Intl. Women's Day, and some "film festival", sponsored by Uncle Bingo's Bald Cream and Knob Butter.

 

 

March 8 was International Women's Day.

As per the good book, "be prepared to give a reason for your hope".  And that, indulging hope and so forth, as the Ides of March approach, good old Bette and Cassiopeia.  "Methinks yon Cassie has a lean and hungry look."

Turner Classic Movies is doing a dual focus with women's month and the Oscars, putting mostly the Oscar films in prime time, and squeezing Bette Davis and other classic actresses into the obscure hours.  To some observers, such a relegation would seem a kind of minimizing effort, but wait, the obscure hours are the haunts of some of TCM's most ardent supporters....  some 9 am in the morning or something.

To get the blood flowing on my own little itinerary, a documentary about Barbara Stanwyck.

Weekend of Friday 8 March: Barbara Stanwyck.

Weekend of Friday 15 March: Maureen Ohara

Weekend of Friday 22 March: Katherine Hepburn

Friday, March 8 2024: Crime of Passion.

Previously I had seen some of Barbara Stanwyck's early efforts in film, as a "babyface": a fresh young beautiful face on the silver screen, and even a movie called Babyface, but here she's somewhere in transition in terms of screen persona, in Crime of Passion, opposite Sterling Hayden(more on him later).  Its that profound thing of life experience, a kind of mental tarnish that takes the innocence and beauty and turns it into a bronze luster and duller still daydreams of simply holding on to those regular moments: maturation.

Sterling Hayden in the mix, that cave man glare, the simplistic boom of voice.  A basic kind of hard stone of a man, like when Sterling Hayden brick-walled Peter Sellers's RAF officer....

I called Crime of Passion the "price of cabbage" in my notes on this one.  Its a variation of the yellow wallpaper, I suppose, that a woman's vibrant and active mind is turned asunder by marital concerns.  She's not co-opted or taken charge of, specifically, as in the Yellow Wallpaper; she willfully gives up a brilliant career as an up and coming journalist for the sake of her husband.  He becomes her focus, and with all that time and talent of her left idle, she begins to invent some unique, but morally bankrupt, ways to advance the career of her beloved.

Caveman Sterling Hayden is perfect as the good-guy working-stiff detective.  He's a less caffeine-fueled version of Donnie Wahlberg's detective character on CBS's Blue Bloods, but nevertheless, smart or dumb, he's honest.

However.

His wife envisions him growing in his job, not only becoming better at the work, but advancing higher into the chain of command.  She attaches that, staples it to his mental chicken, and stakes her hopes that the man's value is in his work status, and not in other things.

Mind that his character explains that the police job is just a means to make a wage, and that it doesn't define him.  Consider, if he feels that way, then maybe he hasn't giving his best to the job, if it doesn't own some of his pride, some of his identity.

The film asks the question that a lot of us have wondered about from time to time, "who ordered this Lox and cream cheese on a bagel"?

Saturday March 9: The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers.

Martha Strangelove(Martha Smith/Ivers) in Barbara Stanwyck, and a young Kirk Douglas as "supporting cast".

Sunday March 10, 2024.

Perhaps one of the best of the cable television experiences, is numerical channel surfing, just like we did for decades before streaming and the absences of numbers of the television remote controls.

So there I was, full of unction...

"flipping" from The Redhead From Wyoming on INSP, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Turner Classic Movies.  Redhead, was a new one to me, while Cat was beloved and familiar.  Mere appetizers and afterthoughts during my little Gal's Month revue.

...she just brushes through--does the redhead in the low-cut saloon girl dress, turned horse meat monger, cattle baroness- lightly scraping against the felicities of some cowpokes, and that with its jealousies and infatuations alternating in such a way as to produce dull violence amongst several big ranches, the local police, the state courts, and a candidate for governor.

She's Cattle Kate, is Maureen Ohara.  And she has to struggle some to get, not exactly far ahead, but to just to keep her place with the ranch.  And the struggle, Cheevers, we relate to that.