Tired Old Queen at the Movies: Night of the Hunter

Steve Hayes reviews the 1955 thriller:

Menace comes in the form of a murderous false prophet in Charles Laughton's classic thriller The Night of the Hunter.

Robert Mitchum stars in one of the most malevolent roles of his career as a psychopathic evangelist in the Depression ridden mid-west. Shelly Winters is the gullible widow who makes the mistake of taking on Mitchum as her second husband, to homicidal results. Lillian Gish rounds out a distinguished cast, which includes James Gleason, Peter Graves and Broadway veteran Evelyn Varden as the local harridan. Laughton's sensitive direction and the beautiful cinematography enhance this action packed, cross-country, suspense tale of two children running for their lives from a genuine "Boogie-Man".

FYI:  In this movie, the great Lillian Gish had one of her most memorable performances, in a film career that spanned 75 years: 1912-1987.

Tired Old Queen at the Movies: The Philadelphia Story

Steve Hayes showcases Kate Hepburn in her defining performance (1940):

Good Lord! Tracy Lord's getting married again! And look who's here to bust up the wedding!

Katharine Hepburn finds herself up to her long neck in man trouble when former Husband Cary Grant hires reporters Jimmy Stewart and Ruth Hussey to cover her society wedding for Spy magazine in George Cukor's hilarious The Philadelphia Story.

This was the great part of Hepburn's career and the role that saved it. Having been labeled "box office poison," she retaliated with the help of her then-boyfriend, Howard Hughes, by buying the screen rights to Phillip Barry's hit Broadway comedy, which she'd starred in, and selling herself and the property to MGM, making a killing. She also had casting approval, and when Gable and Tracy weren't available, chose Grant and Stewart, who subsequently picked up his only Oscar as Best Actor for his efforts. It's smooth, fast-paced, witty, and handled by a group of seasoned pros with all the MGM glamor the studio could muster. The Philadelphia Story proves unequivocally that indeed, they don't make 'em like that anymore!

Waitin' for the Weekend

Nick Ayler

Forbidden History: Edward Carpenter

For my truckbuddies - a series on people and events they cut out of your history books - the stuff they didn't want you to know about, the people they didn't want you to know ever existed.  People like you and me, that is.

Would you believe this studly guy was born in 1844?  Sure looks modern to me:


Edward Carpenter, age 30

 As Wikipedia notes,

A leading figure in late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain, he was instrumental in the foundation of the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. A poet and writer, he was a close friend of Walt Whitman and Rabindranath Tagore, corresponding with many famous figures such as Annie Besant, Isadora Duncan, Havelock Ellis, Roger Fry, Mahatma Gandhi, James Keir Hardie, J. K. Kinney, Jack London, George Merrill, E D Morel, William Morris, E R Pease, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner. . . .  he had a profound influence on both D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster.

To name a few.  But the dude wasn't a party boy; he had quite a serious turn of mind.  After a fine academic career at Cambridge, he became a curate in the Church of England - but eventually grew disillusioned and left his post, becoming a writer, lecturer, and advocate for, among other things, woman suffrage, the eight-hour day, vegetarianism, nudism, and "mystical socialism" - while decrying air pollution and vivisection.

He was one of the first people to make a habit of wearing sandals, too; would have been like, so at home in the 1960's, ya know?  I often think about some people I know of who were marooned in time, born way, way too soon - like poor Mary Wollstonecraft, the early feminist, stuck way back there in the 18th century.

Eddy also had a thing for, um, blue-collar dudes who were more brawny than intellectual.  Your Head Trucker can relate.  (I could tell you stories.)   In fact, he settled down with one, George Merrill, in happy domesticity in a remote country village for thirty years, and was devastated when his partner died in 1928; he survived George by only a year, dying at age 84, and special tributes were paid to his work as one of the fathers of the Labour Party by the prime minister and other high officials of the realm.

Someone who, um, knew Carpenter at age 80 - the 23-year-old grandson of a U. S. President - reported much later that Carpenter had had sex with Walt Whitman way back in 1877, but I wasn't there so I can't say.  You can read the story and make up your own mind about that.

Down the line, his books, like The Intermediate Sex, influenced a number of gay men - at least, the ones who could ferret them out from the "restricted" shelves in the library - like Harry Hays, who was a founder of one of the first pre-Stonewall gay-rights groups, the Mattachine Society, in 1950.  Eddy and George's relationship was also the model for the happy-ending relationship in Forster's novel Maurice between middle-class Maurice and the gamekeeper Alec.

So all in all, quite a life, even way back there in the gay dark ages:  busy, happy, fulfilled, sucessful, liberated, free. 

Which you weren't supposed to know.

Tired Old Queen at the Movies: The Spiral Staircase

Steve Hayes reviews the 1946 thriller:

It's a dark and stormy night! Hide under the bed! Don't look in the closet! Stay downstairs! He knows you're alone!

These warnings pop in and out of the heroine's mind as the tension runs rampant in Robert Siodmak's suspense classic, The Spiral Staircase.

But Dorothy McGuire isn't listening. She isn't talking either and that's half her problem. She's a mute. And there's a psycho killer murdering women with handicaps who may be hiding somewhere in the old dark house where she works. Where is it safe? Who can she trust? What was that noise? Is it just her imagination, or was that window closed the last time she passed it?

Dorothy McGuire leads a top flight cast of character actors including: Ethel Barrymore, in an Oscar nominated role, George Brent. Elsa Lancaster, Rhonda Fleming and Sarah Allgood in what is probably the greatest "Where is he in the house?" movie ever made.

Your blood'll run cold, Your spine'll tingle. You'll want to run. You won't dare. Whatever you do, don't go down The Spiral Staircase.

In Living Color

These beauties from 1922 live again in this early test of Kodachrome motion picture film, newly scanned and digitized by Kodak.  The first feature-length movie in color didn't appear till 1935.

Miraculous.




Honk to my truckbuddy dave for tipping me to this clip.

Today's Quote: Laura Ingalls Wilder

From the biography by Donald Zochert:

Like many people who are not pushed in among the crowds of city strangers every day, she was shy and somewhat distant. . . . These quiet times came midway between the hard years of Dakota and the happy years in which she mined her memory for the stories of the Little House books. . . . she was forty-eight years old. She had already reached middle age, that balancing point in life from which many people look backward with less than satisfaction and forward with less than hope.

But Laura was happy and she always seemed to look forward with hope. Her life was anchored in the success she and Almanzo had made of the farm at Rocky Ridge [near Mansfield, Missouri], in its quiet ways and places, in the moments she put aside from her busy chores to reach out and touch the face of nature she had always adored. The hard shadowed years at the beginning of her life with Almanzo had tutored her in the paths of simplicity . . . .

Laura looked around her and thought she saw “a madness in the cities, a frenzy in the struggling crowds” – her words. “We who live in the quiet places,” she realized, “have the opportunity to become acquainted with ourselves, to think our own thoughts and live our own lives in a way that is not possible for those who are keeping up with the crowd.”

[She wrote:]

In thine own cheerful spirit live,
Nor seek the calm that others give;
For thou, thyself, alone must stand . . . .

(Note by Russ:  I very much relate to what she's saying, but in point of fact, both she and her husband lived to be past 90, and she married at 18, so they had each other to build a life with for a long, long time.  Which is not the same thing.)

Sunday Drive: Waiting for a Train

Some essential stuff here.  A rare motion picture of the Father of Country Music, the great Jimmie Rodgers - some of you boys may not ever have heard of him, but he was the first country & western superstar, whose music influenced a whole trainload of later recording artists you have heard of, both country and pop.  My daddy thought he hung the moon.  Enjoy.

Waitin' for the Weekend

Tired Old Queen at the Movies: The Lady Eve

Henry Fonda taking pratfalls?  Yup.  The fabulous Steve Hayes reviews the 1941 romantic comedy:

It's hi-jinks on the high seas as Barbara Stanwyck and Charles Coburn play a pair of father and daughter card sharks out to swindle millionaire Henry Fonda out of his millions in Preston Sturges' classic romantic comedy The Lady Eve. Filled with a stellar collection of character actors including Sturges regulars: William Demarest, Eric Blore and Eugene Pallette, with brilliant dialogue, fast pacing and masterful direction, The Lady Eve is one of the classic comedies of the Golden Age. Stanwyck proves she was a master at subtle comedy and Fonda the king of the pratfalls as she pulls switcheroo after switcheroo in order to land her man. It's Sturges, Stanwyck, and Fonda at their very best ,and one of the comedies that every director has borrowed something from at sometime or other . . . if they're smart.

Sunday Drive: Vivaldi, Summer

Appreciate your cards and letters, guys.  I'm okay, the Blue Truck has just made a little unscheduled stop for a while.  Sometimes you need to pull over and just stretch your legs a bit, ya know?

*          *          *

Tempus fugit.  Already, it's somehow September:  the underside of the year.  Now summer declines toward its inevitable end, as summers always do - though the light and warmth will linger a good while yet in Texas.  A time of musing and taking stock, reflecting on what one has and what one has not.

I was going to post a regular version of the first movement of this favorite, but then I stumbled across this unexpected rendition, which is worth a listen.  See what you think - enjoy.