Thank you 100,000 Views!

While we were ringing in 2013, Film Gab received its 100,000th page view! Thank you to all our Film Gab readers and those internet folk in Eastern Europe who enjoy pictures from Porky's, the swimming hole scene from A Room With a View, and Christina Crawford. We promise you many more pictures of Shirley Temple, Kirk Douglas, and Estelle Winwood.

Two Gabba Gabba

Werth: Happy Film Gab-iversary, Wise!  Our little celluloid-loving blog has just turned two!

Wise: Happy Gab-iversary to you too, Werth.  It's hard to believe that another year has passed, full of thrills, chills, and the eternal cage match between Joan and Bette.  

Werth: Joan would never put herself in a cage.  

Wise: And what better way to kick off a celebration of ourselves, except by revisiting some of our most popular posts from the past year, including one celebrating the birthday of one of Hollywood's biggest stars: Kirk Douglas.  There's nothing better than sharing some cake with a guy who looks great in a loincloth and whose talent is even bigger than the cleft in his chin.  


Werth: But we're not all about lantern jaws here at Film Gab because sometimes we get a hankering for the softer side of things, like dudes in dresses.  

Wise: Or the stranger side, like when we discussed Hollywood's oddball auteur David Lynch.  

Werth: Fun Film Gab fact: Kyle MacLachlan's tuckus is almost as popular among Film Gab readers as Julian Sands' rump.   

Wise: Talk about a celebrity cage match! 

Werth: One of the biggest defeats at the box office this year was Disney's John Carter, a sci-fi flop overstuffed with Martians, mayhem, and Taylor Kitsch attempting to act through his abs.  We had much better luck with our voyages with time and space traveling hunks.  

Wise: Of course we're not adverse to disasters, especially when it gives us a chance to revisit a modern classic like Titanic and plunge into shipboard romances of various stripes.

Werth: Maybe they would have had better luck forming a ragtag band of misfits determined to fight injustice instead of getting caught up in the pitfalls of romance.  

Wise: Some of the most enduring Tinsel Town romances are between celebrities and their political party, much like a certain tap-dancing tot or particular tough guy with brains and a penchant for fast-talking showgirls.  

Werth: We here at Film Gab have a penchant for great actresses, especially those with long and varied careers who aren't afraid to get a little pig's blood on their hands.  

Wise: So, Werth, are there any entries from the past year that you wish had attracted more readers?  

Werth: Well I'm still mourning the loss of gap-toothed classic Ernest Borgnine. A 61-year career in Hollywood deserves props... even with films like Bunny O'Hare on his resume. What about you, Wise?  

Wise: I'd have to say that our salute to Hollywood's funny ladies is one of my favorites.  It's just too bad that a giggly blonde never got a chance to share the big screen with a legendary fast-talking brunette.  

Werth: I know one silver screen pair that's destined for more laughs.

Wise: Join us for another rollicking year of leading ladies, Hollywood toughs, big budget bonanzas, gut busting comedies—

Werth: —And the finer side of Julian Sands.  

   

 

Red State Stars

Werth: Happy Friday, Wise!

Wise: Happy Friday, Werth! I trust you survived this week with your chipper-ness intact.

Werth: I did—but with so much focus on Republicans in the media, I got a little antsy.

Wise: Now, now, Werth. Republicans can be a great source of entertainment—and some of them were even great movie stars. Long before she became a pal of high-powered Republicans, or the U.S. Ambassador to Ghana (1974) and Czechoslovakia (1989), but after she had abandoned the frilly dresses and sausage curls, Shirley Temple tried to make a career of being a teenage movie star. 

Werth:  This is the second time you've talked about late-career Shirley Temple.  

Wise: It's a fascinating period as she attempts to transform from Depression-era icon of spirited pluck and into a more complicated image of a young woman whose desire to do right is sometimes torpedoed by her overblown romantic fantasies.  


Werth: The Good Ship Lollipop could have used a torpedo...  

Wise: In The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947) Temple stars as seventeen-year-old Susan Turner who unceremoniously discards her boyfriend after playboy/artist Richard Nugent (Cary Grant) delivers a lecture at her school.  Her sudden infatuation is so intense that her older sister and guardian Margaret (Myna Loy playing a dour, smalltown judge with a bit of a wink) forces Grant to pose as Temple's boyfriend until she gets over the crush.  This leads to some fantastic comedy as Grant gamely delivers nonsensical teenage patois, makes a mad dash in a sack race, and suffers the kind of indignities that only an actor with his unflappable charm could endure.  

Werth: He doesn't tapdance on a stairway with her, does he?

Wise: Screenwriter Sidney Sheldon captures and caricatures the pretensions of each character—including fine comedic work from Harry Davenport, Rudy Vallee and Ray Collins—and won an Oscar for best screenplay.  His script is both funny and savvy and features the kind of cross-talking gymnastics that Grant specialized in during these screwball comedies.  

But it is Temple herself who has the biggest heart and gives the biggest performance in this movie—she is sly, witty, vulnerable and endearing—and it's a shame there aren't more examples of her skills playing a young adult.  

Werth: My favorite Hollywood Republican never had sausage curls, but he was definitely a beefcake. William Holden considered himself a moderate Republican, but was not very politically active, unless you count his stint as best man at Ronald Reagan's wedding to Nancy Davis in 1952 (back when Reagan was still a Democrat.)

Wise: Also before the Republicans abandoned the country club for NASCAR. 

Werth: Holden made a career out of playing leading men who had brains as well as looks, and his turn as journalist Paul Verrall in Born Yesterday (1950) is no exception. Paul is hired by scrap metal magnate cum gangster Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford) to smarten up his ex-chorus girl fiancée (pronounced "fee-an-see") Billie (Judy Holliday) so she won't embarrass Harry while he wines, dines and bribes Washington, DC, congressmen and their wives.

Wise: Now, of course, the obvious path for dim-witted dames afflicted by malapropisms is running for President. 

Werth: Paul wants to write a story on how crooked Harry is, so a civics lesson for Billie is the perfect chance for him to get in close. Following the bible of romantic comedies, Paul and Billie fall in love, but the unique element is how Billie is transformed—not by love—but by knowledge. She goes from being comfortable with being stupid as long as she gets a coupla' mink coats designed by Jean Louis, to a woman who wants a better life for herself and for her country... but who still wears Jean Louis.

Wise: These days you'd be stupid to want mink coats—unless you enjoy having paint thrown at you.

Werth: Directed by George Cukor and based on the successful Garson Kanin stageplay, Born Yesterday has its moments of "too cute" as Billie learns about democracy walking with Paul through quaint '50's DC locations, but the performances of the three leads more than make up for it. Holden is so effortlessly charming on camera that it is impossible not to fall head over heels in love with him—even when he's wearing glasses. 

Broderick Crawford gets the right balance of doofus and menace to make Harry the comic villain that we like less than we hate. And Holliday puts in an Oscar-winning performance as Billie (she beat both Bette Davis for All About Eve and Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard). Following-up her performance in the role on Broadway, she chirps and squawks her way through the film with comic precision and sensitivity—creating a woman that transcends the typical dumb, blonde, mob moll stereotype. 

Wise: See. Didn't I tell you that Republicans could be entertaining?

Werth: At least when they're on the silver screen. Tune in next week when we discuss Michelle Bachman in The Goodbye Girl.

In the Gab Old Summertime

It's a quiet week here in Film Gab's spacious Manhattan digs.  Werth is off gallivanting through Europe doing his best Henry James impersonation, although with all his hair and none of the digestive complaints (we hope).  The less picaresque half of Film Gab stuck around the city to get a little work done and dream of foreign shores.  The combination of the two brings to mind those great Hollywood flicks where even those who stay at home get to take an incredible journey. 

Marking the end of her reign as kiddie box office champ, The Little Princess (1939) is one of Shirley Temple's most unusual films.  Based on the book by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the movie follows Sara Crew (Temple), who is sent to boarding school by her doting father (Ian Hunter), only to run afoul of the mean-spirited headmistress Miss Minchin (Mary Nash) when her father and his fortune are lost in the Boer War.  Even though Miss Minchin forces her to become a scullery maid, Sara never loses her good spirits, making friends with the other domestics and finding an ally in Ram Dass (Cesar Romero), the servant of a powerful lord next door.  Refusing to give up hope, Sara continues to search army hospitals for her father until she gets a royal assist from Queen Victoria (Beryl Mercer).   

The film is at times slavishly faithful to its source material while it also packs in all the usual bits from previous Temple films: a dance number with a comedian, young lovers reunited, and a confrontation with an old crank.  These changes never violate Burnett's creation, in fact, they seem to honor the story's muddled past: originally a magazine serial, Burnett revised Princess into a novella, adapted it to stage play with distinct versions running in London and New York, and eventually incorporated bits from all those incarnations into the final novel.  (And to add to the blurry history, when Alfonso Cuarón made his adaption in 1995, he included elements from the Shirley Temple film that had never appeared in print.)

Of course the most famous scene is the dream sequence that takes place after Sara has been banished to the garret by Miss Minchin and she dreams of being a princess in a storybook land that looks like it sprang directly from a Maxfield Parrish illustration.  Inside the dream, Sara meets fantasy versions of her real-life friends, plus she is able to dispatch cruel Miss Minchin and to assert the importance of generosity and kindness over the petty cruelties favored by the headmistress.  

Another film that uses dreams as an escape from the drudgery of the everyday world is Dreamchild (1985), a hallucinatory mediation on the later years of Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's literary heroine.  Journeying to New York City in 1932, Alice, now a very elderly and snappish Mrs. Hargreaves (Coral Browne), is preparing to make a speech at Columbia University in celebration of the centenary of Lewis Carroll's birth.  

The trip and the occasion dredge up troubling memories of stuttering clergyman Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Ian Holm) whose infatuation with her transformed him into a literary giant and her into the beloved heroine of millions of readers.  Never comfortable with the acclaim, Alice has grown into a dour adult, but the trip forces her to confront her past, both her actual past at Oxford University among her family, and the imagined past in Carroll's fantasy land.  

The creatures of Wonderland were created by the Jim Henson workshop, and they are startlingly lifelike realizations of  Sir John Tenniel's famous illustrations.  But their function within the movie is to force Alice to re-evaluate her memories and to accept her strange double history.  

The film is a fantasia of odd juxtapositions with deep emotional undercurrents, and while it definitely shows traces of screenwriter Dennis Potter's 1965 stage play, director Gavin Millar skillfully manages the transitions between Victorian England and Great Depression era New York.  Part of that success emerges from the fine performances by Browne and Holm, and even Peter Gallagher's take on a raffish tabloid reporter adds a certain panache.

Both these films leave us pleasantly bewildered, full of imaginary landscapes, and ready to dream of our next journey abroad.  Just make sure we all make it back in time for next week's Film Gab.