Hiya all! Despite getting quite distracted by, you know, everything last week and wandering around in a daze for quite a while during what I can only call an existential crisis of spirit, I’m looking forward to this week and all the opportunity it can bring me in new and charming ways to crush fascism.
While I didn’t really watch anything between Wednesday and Friday (and what I did watch was Smallville), I did manage to pull myself together over the weekend for some pre-Code lasciviousness and started the week off with The Thin Man. Fun fact: I’d never seen The Thin Man before! I know! I should be banned from theaters! At some point in my life I had watched Myrna Loy asking a waiter to line up six martinis in front of her and knew I was in love.
Since then I’ve tried watching the movie all the way through multiple times but it never stuck. Well this time it did and I also watched After the Thin Man and BOY was that a twist at the end. (SPOILER: I wonder how much the audience at the time had a strong enough impression of Stewart that his betrayal at the end felt like a heelturn. Because really for me that’s a huge selling point of the movie.) At the beginning of Another Thin Man Nick mentions something about Nora not drinking, which seems insanely false, but I guess that’s why they say the sequels aren’t as good. The dynamic of a well-to-do upper class society lady and an underworld detective doesn’t really ever go out of style though. Nick and Nora are the stuff of legend.
“What law?”
Of the two Pre-Codes I watched (Night Nurse and Parachute Jumper) one was…well…watchable. Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing Bette Davis as a down-on-her-luck blonde from Alabama who shacks up with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. but there really wasn’t much to the plot or the action sequences that were crammed in. None of it really made much sense and while I appreciated the blasé attitude toward bootlegging alcohol (but not narcotics), there wasn’t much to hold it together. Admittedly, I spend most of the time looking at my cross stitch project.
Night Nurse, on the other hand, was gallons of fun from start to finish. I’d never seen Barbara Stanwyck so young in a movie and I honestly have to say I think I prefer her Pre-Code. (I’m gonna make time for Baby Face one day, I swear.) She’s got verve and brains and a sweetness to her that I think really plays well in contrast to the down-on-its-luck grittier 30s that I think sometimes plays as overbearing in the 40s as films become more glossy and melodramatic. Plus, her and Joan Blondell trail fires everywhere they go together. Over on Pre-Code.com I read that they only made one other film together and that’s such such a shame because I immediately believed them as fast friends. Plus the constant undressing and staying out late and hopping into each other’s beds in bras was scandalously entertaining to say the least. My crush on Blondell that started last winter continues to hold on.
Dark Victory
Perhaps as a way to save her face, earlier in the week I did watch another, much more popular, Bette Davis movie, Dark Victory. In many reviews I saw it referred to as a weepie, which I suppose I can understand because it has some fairly melodramatic scenes and it about the tragedy of a woman confronting her own death and mortality – but Davis plays the character with such a sharpness and acidity that I never truly felt that I was being emotionally manipulated in the way that many other Oscar-bait tragedies tend to do. The addition of Humphrey Bogart was a total surprise (as was his accent), but not unwelcome, as he added a sense of groundedness and urgency to a film where a patient with a brain tumor marries her surgeon. It’s another film that I think deserves a rewatch (and I was certainly minorly distracted because I was watching along on twitter with the TCM lot) mostly because I kept waffling on whether they would find a magical cure or not.
It was also really interesting to see the relationship between the main character, Judy, and her best friend and secretary, Anne. Women’s relationships on screen aren’t normally allowed to be so close and codependent. It makes me wonder if in the stage play they were more explicitly romantically linked. Anne doesn’t seem to resent Judy for her money or station in life and instead ceaselessly tries to make her life as pleasant and beautiful as possible. The implication at the end of Anne going on to marry Judy’s widower so they can take care of each other sort of ties the trio up as forever inextricably linked.
It’s a film that has been infinitely written about and a dozen interesting aspects in terms of emotion in film, the portrayal of women, and existential questions about life and love.
Beverly Hills 90210
As a way to protect my brain from total and complete annihilation I’ve been watching more and more of the first season of Beverly Hills 90210. I got halfway through Season 2 a few years ago before I realized I simply couldn’t keep watching the show without a friend and a bottle of wine. It’s the vaporwave smooth brain escape of my dreams and I take great pleasure at constantly screaming at Brandon to get good. The first season of the show has such a strong educational, learning-about-inequalities, after school special vibe that every episode presents the viewer with a new exciting chapter of Brandon’s outrage. Brandon’s outraged on behalf of minimum wage workers! Brandon’s outraged on behalf of bad fathers! Brandon’s outraged about racism! Brandon’s outraged every time Andrea holds him accountable for his actions! It’s all great, great fun.
This time I’m even way more invested in Brenda and Dylan because although the relationship comes out of freakin’ nowhere I can read the flirty bits better and find their chemistry charming. It’s insane to me how Brenda’s bad habits and obnoxious behavior actually makes her character seem wholly flawed instead of wildly uneven. I feel like I have a total sense of who she is and how she loves to overreact to things, instead of the writers just throwing random traits at me. She almost seems too grown up for the show, aside from her moodiness and tantrums. (As if those would stop in her twenties and thirties.)
Finally, I’ve spent most of the week reading! I’m about halfway through “Siege & Storm” in anticipation of the Netflix Shadow & Bone Grishaverse. Technically that first season will only be the first book (Shadow & Bone) and “Six of Crows” but I’ve decided to read the entire Shadow & Bone trilogy and then start in on Six. I’m fairly certain that seeing Sturmhond on screen would knock me dead but here’s hoping I die happy.
You might also notice I have a few new buttons around the site. I recently set up a ko-fi so that people could help support my writing and blog. If you feel so inclined, I’d really appreciate anything you send my way.