Entries in the Category "ginger rogers"
In Praise of...Ginger Rogers!
Ginger Rogers is Star of the Month on TCM right now, and last night I watched three of her movies back-to-back. She made them all in the same 2-3 year period when she and Fred Astaire were taking a little break from each other:
Vivacious Lady (1938)
In which a straight-laced professor marries a nightclub performer on a whim, then can't figure out how to break the news to his parents.
Bachelor Mother (1939)
In which shopgirl Ginger gets mistaken for the mother of an abandoned baby and is stuck keeping him (or else she loses her job--classic 1930s film logic).
Stage Door (1937)
In which a bunch of aspiring actresses live in a boarding house together and fight and cry and sing and persecute each other and jump out of windows and things.
What struck me, settling in at 8pm to watch Vivacious Lady (which I've seen many times and even written about here) and then being glued to the screen until Stage Door ended at ten to one, was how funny Ginger was. If you hear discussion of her today, it's all about dancing and Astaire, which really doesn't do justice to how multi-faceted a performer she was.
I mean, there's no denying that she was an incredibly talented dancer. She dances in all three of the above movies, too, I guess because the logic was, if you're hiring Ginger Rogers you might as well get 'a number' out of her. But it seems like most people, if they know her at all, know her as "and Ginger" and that's a shame. (But then I never really liked Astaire anyway, sorry! I'm more of a Gene Kelly girl.)
She had such great comedic chops, though. She's a goofball in Vivacious Lady, kind of hapless in Bachelor Mother, but she really owns Stage Door for me--opposite Katharine Hepburn!
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(Also notice Lucille Ball, then a little-known brunette.) Rogers plays the seasoned veteran of the wannabe-actresses; she knows all the tricks, and she has no patience for idealists like Hepburn's character. She smirks, she snipes, she has an affair with a stage producer and then tells him off when he tries to trade her in for a new girl. Hepburn's character does something morally questionable, and Rogers gives her the coldest cut-you-down-to-size speech ever. Also, at one point, she has this exchange:
Jean (Rogers, commenting on a housemate's fur coat): Say, I think it's very unselfish of those little animals to give up their lives to keep other animals warm.
Linda (Gail Patrick): You know, they're very smart little animals. They never give up their lives for the wrong people.
Jean: Well, you understand the rodent family much better than I do.
While watching the mini-marathon, I was trying to think of a modern actress who exemplifies everything that Ginger could do. There are actresses out there today who can sing and dance competently, and there are actresses who are brilliant comedians, but I can't think of anybody who did both so well. I think Stage Door might be the perfect role for Ginger, actually--she gets to play comedy, drama and chorus line all in one movie, plus there's no man in there to steal the credit!
Also, searching Google for a Ginger Rogers pic, look what I found: a classic film blog! He does an "Audrey of the Month".
The Best Actress Fallacy
One of the more controversial Oscar winners from this past weekend was Sandra Bullock. This past summer, her career was seemingly in the toilet thanks to that All About Steve fiasco, and then suddenly The Proposal made a buck or two (although if my sister didn’t like it, I do not see what it could possibly have to recommend itself as a romantic comedy). And then this The Blind Side thing happened, and somehow her career trajectory veered so crazily in the opposite direction that she—as predicted—won a Razzie and an Oscar in the same year.
So the question becomes: does Sandra Bullock, mistress of pratfalls and goofiness, big opening weekends and almost supernatural hotness in her mid-forties (YES, REALLY), fit the profile of the Academy Award-winning actress?
First, we need to establish what the profile is. There’s this tendency to think of Oscar winning actresses as grande dames of cinema.
Bette Davis in All About Eve, for example
Or Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard
Would it surprise you to discover that both of those women went up for Best Actress in the same year, 1951? And that both of them lost? Who swiped the award from these two women in the prime of life, tackling two of the meatiest roles in Hollywood history?
Judy Holliday (age 29) in Born Yesterday
Nothing against Judy--that's a great movie, and her performance is more nuanced than 'dim bulb with a heart of gold.' Although that's a lot of it.
Continue reading "The Best Actress Fallacy"
Reviews: Musicals
TOO LONG. Too long.
Look, I think Julie Andrews is legitimately wonderful. I watched Mary Poppins about a thousand times as a kid. I may have even sat through one of the Princess Diaries movies just to see how a class act maintains her dignity throughout the Disney cheese. (The answer to that one seems to be, by having a British accent and by looking approximately twenty years younger than she actually is.)
This movie was too long, though, for the amount of actual plot that it had. The problem is (bear with me, I know how this sounds) they just kept breaking into these pointless, story-stalling songs. I remember at least two songs which seemed to be primarily about birds that went “Cu-ckooo, cu-ckoooo.” Giving up three hours of your afternoon, being forced to watch a bunch of perky children singing about cuckoo birds just begs the question…what’s the point? (It might also have been just one song, but sung twice.)
OK, I know what the point is. They’re juxtaposing the innocence of the children with the evil of the Nazis. I get it. I just find it really boring—and I feel better admitting that since I read the Wikipedia entry of the movie, which reveals that legendary film critic Pauline Kael panned the movie so bad she was ultimately fired from the magazine that was employing her at the time. Pauline Kael rocks!
Click ahead for Jimmy Cagney, Fred and Ginger, and more musical bashing!