A little Bondische derring-do, featuring a rather unusual protagonist.

We're having a quiet Hallowe'en this year, but if we were to head to some theoretical costume party, I think I'd like to go as Aunts Enchantra and Hagatha.

In our last look some Unlikely Thrushes of the silver screen, you may remember, we peeked in on Miss Constance Bennett and her not uncreditable go at a little song and dance.  This week, we veer sharply in another direction to catch a crucial moment in the long and seemingly haphazard career of a star both unlikely and beloved:  Miss Marie Dressler, who is happy to tell us what's what in this antic moment from The Hollywood Revue of 1929.

Miss Hattie McDaniel would have been 119 today.  In her honor, let's give ourselves a little present.

And meet our mystery challenger!

Sometimes I'm startled by my own ignorance...

There is never not a good reason to visit this little moment of TV insanity...

Life is mad these days, darlings, but just getting under the wire this evening to wish a very happy birthday to this fetching creature - dear Miss Billie Burke is 129 today.

The world's national anthems are a mixed bunch.

I've found myself thinking, rather to my surprise, a lot about Deanna Durbin since we learned of her death earlier this week.  I've also listened to her a great deal more than I probably ever have before, and it makes me sad I hadn't done so earlier. Whatever you can say about her vehicles, which were pretty much doomed to mediocrity just because she was tied to Universal rather than a studio, like Metro or Paramount maybe, that could have surrounded her with taste and style, she herself is really rather marvelous.  If nothing else, she's hugely livelier and more unaffected than her rather turgid reputation would suggestion.

She's remembered, I suppose, far too patly, as the stiff and stuffy girl soprano who represented High Culture against the swing stylings of the likes of Judy Garland - a role she played (without the stuffy part) exactly once, in an MGM short, Any Sunday.  Her fans have known better, of course: she can act, she can charm, and more than anything else, she can sing, really and truly, in a way that puts to shame most of the other light soprano darlings of the day.  There's a story that she turned down a chance to sing at the Met, and while that may be a stretch, it's not the ridiculous puffery it would be if attributed to, say, Jane Powell or even Kathryn Grayson.

It's moments like the above, however, that probably haven't helped her case.  Here we have the climax of 1940's It's a Date, with St. Deanna singing Schubert in a Vera West habit that calls to mind the more risible moments of the old Radio City Easter Pageant.  This is one of those sequences when the plot has long finished and the principals are assembled solely for the purposes of admiring the star as she trills her way to a lingering fadeout.  On hands are, by Universal standards, a host of extras and a treasury of characters, led by Eugene Pallette and S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall (as the Famous Playwright whose vision this scene somehow fulfills), along with Kay Francis as Durbin's actress mother, at the start of her coast into supporting parts that ended in Monogram quickies and summer stock.*

It's all, in Sontag's words, just a shade "too much."  But close your eyes, or better, focus them only on Deanna: that's real music, an old chestnut sung straight, and well, and on its own terms genuinely moving.  The scene is Camp, through and through, but she's someplace else. Gratia plena, you might almost say...

* The part is by way of being a kind of rite out of passage out of stardom; Joan Blondell** Ann Sothern played it a decade later in her last MGM picture, when It's a Date turned into Nancy Goes to Rio.  She was saddled with Jane Powell as the daughter, actually ,which only makes it all the more so...

** Thanks to Gentle Reader Joel65913 for the correction.  Why do those two ladies insist on confusing themselves in my feeble brain?

Many happy returns today to two of Hollywood's most fondly remembered ladies; neither was ever the biggest star - one a second-tier leading lady, the other a reliable character trouper - but both delighted audiences for a goodly number of years, and both seem to have been thoroughly good eggs.

First born was Miss Una Merkel, who first saw the light of day in Kentucky in December 1903, while Miss Dorothy Lamour came along 11 years later in New Orleans.  We see them here in the one picture they made together, 1941's Road to Zanzibar, one of the genial programmers in which Dottie played longsuffering sidekick to Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.  Playing a con artist, in this one she even gets her own sidekick, Una, and together they fuel as much plot as any Hope-Crosby opus ever needed.

Zanzibar was the second of the seven Road movies (the boys and Lamour went to Singapore first, and then on to Morocco, Utopia, Rio, Bali, and Hong Kong, although alas never again with Merkel).  While best remembered for these trio outings, Lamour had a quite respectable career on her own, frequently playing an exotic temptress (inevitably clad in sarong and a scattering of flowers), especially early on, in titles like Hurricane and Her Jungle Love.  When her career in Hollywood sputtered, she took to the stage with relish, keeping her face familiar in dinner theaters and joining the legion of ladies who barnstormed 'cross country in Hello, Dolly!  She was a terrific all-purpose star, one who could sing well, dance a little, and handle lines both comic and poignant.  She never made art, but audiences liked her, a lot, and even when she turned up at the very end of her career in dreck like Creepshow 2, it didn't do much harm to her image as the glamour girl you wouldn't mind having over for a cup of coffee.

By comparison, Merkel carved out a career as an indispensable supporting player, below the title but recognized with affection by audiences who could appreciate how her Southern sass and common sense could leaven turgid scripts saddled with predictable love-plot shenanigans that more often than not seemed to get in the way of the real fun to be had from backstagers, dance-hall sagas, and hospital dramas in the pre-Code era.  She spent much of the '30s under contract to MGM, which meant she got a better showcase as a character player than most leads got at lesser studios (like Lamour at Paramount, for example).  Never a full-on glamour girl like Dottie, she slowly matured into parts that kept her on-screen for a couple of decades after her brassy heyday; eventually, she even copped a surprise Oscar nomination for her supporting part in a pretty much forgotten Tennessee Williams pictures, 1961's Summer and Smoke.

What set players like Lamour and Merkel apart, not just from the biggest A-list ladies but from many of their counterparts - all the utility leading women and inveterate second-, third-, and fourth-billed actresses - was their own personal warmth, their complete lack of personal pretension, and the way that they were able (in large part because they didn't put on airs) to connect with audiences, first in the Depression years in which pretty much everybody went to the movies at least once a week, but then also for decades after, when many whose names for a while shined much brighter found themselves on Poverty Row, selling real estate, or worse.

One of things that consistently disappoints me about today's movies is how little place there is for performers like Lamour and Merkel.  Today's leading ladies don't need to put over a song (let alone in a sarong) in movies that mostly rely on sex, explosions, or zombies, and as for character parts, they have virtually disappeared.  For example, Mr. Muscato and I finally got around to seeing last spring's Streep picture Hope Springs.  Now, in these parts Meryl can do no wrong, and Tommy Lee Jones was very good indeed, but aside from them and some disappointingly pallid support from Steve Carell, the only other parts were more or less bits.  Today its all stars, and nothing else.  Why didn't Meryl have a real best friend, instead of a tiny scene or two with the wasted Jean Smart in what might have been the Una Merkel role?  What induced Mimi Rogers and Elizabeth Shue to take on nothing throwaway roles - glorified walk-ons, really -  that Metro would have worked up into a delicious running gags for Alice Brady or Norma Varden or Marjorie Main?  Why couldn't there have been a recurring bit - as an innkeeper, perhaps - for Eric Blore or Eugene Pallette?

Ah, well.  At least we can look back, and when we want to see how it was done back when they knew better, we need only set out down that Road.  I hear Zanzibar's very nice, this time of year, not to mention Utopia...

I think I could be forgiven had I been tempted to save this particular birthday girl to use as a future Mystery Guest.  Would you have connected this rather alarmingly coiffed, mildly Tallulahesque denizen of the '20s with Maude Findlay's sharp-tongued factotum Mrs. Naugatuck? 

But it's true, for decades before Hermione Baddeley became beloved of a generation of young filmgoers as the housemaid in Mary Poppins or, later on, traded barbs with Adrienne Barbeau, she was a stalwart of the British stage and screen.  Of all the things she did, I think, the one I'd trade my eye-teeth for (such as they are) would be the chance to glory in her turn, alongside her namesake, the immortal Hermione Gingold, in their pal Noël Coward's Fallen Angels.  That, I am quite sure, was a memorable night in the theatre.

I feel especially lucky today, for in my quest to find a good snap to pay tribute to Hermione B., I happened across a rather enchanting new destination:  The Fabulous Birthday Blog.  I can't think how I've missed it 'til now.  Go there immediately, but do come back; it gets lonely here without you...

Let's wish a happy 120th birthday to dizzy screen favorite Alice Brady, seen here in her alternate incarnation as sophisticated stage star in a rather dazzling Steichen snap.

Brady's career is a nice example of both the richness of casting available to the studios back in the day and the dilemma that faced theatrical favorites as they considered their place oncscreen. A leading name on Broadway from the teens, Brady made dozens of silent films without ever really compromising her reputation with stage audiences as a glamorous leading lady, adept at both arch comedy and serious drama (and you don't get by in O'Neill, and especially not in Mourning Becomes Electra, on a cute profile and your comic technique - just ask Rosalind Russell).

When talkies beckoned, she likely thought she could follow in the footsteps of fellow luminaries like Ruth Chatterton and Helen Hayes, who essentially transferred their stage personae onto the soundstage, playing great ladies, socialites, and other parts that called for poise, diction, and the kind of wardrobe we see above.

Instead, Brady found herself in the company of theatrical veterans like Billie Burke and Spring Byington, players who discovered that what registered on Broadway as ladylike chic and nervy elegance made Depression movie audiences giggle. Rising 40, with features a little too broad for movie beauty and a definite tendency toward the dithery, Brady was transformed into a character lead, often a supporting player; of course, she also found a niche that guaranteed her, whether playing a foolish mother in Our Man Godfrey or the lady whose cow burned down a metropolis In Old Chicago, a kind of immortality.

Sometimes, before her too-young death in 1939, she must have wondered - even with the praise, the cash, and the Supporting Actress Oscar - whatever happened to the star whom Steichen saw. That her fellow stage ladies fared a lot less well than she over the long haul (with Chatteron, Hayes, and fellow travelers like Tallulah Bankhead all heading back to Broadway by the mid-thirties) must have helped. And, come to think of it, the cash couldn't have hurt as well...

This post first appeared on November 2, 2009.  I have updated the year, from 117.  Well, we're none of us getting any younger...

On what would have been her 90th birthday, let's stop and take a moment to appreciate the glory that was that most roguish of British character ladies, the incomparable Mollie Sugden.  A peerless mistress of the double take, double entendre, and double-high (alarmingly shaded) bouffant, Sugden was a shining light of UK television for several decades, achieving a kind of immortality, of course, as the doughty Mrs. Slocombe on Are You Being Served?

She left us a couple of years ago, and now presides, I think, in spirit at least, at a celestial Ladies' Intimates counter in some higher plane (joined, with luck, by her plucky companion Miss Brahms, the lovely Wendy Richard, alas also gone too soon).

I am endeavoring to maintain some measure of her attitude to trying times.  Tough customers, cheeky co-workers - even her tryingly flirty neighbor, Mr. Akbar - nothing daunted Mrs. S.  With a tot of gin and a quick check in (as seen above) on her beloved pussy, she was game for anything.  Especially if it meant a chance to one-up those annoying customers, always trying to distract one from the really important things in life...like that gin.

...nor, for that matter, did today's birthday boy, seen here looking rather more sedate than was his wont.  Paul Lynde, who first burst upon the scene in that cradle of fame, New Faces of 1952,* was about as far from leading man territory as Wickes was from pinup stardom.  Even so, audiences responded to his incredible timing and genial bitchiness with an enthusiasm that seems inconceivable given the era. 

Character men don't often get the juicy little parts (scheming secretary, dotty neighbor, deluded dowager, flighty aunt) that their female counterparts do (and that allow them to become general-public Beloved in ways that belie the scale of their roles).  Nonetheless, Lynde turned the smallest parts into little tours de force of innuendo and arch double-takes, and as Uncle Arthur on Bewitched (the Valhalla, in its way, of glorified character stars) achieved a kind of camp nirvana.  I can only think it was instructive (and beneficial) for those of us who were children of the '60s, sitting with our families in front of the flickering Mediterranean Fruitwood Veneer Consolette, to soak in the richness that was Lynde, Marion Lorne, Maurice Evans, Agnes Moorehead,** and the rest of the treasurable cast of zanies and oddities surrounding Elizabeth Montgomery and the Darrin of the moment - some of us, at least, thinking, "if they can get away with that, why can't I?"

Lynde really came into his own, of course, on The Hollywood Squares, dishing out slyly catty one-liners that must frequently have soared over the heads of many in the prime daytime-TV demographic, bored housewives (but that made some of their kids feel very sophisticated indeed).  He doesn't seem to have been the happiest of people, but I can't help feeling that he must, at the right moment, have been peerlessly good company.

The success of people like Miss Wickes and Mr. Lynde reminds us that, at least some of the time, talent will out, for even the gawkiest and queerest of us, and I think that's a reassuring sort of thing, what with being more a hint of both myself.  In whatever ineffable realm they now inhabit, aged 102 and 86 (only!) respectively, I hope they're sitting down over a celestial cocktail and congratulating each other on their improbable success.

* Lynde, Alice Ghostley, Eartha Kitt, Carol Lawrence, Mel Books ... it really must have been a hell of a night in the theatre, no?

** Odd, isn't it, that Wickes never did a Bewitched. She did turn up on the spin-off, Tabitha, but somehow, by that time, the magic was gone (from the series, that is - never from Mary!)

Ten questions this arresting image provokes:

1.  Who would have thought that Jimmy Olsen would so closely resemble Anne Baxter?

2.  Wouldn't you love to see the rest of the outfit?  Based on the blouse, I'm guessing knee-length navy pencil skirt with rear kick-pleat and coordinating sensible pumps.  Alternate scenarios welcome.

3.  Did he borrow the outfit from Lois, or was it a fresh purchase?  Spend a moment thinking of Jimmy Olsen shopping in the Career Gal section of Gimbels.*

* I just looked this up.  Turns out the department store in Metropolis is Lacey's.  I suppose that means their competition is Mimbels, Kanamakers, or Ultmans.  Fancy metropolites must shop at Pergdorf Doogman.

4. Is it a coincidence that the wig so closely resemble's Ed Woods's in Glen or Glenda?

5.  If so, why isn't there more angora involved?  If not, why not?

6. Haven't we all had a night or two like this?

7.  If your answer to (6) was "no," was the overriding reason: (a) the drag? (b) the armed, J. Edgar-ische heavy? or (c) the bat-toting chimp?

8.  Do you suppose that 7(c) marks the first appearance in English of the phrase "bat-toting chimp"?

9.  In this case, is a cigar just a cigar?

10.  If this is panel No. 8, do you suppose panels 9 through 12 hinged more heavily on the pistol or the baseball bat?  Please submit your concepts, with special points given for (a) the intervention of aliens; (b) the appearance in a pivotal role of Thelma Ritter as Birdie Coogan; or (c) a sex scene not involving the chimp.

Oh, dear - time in its flight; Edith Bunker is 87 years old today. Rather, of course, the great lady who played her, Jean Stapleton, has reached that great age.

All in the Family and being Edith may have been what made Stapleton a household name, but real Jeanketeers love her best as another memorable New Yorker: Sue, proprietrix of Susanswerphone, in the treasurable musical (stage and film) Bells are Ringing. She plays the voice of reason - never an easy thing in a musical comedy - and does so in a way that only sets off sweetly, wildly anarchic Judy Holliday to even better advantage.

Once upon a time (and you will forgive me if I stroll down Memory Lane, won't you?), back when I was doing my Birdie Coogan impression and being amanuensis to a Personage of the Theatre, I was on dressing-room door duty. My Personage was not the fastest of changers, and so quite a group would sometimes form to say good evening and (a vanishing phenomenon, I think, however familiar from the pictures) have a drink or two. I had just put my head out and been encouraging to the dozen or so people waiting, when what felt like just seconds later there was a firm rap at the door.

I was busy, dammit, and it was with rather too much force that I threw the door open with something likely along the lines of "What?" Collecting myself, I looked...up. Standing there was a very tall and, briefly, very apologetic lady. Briefly, because within nanoseconds I was falling over to (a) frantically apologize and (b) not make a total fool of myself in front of Sue. She was far nicer than I deserved - what with her having known my Personage for significantly longer than, at that point, I had been alive and all - and the evening went uphill from there.

I think some of the other people who'd been waiting felt quite put out that I wasn't nearly as flustered by them. What can I say? They never spent any time on the same switchboard as Our Lady of the Bonjour Tristesse Brassiere Company...

Despite an onslaught of unrelentingly creative guesses, ranging from Sophie Tucker to the Queen Mother (and including the popular favorite, the highly likely Mr. Peenee), the identity of our Edwardian mystery lady remained unsolved. She was, of course, the roguishly charming matron seen above, Miss Mary Boland. With no prizes to hand out, it just means wee drinkies and radio cowboys in the bar car for everybody.

Boland's was a fine career, encompassing everything from turn-of-the-century Broadway to a solid place in moviegoers' hearts for more than two decades after the her appearances in early talkies. As in her best-remembered role as Flora, Countess de Lave in The Women, she generally played vague, funny ladies, frequently of the upper classes.

In her last picture, an obscure 1950 indie noir curiosity called Guilty Bystander, she apparently played against type as "Smitty," a flophouse manager. Sadly, despite being third-billed, she didn't make the poster. From the look of it, she could only have helped.

Let's wish a happy 117th birthday to dizzy screen favorite Alice Brady, seen here in her alternate incarnation as sophisticated stage star in a rather dazzling Steichen snap.

Brady's career is a nice example of both the richness of casting available to the studios back in the day and the dilemma that faced theatrical favorites as they considered their place oncscreen. A leading name on Broadway from the teens, Brady made dozens of silent films without ever really compromising her reputation with stage audiences as a glamorous leading lady, adept at both arch comedy and serious drama (and you don't get by in O'Neill, and especially not in Mourning Becomes Electra, on a cute profile and your comic technique - just ask Rosalind Russell).

When talkies beckoned, she likely thought she could follow in the footsteps of fellow luminaries like Ruth Chatterton and Helen Hayes, who essentially transferred their stage personae onto the soundstage, playing great ladies, socialites, and other parts that called for poise, diction, and the kind of wardrobe we see above.

Instead, Brady found herself in the company of theatrical veterans like Billie Burke and Spring Byington, players who discovered that what registered on Broadway as ladylike chic and nervy elegance made Depression movie audiences giggle. Rising 40, with features a little too broad for movie beauty and a definite tendency toward the dithery, Brady was transformed into a character lead, often a supporting player; of course, she also found a niche that guaranteed her, whether playing a foolish mother in Our Man Godfrey or the lady whose cow burned down a metropolis In Old Chicago, a kind of immortality.

Sometimes, before her too-young death in 1939, she must have wondered - even with the praise, the cash, and the Supporting Actress Oscar - whatever happened to the star whom Steichen saw. That her fellow stage ladies fared a lot less well than she over the long haul (with Chatteron, Hayes, and fellow travelers like Tallulah Bankhead all heading back to Broadway by the mid-thirties) must have helped. And, come to think of it, the cash couldn't have hurt as well...