What We're Watching

I have some new Pork Boys pictures of recent dinners to post, but just haven't got around to doing it yet.  I plead heat exhaustion:  it's been over 100 degrees down here every damn day since the middle of May, most unusually.  

But we don't always dine in state at the dinner table; in late years, we've developed a custom of sometimes watching old movies on my laptop while we eat dinner in the kitchen.  Here are three comedies from the Golden Age of Hollywood that we enjoyed this week - maybe you will, too.

1.  A Night to Remember, 1942 (Not to be confused with the other Night to Remember about the Titanic, made in 1958.)

Starring suave and studly Brian Aherne and gorgeous Loretta Young as a young married couple who move into a Greenwich Village apartment house that turns out to be a comic hotbed of blackmail and murder.

 

2. A Woman of Distinction, 1950 

Starring our gal Rosalind Russell (later "Auntie Mame"), Ray Milland, and Edmund Gwenn (aka Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street), in a collegiate comedy about a busy dean who says her career is more important than romance - until a tall, handsome visitor who won't take no for an answer brings her lofty ideals down to earth with a bump and a splash. Includes delightful cameos of Lucille Ball and Gale Gordon, who at the time were stars of the radio sitcom My Favorite Husband (the forerunner of I Love Lucy). 

 

3. It Grows on Trees, 1952 

Starring the delightful Irene Dunne and Dean Jagger in a whimsical laugh riot about a middle-class couple struggling to raise a family on a tight budget until a couple of newly planted trees begin to bloom, causing wonderment - and a national scandal.  This was Miss Dunne's last film role before she retired from acting.

-----