Oh, just go and see a cinema show in the first row
So I did not make it to tonight's screening of The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) after all, but that's all right because this afternoon ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch met me after my doctor's appointment and there were cut-paper clouds moving fast behind the skyscrapers in a deep autumn sky and I had earned enough points with the Boston Smoked Fish Co. for a free bagel with hot smoked salmon and when I asked Rob to find me a bookstore, he took me to the Brattle Book Shop. I must have been there before, but not for years. We didn't even make it past the first floor and I still had to put books back. They did not have a copy of Eloise Jarvis McGraw's Sawdust in His Shoes (1950), a childhood favorite of my mother's which I have been trying to locate for her—for non-exorbitant prices, which is the sticky part—for years now, but they did have Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station (1983), which she has been trying to replace ever since significant portions of her mystery collection drowned. I intend this volume of Richard Matheson's Twilight Zone scripts for my father, which I consider a noble gesture since it contains the shooting script for "The Last Flight" (1960). I could not afford the coffee-table hardcover of Peter Boyle's City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912–1948 (2007). But nothing short of total poverty was going to keep me from taking home Richard Barrios' Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (2003). It has been obviously relevant to my interests for some time now. The inside jacket flap features my favorite photograph of Lee Patrick and Hope Emerson in Caged (1950)—
—and the text, as I paged through it on public transit home, appears both exhaustively and wittily written. Here's Barrios on one of my longest-loved character actors:
A great character actor's prime asset is his unique voice. It's fitting, then, that millions of baby boomers first experienced Edward Everett Horton through his voice alone—as the mordantly decorous narrator of "Fractured Fairy Tales" on the Rocky and Bullwinkle TV series. Even without his elegantly gangling figure and spooked countenance, EEH had no trouble establishing his presence.
For years, Mr. Horton was Hollywood's highest-paid character actor, a dependable and welcome and unchanging presence. In leads and more frequently in scores of supporting roles, he embodied aristocratic befuddlement and bungled composure. He existed, it seemed, in order to be startled, a Sisyphus for the world's irregularities. It took almost nothing to rattle him, after which the skinny 6'2" frame would cringe and the rubber face would assume its perennially contorted affect: even more than [Edgar] Pangborn or Johnny Arthur, EEH was most compelling when flustered.
He also embodied the complete inverse of sex appeal. Although he played some romantic roles early on and was frequently cast as husband or father, one could hardly think of him in terms of sex. Consequently, he was in many ways the ideal gay persona for a post-Code age, as duly demonstrated in late 1934 in The Gay Divorcée. In films such as In Caliente (1935) and The Gang's All Here (1943), he would find himself dancing with another man, and as he registered shock with his standard cry of "My word!," you could tell that this would indeed be his preference, were sexuality his lot. Like all great character actors, he had decades of stage experience, coming to film in 1923 as a quirky leading man and easily settling into the supporting niche he maintained for over forty years. His defining moment came with the play Springtime for Henry—even the title evokes him—in which he starred as a Milquetoast who learns about love. Oddly, he did not appear in the film version; if he had, the pantywaist portions would have been, as always, far more convincing than the romantic aspects. But then, Mr. Horton knew his audience well enough to know that it loved and remained faithful to him for one thing above all: his sheer, and eternally enduring, improbability.
He quotes Boyd McDonald when discussing Edgar Pangborn. He's not as impressed by Way Out West (1930) as I was (which may explain why he misquotes its best line), but he does associate it with the pansy craze, along with something called The Dude Wrangler (1930) which was marketed with the honest-to-God tagline "The Story of a 'Pansy' Cowboy—Oh Dear!" He makes a surprisingly cogent case that I should rewatch Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951) for a reason other than Oscar Levant, namely Gene Kelly's "one moment in the ballet when he impersonates the Toulouse-Lautrec jockey: one of the great butt-watching moments in American cinema." And he writes sympathetically about Doris Day, whom he sees as an enormously talented and genuine actress whose famous sex comedies with Rock Hudson, in addition to being pernicious miscasting on both sides, serve now as epitomes of everything that was wrong with mainstream Hollywood portrayals of sexuality in the late '50's and early '60's: "Their artifice was stultifying and total: they were phony films about phony people, telling lies about sex, both straight and gay. Their efforts would be suitably rewarded with laughs that were equally phony."
—At this juncture Rob screamed a string of expletives from the kitchen and that turned out to be the news about Kevin Spacey, which derailed me badly enough that I really don't want to end a post about queerness in the movies with it, so here's one of my favorite photographs of Dorothy Arzner instead:
and one last note from Barrios:
The following year, Singin' in the Rain ran afoul of Breen for one innocuous innuendo: Donald O'Connor demonstrates voice-dubbing to Gene Kelly by moving his lips to Debbie Reynolds' voice. Kelly responded: "What are you doing later?" At least he did until the line was ordered dropped from the script.
I am comforted by the idea that even Comden and Green OT3'd Cosmo/Don/Kathy.
spatch met me after my doctor's appointment and there were cut-paper clouds moving fast behind the skyscrapers in a deep autumn sky and I had earned enough points with the Boston Smoked Fish Co. for a free bagel with hot smoked salmon and when I asked Rob to find me a bookstore, he took me to the Brattle Book Shop. I must have been there before, but not for years. We didn't even make it past the first floor and I still had to put books back. They did not have a copy of Eloise Jarvis McGraw's Sawdust in His Shoes (1950), a childhood favorite of my mother's which I have been trying to locate for her—for non-exorbitant prices, which is the sticky part—for years now, but they did have Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station (1983), which she has been trying to replace ever since significant portions of her mystery collection drowned. I intend this volume of Richard Matheson's Twilight Zone scripts for my father, which I consider a noble gesture since it contains the shooting script for "The Last Flight" (1960). I could not afford the coffee-table hardcover of Peter Boyle's City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912–1948 (2007). But nothing short of total poverty was going to keep me from taking home Richard Barrios' Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (2003). It has been obviously relevant to my interests for some time now. The inside jacket flap features my favorite photograph of Lee Patrick and Hope Emerson in Caged (1950)——and the text, as I paged through it on public transit home, appears both exhaustively and wittily written. Here's Barrios on one of my longest-loved character actors:
A great character actor's prime asset is his unique voice. It's fitting, then, that millions of baby boomers first experienced Edward Everett Horton through his voice alone—as the mordantly decorous narrator of "Fractured Fairy Tales" on the Rocky and Bullwinkle TV series. Even without his elegantly gangling figure and spooked countenance, EEH had no trouble establishing his presence.
For years, Mr. Horton was Hollywood's highest-paid character actor, a dependable and welcome and unchanging presence. In leads and more frequently in scores of supporting roles, he embodied aristocratic befuddlement and bungled composure. He existed, it seemed, in order to be startled, a Sisyphus for the world's irregularities. It took almost nothing to rattle him, after which the skinny 6'2" frame would cringe and the rubber face would assume its perennially contorted affect: even more than [Edgar] Pangborn or Johnny Arthur, EEH was most compelling when flustered.
He also embodied the complete inverse of sex appeal. Although he played some romantic roles early on and was frequently cast as husband or father, one could hardly think of him in terms of sex. Consequently, he was in many ways the ideal gay persona for a post-Code age, as duly demonstrated in late 1934 in The Gay Divorcée. In films such as In Caliente (1935) and The Gang's All Here (1943), he would find himself dancing with another man, and as he registered shock with his standard cry of "My word!," you could tell that this would indeed be his preference, were sexuality his lot. Like all great character actors, he had decades of stage experience, coming to film in 1923 as a quirky leading man and easily settling into the supporting niche he maintained for over forty years. His defining moment came with the play Springtime for Henry—even the title evokes him—in which he starred as a Milquetoast who learns about love. Oddly, he did not appear in the film version; if he had, the pantywaist portions would have been, as always, far more convincing than the romantic aspects. But then, Mr. Horton knew his audience well enough to know that it loved and remained faithful to him for one thing above all: his sheer, and eternally enduring, improbability.
He quotes Boyd McDonald when discussing Edgar Pangborn. He's not as impressed by Way Out West (1930) as I was (which may explain why he misquotes its best line), but he does associate it with the pansy craze, along with something called The Dude Wrangler (1930) which was marketed with the honest-to-God tagline "The Story of a 'Pansy' Cowboy—Oh Dear!" He makes a surprisingly cogent case that I should rewatch Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951) for a reason other than Oscar Levant, namely Gene Kelly's "one moment in the ballet when he impersonates the Toulouse-Lautrec jockey: one of the great butt-watching moments in American cinema." And he writes sympathetically about Doris Day, whom he sees as an enormously talented and genuine actress whose famous sex comedies with Rock Hudson, in addition to being pernicious miscasting on both sides, serve now as epitomes of everything that was wrong with mainstream Hollywood portrayals of sexuality in the late '50's and early '60's: "Their artifice was stultifying and total: they were phony films about phony people, telling lies about sex, both straight and gay. Their efforts would be suitably rewarded with laughs that were equally phony."
—At this juncture Rob screamed a string of expletives from the kitchen and that turned out to be the news about Kevin Spacey, which derailed me badly enough that I really don't want to end a post about queerness in the movies with it, so here's one of my favorite photographs of Dorothy Arzner instead:
and one last note from Barrios:
The following year, Singin' in the Rain ran afoul of Breen for one innocuous innuendo: Donald O'Connor demonstrates voice-dubbing to Gene Kelly by moving his lips to Debbie Reynolds' voice. Kelly responded: "What are you doing later?" At least he did until the line was ordered dropped from the script.
I am comforted by the idea that even Comden and Green OT3'd Cosmo/Don/Kathy.
no subject
It's only reasonable.