Forgive me for breaking the timeline, but I wanted to note that today is the birthday of Jane Greer, one of my all-time favorite actresses and the only femme fatale in the grand history of film noir I'd let shoot me. She'd be 86 today if she were still kicking it. No doubt I'll write about her at length come 1947 when she starred with Robert Mitchum in Out Of The Past, but in the meantime, drink in one of the greatest entrances in movie history:
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Showing posts with label Jane Greer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jane Greer. Show all posts
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Happy Birthday, Jane Greer
Forgive me for breaking the timeline, but I wanted to note that today is the birthday of Jane Greer, one of my all-time favorite actresses and the only femme fatale in the grand history of film noir I'd let shoot me. She'd be 86 today if she were still kicking it. No doubt I'll write about her at length come 1947 when she starred with Robert Mitchum in Out Of The Past, but in the meantime, drink in one of the greatest entrances in movie history:Monday, January 18, 2010
We Interrupt This Blog, Part 2
If you've been following my blog for a while, you're probably aware of Zoe, who lives in New Zealand and writes the blog The Big Parade. This last weekend, Zoe was awarded the "prestigious" kreativ blogger award (the quotation marks are hers) in recognition of the creative and worthy work she has done as a blogger. If you read her work, you know she deserves it.And then Zoe passed the award along to seven more bloggers, including me, your unworthy correspondent, the Mythical Monkey. This is my first award since the last time I got a check from a federal agency in recognition of my work as a lawyer—and I had to win a $19 million case to earn that one. All I had to do for this one was watch movies and write about them, something I'd be doing anyway. It's like stealing!
But as always, I can never leave anything alone without doing a little research first—not as an act of churlish cynicism but because curiosity is one of my defining characteristics. Here are a couple of things I think I've learned:
Originally, "kreativ blogger" was a quilt block designed by a Norwegian woman named Hulda, which because I have a personal connection to the quilting community, I find quite interesting. Somewhere along the way, though, somebody decided "kreativ blogger" would be a good name for an award, slapped some chain letter-like rules on it—like forwarding the award to seven more bloggers—and started sending it around the internet.While drinking my coffee this morning, I did a little math, never one of my strong suits, and found that if every person receiving the kreativ blogger award passes the award along to seven more people who pass the award along to seven more (different) people, and on and on, etc., within twelve days every man, woman and child on the planet will have received the kreativ blogger award—which accounts for, what, half the blogs in existence?
Which is not in any way to suggest I didn't want to receive the kreativ blogger award. If I could have lobbied for it, I would have and I am genuinely touched that Zoe tagged me, especially since she knows me only through my writing and has no personal obligation to be nice to me whatsoever. And as for the fact that Zoe ranked me at the top of her list, well, all I can say to the other recipients of the award is Ha ha!
Writers may be as shy and solitary as oysters, working away day after day, year after year, in the anonymity of their dark, dank offices, but they in fact crave attention, at least attention directed at their work (the work, which after all is merely another disguise designed to deflect attention from our shy and solitary selves). Every award we receive is as precious as the Pulitzer and if you don't think it is, you're probably not a writer.Still what I am suggesting is that unless we branch out, we're going to run out of potential recipients of the kreativ blogger award in a big hurry. Thus, rather than pass the award along to Plain Chicken, The Mouth O' The Mule, Who Am Us Anyway, Clicks and Pops, Classic Movies, and all the other blogsters I read on a daily basis,
I am forwarding the award to my favorite deceased movie critics, who despite their passing continue to influence the way we think about movies. This expands the potential list of rewardees rather substantially, and if somehow they hear about the award and write about it, imagine what a story that would be!Some, you will note, are also known for accomplishments other than film criticism.
The seven:
James Agee
Bosley Crowther
Leslie Halliwell
Pauline Kael
Gene Siskel
Francois Truffaut
Robin Wood
Then apparently because the kreativ blogger award works in sevens, I am supposed to reveal seven personal things about myself—a real trick since I have spent my entire life concealing the personal, even from myself. Here they are, though, each fact somehow related to the one before it.
* I own 559 movies on DVD or Blu-Ray (not including television-related stuff or the 1600 or so movies on VHS tape I have floating around in the basement). I have arranged them on the shelf chronologically, from 1915's Les Vampires to last year's Up.
* We have only one working television in the house. It's in the family room.
* My "porn" name (first pet/street where I grew up) is "Snappy Landings." (Katie's is "Janie Colton.")
* Jane Greer is the only femme fatale in movie history I would let shoot me.
* My favorite movie to take a long nap to is The Thing From Another World.
* I wrote my first book when I was thirteen years old—125 handwritten pages. It remains unpublished.
* Don Rickles has insulted me personally.
That's it. Tomorrow, back to the lucrative business of blogging with Scarface, Part Two.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Cognitive Dissonance
And the current carries us farther yet from the essay for best director of 1930-31 ...
The ever reliable Wikipedia describes cognitive dissonance as that "uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously" and suggests that most people instinctively try to bring the two ideas into harmony by either changing their belief structure so the two ideas are no longer in conflict or rationalizing away one of the two ideas, again to reduce the conflict.
Yesterday's seemingly innocent picture of Errol Flynn inadvertently created a lot of cognitive dissonance when, between Douglas Fairbanks's dirty joking and my own curiosity, we discovered that Flynn's already shady past cast darker shadows than we here at the Monkey had imagined. Not just a "dashing ladies man who drank too much and tickled Basil Rathbone's ribs with the blade," as I put it on Thingy's blog, "Pondering Life," Flynn was a serial seducer of underage girls (tried in 1943 but acquitted on charges of raping two teenagers and engaged to marry a fifteen year old at the time of his death in 1959), as well as, at least on one documented occasion, an anti-Semitic blowhard.
One biographer has even charged he was a spy for Hitler's Germany (although others contend he was a leftist drinking buddy of Fidel Castro's and the British government a few years ago revealed that during the last days of World War II, Flynn was actually a spy for the British).
In any event, nasty business.
Which is a bit of a problem because I, for one, like Errol Flynn's movies, particularly The Adventures of Robin Hood. Am I required to like Errol Flynn as well or otherwise have to explain away his private behavior before I can admit to such? Or should I just stop watching his movies altogether?
The instinctive sense that I need to choose one of these options is cognitive dissonance.
There was an even bigger example of cognitive dissonance in the movie-fan blogosphere recently when Switzerland arrested Roman Polanski in advance of extraditing him to the United States to face sentencing following his 1978 guilty plea to unlawful sexual intercourse—a subject I hadn't planned to address in any fashion until my cryogenically-frozen head reaches 1974's Chinatown in this blog, sometime around the turn of the next century.
In my notes for the essay about the best director of 1974 (yes, I've made notes that far ahead— I've even written about Amy Adams's 2008 performance in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day and Lord knows you'll be waiting forever before I get around to posting it), I have written: "Judgment of Polanski the man I leave to you, to God, to history, to Polanski's own withered conscience and to the appropriate legal authorities in any event. I certainly wouldn't want anything I've said about Polanski the artist to be construed as a defense of Polanski the man."
That's pretty much how I feel about Errol Flynn. And a lot of other people, too.
The farther I get into blogging about movies and their history, the clearer it becomes that the people who made great movies weren't necessarily great people, and certainly what you see on the screen doesn't reflect what you would have seen in their private lives. John Ford was an insufferable bastard, Henry Fonda was a terrible father, Woody Allen married his girlfriend's daughter. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist, Ward Bond hated Communists, Elia Kazan informed on his friends. Veronica Lake earned the nickname "the Bitch," Margaret Sullavan was a depressed alcoholic and Betty Hutton was as crazy as an outhouse rat. Clark Gable had bad breath and Joan Crawford's and Marilyn Monroe's legendary shortcomings I dare say you know about.
Renee Zellweger was reportedly so difficult on the set of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason that afterwards her co-stars Hugh Grant and Colin Firth announced their (thankfully short-lived) retirements from the movies. Jane Greer, on the other hand, was as sweet as chess pie, as loyal as a faithful dog and as brave as your average Marine, but that doesn't mean she wasn't absolutely riveting as the murderous femme fatale Kathy Moffit in the noir classic, Out of the Past.
There are any number of ways you can handle unpleasant information about the people who make movies. My father refused to watch Jane Fonda because of her politics; my mother-in-law still won't watch John Wayne because of his. Which is a pity from the point of view of the movie fan because it means you miss out on Klute and The Searchers, two great movies with two great performances that, I'll tip my hand now, will win their respective stars Katie Awards.
You can also go the other way and excuse behavior of your heroes you would never forgive of your enemies. Thus you'll find plenty of petitions seeking to free Roman Polanski despite committing a crime you'd insist your neighbor be buried for. Our brains are hard-wired that way, or so scientists tell us, something to remember the next you (or I) want to beat someone senseless for taking a position we don't agree with, but there's not much future for the republic if we're forever choosing to behave like territorial pack animals.
In writing this blog, I have opted for a third way. I have in the past and will continue in the future to distill out the professional from the personal, the on-screen persona from the private one, and though I have written about both, and will continue to do so, I've been choosing awards and reviewing movies strictly based on the former. Some of the winners have been creeps and some have been saints, but all of them have done something on screen that I think is worth your time and attention.
It's either that or stop writing about movies altogether. But then anything you write is guaranteed to offend somebody. After all, I imagine there are still some people out there who insist the world is flat. You can't please everybody.
So when 1938 rolls around, I will go ahead and lavish praise on The Adventures of Robin Hood and its star, Errol Flynn, no matter what he may or may not have done when he wasn't wearing green tights and a feather in his cap.
You're okay with that, right?
The ever reliable Wikipedia describes cognitive dissonance as that "uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously" and suggests that most people instinctively try to bring the two ideas into harmony by either changing their belief structure so the two ideas are no longer in conflict or rationalizing away one of the two ideas, again to reduce the conflict.Yesterday's seemingly innocent picture of Errol Flynn inadvertently created a lot of cognitive dissonance when, between Douglas Fairbanks's dirty joking and my own curiosity, we discovered that Flynn's already shady past cast darker shadows than we here at the Monkey had imagined. Not just a "dashing ladies man who drank too much and tickled Basil Rathbone's ribs with the blade," as I put it on Thingy's blog, "Pondering Life," Flynn was a serial seducer of underage girls (tried in 1943 but acquitted on charges of raping two teenagers and engaged to marry a fifteen year old at the time of his death in 1959), as well as, at least on one documented occasion, an anti-Semitic blowhard.
One biographer has even charged he was a spy for Hitler's Germany (although others contend he was a leftist drinking buddy of Fidel Castro's and the British government a few years ago revealed that during the last days of World War II, Flynn was actually a spy for the British).
In any event, nasty business.
Which is a bit of a problem because I, for one, like Errol Flynn's movies, particularly The Adventures of Robin Hood. Am I required to like Errol Flynn as well or otherwise have to explain away his private behavior before I can admit to such? Or should I just stop watching his movies altogether?The instinctive sense that I need to choose one of these options is cognitive dissonance.
There was an even bigger example of cognitive dissonance in the movie-fan blogosphere recently when Switzerland arrested Roman Polanski in advance of extraditing him to the United States to face sentencing following his 1978 guilty plea to unlawful sexual intercourse—a subject I hadn't planned to address in any fashion until my cryogenically-frozen head reaches 1974's Chinatown in this blog, sometime around the turn of the next century.
In my notes for the essay about the best director of 1974 (yes, I've made notes that far ahead— I've even written about Amy Adams's 2008 performance in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day and Lord knows you'll be waiting forever before I get around to posting it), I have written: "Judgment of Polanski the man I leave to you, to God, to history, to Polanski's own withered conscience and to the appropriate legal authorities in any event. I certainly wouldn't want anything I've said about Polanski the artist to be construed as a defense of Polanski the man."That's pretty much how I feel about Errol Flynn. And a lot of other people, too.
The farther I get into blogging about movies and their history, the clearer it becomes that the people who made great movies weren't necessarily great people, and certainly what you see on the screen doesn't reflect what you would have seen in their private lives. John Ford was an insufferable bastard, Henry Fonda was a terrible father, Woody Allen married his girlfriend's daughter. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist, Ward Bond hated Communists, Elia Kazan informed on his friends. Veronica Lake earned the nickname "the Bitch," Margaret Sullavan was a depressed alcoholic and Betty Hutton was as crazy as an outhouse rat. Clark Gable had bad breath and Joan Crawford's and Marilyn Monroe's legendary shortcomings I dare say you know about.
Renee Zellweger was reportedly so difficult on the set of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason that afterwards her co-stars Hugh Grant and Colin Firth announced their (thankfully short-lived) retirements from the movies. Jane Greer, on the other hand, was as sweet as chess pie, as loyal as a faithful dog and as brave as your average Marine, but that doesn't mean she wasn't absolutely riveting as the murderous femme fatale Kathy Moffit in the noir classic, Out of the Past.There are any number of ways you can handle unpleasant information about the people who make movies. My father refused to watch Jane Fonda because of her politics; my mother-in-law still won't watch John Wayne because of his. Which is a pity from the point of view of the movie fan because it means you miss out on Klute and The Searchers, two great movies with two great performances that, I'll tip my hand now, will win their respective stars Katie Awards.
You can also go the other way and excuse behavior of your heroes you would never forgive of your enemies. Thus you'll find plenty of petitions seeking to free Roman Polanski despite committing a crime you'd insist your neighbor be buried for. Our brains are hard-wired that way, or so scientists tell us, something to remember the next you (or I) want to beat someone senseless for taking a position we don't agree with, but there's not much future for the republic if we're forever choosing to behave like territorial pack animals.
In writing this blog, I have opted for a third way. I have in the past and will continue in the future to distill out the professional from the personal, the on-screen persona from the private one, and though I have written about both, and will continue to do so, I've been choosing awards and reviewing movies strictly based on the former. Some of the winners have been creeps and some have been saints, but all of them have done something on screen that I think is worth your time and attention.
It's either that or stop writing about movies altogether. But then anything you write is guaranteed to offend somebody. After all, I imagine there are still some people out there who insist the world is flat. You can't please everybody.
So when 1938 rolls around, I will go ahead and lavish praise on The Adventures of Robin Hood and its star, Errol Flynn, no matter what he may or may not have done when he wasn't wearing green tights and a feather in his cap.You're okay with that, right?
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