Poll Results: Barbara Stanwyck

I never doubted this one, either. Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson in 1944's Double Indemnity. So much brilliant dialogue, so many great Los Angeles locations, Fred MacMurray his usual brilliant self--baby boomers weaned on My Three Sons should symbolically kill their ill-kept image of MacMurray's wholesome TV persona after seeing Double Indemnity. I wouldn't want Steve Douglas' pipe-puffing, cardigan-wearing shroud hanging over my thoughts, either.

But above it all, there's Barbara Stanwyck. It's a Billy Wilder film, but it's *her* movie. Here's how the voting went, with a total of 75 votes:

Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity 32 (42%)
Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven 18 (24%)
Rita Hayworth in Lady From Shanghai 12 (16%)
Jane Greer in Out of the Past 10 (13%)
Lizabeth Scott in Dead Reckoning 3 (4%)

Some quick takes:

There was some serious competition here, but Babs crushed them all. Manupulative and desperate and just plain twisted, yet you still sympathize with her, despite how evil and remorseless she is. Stanwyck was robbed (as usual) at Oscar time; sorry, Ingrid. Gene Tierney's best-remembered for her role in Laura but she was never better and cast against type as she was in the color noir masterpiece, Leave Her to Heaven. Rita Hayworth's hair was dyed blonde and she utters some seriously disturbing dialogue at the end of Lady from Shanghai. My favorite role of hers and if the film had trimmed some of its excess, it may have been remembered as a masterpiece. Jane Greer in Out of the Past. I love how Greer's personality becomes mean and just plain rotten by movie's end. Lizabeth Scott in Dead Reckoning is fine, but she just wasn't the actress those other women were. It is among my favorite Bogart films, though. I think I'm alone in that claim.

Stop with the Death Montages

The Death Montage. We all know what they are: that year-end collection of clips of that year's movie industry people who have died--I'm sorry, too harsh a word--"passed away"--during the previous year. It's an entirely different thing than someone's own, heartfelt rememberances of a deceased movie person. But I've come to the point where I can't stand them and won't watch those Death Montages. Time was I loved torturing myself to a depressed stupor remembering all over again the cherished movie people who will no longer be with us. Plus, they often forget a beloved favorite of mine, so I'm angry and depressed afterwards. That's why I have Patrick McGoohan as the picture of this entry; he died back in January but didn't make AOL's annual death list. I probably should be happy for that; as McGoohan is more worthy of his battle cry "I am not a number, I am a Free Man!" for being exempt from that roll call.

The Academy Awards show started this practice and it was fine. Then around the mid-1990s it became a macabre popularity contest, with the loudest applause for the "biggest" legend who joined the Choir Invisible. As they said about a Hollywood mogul, whose funeral brought out thousands of mourners: "Give the people what they want and they'll come out in droves." It got to the point where people I knew looked forward to that part of the Oscar broadcast.

Perhaps I'm too cynical. And yes, I am. But behind every cynical man is a sentimental sap who's deeply affected by such things. Turner Classic Movies, in its ongoing move to "youthify" classic movies for my generation--the dreaded "Gen X"--it only serves to remind me how slick and pre-conceived (to quote Michael Caine in Hannah and Her Sisters) it all is. It comes off as a mawkish, "Death as Nostalgia" production to me.

Ah, well. The year's almost done and I couldn't be happier. As much as I love the past, I'm not particularly enamored with my past. However, when it comes to the past of movie icons, I'm quite enamored with that. And to see their lives reduced to a three-and-a-half minute montage just casts a--pall--over me.

In 1997, I WAS J.J. Hunsecker

I knew I was destined to be a classic movie fanatic from a very early age. I was always in the habit of watching and rewatching favorite films. Memorizing the dialogue, then using said dialogue in my mundane, everyday life. I'd use the many clever lines from 1957's Sweet Smell of Success on my fellow unsuspecting music store drones. The lines would come out of nowhere. Usually they were in context but a lot of times they weren't, which made those in the know all the more amused.

Wait. Let me back up for a second.

In 1997, I became fascinated with New York City and how it looked in the 1950s. I was and am obsessed with jazz from that time and to get a sense of what things looked like circa 1957 is best exemplified in Alexander Mackendrink's Sweet Smell of Success. Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis became legends in my personal, worshipful pantheon of movie heroes. Lancaster played powerful NYC gossip columnist--and Walter Winchell surrogate--J.J. Hunsecker, a strange man with a swank apartment filled with objets d'arte that he knew nothing about ("Picasso-- one "S" or two?") and who was in love with his power as well as his virginal little sister, Susie. Curtis played the oily, hand-wringing press agent, Sidney Falco. Tom Cruise's Jerry Maguire owes everything to Sidney Falco; the chump.

Every friday night for fifteen consecutive weeks, my pal and I would set up the steam-powered VCR (that's Video Cassette Recorder to youse kids born after 1990) and watch a different movie each week, but we would end the night with our corrupt noir masterpiece. It would be several years and one slow internet connection later when I would finally realize that Sweet Smell of Success was a cult classic. It was also adored by critics but largely unknown by the Great Unwashed. Still, I loved this movie.

Movies and junk food go together like Liz Taylor and divorce, so we armed ourselves and filled our burgeoning guts with sweet and salty crap. We live in South Florida, so we had to have something hispanic, and Inca Kola fit the bill. It's the national beverage of Peru. It tastes something like liquid bubblegum. It goes great with spicy and salty foods, not that that stopped us from downing a dozen doughnuts along with it. We sure punished our bodies.

Let's not forget to have a movie icon and personal hero's line of foods along for the ride: Newman's Own. We continued to put up speed bumps for our metabolism by gobbling anything and everything with Paul Newman's mug on the box/jar/carton/bottle. We loved his popcorn, salsa, spaghetti sauce, and lemonade: which I can no longer find; did it die with him???

"Movie Night", as we called it, was a great time of bonding and learning about classic film. Black and White became our friend, Elmer Bernstein's big, big, BIG score for "Sweet Smell", as we came to call it, was a call to arms. We worked on our Burt Lancaster accents and Tony Curtis mannerisms and quoted Emile Meyer ("I call him the boy with the ice cream face.") more than any twentysomething ever should. Hard to believe it was thirteen years ago.

Oh well, onward with new memories.

Jennifer Jones

I always regretted not being more into Jennifer Jones. Not because she died this past week at age 90, but because she was one of those performers that I was quite familiar with yet never embraced. To me, Jones was the actress that people's mothers, aunts, and grandmothers liked. She often played the good girl, dutiful wife, and even the occasional martyr, but she appeared against type in enough films that she got my attention. She certainly grabbed and yanked me to the TV screen when I saw her as the tempestuous Pearl in 1946's Duel in the Sun. Jones was hotter than a Texas Summer in that movie. She got top billing over the likes of Gregory Peck--then a rising star--and Joseph Cotten--an established second lead. I didn't know about Jones' connection to David O. Selznick, big shot studio boss. When I did learn of her marriage to him, I dismissed her Oscar win as politics in action and moved on. Why I did this, even though Jones had received five Oscar nominations in less than ten years, shows what I knew.

Years later, when I became interested in post-war America and specifically, Sloan Wilson's novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit ("That sounds warm" said the young female book clerk when I called my local bookstore inquiring as to their having a copy). Of course it was long out of print, but I would run into Jennifer Jones again as she played the long-suffering wife to Peck's preoccupied corporate career climber in the film version. This is when Jones' talent made an impression on me. Her performance alone was the sympathetic role that I clung to when watching this rather depressing movie--with a typically moody score from Bernard Herrmann--and then I no longer dismissed Jennifer Jones as a studio mogul's wife with the right connections.

Jennifer Jones had endured much personal tragedy. Her husband, the actor Robert Walker (Strangers on a Train) died prematurely, and was overwhelmed by devastating emotional problems after he and Jones' divorce in 1945. Jones' daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick, committed suicide by jumping from the 20th floor of a building, age 22 in 1976.

Perhaps Jones' refusal to give interviews and maintaining an intensely private life hurt her chances of being remembered by the general public. Or maybe the shrill feminism of subsequent decades cast a scornful eye on Jones' roles and "inconvenient" screen persona. If Jones had led a public life and tended to her own legacy like some stars have, it may have kept her in the minds of film lovers. But Jones saw her life with her family and work with mental health issues as more important than her screen career. I respect her all the more for it. It takes a selfless person to turn their back on fame, and Jones no doubt had her fill of it, for better or worse. I was surprised to learn of her death because I mistakenly believed that she had died back in the mid-90s. Chalk up another victory for the privacy-loving actress, who would no doubt find that amusing.