#source: it happened one night (1934)

[the-badger-mole]

Incorrect Quotes: You Drive Me (LITERALLY) Crazy!

Iroh: Having heard Zuko complaining about Katara for the thousandth time. Do you love her?

Zuko: Affronted A normal human being couldn't live under the same roof as her without going nutty! She's my idea of nothing!

Iroh: I asked you a simple question! Do you love her?

Zuko: Yes! 😡 But don't hold that against me. I'm a little screwy myself.

[oh-sewing-circle]

Claudette Colbert (born Émilie Claudette Chauchoin; September 13, 1903 – July 30, 1996) was an American actress most known for It Happened One Night (1934). Despite both her marriages being seemingly legitimate and loving, rumors of Claudette’s affairs with other actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich followed her for her entire career. Most notably, Claudette had a very public intimate relationship with the "out" lesbian artist Verna Hull in the 1950s. Although Claudette denied the rumors that she was bisexual or a lesbian, she and Verna rented a home together in New York City and even had neighboring vacation homes in Barbados. The relationship ended abruptly and on bad terms in the early 1960s after the death of Claudette’s husband. When Claudette passed away on July 30, 1996, she left her entire estate to another woman named Helen O’Hagan, whom she instructed in her will to be treated “as her spouse.” "She certainly moved with great ease in gay circles," said a friend. "I used to see her at George Cukor's, and there would be quite the carrying-on. She was never shocked. It was a world she was comfortable in. It was taken for granted that she was gay, or at least not conventionally straight." "We used to call her "Uncle Claude"," said Don Bachardy, the lover of the writer Christopher Isherwood. "Actually, I think she's really a good example of a very closeted situation. Only well within her own circle did they know the truth."

-Source

[byneddiedingo]

Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Will Sampson, William Redfield, Brad Dourif, Sydney Lassick, Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito, Vincent Schiavelli, Scatman Crothers. Screenplay: Laurence Hauben, Bo Goldman, based on a novel by Ken Kesey. Cinematography: Haskell Wexler. Production design: Paul Sylbert. Film editing: Sheldon Kahn, Lynzee Klingman. Music: Jack Nitzsche.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is beginning to show its age, as any 48-year-old movie must. It no longer exhibits the freshness that won it acclaim as a masterpiece and raked in the five "major" Academy Awards: picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay -- only the second picture in history to do that: The first was It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), and only one other picture, The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), has subsequently accomplished that feat. Today, however, One Flew has the look of a skillfully directed but somewhat predictable melodrama; its tragic edge has been blunted by familiarity. In treating the material, director Forman goes for straightforward storytelling, without showing us something new or personal as an auteur. And as time has passed, some of the elements of the source, Ken Kesey's novel, that screenwriters Laurence Hauben and Bo Goldman took pains to mitigate -- namely the countercultural glibness and antifeminism -- have begun to show through. It's harder today to wholeheartedly cheer on the raw, anarchic antiauthoritarianism of McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) or to accept as a given the unmitigated villainy of Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). We want our protagonists and antagonists to be a little more complicated than the film allows them to be. There are still many who think it a great film, but if it is, I think it's largely because it's the perfect showcase for a great talent -- Nicholson's -- supported by an extraordinary ensemble that includes a shockingly young-looking Danny DeVito, Scatman Crothers, Sydney Lassick, Christopher Lloyd, Will Sampson, and a touchingly vulnerable Brad Dourif.

[our-flag-means-death-ao3feed]

if i'd gone with you

by the_ruined_earth_sagelord

It was in the deep black of night’s small hours, when two hours had come and went with naught a whisper in the sand or a whistle in the woods, that Blackbeard wondered if after all’d been said and done Stede wouldn’t come.

He arose and looked about the little dock. It had been built on the small jut of beach on the eastern tip of the islet, where barely a boy or goat might wander too far from the smattering of farms on the high bluffs yonder. Few came this way except the King’s own men in daily surveying of the King’s own land, just to give the lads something to do while stationed at such a backwater post. No one expected anyone to use the dock to make port, least of all to leave in a dinghy.

Maybe he’d misspoken and given Stede the wrong directions. Maybe the guard hadn’t cared to honor their agreement, even after taking the bribe. Admittedly, Blackbeard didn’t have his usual resources to place a bribe as tasty as he might have were he aboard his own ship, but it was certainly more than the lad would see in a month in the King’s pay.

Maybe Stede didn’t want to come at all.

~~~

[Or, what happens the night Ed and Stede plan to leave, and this time Stede makes it to the dinghy]

Words: 1934, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Our Flag Means Death (TV)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: Stede Bonnet, Blackbeard | Edward Teach

Relationships: Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet

Additional Tags: Running Away, Getting Together, Fluff, wow what has become of me i used to only write angst lol, Canon-Typical Violence, like it references punching a guy that's it, hence the teen and up rating, Fix-It of Sorts

source https://archiveofourown.org/works/44769358

[creatinghealthandwellnessnow]

Did you know that Bugs Bunny was modeled after Clark Gable’s character stood by a fence chomping carrots, with his mouth full, in the 1934 film “It Happened One Night?” And it is said that Mel Blanc, the original voice of Bugs Bunny, didn’t like carrots! Funny, because researchers have found that rabbits in the wild will eat sweet carrots but actually prefer the leafy greens on the top better. In @hminutritionschool, we learn that those greens and their B2, Riboflavin, not only help people stay calm, maintain a healthy nervous system, support adrenal function and facilitate key metabolic processes but also are instrumental in Acetylation in the Phase II liver detox pathway. Carrots also promote healthy vision, aid in weight loss, and improve skin health, immunity and digestive health. And not only is the root edible but also the leaves as pesto, the flowers for salads or jelly and the seeds to flavor foods! Carrots are also an excellent source of Vitamin A and Beta-carotene, source of Vitamin C, Vitamin B6, and Vitamin K, are high in fiber, and are great energy boosters. Even though they are 88% water, it is said that one carrot gives enough energy for a mile walk! And it’s a fact that the nutritional value of carrots changes during the cooking process. Raw carrots in juices or steamed are rich in vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. But cooking carrots releases more beta-carotene, around 40%, which gives the yellow-orange pigment that becomes Vitamin A, which helps your eyes, immunity and skin. Unfortunately, according to a 2010 study, 4% of Europeans suffer from carrot allergies which include a sore throat, swollen lips and tongue, and itching on the mouth and ears. For more fun info on carrots check out the “Healthy Trivia” reel in a previous post! 💚 Julie https://www.instagram.com/p/CnSIpJOuckR/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[sunnyapollonjabrigidotter]

Gaius Iulius Hyginus ...

"Latin author, a pupil of the scholar Alexander Polyhistor, and a freedman of Caesar Augustus. He was elected superintendent of the Palatine library by Augustus according to Suetonius' De Grammaticis, 20. It is not clear whether Hyginus was a native of the Iberian Peninsula or of Alexandria." Wikipedia

"Under the name of Hyginus there are extant what are probably two sets of school notes abbreviating his treatises on mythology; one is a collection of Fabulae ("stories"), the other a "Poetical Astronomy"."

He's got many lost writings... (hate when this happens, but nah...)

More on the Fabulae..

"The Fabulae consists of some three hundred very brief and plainly, even crudely, told myths (such as Agnodice) and celestial genealogies,[3] made by an author who was characterized by the modern editor, H. J. Rose, as adulescentem imperitum, semidoctum, stultum—"an ignorant youth, semi-learned, stupid"—but valuable for the use made of works of Greek writers of tragedy that are now lost. Arthur L. Keith, reviewing H. J. Rose's edition (1934) of Hygini Fabulae,[4] wondered "at the caprices of Fortune who has allowed many of the plays of an Aeschylus, the larger portion of Livy's histories, and other priceless treasures to perish, while this school-boy's exercise has survived to become the pabulum of scholarly effort." Hyginus' compilation represents in primitive form what every educated Roman in the age of the Antonines was expected to know of Greek myth, at the simplest level. The Fabulae are a mine of information today, when so many more nuanced versions of the myths have been lost.

In fact the text of the Fabulae was all but lost: a single surviving manuscript from the abbey of Freising,[5] in a Beneventan script datable c. 900, formed the material for the first printed edition, negligently and uncritically[6] transcribed by Jacob Micyllus, 1535, who may have supplied it with the title we know it by.[7] In the course of printing, following the usual practice, by which the manuscripts printed in the 15th and 16th centuries have rarely survived their treatment at the printshop, the manuscript was pulled apart: only two small fragments of it have turned up, significantly as stiffening in book bindings.[8] Another fragmentary text, dating from the 5th century is in the Vatican Library.[9]

Among Hyginus' sources are the scholia on Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica, which were dated to about the time of Tiberius by Apollonius' editor R. Merkel, in the preface to his edition of Apollonius (Leipzig, 1854)."

Yeah, seems.. idk... im confused...

Gotta appreciate the ones who can work a nice way out w too little infos, really want to know what he had to say on the godess he & probably a select group of ppl envisioned as a primordial, was it instead of another primordial as we learn in Hesiod's Theogony... or was an addition, did i read right? Appeared b4 Chaos?? Or im already confusing w sth else... my bad, cs taken a mlp pause to work on a ship edits, of which two i lost cs picsart got bugs agn...

But here's the one that didnt (cs didnt forget to save)... the pony on the right is the oc, ik, i placed cheese sandwich too much in center, so it looks like its abt him, but no, he's just a pal... the name of the blue one w what i envisioned as brown curly mane w blue highlights, is Swirling Magus - & he's oc kid of wizwinds (wiz & winds) gay ship from mlp equestria girls... he's a nice guy, an ambivert, likes both to study like twillight, & hangout w friends, hold magical performances, & he can be so silly... pronouns: he/they

Yeah, just explained my dizzy mind 😆😁

Now ill back to Higynus ...

Found it on topostext.org 😍

"§ 0.2 Preface: From Caligine (Mist) (was born) Chaos; from Chaos and Caligine: Night, Day, Erebus, Aether. From Night and Erebus: Fate, Old Age, Death, Dissolution, Continence, Sleep, Dreams, Love — that is, Lysimeles, Epiphron, dumiles [?} Porphyrion, Epaphus, Discord, Wretchedness, Wantonness, Nemesis, Euphrosyne, Friendship, Compassion, Styx; the three Fates, namely, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos; the Hesperides, Aegle, Hesperie, aerica." ...

Here

[dr-archeville]

This Friday (August 18th, 2023) night at the Carolina Theatre of Durham, a retro film series double feature:

Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934)

Howard Hawks’ 20th Century (1934)

$12.00 [plus tax] to get in, movies start at 7(-ish).

“Along with the City of Durham, we have made major investments in the Carolina Theatre for the comfort and safety of our guests during our closure,” says Randy McKay, the Carolina Theatre’s President & CEO. “That includes tens of thousands of dollars in new state of the art HVAC upgrades from Global Plasma Solutions (GPS) that remove biohazards, pollen, and other contaminants to make our air as pure — and sometimes purer — than outdoor air.”  The theater has also earned a Global Biorisk Advisory Council® (GBAC) STAR™ accreditation for its cleaning practices to ensure that guests have a safe and enjoyable experience.  “Together, these cleaning practices and advanced air filtration make the Carolina Theatre one of the safest spaces to attend a film or live event in the region,” says McKay.  [source]

Carolina Theatre of Durham 309 W. Morgan St., Durham, NC http://www.carolinatheatre.org/

[macknnons]

okay last one, #42 from the dialogue for 1934 :))

42. “Touch me again and I’ll push you off the bed.”

Thom doesn’t necessarily mean business when he spans one hand on the small of Brendan’s back, but the sharpness in Brendan’s tone when he says “I’m not in the mood” still throws him for a loop and he freezes.

“Okay,” he whispers and moves his hand a little higher, giving more cuddles vibes. Thom can do cuddles, that’s also something they’re very good at.

When Thom leans down to press the lightest of kisses against Brendan’s shoulder, Brendan tenses up and throws a hand out to forcefully take Thom’s arm away.

“Touch me again and I’ll push you off the bed.”

Brendan’s voice is so cold Thom feels his stomach drop. He didn’t have much to drink but the whole moment makes him feel super sober all of a sudden.

“What’s wrong?”

Brendan is still lying on his stomach, head turned towards the door. 

“Nothing.”

“Briss.”

Brendan sighs loudly, almost theatrically so, and he finally turns on his side, facing Thom. It’s pitch dark outside except for the street lamps that are enough for Thom to now see the lines of Brendan’s face (for once, God bless America and its lack of perfect blackout curtains).

“Look, if you wanted to hook up, you should have stayed at the bar with that tall blond who couldn’t get his eyes away from you. Like, did he really need to know the story behind all of your tattoos and to touch every single one of them? Honestly that’s such an obvious thing to do, that flirting was lame.”

Oh.

People use his tattoos to flirt with him all of the time but Brendan’s the only one Thom will let use a pen to fill them in and trace them endlessly, no matter how hard he has to scrub his skin afterward to take the ink off.

Thom doesn’t mention that to Brendan.

“I didn’t want to hook up with that guy,” he says instead, quietly.

“Right, because you can have me anytime you want and that’s just easier anyway.”

Thom frowns. Brendan’s voice is maybe a tiny bit warmer than earlier but it’s mostly bitter and it goes with the expression on Brendan’s face, mouth a thin flat line and brows drawn together.

The two of them started sleeping together early that year, apparently finally long enough in the same place for them to act on the tension that Thom had noticed in the past, in Montreal and in LA. 

It was convenient, good, easy. They were great together and it just worked.

Sleeping in the same bed after a night out together is a mix of both habit, the pretense of sharing Uber expenses and the excuse of not having to walk home in the cold and dark. The sex is an added bonus when it happened and yeah, the primary source of them ending up in the same bed to begin with sometimes, but it’s not— it hasn’t been Thom’s favorite part in a good while.

Thom will lie if he says he hasn’t been thinking about this lately but he didn’t expect things to unfold like that. It’s a little bit chaotic and maybe it fits them just right.

“Can I?” Thom asks quietly, hand hovering a few inches away from Brendan’s head.

Brendan’s still glaring at him a little but he nods anyway, lets his cheek fit perfectly against Thom’s palm.

Thom uses his thumb to lightly caress the skin under Brendan���s eye. He thinks he can feel him relax a little.

“You’re the only person I’ve kissed in the past two months.” Another swipe of his thumb. The very hint of a smile on Brendan’s face. “And you’re the only person I’ve been wanting to kiss for a good while. And sleep with. Both senses of the words.” Brendan’s definitely smiling now. Streak of outside light hitting him just right. “And a bunch of other stuff too.”

And I only let that guy flirt with me tonight because receiving the attention felt nice and I didn’t say anything sooner because you’re overly friendly with every new person to meet and I didn’t want to mess us up, you know?

Brendan turns his head just enough to kiss the inside of Thom’s palm, catching him by surprise.

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Yeah. And, same.”

“I see we’re being super eloquent tonight.”

“Shut up.”

Thom’s faux-offended laugh gets cut off when Brendan closes the distance between them to kiss him properly. 

[conradscrime]

Thelma Todd: Suicide or Murder?

March 10, 2021

Thelma Alice Todd also known as the “Ice Cream Blonde” and “Hot Toddy” was one of the most famous actresses in Hollywood in the 1920′s and 1930′s. Some of her most popular comedies were Horse Feathers and Monkey Business. Thelma had appeared in around 120 films between the years 1926 and 1935. She is claimed to have died by suicide at the age of 29 on December 16, 1935. However many believe this is suspicious and that her death was actually a murder...

Thelma was born on July 29, 1906 in Lawrence, Massachusetts to parents John Shaw Todd, an upholsterer and Alice Elizabeth Edwards, who was Canadian. Thelma was a good student who graduated high school in 1923 with the dreams of being a school teacher. Thelma was also very beautiful and began competing in beauty pageants in her late teens, even winning Miss Massachusetts in 1925. She was then spotted by a talent agent in Hollywood and began her film career. 

Thelma acted in multiple silent films to start but then began to act in “talkies” where she could actually show her talent and expand her career. Thelma became extremely popular and was an even a successful business woman, opening her own restaurant called Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe at 17575 Pacific Coast Highway in August of 1934. 

The last movie role Thelma was cast in was Bohemian Girl, a full length comedy, in 1935. However, the director ended up cutting most of the footage of her out and only left her in one musical number. 

On Monday morning, December 16, 1935 Thelma Todd was found dead inside of her car. She was found slumped over in the front seat with her head to the left. The car was found in Jewel Carmen’s garage. Jewel Carmen was a former actress and was also the ex-wife of Thelma Todd’s occasional lover at the time, Roland West. Super suspicious huh. The house was about a block away from Thelma’s restaurant. 

Thelma’s cause of death was deemed to be carbon monoxide poisoning. It is alleged that Roland West had locked Thelma out of the house the previous night, and due to this Thelma decided to sleep in her car for warmth.  

Thelma had spent the Saturday night (December 14) at a party in a Hollywood restaurant hosted by Stanley Lupino and his daughter Ida. Thelma apparently had a negative exchange with her ex-husband Pat DiCicco, however her friends later stated that she was in a good mood the rest of the nights and there was no indication that she was planning to end her own life. Thelma then left the party and was driven home in the early hours of December 15 by her driver, Ernest O. Peters. 

The police came to the conclusion that Thelma’s death was an accidental suicide, that she simply turned her car on to either stay warm or she had the intention of driving home and was warming up the car. I am assuming that a lot of people probably assumed Thelma was fairly drunk and accidentally fell asleep with her car running, though I am a little suspicious of this. 

An autopsy was done on December 18, 1935 and the coroner found no marks of violence anywhere on or near the body. However, in another source I found it claimed Thelma had a broken nose, bruises around her throat and two cracked ribs. If she was found with these injuries it is obvious that someone was either beating her up frequently and recently, or they had just given her those injuries the night she died. 

 A jury ruled that the death had been accidental though they did agree that authorities should further look into it. A grand jury looked into whether Thelma had been murdered and concluded that there did not appear to be any foul play. 

Authorities found no suicide note and concluded that there was no motive for Thelma to commit suicide. I do not believe that Thelma Todd committed suicide, she had everything going for her in life, she was at the prime of her career. 

Some believed that Roland West and his ex-wife Jewel Carmen are the ones responsible for Thelma’s death. All three lived above Thelma’s restaurant and ran the business together. It is believed that the restaurant began to lose money and Jewel blamed this on Thelma. Is money a possible motive for murder? Or perhaps jealousy? Maybe Jewel was jealous of Thelma hooking up with Roland or wanted to take over her restaurant. 

Pat, Thelma’s ex-husband is also a suspicious person and I’m sure he’d have a reason to want to kill Thelma, considering she was his ex-wife. 

Another potential theory is connected to Lucky Luciano, a well known mobster who knew Thelma. Not only did Lucky allegedly beat Thelma, he also got her addicted to amphetamines. There were reports that Lucky wanted to open a gambling casino within Thelma’s restaurant but she refused, saying that would only happen “over her dead body.” 

Thelma’s mother Alice was also acting pretty suspicious and was Thelma’s only heir, meaning money could have been a potential motive. Alice supposedly made plans to build a mansion right before Thelma died, though no one knew where she would get the money to do so. 

It seems as though we will never know if Thelma Todd was murdered or took her own life but based off of the evidence I have found through my research there is no doubt in my mind that someone had it out for Thelma Todd and they unfortunately succeeded. 

[jobilt]

Cinema Bunz 5-10

I've watched 150 "significant" movies (and probably another 50 others) since the last time I did a write-up.  So here are 20 of my favorites, in no particular order:

-Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)  A window into the proto-Trans community in Tokyo.  Flawed but stylish and fascinating.  See also: The Queen, Portrait of Jason.

-M (1931) A landmark film that doesn't need my endorsement.  But it stands out even among landmarks.  See also: The Third Man

-Black Narcissus (1947) The Archers were Masters of Sweep.  This one is absolutely sopping with color, spectacle and emotion.  

-Night of the Hunter (1955) In contrast, this one's intimate and impressionistic, a child's nightmare with one of the greatest villains in film.  See also: Eraserhead.

-Tower (2016) Rotoscoped animation can feel like a novelty, but there's a genuine marriage here of medium and message.  It's a mastic that fills in gaps between sources and memories, a hyperreality between the actual and the reenacted.  See also: Peace Officer.

-Edward II (1991) Another example of stylization used to draw parallels.  The point where New Queer Cinema meets Elizabethan drama.  Baz Luhrmann for adults.

-Play Time (1967) Must-watch for architects.  Physical humor enacted by buildings and the frustrated people trying to navigate them.

-The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Another towering epic.  I war story with very little combat, addressing pride and honor from a completely different angle.

-The Exterminating Angel (1962) Magical realism + comedy of manners is a combination that still feels novel.  What if the party you didn't want to end became a party you couldn't escape?

-Chico & Rita (2010) Just a flat-out gorgeous animated romance for adults.  

-The Wages of Fear/Sorcerer (1953/1977).  Separate adaptations of the same novel.  The former lean and stark; the latter, shaggy and lush.  Both masters of psychology and tension. 

-The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978).  Glossy 80's supernatural melodrama. So. Much. Fun.  See also: Blow-up (1966).

-Jules & Jim (1962).  It's refreshing to see sexual mores questioned so frankly this early.  Triads and polyamory still haven't had their moment in contemporary film, and the relationships flow naturally from well-drawn characters.  See also: Design for Living (1933).

-Black Lizard (1968).  A mod Japanese spy romp starring a trans woman.  Does something have to be more than the sum of its parts, if it's executed at the highest level? I say no.  See also: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014).

-Grand Hotel (1932).  Ensemble comedy that throws you in the deep end and doesn't care if you keep up.  So saturated with charm I want to date it.

-Strange Days (1995).  The best of the 90's near-future films, that's mostly just a well-crafted crime flick?  The philosophy has mostly held up but the racial politics are depressingly current.

-It Happened One Night (1934).  My favorite of the Capra I've watched.  Certainly a genre-defining romantic comedy, with a Clark Gable performance that washed Rhett Butler out of my hair

-The Conformist (1970).  Production designed to the GODS, Mama!  The plot is twisty and the performances are strong, but I'm here for the sets.

-Raise the Red Lantern (1991).  The plight of a third concubine in 1920's China.  Gorgeous, subtle, wrenching. 

-A Separation (2011).  I am a sucker for spectacle, abstraction and melodrama.  Reality is hard!  But this one is a chunk of concrete executed flawlessly.

[chiseler]

Ginger Rogers: Curse of the Working Class

A natural-born mimic, ham, tease, hard worker, stoic follower and out-of-reach babe, Ginger Rogers has proven one of the most difficult to define of all the 1930s Hollywood stars. At her best she was a synonym for fun and high spirits while also conveying a dignified and skeptical kind of resistance to other people, and these contradictory impulses made her one of the most special and ambiguous performers of her time. Rogers excelled in her first seven musicals with Fred Astaire and in several of her comedy vehicles and even in some of the programmers she churned out in the early 1930s. She was beloved, and rightly so.

In Stage Door (1937), Rogers gives one of the most distinctive, most suggestive, and most perfectly judged performances of the period, molding every one of her bone-dry, wisecracking line readings (and what lines she has in that movie!) into something pleasurable, something unexpected, even something profound, delivering them all with her guarded, in-transit sort of face.

I’ve seen Stage Door probably more times than I’ve seen any other movie, but I always notice something new in it, some new line, some new angle. As a kid, I didn’t really understand the source of Rogers’s misgivings here, which is the same source that animates her outrageously and inventively bitchy yet somehow tender and worldly fights with Linda (Gail Patrick), her high-falutin’ former roommate. Linda is the mistress of Anthony Powell (Adolphe Menjou), a powerful Broadway producer. When Powell sees Rogers’s Jean Maitland rehearsing a dance routine, his little weasel eyes light up with lust. He thinks she’s just playing hard to get when she makes her habitual mordant jokes at him, but she is really just trying to delay the inevitable. She wants no part of sleeping with a man for his money not because she thinks it’s morally wrong, per se, but because she’s basically too tired-out to go through those motions.

Jean is so disenchanted that the disenchantment seems to be leading her to some kind of drastic change. She talks herself into going out with Powell but gets out of sleeping with him by getting, or pretending to get, disruptively yet vaguely drunk. Jean gets drunk the way she does everything else, at some very unusual kind of steady and wary behavioral half-mast. She cracks wise as a matter of course, but she sleeps with a doll and she plays a ukulele. These cute details don’t seem to fit her character, but they do express the divided character of the woman who was playing her.

Jean stumbles home from Powell’s penthouse to her new roommate Terry (Katharine Hepburn), a rich girl with airily la-di-da attitudes about life and the theater. Hepburn had not endeared herself to Rogers with her much-repeated remark about Rogers’s partnership with Astaire: “He gives her class and she gives him sex.” The competitive rivalry between Hepburn’s upper-class pretension and Rogers’s low-burning common sense is the heart of their conflict in Stage Door, and this conflict and mutual dislike reads as pure chemistry on screen, just as it did for Rogers with Astaire.

There is such chemistry between Jean and Terry that Stage Door has always been a kind of closeted lesbian classic just waiting to burst into full-on Sapphic love. Terry has no love interest and shows zero interest in acquiring one, while Jean looks more than ready to give up on poor, unreliable young men and rich, sexually demanding older men like Powell. Jean and Terry, in fact, are perfect for each other and wind up with each other, and in the last scene Rogers reaches a kind of epiphany as she reacts to their friend Judy (Lucille Ball) leaving New York to get married. “At least she’ll have a couple of kids to keep her company in her old age, and what’ll we have?” she asks. “Some broken-down memories and an old scrapbook that nobody’ll look at.”

I first saw Stage Door when I was eight years old. Now that I’m well into adulthood, these last few lines that Rogers tosses off with such face-the-facts casualness have the force of revelation, as if she has finally washed up on the shores of some final philosophy. They predict the real lives of both Hepburn and Rogers (though some people still do want to leaf through those particular scrapbooks) and Terry and Jean, and everybody else for whom the easy way and the conventional way of living will never fit or will never be acceptable.

Rogers was capable of that tough-minded and frank and bleak attitude on screen, but in life and in general she was actually, and alarmingly, one of the most clueless of stars, never quite knowing what it was that people liked about her. Starting as early 1938, the year she made Vivacious Lady and Carefree, something peculiar started to happen to Rogers. After years of the most unlikely and enormous success in her Astaire films, where she was up to any dance challenge he gave her and where her timing in both musical and comic and dramatic scenes was magically sharp, her timing started to go horribly awry. Rogers began to be afflicted by self-consciousness, miscalculation, cutesiness, self-infatuated archness and flashes of deep-rooted mean-mindedness. She slipped back into her best controlled star mode in several films after that year, but she started to deteriorate more and more by the mid-1940s, almost as if someone had put a curse on her.

Rogers was born Virginia McMath in Independence, Missouri in 1911. Her formidable mother Lela Rogers was a writer for silent films and a journalist, and she was seemingly joined at the hip to her daughter. It was Rogers who wanted a career as an actress, and Lela resisted this at first, but when Ginger won a Charleston contest Mama Lela knew which way the wind was blowing. She poured all of her own considerable energy and ambition into making Ginger a star and keeping her one (that first name supposedly came about because a cousin couldn’t pronounce the name Virginia).

At the height of her stardom, when Rogers was sent the script of The Hard Way (1943), she wonderingly said, “This is the story of my life,” and turned it down. In that movie, Ida Lupino works like a demon to get her malleable kid sister (Joan Leslie) into show business, and the comparison is not flattering to Lela, who made a fool of herself testifying before HUAC as an expert on Communist infiltration of Hollywood, citing particularly the time when Rogers had to say Dalton Trumbo’s line, “Share and share alike, that’s democracy” in Tender Comrade (1943). Lela herself actually turns up playing Ginger’s mother in Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor (1942), and she’s a rather low-key presence, but she talks and moves like a woman who has power and feels no need to make any outward show of it.

In that Wilder movie, Rogers spends most of her time pretending to be a twelve-year old, and this uneasy reversion to little-girlhood was one of her most troubling fallback modes. She had made her first successes on stage with “baby talk monologues” written by Lela, and her early style, as seen in films like Young Man of Manhattan (1930) and Honor Among Lovers (1931), was very much a hold-over from the 1920s, a Betty Boop baby vamp persona that was more suited to cameo roles than to leads (Claudette Colbert, the star of Young Man of Manhattan, gently mocks these baby affectations after meeting Rogers’s character).

She churned out lots of low-budget programmers in 1932, and in 1933 she made ten films. In two of those, 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, Rogers nearly steals the show in fairly small parts. As Anytime Annie, a notoriously obliging chorus girl in 42nd Street, Rogers is first seen wearing a monocle and affecting a grand manner accent, and this was the first sign of her aptitude for two-faced disguise. As Manuel Puig once said of Ann-Margret, Rogers is anything but reassuring.

She’s close to surreal in her gold-coin outfit singing “We’re in the Money” with pig Latin verse in Gold Diggers of 1933, looking directly into the camera and not flinching as it travels all the way up to her face. Rogers gobbled up attention like that, and she had what it took, but she needed something or someone to stabilize her. When she strips down to her slip and stockings and gyrates in Professional Sweetheart (1933), an outraged Norman Foster spanks and then punches her, the first in an increasingly ominous series of punishments that would shadow her later career.

In the very horny Pre-Code musical Flying Down to Rio (1933), her first film with Astaire, Rogers is a hot mama, singing and swaying to “Music Makes Me” in a vagina power dress that even Marilyn Monroe might have rejected as too overt. When they dance “The Carioca,” Astaire starts out holding his head slightly away from Rogers, as if she might be diseased, but by the end their electric chemistry has fully kicked in.

Astaire had spent his youth dancing with his sister Adele and didn’t want to get stuck with another steady partner. Rogers had her eye on dramatic parts, announcing to an incredulous press that she wanted to play Joan of Arc. She was an ambitious and competitive person, and she knew that she was not even close to Astaire’s Olympian league as a dancer. But that’s part of the magic of their series of films, in which Rogers improves as a dancer bit by bit until she is fully capable of following his every step.

Astaire objected that no one would believe Rogers as an English girl in The Gay Divorcee (1934), and surely no one could mistake her for English, but this part gave her the reserve that she intriguingly used and toyed with for her best years as a star. Like most first sexual experiences between two people, their first real romantic dance together in that film, “Night and Day,” is both exciting and a little awkward. In their follow-up Roberta (1935), Rogers looks tense during their slow “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” routine, but she comes wonderfully alive when they casually tap to “Hard to Handle,” their first really great dance together.

She was always at her best in the lively comic numbers, where her wacky energy seems to warm Astaire, but she worked hard at the dramatic routines, so that when they do “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” in Follow the Fleet (1936), Rogers has somehow ascended up to Astaire’s level as a dancer. It must have taken nearly super-human will, but she did it, and audiences saw and felt her progress, and they loved it because it meant that anything was possible if you worked hard enough, even dancing like or with Fred Astaire.

Astaire didn’t like her feather dress for the “Cheek to Cheek” dance in Top Hat (1935), and you can see why he didn’t: it’s a little tacky. Costumer Walter Plunkett said Rogers always wanted to “add a crepe paper orchid or a string of beads or some goddamned feathered thing. She just never could resist little improvements.” But her feather dress in Top Hat does move beautifully when she dances, even if we do see some of the feathers floating away from them, as if she’s molting.

A more characteristic and winning image of her comes in the way she hikes up her skirt in the “Pick Yourself Up” number in Swing Time, which has a deeply charming kind of put-on nonchalance, or in the soldier-like way she executes a series of brutally exacting turns at the end of the “Never Gonna Dance” finale toward the end of that movie (while she shot this scene, her feet started to bleed in her shoes). One of the real pleasures of American moviegoing is watching Rogers as Astaire sings a love song to her: she would listen so intently, with barely any change of expression, but with such sensitive receptivity behind her eyes and in the set of her mouth.

People like to wonder if Astaire and Rogers hated each other. Maybe there were moments when they did, but mainly they just resented being tied together as a team, and those misgivings are part of what give their partnership and their best dances such impact, such crackle. Rogers reported in her autobiography that Astaire had taken her out on dates in New York when they were both working in theater, and at the end of one such date he gave her “a kiss that would never have passed the Hays Office Code!” But when they worked together in films, Astaire was married to a woman he adored, and he was a distant taskmaster in the killer rehearsal sessions for their dance routines. His friends, cultivated when he played on stage in London in the 1920s, were the English gentry. Rogers was not his cup of tea, and he made that known to her in subtle ways. She said either, and he said eye-ther, and they wanted to call the whole thing off, but no one else ever did.

In the many years after their partnership ended, they were still stuck with each other, and they both still resented that. Rogers would sometimes make friendly overtures to Astaire, and he would politely but firmly put her off, and this led to hurt feelings for her, so much so that she didn’t even go to his American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony. Film scholar Joseph McBride helped to put together that evening, and when I asked him about it, he remembered Astaire saying, “I suppose we’ll have to have Ginger,” in an irritated voice. When she didn’t come to the ceremony, it seemed like sour grapes on her part, but it had been made clear to Rogers that Astaire only wanted the bare minimum to do with her, and so she withdrew. It would do well to remember, of course, just how obnoxious Rogers could be. If you want to feel the full force of that, just look at any number of the films she made from 1944 to 1964 and you’ll see one garishly misplayed, mistimed performance after another, including the last one she did with Astaire, The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), where her dramatic aspirations were mocked and then the mockery was unintentionally confirmed when she did a goggle-eyed recreation of Sarah Bernhardt reciting the Marseillaise.

So what happened to Rogers? Why did she lose all of the qualities that had made her a star right after her stardom was confirmed? Many writers have tried to explain it. Analyzing Astaire and Rogers in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (1972), Arlene Croce says, “She’s an American classic, just as he is: common clay that we prize above exotic marble. The difference between them is that he knew it and she didn’t. Rogers always wanted to be something more. Probably no other major star has so severely tried the loyalty of her public by constantly changing her appearance and her style.” In his book Romantic Comedy (1987), James Harvey writes, “Can there be any other major star who was so variable, even from film to film, as she was?”

Harvey blames George Stevens, who directed maybe the finest Astaire/Rogers film, Swing Time (1936). He sees a softening of her character in the straight scenes in Swing Time, but the rot really sets in with Vivacious Lady, a romantic comedy that has all the elements for success but perversely ruins them with its taffy-pull pacing, its willful lack of coordination, its leaning on jags and cutesiness and bizarre sequences like the fight scene between Rogers and a rival that devolves into a series of unmoving tableaus broken only by a coy laugh from Rogers, as if Stevens wanted to turn her into Frank McHugh. In the same year, in Carefree with Astaire, Rogers exhibits such unpleasant sadism when her character is under hypnosis that it feels like a revelation of some inner nastiness that had always been prudently hidden from view.

The damage was reversed in Bachelor Mother (1939), a working girl comedy that has no right to be as charming as it is, where Rogers added a kind of moony dreaminess to her repertoire of personas. She then made two films for Stage Door director Gregory La Cava, 5th Avenue Girl (1939) and Primrose Path (1940). In her second La Cava film, Rogers is so deadpan that it reads as a lack of basic vitality, a first in her career; it’s as if La Cava is unearthing the suicidal or even homicidal side of Jean Maitland. “People annoy me,” she says in that movie, and boy does she mean it. In Stage Door, when Powell tells Jean he wants to put her name in big electric lights, she says, “Gotta be big enough to keep people away.” La Cava is the director who understood Rogers the most, discerning something anti-social and solitary behind her sunny audience-pleasing looks and manner. In Primrose Path, he cast her as a teenager who breaks away from her family before she joins their prostitution racket, and her work in that movie is stark, clean, unsentimental.

Rogers won an Oscar for Kitty Foyle (1940), and many have dated her decline from that point, even if she is modestly touching in what is a modest working girl soap opera. She was close to unbearable in Tom, Dick and Harry (1941), where director Garson Kanin seems to dote on every moment of her self-indulgent performance as a dumb and narcissistic telephone operator who must choose between three suitors. Something about playing dumb here makes Rogers’s style seem laborious and throws her timing all out of whack, yet the following year, in Roxie Hart (1942), she certainly gets her laughs with her broad playing of a very dumb murderess who lives for publicity and likes to do the Black Bottom for reporters. In her segment in Tales of Manhattan (1942), you want to say to her, “OK, you can have all that hair on the top of your head or you can have all that hair fanning over your back, but you can’t have both, Ginger.”

Leo McCarey’s Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942) did her no favors, but most writers agree that the real coup de grâce in her career was Lady in the Dark (1944), a Technicolor movie of the psychoanalytical stage musical that had starred Gertrude Lawrence. Rogers insisted on playing it, and she was at loggerheads with director Mitchell Leisen and Paramount studio chief Buddy DeSylva, who vengefully cut most of the Kurt Weill songs from the film. All in all, the mercifully little-seen Lady in the Dark looks now almost as if it had been made in a spirit of deliberate sabotage. It is has to be the most nastily misogynist of any major studio production of this time, constantly hammering home the idea that Rogers’s Liza Elliott is an unnatural woman unhealthily attached to her work, and her leading man Ray Milland warrants particular scorn here for the gleefulness he brings to the scenes where he humiliates Rogers’s character. In the one extended musical number Rogers has, “The Saga of Jenny,” she doesn’t seem to have been given any choreography or direction and she can barely move in the outfit Leisen designed for her. “After Lady in the Dark there was nothing left of the Rogers character,” wrote Croce. “She died on the analyst’s couch.”

Rogers’s career proceeded only through sheer determination on her part (and on Lela’s part). She floundered in an updated remake of Grand Hotel (1932) called Week-end at the Waldorf (1945), and the next twenty years of her career were a real trial for her fans from the 1930s. Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business (1952) was supposed to be about scientist Cary Grant reverting to childhood when he drinks an elixir of youth, but Rogers insisted that she “wanted to do the kid thing too,” and so she ripped into scene after scene of coarse-grained youthful impersonation, the wise child of her early ‘30s character bearing rotten and poisonously un-watchable fruit.  Cast as a hardened gangster’s moll in Phil Karlson’s Tight Spot (1955), Rogers is so heavy-handed and slow and cutesey with her dialogue that the effect is ghastly. If I were to make a simple diagnosis of her problems in the last half of her film career, I’d say that she caught a bad case of George Stevens-itis and never got over it (she had an affair with the married director during Vivacious Lady, which had Lela up in arms).

When she worked with a fine and sensitive director, as she did with Frank Borzage for Magnificent Doll (1946) and with Edmund Goulding for Teenage Rebel (1956), Rogers was still capable of restrained and acceptable if somewhat colorless work. But hateful things kept happening to her. In something like Storm Warning (1951), where she does battle with the Ku Klux Klan while also doing a transposed version of A Streetcar Named Desire, it seemed as if someone behind the scenes wanted to see Rogers punished. When Steve Cochran attacks her in Storm Warning, the scene is so prolonged that finally it is Rogers being humiliated and hurt, not the character she is playing.

Rogers went through five husbands, including the pacifistic and beautiful Lew Ayres, and most of them lasted for a couple of years, but Lela was her real partner for life. The last husband, William Marshall, got her to play a madam in a dire film shot in Jamaica, variously known as The Confession and Quick, Let’s Get Married (1964), and after that low point she made only Harlow (1965), where she was intriguingly cast as Jean Harlow’s mother, before retaining her star status in long-running stage stints in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway and Mame in London. After that came a little TV and nightclub work, where she ended most of her songs with a corny wink to the audience. A Christian Scientist like her beloved or at least inescapable mother, Rogers refused medical treatment after having a stroke, and she was ill for several years before dying in 1995.

The last forty-five or so years of Rogers’s long career basically ran on fumes of good will from her first twelve years in movies, and particularly those Fred Astaire musicals that she preferred to forget. Like many actors, Rogers had no real center or base that was really her, and this lack of center meant that she was able to in effect be something she wasn’t with Astaire, and transcendently so, but it also meant that bad habits and instincts were ready to rush in and overwhelm her when her guard was down.

“May I rescue you?” Astaire asks her in Top Hat, to which she snaps, “No, I prefer being in distress.” The Astaire/Rogers films are so romantic because part of her resistance is that she is suspicious of romance, and maybe she doesn’t believe in it at all. That lack of belief was what made her so sexy beyond her God-given but worked-on perfect figure (“Women weren’t born with silk stockings on, you know,” she says in Follow the Fleet). Look at how cool and unreachable she is when Fred is singing his heart out to her during “Never Gonna Dance” in Swing Time. She preached that God is Love and soda fountains were forever, but in her best work with Astaire and in Stage Door, she let darker and more movingly yearning things cloud her almost cartoonishly pretty brow, and those things are what should define her and what should be remembered.

by Dan Callahan

[filmhistorymptv1145]

In your first blog post of the semester, explore the tug of war in cinema between the “classical” in cinematic storytelling and those who try to subvert it. Drawing upon examples from the films we have studied thus far, define what “classical” cinematic storytelling is and demonstrate how it functioned in an earlier period of film history, as well as its continuing legacy. Where do you see evidence of the “classical” today? Then, consider how filmmakers working in subversive modes challenge the dominance of classicism, either through subtle, indirect means or by full-on assaults. What kinds of classical storytelling approaches do they reject? How do they do that? What changes in form and content defy the classical? The films we’ve seen will help, as will the various sources you’ve been given for study. Use examples from the films we have studied, and draw upon others that you think are relevant.

Cinema is often thought to be the highest form of art, since it combines storytelling, acting, and music all in one glorious attempt to do something that feels simple, but as we find in exploring the history of film, not so much: the art of telling a story. There are many different ways to approach conveying information in a visual manner, and although the direct method might seem to be the easiest, we find that directors can get away with telling their story in the most imaginative ways possible. From the use of flashbacks, forwards and sometimes even sideways, the viewer is taken on a journey through which they are given the clues needed to piece the entire story together on their own. Directors use these various methods of storytelling often to drive home a point, possibly about how the main protagonist sees the world, or how memories are often skewed through the lenses of either emotion or possible mental illness. Telling a story on screen involves a lot of elements that were cemented as ‘classical’ during the early days of Hollywood, and many directors still utilize these storytelling techniques to this day. Others have forged their own path in defying the classical model of film, whether by altering how the progression of the story is conveyed to the viewers, or simply casting away the norms all together.

As Hollywood began to come into its own in the early 1900′s, many of the silent films that were made followed a recipe for getting its message across to the audience watching the screen. It all started off with Alice Ida Antoinette Guy-Blaché, credited with creating the first directed narrative. Up until that point, most movies that were being made were what we would call by today’s standards ‘b-roll footage’. Images of trains coming into a station, workers leaving factories for the day, and horses running were what was most often seen in early day Nickelodeon’s. Alice was the first to use a three stage story arc when she directed her first short film Suspense. Illustrating the rising action with the mother seeing the robber in the alley below her bedroom window, the climax of the husband bringing the police home with him in time to save his wife and child, and the resolution when the family is safely reunited, and the would-be robber is taken away by the policeman. Using film to not only illustrate a story but take the audience on a journey that tugs at their emotions and leaves them sitting on the edge of their seat was not something that had been done before.

Alice paved the foundation for classical storytelling in early cinema, which was firmly linear for several decades once the Motion Picture Production Code began being firmly enforced by the Catholic Church. Since villainy was to be punished and goodness was to be rewarded in the rules, many of the films that came out between 1934 and 1965 followed the same formula. The man ended up with the woman he was in love with, and they were able to get through whatever troubles sprung up in their way throughout the movie.

We see this in Ninotchka, where a Soviet agent is tempted by the love of a Frenchman named Leon and driven to betray the Communist regime of her country in order to pursue it. Nothing can come between them, not even when she returns to Russia and Leon is barred from visiting her. Even when his romantic letters to her are censored by the Communists, the hope in the story is not completely lost. 

Through all obstacles, Ninotchka and Leon are happily in each other’s arms by the end of the movie. You would think that the Communist regime of 1930’s Russia would easily get in the way of two lovers, but in the glittering bauble of Hollywood, there was seemingly nothing that could prevent the linear storytelling model from rewarding the deeds of the good-doers. Not even a strong-willed, stony Communist woman can ignore the temptation of the love of a man, or the freedom that would come with fleeing her home land. Betraying their home country in the name of love isn’t something many people have to struggle with. Yet we see Ninotchka’s transformation unfold on screen in an almost eerie fashion, under Leon’s influence. At the same time, she doesn’t lose the core of who she is even after falling in love. We see this when she gets quite drunk while out with Leon, and she’s caught promoting Marxist ideals inside the women’s bathroom. At the end of the day, Leon still loves Ninotchka for who she is, Communist and all. 

However, some modern films still manage to follow a linear manner of storytelling, even if they are groundbreaking via other means. Take Donnie Darko for instance. Filled with strange imagery that represents Donnie’s visions of how to save the tangent universe from certain destruction, it can feel like a film that displaces the viewer. However, if you have watched it a few times, you can see that the strange, obscure events in the story are still told in the order as they happen. From the night that Frank appears to Donnie and warns him of the world’s impending doom that is to come in twenty-eight days, a countdown begins from that point onward. Even when Donnie is experiencing visions of his school flooded with water, or being egged on by Frank to burn down the house of a local celebrity, we see each day pass by in order until the film’s ending. Images of water and fire are placed against Donnie’s relatively normal, everyday life as a high school boy in a stark, brilliantly vivid contrast. 

While Richard Kelly could have chosen to present the film’s events out of order or utilize flash backs and forwards to communicate his vision, his unique and bizarre story was easier to understand since it was told linearly. Kelly still manages to subvert the norm by creating his own science behind what was happening to Donnie, between the tangent universe, living receiver and the manipulated dead and living. Kelly also did not feel the need to show the audience every last little detail of Donnie’s abilities and experiences, feeling that ‘less was more’ in his interview in The Donnie Darko Book. Rather than showing Donnie levitating off of the ground and swinging the axe into the bronze statue of the school’s mascot, Kelly instead cuts to the scene where the disfigured piece of art is discovered by both the police and the principal. 

Choosing to let the audience use their own imaginations to fill in the blanks allows the viewer to come up with their own creative ideas as to how events unfold, instead of being spoon fed them shot by shot. A cult classic, Donnie Darko still comes to mind all these years later whenever the topic of films that challenge the classical model through indirect and still wildly creative means.

Then there are directors which completely subvert the linear story model, turning it on its head and taking the audience through an unexpected, wild ride where they are never quite sure if they can trust what they are seeing on screen. Robert Eggers’ newest film The Lighthouse is a story that is difficult to grasp on the first viewing. Even in just aesthetic terms, Eggers goes against the norm in choosing the 4x3 aspect ratio for his movie, instead of the traditional widescreen. It brings us closer to the actors and their rapid descent into madness, giving off a sense of claustrophobia as the dread slowly builds on screen. The movie is shot in black and white instead of contemporary color film, which leads to our eyes having fewer things to be distracted by as we watch. It also adds to the otherworldly, nightmarish atmosphere of the movie, and gives the director more opportunities to use the lighting on set to convey the deeper messages that are found in The Lighthouse.

Eggers has a way of giving the viewer a creeping sense of foreboding without showing anything scary at all. The opening shot of The Lighthouse begins with a large ship cutting through dark and stormy waters, and then we see our two main characters shot from behind with the lighthouse towering above their heads, accompanied by tense music. There’s something to be feared in these beginning moments, even if the viewer can’t quite put their finger on just what it is yet.

The audience is not sure if the main protagonist, Winslow, is a reliable character or not. There comes a point in the movie where everything we are led to believe up to that point is turned onto its head, and from that moment forward the viewer can not tell if Winslow is of sound mind or not.

The night before their shift is supposed to end and the ferry will come to take them away from the lighthouse and the island, Winslow finally breaks his sobriety and he gets quite drunk with Wake. During what we think is the next day (any attention paid to how much time has passed feeling scrambled by this point), Wake informs Winslow that the rot has gotten to their salted fish. Winslow replies that they had only missed the ferry by a day, and there is no need to ration their food. Wake replies that it had been weeks since they had missed the ferry that was supposed to take them home, not a single day. Wake also says that he had been telling Winslow to ration their food for the past few weeks, to which Winslow does not believe him. Wake comments that he does not want to be stuck at his post with a lunatic, and bids Winslow to go with him to dig up their extra rations, which turn out to be comprised of nothing but more alcohol. Wake makes a few slip-ups of his own in recounting his sailor days with Winslow, having two different versions of how he lost his leg, or whether or not he had been married and had a family. Between Wake’s lying and Winslow’s seemingly unstable mental state, there is no reliable narrator to trust throughout the film.

From then onward, the film spirals into such madness that the viewer can only hope to retain their wits enough to follow what is unfolding on the screen and attempt to piece together what is real and what is not in their own mind. We no longer have any baseline for reality to cling to at this point, between the excessive drinking on screen, and the characters’ untrustworthy narrations. Eggers gives us only the briefest, pin-prick sized moments of normalcy, such as Wake and Winslow catching lobsters for their dinner, or Winslow attending to his various duties on the small outcrop of land that the lighthouse sits on. Even then it is difficult to pay close attention to these tiny seconds of peace after having been put through a dizzying whirlwind of stimulus only seconds prior, with visions of sirens washed up on the beach, or tentacles belonging to some great, terrible beast sliding across the top floor of the lighthouse.

The linear model of storytelling that was cemented in early Hollywood is classical for good reason. The early directors and screenwriters of that era paved the foundation that modern day films still utilize nearly a hundred years later, setting a standard that directors can either utilize, or subvert entirely. It is safe to say that there is no limit on creativity and ingenuity, no matter how the director may choose to tell their story on screen. Whether they follow the classical model, subvert it entirely or land in some sort of middle ground, we as the audience are given plenty of artistic content to work with and ponder about regardless of what they choose.

[myhauntedsalem]

Ghostly warning: Dead gangster Ma Barker doesn’t want her house moved

He called the newsroom with a warning: They can’t move that house.

“I’m worried something terrible is going to happen,” the man said in a thick New York accent. “I have to warn somebody.”

Then he told me a ghost story.

His name is Donald J. Weiss. He’s a 62-year-old retired police patrolman from upstate New York. He had moved to Ocala several years ago and visited the house where gangster Ma Barker had been killed. He had wanted to see the site of the longest shootout in FBI history: four hours, more than 2,000 bullets.

But when he wandered beneath the live oaks, a voice growled, “Get outta here, lawman!”

And when he took a photo of the front porch, a shadowy figure appeared.

“That woman is still in that house,” he told me. “And she’s pissed.”

He gave the photo to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office because he wanted to enter it into evidence. And because bad things started happening as soon as he had blown up the print. “I had a heart attack,” he said. “You think that’s a coincidence?”

The property has been sold, he told me. County officials want to move the house.

“They have no idea who or what is in there,” Weiss said. “That woman has the power to do a lot of things. We are dealing with the afterworld here.”

I thanked the caller for his concern.

“When are they moving it?” I asked.

He paused, as if to make a point, then said gravely, “By Halloween.”

Reporters get a lot of crazy calls. Many might have dismissed this one. But I knew this house, and so did my photographer friend John Pendygraft.

“Hey John,” I called across the cubicle wall. “Do you remember that story we did on the Ma Barker house?”

John’s eyes got big. “Do you remember what happened?”

Our story four years ago had been about real estate: historic home for sale on nine waterfront acres, eight miles north of the Villages, two hours from Tampa. And about the gangsters who hid out there until the end.

We had toured the four-bedroom house with a Realtor, whose assistant shivered and said, “I get the weirdest feeling when I’m in here.” We had reported rumors about flickering lights and an unsuccessful exorcism.

But we hadn’t written about what had happened to John. Or what he saw when he enlarged one of his pictures.

John has worked in war zones in Afghanistan and the Gaza Strip. He has photographed the dead from an Asian tsunami, a Mexican assassination and Hurricane Katrina. If he ever is scared, he won’t show it.

That fall day in 2012, in the Ma Barker house, he had gone alone into the front bedroom to take pictures through the window, looking out toward the lake where the FBI agents had crouched behind trees.

All of a sudden, John rushed out, cameras, lights, tripod flapping over his shoulders, nearly sliding down the 13 stairs. “I don’t know what happened, or what that was,” he panted. He heard the mattress fall, then saw it, dangling through the bed frame. “I didn’t touch it,” he insisted.

We left that afternoon, as dusk began to descend. From beneath the Spanish moss, John shot a few final frames. The next day, when he zoomed in on his laptop, he saw a strange figure on the screened porch: The silhouette of a stout woman with a bun, who looked like she was holding a machine gun.

Her story starts in Missouri, in 1873. Her parents named her Arizona Donnie Clark. She and a farmhand, George Barker, had four sons. As soon as the boys were grown, her husband left.

Legends vary about Ma Barker’s role in her boys’ gang. Some say she just cooked and cleaned. Others say she was the mastermind.

They began by robbing banks, then murdered a policeman. From 1910 through 1930, they are said to have stolen $2 million. And killed at least 10 people.

The FBI’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, called them “the worst criminals in the entire country.” Ma Barker became the only woman to top the most wanted list.

In 1934, the gang split and went into hiding. One son fled to Chicago. Ma and her favorite son, baby Freddie, moved to Miami where, posing as a wealthy widow, she asked if anyone knew a secluded spot where she could spend the winter.

Someone introduced her to Carson Bradford, whose family had a lovely home in the center of Florida, on Lake Weir.

The house sounded perfect: fully furnished, set back from the road, with a boat tethered to a dock out back. Ma paid the full season’s rent in cash. Just before Thanksgiving, she moved in with Freddie and a couple of his friends.

In a letter to her son Arthur in Chicago, she drew a map of the lake and circled the closest town, Ocala. She mailed it from Ocklawaha’s little post office.

FBI agents found Arthur the following January, and with him, the letter, which led them to Ma’s hideout.

In the predawn darkness on Jan. 16, 1935, a dozen officers pointed their guns at the upstairs windows. “This is the FBI,” an officer shouted, according to an agency report. “You are surrounded.”

Some say the gun battle lasted as long as six hours.

When it was over, they found Freddie, 32, shot in the back of his head. Ma, 63, was curled on the floor, cradling her Tommy gun. That day, Hoover said, marked “the end of an era of violence.”

For nine months, the corpses lay unclaimed. Finally, a relative moved them closer to home.

But some say Ma still inhabits that two-story, cream-colored house with forest green shutters. The cop on the phone, my friend the photographer, the former and current owner all saw, heard or felt … something.

But how do you report a ghost story?

I started with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office and that “evidence” photo the retired cop mentioned on the phone.

Lt. Dave Redmond remembered some man bringing in the photo, but the deputy hadn’t seen anything in it.

Records only go back to 1990, said department spokeswoman Lauren Lettelier. “But since then, there have been no reports of hauntings at that house.”

I talked to Carson Good, 47, the great-grandson of the man who built the house. He has memories of swimming and sailing in the lake. And of countless sleepless nights, cringing in the dark. “I��m not a big believer of ghosts, but I heard a lot of sounds in that house,” he said. “Voices. Furniture moving. People walking up and down the wooden stairs.”

His grandmother didn’t like to talk about it, but she often heard spirits stirring. Years ago, he said, a psychic from Cassadaga held a seance at the house and convinced the ghost of Freddie Barker to move on. But the medium said Ma refused to move.

Good and his family sold the property for $750,000 and donated the house to the county, which hired a contractor to lift the home off its foundation and float it across Lake Weir to a park called Carney Island. County commissioners allocated $270,000 for the move. Private donations and fundraising will finance the museum.

County tax collector George Albright, who grew up next to the storied house, envisions an homage to the early days of the FBI, as agents set out to capture notorious gangsters like “Baby Face” Nelson, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde and, of course, the infamous Barker gang.

“We’ve already had calls from people asking about ghost tours. If they want something like that, or to hold seances, we’ll look into that,” said the tax collector, “as a revenue source.”

Some say the gang buried Mason jars filled with cash along the lake. Local children used to spend summers digging for the treasure, but came up with shovels full of sand.

As soon as the home is removed, before the new owner closes on the land, the tax collector plans to bring in a team with ground-penetrating radar to scan the soil.

“Let’s hope she’s a friendly ghost,” he said.

On a gray Wednesday in October, more than 81 years after the shootout, John and I returned to the scene. The house already had been lifted on jacks. The screened porch was gone; workers were carrying out lamps. A true-crime novelist was parked in an SUV, taking pictures.

Like John, he swore he had seen a face in a window.

“I think whatever’s in there doesn’t want us to come in,” said Tony Stewart, who had driven from Indiana to see the house in its original setting. “And it won’t come out.”

We had told the retired cop that we would meet him later. The tax collector didn’t want anyone else at the construction site. But Weiss pulled up in his white Cadillac, quaking in his tassled loafers.

“This is where their bodies were. They dragged ‘em right down this driveway,” said Weiss, clasping his arms across his chest. “She’s not at rest. She will never leave this property.”

He has felt this before, he said. “I sense spirits.”

The first time was in 1992, just before Christmas. He was on patrol in White Plains, N.Y., resting in his car between calls, when he had a vision of a sad teenage boy: long hair, pale, with a pug nose. Two days later, he was sent to a home where a teenage boy had hanged himself. “The same boy I’d seen.”

[our-flag-means-death-ao3feed]

Greyhound Bring My Baby Home

by hecatesthirdface

Inspired by It Happened One Night (1934).

Stede Bonnet is a rich society darling attempting to run off with Charles Vane against his father's wishes. Edward Teach is an exhausted journalist just trying to eke his way through life. When the two meet on a bus headed from Florida to New York, their lives will change permanently, obviously.

The story is much better than this summary.

Words: 31626, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Our Flag Means Death (TV)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: Blackbeard | Edward Teach, Stede Bonnet, Father Bonnet, Mary Allamby Bonnet, And other fun cameos

Relationships: Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet

Additional Tags: I told myself I wasnt gonna do this but it happened anyway, Alternate Universe - 1930s, Alternate Universe - It Happened One Night (1934) Fusion, I cant believe thats a fucking tag, But yeah this is inspired by that, No Period Typical Homophobia, No Smut, Obviously like do you know who I am, Some angst, journalist!Ed, societydarling!Stede, I cant imagine this being very good but you have no idea how long its been in my brain, Running Away, Stede is gonna be bitchy!, Ed is gonna be fed up, And this is gonna be hokey as hell, david jenkins levels of anachronisms, Mistaken Identity, Something adjacent to enemies to lovers, and even a splash of fake dating, oh and guess what?, Blackbeard | Edward Teach is on the Asexuality Spectrum, Stede Bonnet is on the Asexuality Spectrum, ACE4ACEGENTLEBEARD BAYBEEEE, Fluff and Angst, Humor, But its very classic film humor if that makes any sense, Very few of these tags are useful

source https://archiveofourown.org/works/48031456

[classicmollywood]

The Screwball Comedy Films Review

There’s a book in there, I promise! I can’t believe I am on review #4 for Out of the Past Blog’s 2020 Classic Film Reading Challenge! This has been a blast and made me (in a good way) keep up with my reading! And also try to get my photography skills improved (not really working but that’s okay!).

Okay, let’s get to the actual review. The book’s full title is The Screwball Comedy Films: A History and Filmography, 1934-1942 and it was written by Duane Byrge and Robert Milton Miller. When I first opened this book, I got a little nervous because the title and picture on the cover sold me, but the Table of Contents seemed very textbook like. It is a wonderful thing I ignored my original assumption, because this book was more of an enjoyable reference book than a bland textbook. The book is set up into four major sections which I believe was the smartest way to intrigue a reader. Why you might ask? Because it’s kind of like in baseball (sports?) where you do a wind up and a pitch before the batter hits a home run. The wind up and the pitch are the first three sections - which are Major Performers, Major Writers, and Major Directors. The home run comes in the last section, The Films, 1934-1942. The book also explains why screwball comedy is so great. So let’s talk about that now!

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant can’t believe I mentioned baseball too! Source: Britannica

So I used the baseball analogy because the term ‘screwball’ actually comes from that sport. But I don’t wanna talk too much sports because this a book review and my baseball knowledge is limited. This book really pointed out the comparison though and made me realize why screwball comedies are called well, screwball comedies. You could say, oh these are just romantic comedies. STOP! NO, HOLD ON A SECOND. Screwball films combine a specific formula, which yes, includes a love story and some comedy, but goes more in a satirical zone whereas traditional romantic comedies don’t always do that. There is usually some slapstick, witty fast talk, and some sort of ‘untraditional’ romantic pairing that usually ignores socio-economic boundaries and one of the characters is so zany it is hard to believe they are real and the other one keeps getting dragged into zany shenanigans even though they are the practical one. This is a gigantic paraphrase, but Byrge and Miller really do a good job of describing what makes a comedy more of the screwy variety. They also taught me something I should have known... but didn’t.

In My Man Godfrey, Carole Lombard’s spoiled rich girl against William Powell’s butler is so Screwball. Source: Pinterest

It Happened One Night is crowned by the authors (and history) as the first ever screwball comedy. It has most of the identifiers above, and really was the guinea pig to see if this new genre would even survive. Once that film became a hit, earning Oscars galore, writers went full steam ahead to create that perfect chemistry that Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable had and the new ‘screwball formula’ that delighted audiences. I also learned that It Happened One Night had so many imitation films it isn’t even funny. The imitation was mainly in the plot, with the whole spoiled rich girl meets working class male on a cross country trip because she is escaping something or someone and then she realizes she doesn’t hate the working class life or the working class male. 

The film that started it all! Source: Medium

The irony is Claudette Colbert starred in the first screwball and also in the last of the glorious period of screwball greatness that was 1934-1942. Colbert was in The Palm Beach Story with Joel McCrea. Why did screwball mania end? Because when a war is going on, it is kind of hard to focus on the fun shenanigans that follow the rich mixing with the poor with excitement. The Depression audience that started the screwball craze just simply grew out of it and had other things on their minds. But the ‘70s and ‘80s had a revival of sorts for the screwball genre (this book mentions What’s Up, Doc? and that is the perfect example of screwball revival).

The film that was the closing chapter of the screwball era’s highpoint. Source: BFI

The first three chapters of this book are more in paragraph form, but are easy to read because they explain things with just the right amount of info but not to the point where you start getting overwhelmed. My favorite section of the first three is the one on the performers, because it was fun reading which actors and actresses dominated the genre and which ones only did a real toe dip and then moved on. If you were wondering, Carole Lombard was pretty much the queen of screwball and was in quite a few of those films and usually played the zany one. Lombard knew minor success in various genres but really shined when she was a bit ‘screwy’. Cary Grant had similar luck like Lombard, and the genre catapulted him to superstardom. I could go on and on about the other stars of the genre, but then it wouldn’t leave you anything to read in the book.

Screwball royalty Grant and Lombard with Ronald Colman. The duo were in films together, but the main one is a drama. Source: bridiequality on Tumblr.

The reason why I loved the last section so much is because it lists almost all of the screwball comedies made between the ‘34 and ‘42 time period. It is also in chronological order and my brain works best chronologically when it comes to movies (my extensive movie collection is in chronological order and my friends think that’s weird but it isn’t! It’s how I am programmed, okay?!). The chapter lists the film, the year it was made, director, cast, does a small plot summary and also provides background on the film. For example, in the His Girl Friday spotlight, the authors talk about the plot and how Howard Hawks inspired the actors to do that rapid pace dialogue, which gives everything a more manic vibe. Then they describe how Rosalind Russell’s character is not the zany one this time, but in fact, it is Cary Grant’s character who gives us the doses of zany. They also explain how this film is the same yet different to others in the genre. The analysis of the films is very intellectual and you can tell the authors actually researched the films they are talking about, meaning it seems they actually watched the films they discuss. I have to point that out because it is obvious when someone is just talking the talk but has no clue what any of it means!

They sure talk fast in this film! Source: Mental Floss

This book is a winner for those who love screwball films, want to know more about them, or just love classic film. I will say if you are not movie minded, you won’t like it. It is a shorter read but you will probably view it as a more academic book than entertaining. I really enjoyed reading this book, and because I love telling anecdotes, I am glad I bought this book. Last summer I was in Asheville and went to a champagne bar/bookstore. I saw this book and was intrigued but thought it was super expensive, so I walked away. But then the next day, I kept thinking about this book, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell on the cover, and went back and told them to take my moneys. The book wasn’t too expensive and once I got around to it, I am grateful that Cary and Roz caught my eye. 

[go-events]

GO Rom Com Spotlight: @handlebarstiedtothestars​

The wonderful @handlebarstiedtothestars​ has claimed It Happened One Night to adapt for Good Omens in the Good Omens Rom Com Event. 

For reference, here’s some information about the source material!

Synopsis of It Happened One Night: In Frank Capra's acclaimed romantic comedy, spoiled heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) impetuously marries the scheming King Westley, leading her tycoon father (Walter Connolly) to spirit her away on his yacht. After jumping ship, Ellie falls in with cynical newspaper reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable), who offers to help her reunite with her new husband in exchange for an exclusive story. But during their travels, the reporter finds himself falling for the feisty young heiress.

We spent some time chatting about how the adaptation is coming so far, as well as future plans for it! Now, get to know @handlebarstiedtothestars​ a little better!

* * * 

goromcom: You know how if you open a Tumblr chat with someone you haven't chatted to before, Tumblr tells you two things they post about? Yours reports that you "post about #love and #photo." I think that's lovely (no pun intended.)

handlebarstiedtothestars: Hahaha! I would've bet on it being Good Omens, but love and photo, that's cute! Yes, that's right!

goromcom: You chose to adapt It Happened One Night as your GO rom com. Has this movie been a favorite of yours, or is there some other reason you chose it?

handlebarstiedtothestars: Yes, it's been a favourite of mine for years now. I think I discovered it years ago during uni! I love old movies, the fast-talking witty humour is something I've always enjoyed and I felt like that might translate well into Good Omens!

goromcom: What's your favorite moment of your chosen rom com, and are you looking forward to presenting it in your adaptation? Any loose plans for that scene that you can share?

handlebarstiedtothestars: I think it's probably the scene near the end [spoilers for It Happened One Night] where Peter arrives at the Andrews house and goes on a tirade exclaiming only a complete fool who was crazy could love Ellie, and when repeatedly pressed finally admits he does love her. [end spoilers] It cracks me up every time. I'm not 100% certain on how to do it yet but I wondered about framing it as a one-sided conversation Crowley has talking to himself and God (a bit like the hanging-dramatically-off-the-throne scene from the show, but funnier). We'll see what happens when I get that far!!

goromcom: Do you plan to stick very closely to the story beats of the original movie, or make bigger changes?

handlebarstiedtothestars: I'm definitely planning to stick closely to the story beats, and knowing me I'll use or paraphrase quotes from the movie to make sure it's all tied together, but I've changed the entire setting and the motivations for the characters’ actions so it's not going to be 1934 on a bus for sure!

goromcom: What's an interesting decision you've made in your planning so far--a notable casting decision, a changing of venue, or some other plan you have to paint Good Omens all over your rom com?

handlebarstiedtothestars: I'm setting it in universe for Good Omens, and it's going to be a Biblical setting--possibly just after Jesus is born. So Crowley is still Crawly, and they still don't really know each other that well, so it's going to be an interesting dynamic between them, I hope.

goromcom: I am blatantly stealing this last question from The Good Place: The Podcast, but here goes: Tell me something "good". It can be something big or small. It can be a charity you think is doing good work, or you can talk about how great your pet is.

handlebarstiedtothestars: Well, seeing as you mentioned pets we'll go with that, because he's tearing his bed up in front of me as we speak.

goromcom: My pet is also an uncontrollable gremlin.

handlebarstiedtothestars: I have a dog called Harry who is 1, and he is essentially my child and the best thing I ever bought, even though my life is now chaos. He keeps me sane while driving me insane, and I think everyone who can should have a cuddle monster pet cos they're The Best.

goromcom: So excited to read the finished story! And as a bonus, a photo of the now-famous Harry follows: