Entries in the Category "katharine hepburn"
Eternal Sunshine and Remember?: The Same Concept Across a Few Generations
So last week I watched this strange film called Remember? from 1939. The synopsis reminded me of one of my all-time favorites, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—in both films, former lovers utilize mind-erasing technology to forget each other—and I was curious how such a postmodern concept was going to be executed circa 1939. What I found was that Remember? is not exactly the mind-bendingly awesome experience that Eternal Sunshine is, though there were interesting similarities.
Basically, what happens is this. Lew Ayers meets Greer Garson on vacation, gets quickly engaged to her and brings her home to meet his best buddy Robert Taylor. Of course, Taylor and Garson fall in love instead. Ayers has apparently not seen his own movie, Holiday, in which almost the exact same thing happens when Cary Grant meets this woman on vacation, gets quickly engaged, and she brings him home to meet her sister, Katharine Hepburn, prompting Grant and Hepburn to fall in love (but, then, Ayers is the drunk brother in that movie, so that would account for him not remembering it). Anyway, Garson and Taylor fall in love and, with Ayers’ blessing, get married themselves. It doesn’t work out, and they’re soon divorced, but LUCKILY, Ayers and Taylor work for an advertising company that is developing a campaign for a forgetfulness serum. Ayers feeds the serum to his terribly depressed best friend—and Garson gets a hold of it somehow, too, I forget how—and, just like Joel and Clementine in Eternal Sunshine, the pair meet again and fall for each other again.
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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.
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Movie reviews: More Stuff I've Seen Lately
Buster Keaton Shorts (1920-1922)
The program was One Week, The Play House and Cops, and One Week was my favorite. Silent films often impress me with how epic they are; it's easy to think of old movies as stagy, cramped drawing-room type stories with tons of talk and not a lot of moving around, because that's the kind of movies that were popular in the 1930s. The reason for that was that sound recording systems were still pretty primitive and the actors couldn't move around much (see Singin' in the Rain for a reenactment). For silent films though, before sound was an issue, they were going wild, having car chases, destroying houses. Have you ever seen Keaton in The General? The guy is jumping from one train to another like he's in Die Hard. And it's funny, too, totally deadpan. Watch One Week below, courtesy of Google video, and enjoy.
More reviews after the jump, some spoilery!
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Movie Reviews: The Boxer as Everyman
See my previous entry on Hoop Dreams, about how sports narratives, despite their inherent strength, are virtually lost on me, and this entry will all make a lot more sense.
It fascinates me, honestly, that two extremely iconic American movies are centered around boxing, which seems to me to be such a marginalized sport. You don’t see it on TV that often. You don’t see celebrities made of boxers the way you see celebrities made of football players, baseball players and basketball players. (With some exceptions, i.e., boxers I have heard of: Mike Tyson, Muhammed Ali, and the guy Russell Crowe played in Cinderella Man. That is all.)
Watching two boxing movies because the AFI made me was an interesting experience, then. As I watched and mused on how gross boxing is, I questioned why people (men mostly, probably) find the story of the boxer so universal. Part of it is primal, I’m sure: the urge to blot out the competition of another male of the species by pummeling him, injuring him, shaming him. Rocky in particular positioned the sport as being uniquely blue collar, a sport for working class schlubs, which seems appropriate for the 70s, which I always imagine was a very scrappy decade. Scorsese, with Raging Bull, seemed to find something very poetic about De Niro destroying himself in the ring while he unraveled outside of it. Hit him with a metaphorical punch in the street and then drive it home with a literal punch in the ring, basically. Again, narratively effective.
But I won’t explore that too much. For my own part, I find it hard to remove my own feminine experience from movie watching. That’s why you’ll never hear me say that Rocky or Raging Bull (or Saving Private Ryan, or Platoon) is my favorite movie; I’m going to name a movie with some incredible actress like Katharine Hepburn in it, that has themes that I can relate to intimately. That’s what makes a movie a favorite, as opposed to great. All critics agree on this, incidentally; the best movie in the world is not necessarily one’s favorite.
Raging Bull had, to put it bluntly, nothing to offer a woman. The culture of this movie was patriarchal Italian life, where women were for making sons, or to be hit when they said something disagreeable. Where when something important had to be discussed, it was demanded that they left the room. I respect Martin Scorsese as a director—and not just because he made the incredibly woman-friendly The Age of Innocence, but also for Goodfellas and The Departed, both of which I loved—but the environment that was so vividly portrayed in Raging Bull was rather offensive to me. There’s really no other way to put it. I’m glad that people and critics have connected with the movie as much as they have, that they find something universal in its message. It was utterly lost on me, I’m afraid.
On the other hand, I didn’t mind the experience of watching Rocky at all. The underdog story kind of got to me—the first time I saw him try to run up those steps, and he didn’t make it, I thought, “Oh, you’ll do it eventually! I’ve seen that.” Rocky’s fumbly little romance with plain Jane Adrian was really quite sweet.
The thing I did not like about the movie was that Stallone sold himself out to such an extent later. There’s a moment in Rocky, where Burgess Meredith the old trainer offers to coach Rocky since Rocky has been challenged by Apollo and suddenly has earning potential. Rocky shouts that the guy should have coached him when he was younger and could have made something of himself because now he’s all broken down. He’s approaching 30 and he’s not in top shape for the game anymore. It’s a poignant moment.
Until the sequels. Then he wins. He wins all the time. And by the fourth movie he’s pulling a damn bobsled and felling ancient trees. And then it’s thirty years later and he’s still fighting! Too bad Stallone didn’t have the guts to let the first Rocky speak for itself; he might’ve had a very different career if he’d made a different choice. But whatever, he didn’t consult me about it.
My favorite kind of boxer:
