"Granny or alcoholic? No, these stars prove there’s more to being 60-plus."

Crazy headline at The London Times.

To be fair, the article is about what characters appear in movies and TV shows, which is never going to be the full range of humanity, because some aspects of life make more interesting stories.

But still: "The disgust that older women are presumed to engender is so great there’s even a horror genre built around it, dubbed 'hagsploitation' and starring the 'psycho-biddy.' The Hollywood star Bette Davis had aged out of being a dramatic lead and into being a scary old lady before she was even 60, with terrifying roles in films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and The Nanny (1965)...."

I think it's not so much that older women are disgusting as that it's hard to think of exciting things for gentle, sweet old ladies to do that could be the center of a story. Bette Davis understood that and was willing to set glamor aside and sink into a horror role. 

Anyway, we're told that these days there are lots of juicy roles for older actresses, and one 30-year-old actress said: “It’s a really good time for older women, which is amazing, and there’s a lot for these young men, but not a lot for the actresses that I know in my age bracket.”

"This is the product of a bunch of hacky bad millennial writers sitting around in a room trying to think of something quirky that two Gen X past their prime comedians can do to appeal to Zoomers on TikTok, even though their actual audience is baby boomers."

Said Matt Walsh, on his podcast yesterday, trashing a Jimmy Fallon "Tonight Show" sketch:

 

And I liked this — at 00:30:32 in the link above — about cancellation of Stephen Colbert's show: "There's a lot of speculation that Colbert got canned by CBS for criticizing Trump too much, which is, I mean, total nonsense.... If you're firing somebody because you don't like what they're saying... you're not gonna give them another year on the air... to, you know, with nothing to lose... to continue criticizing Trump. It doesn't make a lot of sense." 

Giving Colbert 10 more months to speak seems to mean that CBS is not trying to silence him and probably is cancelling him for the reason it's giving: money. I would add that it also seems to mean that it wants even more speech from Colbert — much harsher, more aggressive attacks on Trump. CBS lit a fire under Colbert and turned him loose to express himself without the need to preserve the show.

That prompted me to prompt Grok like this: What are some movies where a character finds out he has only a short time left to live and because of the awareness of his compressed life span, he finds far greater meaning tha[n] had been available to him when he was rolling along living life as if death was only vaguely hovering about in the fog of the seemingly distant future? Obviously, there's "Ikiru." There's "Dark Victory." But there must be a thousand. Help me expand this list. (Grok's answer.)

In short — in jort — I think CBS wants the opposite of silence from Colbert. It wants bigger, broader, more stabbingly painful satire... even as it also must stop hemorrhaging money.

"I hope Grounded in the Stars will instigate meaningful connections and bind intimate emotional states that allow for deeper reflection around the human condition and greater cultural diversity."

Says the sculptor Thomas J. Price at his website, linked at the New York Times in "Times Sq. Sculpture Prompts Racist Backlash. To Some, That’s the Point. A 12-foot bronze statue of an anonymous Black woman has become a lightning rod in a fraught American debate about race, representation and diversity."

Wow! That headline says so much about "meaningful connections," "intimate emotional states," and "deeper reflection around the human condition."

What could be more meaningfully connected, intimately emotional, or more deeply reflected upon than to call you a big old racist if you scorn a monumental statue of a casually dressed black woman?

Price's hopes are dashed. And the Times doesn't even tell us the title of the statue — "Grounded in the Stars" — until the 7th paragraph. After the headline calls it "Times Sq. Sculpture" and "a 12-foot bronze statue of an anonymous Black woman," the text calls it "the bronze sculpture," "the 12-foot statue," "the sculpture," and — quoting others — "a statue of an 'angry Black lady,'" "a D.E.I. statue." 

Shall we just have a cigarette on it?

"This girl wanted life! This girl wanted love!"

We watched that movie last night. "Three on a Match" — selected from from The Criterion Channel's collection, "Pre-Code Divas."

What a crazy movie! I'll avoid spoilers and just say: 1. Fantastic example of a woman who cannot be satisfied with conventional married life (even with wealth and a fine lawyer-husband), 2. Shades of "Reefer Madness," 3. Only 63 minutes long, 4. Who knew there was a boy version of Shirley Temple? 5. Don't expect to see much of Bette Davis, 6. Brief but great shots of Humphrey Bogart, 7.  Loved the sad piano playing in the girl's reform school, 8. Don't reveal the shocking ending! 9. Inventive method of communicating with the police, 10. I love the pre-Code era, 11. Made me want to watch more Ann Dvorak movies.

"She wanted that hairstyle. She was so curious about why so many women have that hairstyle, especially on the Republican side of the ticket."

The "she" is Meryl Streep and the quote is from the hair person for the movie "Don't Look Up," in "Micro Bangs, Mullets, and a Republican Bob: Every Out-of-This World Hairstyle in Don't Look Up" (Pop Sugar). Streep plays the role of President of the United States.

We're told that Streep kept saying, "Don't try to make it look pretty. I like it when it has this flat weird thing!'" 

I share her curiosity about why so many women have that hairstyle. It's so incredibly stupid...

It's hilarious to have a President with that hair. Can everyone please stop? It's like Shirley Temple grew up and couldn't figure out she wasn't a child anymore. That is, it's like Bette Davis in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"

"[Film] critic Sheila O’Malley wrote about the phenomenon of 'back-ting,' in which an actor is turned away from the audience...."

"'To this day, I am fascinated by moments when actors turn their backs on the camera. It is actor as storyteller, actor as auteur.' Rewatching... Fight Club, I was surprised by just how many moments of back-ting there were, the most mesmerizing of which occurs in an early scene, when the eponymous club is just starting to gain traction. Tyler Durden (Pitt) is simply walking through a bar to the tune of 'Going Out West' by Tom Waits."



"But in this singular moment, we can see, even from behind, that Tyler has what the unnamed narrator played by Edward Norton lacks: unbridled, unending confidence and a clarity of self. 'All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me' Tyler says later, sitting with the stillness of a coiled snake that’s waiting to strike."

From "Every Brad Pitt Movie Performance, Ranked A closer look at the Oscar-nominated actor’s body of work" by Angelica Jade Bastién (who goes to a lot of trouble)(in Vulture).

In case you're wondering, "Fight Club" is ranked #6. #1 is not "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," the 2019 movie for which Pitt received an Oscar nomination. That is #3. #2 is another 2019 movie, "Ad Astra." And #1 is "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (from 2007)

Anyway... "back-ting"... that amused me. And it fits with today's mini-theme, hyphens (here and here). If you'd coined the word, would you have written "bacting" or "backting" instead of "back-ting"? It's hard to do portmanteau words, and here you need to find a way to make readers see "back" and "act," with the "k" and the "t" in some weird conflict. Worth it though! Because acting while turned away from the camera is something you have to think of noticing.

Ah! Here's the original Sheila O'Malley column, "Back-ting." Excerpt:

historyofoverplucking.

An Instagram account. I'll just give 2 examples:

View this post on Instagram

Bette Davis

A post shared by @ historyofoverplucking on Oct 19, 2017 at 2:51pm PDT

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A post shared by @historyofoverplucking on Oct 12, 2017 at 4:30pm PDT

How can anyone know? Who is enforcing this? Will no woman take advantage of the redly ripe opportunity to be different?

"'All female actresses attending the Globes are protesting by just wearing black gowns,' a source tells PEOPLE."

Remember what the greatest actress of all time did when she was under pressure to wear the right color:

"41 years! I've been in this business, you know, I don't know why I'm still alive, but somehow it keeps on going. I feel I should be dead, it's been so long."

"Madonna has no patience for bad wine... Madonna's house smells amazing—something delicious, maybe roasted chicken, was cooking in a kitchen elsewhere in the manse..."

"... and there was a gentle fragrance in the air, jasmine, perhaps. While I waited for Madonna, her day-to-day manager, her publicist, and I chatted while reclining on gorgeous cream-colored furniture set upon the largest rug I'd ever seen, on top of immaculate black wood floors."

The furniture is cream-colored, and the prose is purple... in Harper's Bazaar.

But I can believe that, subjected to the chatting of a day-to-day manager and a publicist, one would resort to the distraction of smelling the indoor air and speculating about what might be cooking somewhere... somewhere in the manse.

The writer of the purple prose, Roxane Gay, had to wait a long time for Madonna to show up and when Madonna finally arrived she said: "Roxane, you don't have to wear that dress tonight."

And Roxane didn't unleash sarcasm — like, congratulations on being the millionth person to say that to me — she purportedly "exhaled," because:

This was familiar territory. My name is part of a well-known song or two. I smiled and said, "No, I do not." At one point she asked me for my opinion on a particularly troublesome wine, handed me her glass, and swore she didn't have anything contagious. I believed her and took a sip. To be fair, the wine was terrible....

Sounds as though Madonna did have some patience with bad wine, just not with other people noticing how bad it is.

"Take the mediocre out of here," she tells Dustin, the strapping young man who served all the wine and apologized for its mediocrity even though that mediocrity was not his fault. "I'll go broke before I drink bad wine," she declared...

But you were drinking it, Madge. You were drinking that wine.



I think you meant: I'll go broke before I serve what other people can recognize as bad wine.

And you do have something contagious. You have dishonesty, bad taste, and tardiness.

Now, the Mayor is calling me out, so I've got to move on past this post. I've got to quit this Harper's Bazaar article half-read. Here's the Roxane/Roxanne song.



Roxanne you don't have to wear that dress tonight/Walk the streets for money you don't care if it's wrong or if it's right....

AND: The lovely George Michael version of "Roxanne":

"What most distinguishes the televised wine... It is coping wine. It is medicative wine."

"It is wine that is often consumed alone. And it is wine that is, as an element of TV production, used by its respective storytellers as a visual metaphor for its drinkers’ worry and fear.... Instead of conviviality and/or snobbery, the wine in this case suggests the stormy silence of that most modern of afflictions: stress. While traditional wine-drinking might suggest social confidence-building  ('lubrication,' etc.), this version emphasizes introversion rather than extroversion: anger that steams into a closed vessel, fear that has no outlet. Olivia gulps wine when, you know, she thinks she might be murdered. Alicia does it when she thinks her husband might go to jail. Skyler, Claire, Carrie, Tami—their wine, to varying degrees of acuteness, indicates the pressures that bear down on them, constantly. And the notion that those pressures must be borne, ultimately, alone."

From an Atlantic article by Megan Garber titled "The Women and the Wine/Whether red or white, whether drunk by Alicia Florrick or Olivia Pope, the beverage has become a metaphor for anxieties that are uniquely feminine in their form."

Well, in the old days, actresses smoked cigarettes...



... but that standard stage business has been medicalized out of drama. I'm not surprised to read about all the actresses drinking on screen these days. It's very visual. Lots of hand and face action. Dark red color. (Is really any of the wine on these shows white?)

"Dreadnoughtus (meaning 'fearing nothing'...) is a genus of giant titanosaurian sauropod dinosaur..."

"It is one of the largest of all known terrestrial vertebrates, possessing the greatest mass of any land animal that can be calculated with reasonable certainty, using limb bone measurements."

Are you excited about the Dreadnought dinosaur? "Dreadnought" has a big "disambiguation" page at Wikipedia, with lots of ships, of course, and also trains and books and movies. The word goes back to the 1500s, used for ships. From the OED (which is unlinkable, even as a dreadnought might be unsinkable):

1587   F. Drake Despatch 27 Apr. in R. Hakluyt Princ. Navigations (1904) VI. p. xiv,   A greate leake sprange uppon the Dreadenoughte.

There's also "A type of thick woollen cloth with a long pile; a coat or other outer garment made of this cloth, typically worn in stormy weather."

1834   R. Southey Doctor II. 197   One of those dreadnoughts the utility of which sets fashion at defiance.

"Dreadnought" can be an adjective, meaning "fearless" (or, alternatively, made out of that heavy cloth used to make those above-mentioned coats). It was used to mean "fearless" here:

1978   N.Y. Mag. 18 Dec. 18/3   What is the point of this dreadnought approach to a basically frivolous genre?

That quote comes from a short trashing of the film "Death on the Nile." The preceding sentence is "Bette Davis and Maggie Smith are fun together, but no one else in the huge cast distinguishes himself."



Loving the dinosaurs!

"[W]ith the recent passing of Ernest Borgnine (Marty, 1961) and now Celeste Holm (Gentleman's Agreement, 1947) today..."

"... who is now the longest-ago Oscar winner in each of the five major categories who's still living?"

For Best Actress, it has to be Luise Rainer (The Good Earth, 1937). She's still chugging along at 100+.

ADDED: I mostly know Celeste Holm from "All About Eve":

"I walked onto the set of 'All About Eve' on the first day and said, 'Good Morning,' and do you know her reply? [Bette Davis] said, 'Oh shit, good manners'. I never spoke to her again - ever."

"To help prevent overtesting and overtreatment of older patients — or undertreatment for those who remain robust at advanced ages..."

"... medical guidelines increasingly call for doctors to consider life expectancy as a factor in their decision-making. But clinicians, research has shown, are notoriously poor at predicting how many years their patients have left."

So, let a website figure it out: ePrognosis.

As Bette Davis once said: "I think I'll have a large order of prognosis negative!"

***

"Oh, Ann. Don't be sorry. About anything."

"What Audrey does in 'Breakfast at Tiffany’s' is not uninteresting, but it is far from the modern woman..."

"...  even the one introduced to American audiences in the persons of Bette Davis, Irene Dunne, Margaret Sullavan, the other Hepburn (though she could talk herself into a self-centered corner, too), Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, Jean Arthur, as well as Barbara Stanwyck. Instead Audrey rather resembles her physical antithesis Marilyn Monroe (who wanted to play Holly) in that they have very distinctive voices, but not voices that are good for talking to people."

Questioning "the chilly yet unlived-in gamine glamour of Audrey Hepburn."

"Small men feel... that the world belongs to big men. Seeing men you know to be small playing big on the silver screen is comforting...."

So says the small Fish — small fry — Stanley, who loves the short — under 5'9" — actors who play tough guys in the movies:

The pattern was set in the 1930s and ’40s by Edward G. Robinson (“Little Caesar”), James Cagney, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni — all small men who usually played tough and cruel. Sometimes camera angles obscured the physical facts — Robinson looked absolutely huge as Wolf Larsen in “The Sea Wolf” in what can be called, without irony, a towering performance — and sometimes the camera just didn’t care as when, for example, Cagney regularly beat up men obviously twice his size.

Slightly later came John Garfield, and the smallest of them all, Alan Ladd who played big in “The Blue Dahlia,” “The Glass Key,” “The Badlanders” and who more than holds his own against Ben Johnson and a tree-like Van Heflin in “Shane.”...

Famously slight Paul Newman displayed his chest and pugilistic abilities in movies like “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” “Hud,” “The Long, Hot Summer” and “Cool Hand Luke.” James Dean would have made the list had he lived longer. Now aging tough guy-short guys (by short I mean under 5-foot-9) include Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino, Mel Gibson, Jean Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone, who created not one but two iconic American males, Rocky and Rambo.

And these days we have a bumper crop of undersized super heroes — Tom Cruise, Tobey Maguire, Mark Wahlberg and Robert Downey Jr., along with the occasionally macho Johnny Depp and Sean Penn.

Is there something comparable for women? Maybe we could make a list of women who have fairly average looks who play beautiful women on screen. My favorite example of this is Bette Davis in "Mr. Skeffington," where the raving over Bette's beauty occasionally crosses the line into the laughable. No man could resist her:



Ah, yes! I remember laughing out loud in the theater when she comes down the stairs and a man exclaims "Fanny! You look beautiful!" And check out that death-bed dialogue: "A woman is beautiful only when she is loved." That's what the plain women in the audience — next to the hubbies they dragged to the chick flick — long to believe.

Smoking and the $93,000 stamp.

The print run was destroyed — but a few stamps escaped — because Audrey Hepburn's son did not like that cigarette holder in her mouth.



That happened in Germany. Here in America we just airbrush the cigarette out of the old celebrity photos:



Roger Ebert:

Depriving Bette Davis of her cigarette reminds me of Soviet revisionism, when disgraced party officials disappeared from official photographs. Might as well strip away the toupees of Fred Astaire and Jimmy Stewart. I was first alerted to this travesty by a reader, Wendell Openshaw of San Diego, who wrote me: "Do you share my revulsion for this attempt to revise history and distort a great screen persona for political purposes? It is political correctness and revisionist history run amok. Next it will be John Wayne holding a bouquet instead of a Winchester!"

IN THE COMMENTS: Sofa King picks up on the cue to photoshop:



And kristinintexas found this startling revelation that Bette Davis was not holding a cigarette in the original photograph. (Her fur coat, however, was downgraded to cloth.)

But, of course, Bette Davis was big on smoking, and so Chip Ahoy gives us "Bette Restored:

Mayor Bloomberg " city thermostats turned down as temperatures hovered near freezing."

Gasps the Daily News under the headline "Wear a sweater if you're chilly!' - and you may lose your job, Mayor Bloomberg says."

1. Despite the impression given by the headline, possible job loss is not connected to workers complaining that they are cold. It's just on a list of things Bloomberg might do to save NYC money.

2. It's not as if the thermostats set near freezing. The outdoor temperatures are near freezing, and the article doesn't tell us how low Bloomberg is setting the thermostats. I'll bet it's higher than the temperature I keep my house in winter -- 62° -- which is perfectly healthy and comfortable if you wear a sweater.

3. So I guess it's not "Nanny Bloomberg." Or ... wait... don't let nannies off the hook. Think:

"Being read your death sentence is like being a character in one of the old Bette Davis movies."

Bob Novak tells the story of learning about his huge brain tumor and his approximately 6 months left to live.

Here's the movie:



AND: Keep your eyes peeled at 6:06 for a special cameo.

Goodbye, Kitty.

Kitty Carlisle Hart has died: "the supremely elegant actress, singer, arts advocate and TV personality" was 96.

I remember seeing her all the time, back in the 1960s, on the TV show "To Tell the Truth." You can see a whole segment of the show here with the panelists -- including Kitty in her glory -- trying to guess which of three contestants is really the whale rider. (Embedding is disable, so you have to click over to see it. Kitty first appears at about 3:00.)

It was nice to see her, 20 years ago, in the fine Woody Allen movie, "Radio Days." "Radio Days" was a reverie about the past, and I feel a twinge seeing how long ago "Radio Days" itself was. Kitty sang "They're Either Too Young or Too Old," and I can't find a YouTube clip of that, but I can find the song, sung back in its original time, 1943, by Bette Davis. I hope it doesn't violate some rule to bring a superior diva into another's obit post:



ADDED: In the comments, Madison Man reminds me that Kitty played the ingenue --Rosa Castaldi -- in the great Marx Brothers movie "A Night at the Opera." You can see -- and hear -- quite a bit of her in this clip:



Alone with a sigh of romance!

Oh, there she is with both Chico and Harpo jumping up on her at the same time. That young woman must have been pretty strong. You could almost predict that she'd live to be 96.