Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

“Fasten your seat belts…it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

I spent most of this weekend at my sister Kat’s humble abode in Luthersville, Georgia, which is located about 30-45 minutes from Atlanta and is one of those odd towns that people whose cars have malfunctioned make the fatal mistake of stopping in in practically every horror movie I’ve watched as a child.  We went out Saturday night to nearby Newnan (boyhood home of country singer Alan Jackson) to a restaurant owned by former television mogul Ted Turner (I believe it’s called Ted’s) that features the novelty of serving bison on the menu.  I seem to be the only one in the family who’s wild-and-crazy enough to try the bison each time we go; I ordered a Delmonico-style bison steak while we were there and though I have heard that bison is a little on the gamey side I didn’t have any problem with it.

I love hanging out with Kat, but the problem is that my normal nocturnal schedule (sleep during the day, work at night) always gets thrown out of whack—particularly since I’ve reached that period in life where I’m unable to sleep in the car on long trips.  So after getting a nap when we got there, I was pretty much all up night (for the most part, I grabbed a catnap or two) watching a few goodies on the Fox Movie Channel.  Although Luthersville is located quite a few miles from the civilized world, my sister does have DirecTV, which helps a lot.

All About Eve (1950) was on—I suspect FNC was doing something similar to TCM in showcasing Oscar nominees and winners all month—and although I’ve always been a little bit miffed that a movie that takes place in the legitimate theater stole the Best Picture Oscar from one of the best (if not the best) films on Hollywood (Sunset Blvd.), you certainly can’t deny that Eve is a top-notch flick.  Nominated for 14 Oscars, it snagged six including Best Director, Screenplay and Supporting Actor (the wonderfully caddish George Sanders in his signature role as acidic theater critic Addison DeWitt), and while I again have a quibble as to whether it was the better picture, I certainly can’t argue with the Best Screenplay trophy—particularly due to the film’s reams of endlessly quotable dialogue (my personal favorite: “You have a point.  An idiotic one, but a point.”).

After Eve, Fox trotted out Down Argentine Way (1940), the evergreen Technicolor musical starring Betty Grable and Don Ameche and featuring Carmen Miranda in her American movie debut.  I’ll skip over this one—particularly since I snoozed right through it—in favor of another Fox musical that I had watched one time before but got a chance to revisit: Pigskin Parade (1936).  This harmless bit o’fluff stars Jack Haley as a college football coach who seems to know very little about the game, relying on the advice given to him by wife Patsy Kelly (I can never get enough of Patsy, she’s a treat in every film).  When Patsy accidentally puts the star quarterback out of commission, it looks like the team’s chances to play Yale are in the crapper—but fortunately, they find an ace player in bumpkin Stuart Erwin (I know, typecast again) and end up winning the big game (as if you doubted that for a moment).

Parade isn’t a particularly great musical—that is to say, it probably didn’t keep anyone at MGM up nights—but it does contain a few surprises.  At the top of the list is that this is the feature film debut of Judy Garland (who plays Erwin’s sister)—the only movie that she would make away from her home base at MGM.  Judy gets to belt out a few tunes (including It’s Love I’m After) in that wonderfully big voice of hers, and of course everyone knows that she and Haley would appear together three years later in the classic The Wizard of Oz (1939).  Future movie tough guy Alan Ladd is also on hand as well in one of his first movie roles; he also sings a musical number called Down With Everything with the Yacht Club Boys (a number that also features Elisha Cook, Jr. as a student radical).  All in all, Pigskin Parade is done with a great deal of pep and verve, and the cast includes Betty Grable in her younger days, former Our Gang-er Johnny Downs, Grady Sutton and Tony Martin (billed here as Anthony).

After watching these two flicks, I found myself sort of channel hopping back-and-forth between AMC and FNC—American Movie Classics, which does on occasion manage to showcase a movie worthy of its moniker, was showing The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), two films I like very much made longer by the fact that AMC apparently has to cut into them every five minutes to provide a bathroom break for what I’m assuming is a large audience of the incontinent.  Sometime around noon, Fox rolled out another John Ford classic, How Green Was My Valley (1941)—the movie that’s earned the notoriety of beating out Citizen Kane for the Best Picture Oscar that year.  Personally, Kane is the superior film—but I do like Valley; it has some of the most breathtaking cinematography of any more I’ve seen and fine acting from Walter Pidgeon (this might very well be his best film), Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp (winner of a Best Supporting Actor Oscar), Sara Allgood, Anna Lee and young Roddy McDowall, who’s the focus of the story as a young lad experiencing both hard and happy times in a Welsh coal-mining community at the turn of the century.  It’s just that I’m not convinced that any town exists where its inhabitants are singing twenty-four hours a day.  I’m not making this up; they sing on the way to work, they sing at weddings, they sing at funerals—they’re even singing when they’re trying to rescue Crisp from a mine cave-in.  Just once, I would have liked someone in the film to yell: “Would you shut up already!”

- Posted by Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. - 10:38:47 PM - comment []