![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I never much liked Gene Raymond until I saw him in underpants
I made dinner tonight: steak, paprika-sautéed green beans, twice-baked potatoes with cheddar and goat's milk gouda. I was going to make rice pudding for dessert, but no one quite had room and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks was craving chocolate, so I made cocoa with cinnamon and vanilla instead. I assume this is part of the reason I feel like passing out into my keyboard, but I'm still pretty pleased with the results.
I should mention that I'm no longer in Providence. I got back yesterday in the early evening, after which I spent at least an hour running around in the rain on errands that ultimately resolved satisfactorily: milk run toratatosk, takeout from Noor and Frozen Hoagies for myself and my cousins. Departing the train at South Station, I had to get past a college-age kid putting on his overcoat who reminded me of a young John Hurt—dark-haired, thin-faced, slightly freckled and bruised under the cheekbones; the same all-black eyes. I could not think of any reasonable way to tell him without either sounding like a drive-by weirdo or holding up the commuters behind me, so I said nothing but almost certainly stared at him. I should probably work on sounding like a drive-by weirdo more often. I'd be flattered if comparisons to talented actors randomly happened to me.
Speaking of actors, I really recommend Boyd McDonald's Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985, 2015). I read it on the train from Providence to Boston and then for about two stops on the Red Line, occasionally disconcerting the people next to me who were not expecting the hard-on in the jockey shorts on the facing page; it is an erudite, filthy, funny, insightful combination of film criticism, queer/gender theory, and perving on favorite actors. The majority of pieces collected in it were originally written between 1983 and 1985 and published in Christopher Street (1976–1995). McDonald himself founded and edited the long-running, legendary 'zine Straight to Hell (1973–), a raunchy, political compilation of "true homosexual stories" variously subtitled things like The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts, The New York Review of Cocksucking, and U.S. Chronicle of Crimes Against Nature. Otherwise he seems to have spent a great deal of time in his residential hotel room, watching classic movies at odd hours on a black-and-white TV. Seems legit to me.1
I both like how McDonald writes about film and find it fascinating. The sexual focus is part of it, obviously. It's not a component of the way in which I relate to actors (which is not to say that I don't obsess about them; this month I seem to have fallen backwards into Dan Duryea and I am not complaining2), but more importantly it's a mode I don't associate with traditionally published, professional criticism as opposed to, say, fannish circles on the internet. It is impossible to take two steps on Tumblr without tripping over someone perving on Tom Hiddleston. It took me about ten seconds, for argument's sake, to find an equivalent appreciation of Duryea. Cruising the Movies includes explicit sexual fantasies about David Nelson, Gene Raymond, and a nameless sailor extra in Stage Door Canteen (1943) among others; McDonald evaluates the male stars of old and occasionally new Hollywood not only in terms of screen personae, offstage politics, and pop-cultural importance, but on a personal scale of fuckability, suckability, and general objectification. It is irrelevant that I have never wondered about Elvis Presley's "ornamental hairs" or the penile measurements of Steve Cochran. It turns out I am enchanted that somebody got paid to do so in print. As McDonald notes in the preface to the original edition, "One of my editors and I . . . spent the better part of 1984 speculating about David Nelson's butt, and our discussions are continuing in 1985." Given how much the straight male gaze is still all over film criticism, this kind of alternative is a lot of fun to read. Most of the men he fantasizes about are beautiful in ways I am indifferent to, but he devotes two essays and three film stills to the beauty of Richard Widmark, of which I really approve because Widmark—last seen by me in Jules Dassin's spectacularly sordid Night and the City (1950) as a small-time hustler with a flop-sweat rictus grin—is objectively a weird-looking man. Considering my recent appreciation for Dan Duryea, I am honestly delighted that McDonald calls the actor "alluring" and places him on the shortlist of his "Eating Stuff Hall of Fame." Donald O'Connor rates the same honor, which speaking as a person who imprinted early on Cosmo Brown only makes sense to me. I don't have a thing for Charles Lane, but he was such a ubiquitous and reliable character actor that I think it's wonderful someone did.
There's no organizing principle to the collection—the selection of pictures is a factor of whatever happened to be showing on Channel 9 or 11 or 5 that interested McDonald enough to write about that month. It does not concentrate exclusively on male actors, however, which was a pleasant surprise. McDonald was not sexually interested in women, but that doesn't mean he ignores or disparages them. Some of his criticisms of insufficient male beauty are more misogyny-adjacent than I would prefer, but then he comes out with statements like "There is no personal reason why I should care what today's heterosexual men are like, but for the sake of women, I wish their men could be a little less shitty. It's reached the point where I hate to think of the young girls I know growing up and having to deal with 'straight' boys and men . . . If I had a young daughter, I'd hope she turned out to be a Lesbian. Lesbians worship women; 'straight' males despise them, and worship only ballplayers," and I know perfectly well that there are plenty of dysfunctional lesbian relationships in the world, but it's still an attitude I can appreciate, especially coming from a gay man in the early '80's. He notices actresses. He makes a case for Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (1950) that makes me even sorrier I wasn't in New York City last week; he has sold me on Cry of the City (1948) on the strength of a character turn by Hope Emerson, "one of the very finest Hollywood toughs, a great American goon." He loves Jane Russell and describes her relationship with Robert Mitchum in Macao (1952) as "a rare and touching display of authentic heterosexual passion"—one of three straight romances on screen where he believes the rapport, rather than accepting it for the sake of the form—before illustrating his argument with two scenes that have caused me to request the disc from the library as we speak. The usual reason to see Bombshell (1933) is Jean Harlow, but McDonald cares about it because of Louise Beavers, who in the pre-Code era is a black woman with a life—and a sex life—outside of her domestic role. One of the best pieces in the book is just a short description of a gesture made by Barbara Stanwyck in They Clash by Night (1952).
It's not a love-fest, of course. He despises Ronald and Nancy Reagan,3 he has nothing good to say about Steve McQueen, and he appears completely bewildered by the existence of Sylvester Stallone. I'm not sure what he has against Katharine Hepburn, but I disagree with him every time her name comes up. He has a lot of contempt reserved for actors who build their careers around the forced swagger of machismo and accompanying homophobia; his review of Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge (1986), one of his few forays into contemporary film, is both disgusted and dismayed. "It is a Reagan Era kind of heterosexuality, expressed through relentless boasts of masculinity and through the discharge of bullets, not sperm . . . The picture's meaning finally is that, hard though the Marine Corps training may be, it's not as hard as the older kind of heterosexuality (loving women)." By contrast, McDonald admires the "understated virility" of the very straight Steve Cochran, "a man so experienced and established as a lover of women that he had no need to display the fact," and praises Elvis as "a rare type, the sweet heterosexual, the man who doesn't beat women and children, but obviously genuinely enjoys them." He writes about My Favorite Wife (1940) strictly to protest the narrative shaming of Gail Patrick's glamorous character for checking her makeup in the courtroom, as if vanity were a trait never discovered in straight men. What I think I'm trying to articulate here is that McDonald doesn't just look at movies with a queer male gaze, but with a highly skeptical eye for heteronormativity and its attendant ills, misogyny included. If nothing else, it means I give him a lot more latitude for parenthetical remarks like "This writer has never pretended to comprehend the allure of twat."
There's a photo of McDonald himself at the front of the book. Not that my opinion would have mattered to him, but he has a great face: he looks like a character actor himself, with a lopsided, world-weary wryness, his flattened dark hair side-parted and a cigarette in one hand ashing into his electric typewriter. In a college yearbook picture two pages later and thirty-odd years previously, he's actually pretty, clean-cut and bowtied, with mostly the cat-slant of his brows to give him away. He is disambiguated from the other Boyd McDonalds on Wikipedia by the parenthesis "pornographer," which I think is simplifying the case a little. He died in 1993. I had never heard of him before Wednesday afternoon and I am very glad to know the world had him in it. People who perv on Richard Widmark are national treasures, seriously.
1. The otherwise useful introduction seems to believe this is no longer a common way to experience the Golden Age of Hollywood, which may be true in the sense that classic Code-era movies are no longer cheap late-night programming, but as someone who's been living on TCM, library rentals, and YouTube since 2006, I think it's not as unusual as all that.
2. This is a memo to myself to write more than this footnote about Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945), which I watched last night. They are a weirdly linked pair of back-to-back noirs, playing not quite like variations on a theme. Both star Joan Bennett and Edward G. Robinson; Duryea has an indelible three-scene part in the first film and a starring role in the second, escalating from blackmailing ex-cop to flashy pimp with effortless sleaze. I have now seen Bennett as three very different kinds of character, incidentally, and she's amazing. I had entirely forgotten she was in We're No Angels (1955), but the same thing happened with Basil Rathbone.
3. Both as actors and as people. I can't speak to their attributes as the former, having actually, if accidentally, avoided ever seeing either of them in a movie, but his assessment of the latter does not trouble me. His account of surviving the Reagan vehicle Stallion Road (1947) by dint of MST3K'ing it with a friend over the phone is great.
rushthatspeaks was craving chocolate, so I made cocoa with cinnamon and vanilla instead. I assume this is part of the reason I feel like passing out into my keyboard, but I'm still pretty pleased with the results.I should mention that I'm no longer in Providence. I got back yesterday in the early evening, after which I spent at least an hour running around in the rain on errands that ultimately resolved satisfactorily: milk run to
ratatosk, takeout from Noor and Frozen Hoagies for myself and my cousins. Departing the train at South Station, I had to get past a college-age kid putting on his overcoat who reminded me of a young John Hurt—dark-haired, thin-faced, slightly freckled and bruised under the cheekbones; the same all-black eyes. I could not think of any reasonable way to tell him without either sounding like a drive-by weirdo or holding up the commuters behind me, so I said nothing but almost certainly stared at him. I should probably work on sounding like a drive-by weirdo more often. I'd be flattered if comparisons to talented actors randomly happened to me.Speaking of actors, I really recommend Boyd McDonald's Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985, 2015). I read it on the train from Providence to Boston and then for about two stops on the Red Line, occasionally disconcerting the people next to me who were not expecting the hard-on in the jockey shorts on the facing page; it is an erudite, filthy, funny, insightful combination of film criticism, queer/gender theory, and perving on favorite actors. The majority of pieces collected in it were originally written between 1983 and 1985 and published in Christopher Street (1976–1995). McDonald himself founded and edited the long-running, legendary 'zine Straight to Hell (1973–), a raunchy, political compilation of "true homosexual stories" variously subtitled things like The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts, The New York Review of Cocksucking, and U.S. Chronicle of Crimes Against Nature. Otherwise he seems to have spent a great deal of time in his residential hotel room, watching classic movies at odd hours on a black-and-white TV. Seems legit to me.1
I both like how McDonald writes about film and find it fascinating. The sexual focus is part of it, obviously. It's not a component of the way in which I relate to actors (which is not to say that I don't obsess about them; this month I seem to have fallen backwards into Dan Duryea and I am not complaining2), but more importantly it's a mode I don't associate with traditionally published, professional criticism as opposed to, say, fannish circles on the internet. It is impossible to take two steps on Tumblr without tripping over someone perving on Tom Hiddleston. It took me about ten seconds, for argument's sake, to find an equivalent appreciation of Duryea. Cruising the Movies includes explicit sexual fantasies about David Nelson, Gene Raymond, and a nameless sailor extra in Stage Door Canteen (1943) among others; McDonald evaluates the male stars of old and occasionally new Hollywood not only in terms of screen personae, offstage politics, and pop-cultural importance, but on a personal scale of fuckability, suckability, and general objectification. It is irrelevant that I have never wondered about Elvis Presley's "ornamental hairs" or the penile measurements of Steve Cochran. It turns out I am enchanted that somebody got paid to do so in print. As McDonald notes in the preface to the original edition, "One of my editors and I . . . spent the better part of 1984 speculating about David Nelson's butt, and our discussions are continuing in 1985." Given how much the straight male gaze is still all over film criticism, this kind of alternative is a lot of fun to read. Most of the men he fantasizes about are beautiful in ways I am indifferent to, but he devotes two essays and three film stills to the beauty of Richard Widmark, of which I really approve because Widmark—last seen by me in Jules Dassin's spectacularly sordid Night and the City (1950) as a small-time hustler with a flop-sweat rictus grin—is objectively a weird-looking man. Considering my recent appreciation for Dan Duryea, I am honestly delighted that McDonald calls the actor "alluring" and places him on the shortlist of his "Eating Stuff Hall of Fame." Donald O'Connor rates the same honor, which speaking as a person who imprinted early on Cosmo Brown only makes sense to me. I don't have a thing for Charles Lane, but he was such a ubiquitous and reliable character actor that I think it's wonderful someone did.
There's no organizing principle to the collection—the selection of pictures is a factor of whatever happened to be showing on Channel 9 or 11 or 5 that interested McDonald enough to write about that month. It does not concentrate exclusively on male actors, however, which was a pleasant surprise. McDonald was not sexually interested in women, but that doesn't mean he ignores or disparages them. Some of his criticisms of insufficient male beauty are more misogyny-adjacent than I would prefer, but then he comes out with statements like "There is no personal reason why I should care what today's heterosexual men are like, but for the sake of women, I wish their men could be a little less shitty. It's reached the point where I hate to think of the young girls I know growing up and having to deal with 'straight' boys and men . . . If I had a young daughter, I'd hope she turned out to be a Lesbian. Lesbians worship women; 'straight' males despise them, and worship only ballplayers," and I know perfectly well that there are plenty of dysfunctional lesbian relationships in the world, but it's still an attitude I can appreciate, especially coming from a gay man in the early '80's. He notices actresses. He makes a case for Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (1950) that makes me even sorrier I wasn't in New York City last week; he has sold me on Cry of the City (1948) on the strength of a character turn by Hope Emerson, "one of the very finest Hollywood toughs, a great American goon." He loves Jane Russell and describes her relationship with Robert Mitchum in Macao (1952) as "a rare and touching display of authentic heterosexual passion"—one of three straight romances on screen where he believes the rapport, rather than accepting it for the sake of the form—before illustrating his argument with two scenes that have caused me to request the disc from the library as we speak. The usual reason to see Bombshell (1933) is Jean Harlow, but McDonald cares about it because of Louise Beavers, who in the pre-Code era is a black woman with a life—and a sex life—outside of her domestic role. One of the best pieces in the book is just a short description of a gesture made by Barbara Stanwyck in They Clash by Night (1952).
It's not a love-fest, of course. He despises Ronald and Nancy Reagan,3 he has nothing good to say about Steve McQueen, and he appears completely bewildered by the existence of Sylvester Stallone. I'm not sure what he has against Katharine Hepburn, but I disagree with him every time her name comes up. He has a lot of contempt reserved for actors who build their careers around the forced swagger of machismo and accompanying homophobia; his review of Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge (1986), one of his few forays into contemporary film, is both disgusted and dismayed. "It is a Reagan Era kind of heterosexuality, expressed through relentless boasts of masculinity and through the discharge of bullets, not sperm . . . The picture's meaning finally is that, hard though the Marine Corps training may be, it's not as hard as the older kind of heterosexuality (loving women)." By contrast, McDonald admires the "understated virility" of the very straight Steve Cochran, "a man so experienced and established as a lover of women that he had no need to display the fact," and praises Elvis as "a rare type, the sweet heterosexual, the man who doesn't beat women and children, but obviously genuinely enjoys them." He writes about My Favorite Wife (1940) strictly to protest the narrative shaming of Gail Patrick's glamorous character for checking her makeup in the courtroom, as if vanity were a trait never discovered in straight men. What I think I'm trying to articulate here is that McDonald doesn't just look at movies with a queer male gaze, but with a highly skeptical eye for heteronormativity and its attendant ills, misogyny included. If nothing else, it means I give him a lot more latitude for parenthetical remarks like "This writer has never pretended to comprehend the allure of twat."
There's a photo of McDonald himself at the front of the book. Not that my opinion would have mattered to him, but he has a great face: he looks like a character actor himself, with a lopsided, world-weary wryness, his flattened dark hair side-parted and a cigarette in one hand ashing into his electric typewriter. In a college yearbook picture two pages later and thirty-odd years previously, he's actually pretty, clean-cut and bowtied, with mostly the cat-slant of his brows to give him away. He is disambiguated from the other Boyd McDonalds on Wikipedia by the parenthesis "pornographer," which I think is simplifying the case a little. He died in 1993. I had never heard of him before Wednesday afternoon and I am very glad to know the world had him in it. People who perv on Richard Widmark are national treasures, seriously.
1. The otherwise useful introduction seems to believe this is no longer a common way to experience the Golden Age of Hollywood, which may be true in the sense that classic Code-era movies are no longer cheap late-night programming, but as someone who's been living on TCM, library rentals, and YouTube since 2006, I think it's not as unusual as all that.
2. This is a memo to myself to write more than this footnote about Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945), which I watched last night. They are a weirdly linked pair of back-to-back noirs, playing not quite like variations on a theme. Both star Joan Bennett and Edward G. Robinson; Duryea has an indelible three-scene part in the first film and a starring role in the second, escalating from blackmailing ex-cop to flashy pimp with effortless sleaze. I have now seen Bennett as three very different kinds of character, incidentally, and she's amazing. I had entirely forgotten she was in We're No Angels (1955), but the same thing happened with Basil Rathbone.
3. Both as actors and as people. I can't speak to their attributes as the former, having actually, if accidentally, avoided ever seeing either of them in a movie, but his assessment of the latter does not trouble me. His account of surviving the Reagan vehicle Stallion Road (1947) by dint of MST3K'ing it with a friend over the phone is great.
no subject
Nine
no subject
He is, and in addition I find his descriptions of actors and scenes perceptive, evocative, and full of just the right details.
On Hope Emerson in Cry of the City (1948):
The stills here display Emerson's main physical asset, apart from her large size: her depressed, "down" face with its fantastically cold eyes. She makes no attempt in Cry of the City to act interesting or attractive, or even to act at all. She doesn't smile; she doesn't display actor's diction but talks in a flat whine; she doesn't walk theatrically but schleps, in a tired way, in a wrinkled dress . . . It is absurd (but wonderfully so) because a woman in Emerson's position naturally has a gat. In fact she pulls it on [Richard] Conte in a taxi en route to the subway. What a thrill, to be riding in a cab and have Emerson pull her heater on you. She has her way with the audience as easily as she does with Conte. The thing to do with her is give her her way, give her anything she wants, and you'll have a chance for survival. Had I been a Lesbian, I assume only she could gratify my supposed lusts; what a thrill to have Emerson throw you around. But I'm crazy for her even though I'm not a Lesbian.
On Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum in Macao (1952):
It is clear in Macao that Russell and Mitchum want a piece of one another's ass, if I have that imprecise heterosexual locution right, and their first meeting, in which Mitchum, the minute he lays eyes on Russell, grabs her without so much as a hello and kisses her, is thus unnecessarily, excessively heterosexual. But the meeting, absurd though it is, escapes burlesque; Russell and Mitchum are both so comprehensively and consistently outrageous that such an introduction seems not only possible but probable . . . Anyone who treasures cool virility cannot fail to be favorably impressed by Russell; her easy masculine style is more admirable than the showy machismo of men, for, unlike them, she does not prey upon the vulnerable but merely counterattacks when men prey upon her. She stole Mitchum's wallet, after all, while he was trying to steal something that is also worth money, especially in the "straight" world: a kiss. In that world, a kiss can sometimes lead—and does so lead in Macao—to half a man's income for life.
On Gary Cooper in The Legion of the Condemned (1928):
I have been trying to think why the sight of Gary Cooper wearing lipstick is so interesting. Lipstick was, as the bar scene shows, optional, and in submitting to it (or did he apply it himself?) Cooper looks abandoned in the best sense: desirable, available. A man who wears lipstick will do a lot of things. I cannot agree with Carole Lombard that Cooper was "effeminate." In fact it is his masculinity which makes his lipstick more fascinating, more abandoned than it would be on a babyfaced man.
On Richard Widmark in My Pal Gus (1952):
O.K., so he's driving her home, she won't fool around in the car, she won't let him in the house. It's insane not to let Richard Widmark feel you up, but what I can tell you; she closes the door in his face, that face with those high cheek bones and those fat, sharply-outlined lips. Right away the bell rings. It's him—he. He just stands there leering at her, saying nothing. He walks in slowly, still staring at her, not speaking. The look on his face suggests that his thoughts are unspeakable, but that she knows what they are. He looks both in need of help and determined to get it—both tender and tough.
It's a fantastic way of seducing someone. Don't say anything, just leer; just watch Widmark in My Pal Gus and look at someone the way he looks at Joanne Dru. I have seen it. It works. It embarrasses and thrills them, makes them laugh sheepishly and try to talk and eventually give up. It is red hot.
I really want to see My Pal Gus now. I don't even know that I'll like the movie, but I want to know about that scene.
no subject
From your excerpts above it sounds as though part of his technique for doing so is to adopt the narrative tone of "here we see another artifact from the exotic culture of the Straights." ;)
It is impossible to take two steps on Tumblr without tripping over someone perving on Tom Hiddleston. It took me about ten seconds, for argument's sake, to find an equivalent appreciation of Duryea.
Hell, years ago I found the website (http://www.lchr.org/a/10/nk/) of someone who likes Peter Lorre even more than I do, which is to say, to a frightening degree; I think they also ship him with Margaret Hamilton. Also it claims to be part of the "Yiffy European Actors Webring."
no subject
Yes and no? Heterosexual behavior is almost always presented as the absurd and constricting ritual that it is, so that queering the movies is normalizing them ("it's insane not to let Richard Widmark feel you up"). Even the smallest of unintentional perversities that sneaks past the Production Code is worth pointing out, and if none can be found, it's fair game for the viewer to supply them (the inaugural review begins, "The David Nelson story is largely unprintable, not because of anything David has done but because of what men would like to do with him," which is as clear a declaration of intent as I can find in the book). There's a really neat short review of Dallas North Forty (1979) in which McDonald assumes "the same harshly ageist and sexist standards that are applied to women in pictures" in order to pinpoint the moment on screen when Nick Nolte stopped being desirably edible and just became a middle-aged guy with some body fat; it is nasty to read and that's the point. But the movies are also important to McDonald as themselves, as a language and an aesthetic, not just as signs to be subverted; he can enjoy them ironically, and does it beautifully, but also without irony, which I really appreciate. One of the essays is nothing more than an alphabetized, three-page list of his favorite actors, entitled "When Words Fail." I think that's important to me.
[edit] A thing which really interests me about McDonald's criticism, which I did not really address in the post itself, is that it's not a style I have encountered much outside of the internet. I'm used to reading the work of film critics who see mostly new releases, or classics when they get restorations or re-releases. They are expected to be comprehensive in their opinions and they try to be. Boyd McDonald watched whatever was on and wrote about whatever interested him, even if it was just an actor, a gesture, or a scene. Film bloggers do that. I've done that. I understand liking supporting players better than stars, or stars with very specific qualities. I have discovered actors all out of order with their careers and made sure I was awake to watch anything that contained them after seeing their names go by in the programming schedule. I haven't done it myself with a television—usually it's e-mail/LJ and YouTube clips—but I understand calling up a friend to ask them to turn on their TV and verify that the weirdness currently playing exists in consensus reality. It's an approach to film that only develops once you have random, round-the-clock access to an enormous amount of pop culture rather than relying on whatever's in theaters at the time. And it is patently not an invention of the blogosphere. An eighty-dollar black-and-white TV set and a typewriter worked for Boyd McDonald. In that sense his methods of viewing and reviewing felt very familiar to me, but not much like anything I'd gotten out of a book before. That was unexpected.
I think they also ship him with Margaret Hamilton.
All right, I didn't see that coming.
no subject
Ah, yes...
As a straight woman with a life long thing for men wearing make up (not full on drag, usually - although there are exceptions to that) I really get that whole paragraph so much!
no subject
I tried to find the production still McDonald uses to illustrate Gary Cooper in lipstick—the bar scene from The Legion of the Condemned—in which Cooper has a shot glass in hand and his elbow propped on the bar and is gazing over his drink into the camera, but what I've got just looks like the aftermath:
The lipstick is visible only in profile here:
Nice smile, though.
no subject
no subject
I've heard of it! I believe it to be a Bluebeard retelling; otherwise I don't know much about it.
I'm a big fan of Bennett's, though aside from a few films, I've mostly seen her in Dark Shadows, in which she logged countless hours.
Who was she on Dark Shadows? I suspect she will always mostly look like Lucia Harper to me.
no subject
no subject
Okay; I'm glad to hear that!
no subject
no subject
That is pretty much why I want to see it.
(I also like Richard Conte. But I have never seen Emerson except briefly in Adam's Rib (1949) and she sounds amazing.)
I trust his view of films. Macao was just as good as he'd said and for the same reasons.
no subject
It did not need a lot of hunting, it turns out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spnmba9pECw
no subject
Also there may have been some guys in this movie and a plot or something, I didn't really notice.
no subject
I am so glad. I thought she would be, but it's good to hear it confirmed.
She exists on the screen with a total lack of apology, and it is glorious.
Someday I'd like to think that won't be as rare as it is now, but in the meantime it is precious and refreshing and I treasure the hell out of it when I find it. So that is also good.
Also there may have been some guys in this movie and a plot or something, I didn't really notice.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, HOPE EMERSON.