Have you ever stopped to listen — really listen — to the fervor with which Village People frontman Victor Willis extols the YMCA’s virtues in the band’s most famous song? That’s how I feel about libraries, to the extent that one of my chief house-hunting criteria was “must be located within walking distance of a library.” Crankenstein agreed. We’d both been nerdy kids who read almost everything our home branches had to offer, and she shelved books at hers throughout high school to save money for undergrad.
Especially when she was in residency and fellowship, spending long hours away from home, I practically lived at the library. She joined me there a couple times a week, emerging with stacks of books (science, history, cookbooks, graphic novels) for her bedside table and handfuls of CDs to play during her commute. As January nears its close, I thought I’d start a monthly feature showing some of the movies and TV shows I borrowed. But I have to keep some secrets, so as not to spoil a special project I’ve been working on that won’t be announced until later this year.
Fans of classic movies will recognize that with the exception of Criterion’s Rouge, these were mostly Bette Davis titles, with a sprinkling of Joan Crawford. I’d optimistically borrowed them ahead of the basement work, figuring I might have time for some short movies — many of the older Warner Archive releases clock in at just over an hour. Some I’d seen before, a few I hadn’t, and I sure wish Warner would release more collections instead of single-disc editions; the list of Archive-related interlibrary loans I need to request is a few miles long by now.
None of these were holds, I just plucked ’em off the shelves. There aren’t enough Miriam Hopkins films on DVD, but if you keep an eye on Amazon Prime, Tubi and YouTube, you’ll find the occasional streaming treasure. Smooth Talk, despite its great performances, wasn’t a rewatch that I looked forward to, but Joyce Chopra directed several TV movies on my review slate and I wanted to brush up on it. You’ll find among her credits Nancy McKeon’s Baby Snatcher, Elizabeth Montgomery’s Edna Buchanan flicks, and 2003’s Hollywood Wives: The New Generation.
Crime and Cassavetes were this week’s prevailing themes, with a little Miriam Hopkins and Yasujirō Ozu tossed in for good measure. Now I have to track down Bride by Mistake, a 1944 remake of 1934’s The Richest Girl in the World, which paired Hopkins with Joel McCrea. (Though McCrea is considered boring by some, I love him in The More the Merrier and his work with Preston Sturges.) Featuring Laraine Day opposite Alan Marshal, Mistake doesn’t have the most inspiring cast, but as you might’ve guessed from some of my antics at Cranky Lesbian, I’m nothing if not a completist.
I’ll probably make at least one more library run this month, weather permitting. If so, I’ll update this post. And if any of you ever spot something that makes you think of a recommendation, you can let me know via the contact form or in the comments over at Cranky. Occasionally I review reader suggestions: Before and After and The Cat Creature fall into that category, and there’s a Cloris Leachman movie I’ll post about soon that was also a reader request. In keeping with the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme, another reader has been patiently waiting for me to get around to Mary and Rhoda for a year or two now. I should take care of that for him, but it’ll be an even more depressing rewatch than Smooth Talk.
Updated 1/29/24 with the last borrows of the month, which feature an assortment of familiar faces and one who is (mostly) new to me. You might recognize He Was Her Man and The Beast of the City as pre-code films about crime, a fun genre at any time but especially during that era. The former features a romance between James Cagney, an all-time great, and Joan Blondell. He’s a felon with a bounty on his head and she’s a former prostitute, which was the original plot of Brief Encounter until David Lean asked Noël Coward to rewrite it.*
Never Let Me Go, a Clark Gable adventure pic from 1953, is the sort I’d normally skip, except it’s also a Delmer Daves-directed romance costarring Gene Tierney. Daves is a sentimental favorite, even when his films are overlong and underwhelming, and Darryl F. Zanuck could’ve cast Tierney opposite an animatronic dinosaur or a ham sandwich and I’d still be there with bells on. Dorothy Mackaill, on the other hand, has mostly flown under my radar, but who could resist the synopses from the back of the Office Wife/Party Husband double feature:
Early Talkie titanness Dorothy Mackaill stars in this steamy pairing of racy dramas that tested the limits of the censors — and of marriage! The Office Wife features Mackaill playing a “welcome danger to the tired businessman” while sharing the screen alongside a scene-stealing and clothes-shedding Joan Blondell (in her sophomore screen appearance!). Party Husband finds ex-Ziegfield Girl Dorothy playing the better half of a thoroughly “modern marriage” whose openness threatens to bring about its premature end.
Finally, we have a film each from Isabelle Huppert, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Emmanuelle Devos. All were among my most ardently admired actors in the aughts, before my zanily possessive ex ensured that keeping up with their careers was more trouble than it was worth. Then I met Crankenstein, whose attention span and Maxine Waters-like devotion to “reclaiming [her] time” dictate that we primarily watch sitcoms and one-hour TV mysteries together.** That means I still have some catching up to do with those three actors and other French-language favorites, including Sylvie Testud, Sandrine Bonnaire, Emmanuelle Béart and Isild Le Besco (to name a few).
* It should go without saying that I made that up. Obviously it was Gertrude Lawrence who ordered him to rewrite it. (That, too, is a lie… or is it?)
** Unless it’s a Tolkien adaptation, of course. (What sound is more fitting here to symbolize my sorrow, a sad trombone or the world’s tiniest violin?) She also likes short thrillers and horror films from the ‘30s and ‘40s, and comedies from any era, but if they aren’t in English or German she eventually gets lost after disappearing into her phone.