.
Speaking of Orson Welles, I was so happy when TCM showed "The Third Man" the other night. That is one of the movies on my Nearly Perfect list. The great acting, the gripping plot, the stark shadows, the odd camera angles, and that fabulous zither music! It was a stroke of genius to score the movie with zither music.
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Does anybody else enjoy reading the TCM articles about the movies? I mean the articles you can see when you're reading the daily schedule, then click "Expanded," then click "Article." The most popular movies have several articles each, and you can pick up additional information about the movie from each one. Some articles will be about the experiences of the directors, some will include the comments of the actors, and others will concentrate on the reviews from the time the movie first came out.
Anyway, for the November Star of the Month, instead of an individual actor, TCM is featuring silent movies. I am not a huge silents fan, but I watch them sometimes and like many of them. I have a book, "Hollywood Babylon" by Kenneth Anger, that has lots of lurid gossip about the silents stars and interesting historical photos. (Old book from 1975 that's still in print.) Most of it sounds like today's tabloid stories, meaning that much of the gossip is either exaggerated or not even true, but it's a fun trashy read. I am going back and forth between reading the TCM articles about the silent movies and the HB book.
I especially want to see "The Winning of Barbara Worth," a silent Western about two men in love with the same woman, on Tuesday, Nov. 11 at 7:30 a.m. (I'm not a morning person, but I can prop my eyelids open long enough to watch it.) The stars are Ronald Coleman and Vilma Banky, but the person I really want to see is Gary Cooper, who plays the cowboy in love with Banky; his rival is Coleman. I love Cooper, and I'll watch anything he's in. I love Westerns, so this film is a "two-fer' treat. Also I'm always interested in watching the stars who started out in silents and went on to have good careers in the talkies, such as Cooper, Greta Garbo and Loretta Young. I think of them as Hollywood survivors. The transition from silents to talkies was a huge technological change, and many of the great silent stars fell by the wayside.
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Finance Shows: Show Me The Money
in Genre Talk
So Suze is ending her CNBC show. I used to watch it often, but I gave up on it a couple of years ago because I just could not identify with the people she talked about. She wanted to discuss people with high income, 401K accounts, fat retirement accounts, and assets. That is just not my world. I've never made much money, couldn't afford to put anything aside for retirement, and get by month to month. She never talked about people like me.
I did get a lot of laughs watching the "Can I Afford It" segments. Sometimes people wanted to buy really frivolous stuff, like older men wanting luxury sports cars they couldn't afford, and the young women college students who lived at home, paid no rent and wanted to buy $2,000 designer handbags. In those cases I agreed with Suze, "Denied, denied, denied!" But often the people had perfectly reasonable things they wanted to buy, and they had decent incomes and seemed to manage their money pretty well. Suze would always shoot them down if they didn't have zero credit card debt, a year's income saved up in emergency funds, and big retirement accounts.
I also got mad at her for telling people who were struggling financially that they could not afford to have pets. Yes, the food and vet bills for dogs and cats can get expensive and be a strain on your budget. But pets bring us so much companionship and love; how do you put a value on that? I think pets are worth the financial sacrifice. Besides, the poor things need homes and kindness, not to live their short lives in cages in a shelter or being put to sleep. There is value in being kind to animals.