As we’ve all without doubt most sadly heard by now, Dame Elizabeth Taylor has passed away at the age of 79 after being hospitalized six weeks ago for congenital heart failure. With a career and life as wildly storied as hers (the accolades and awards! The marriages and divorces and remarriages! Her tireless contributions to the fight against HIV and AIDS! Being Elizabeth frickin’ Taylor!), it would be wrong to not offer one of Hollywood’s greatest and most glamourous screen icons of all time a moment of elegant and somber reflection, which is precisely why you should read this New York Times‘s obituary. It really is quite the lovely tribute.
This being the particular corner of the internet that it is, however, it would also be remiss to not pay respect with a wink and a mince and the utmost devotion to the divine Dame Taylor. After all, we’ve gotta smile through the tears (and believe me, there were tears this morning. At work. And now. So awkward!), which is precisely (and perhaps a little surprisingly?) why I’m not going to make too much about this:
Tony Hawk can suck it, y’all, ‘cos this is everybody’s new Lord of Dogtown (whatever the Catherine Hardwicke reference that means):
Apparently this photo comes from Katharine Hepburn’s autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life, which raises the following important questions:
Why in the world haven’t I read Katharine Hepburn’s autobiography? It’s an autobiography written by Katharine Hepburn. With pictures of Katharine Hepburn. Like this one of Katharine Hepburn riding a skateboard. I sorry, but SOLD. (Katharine Hepburn!)
Also, who wants to give me $40 so I can also get a used audiobook read as by the author? Seriously, few things truly delight me more her clipped, New England diction. It’s like slathering fresh Maine lobster and putting it in my ears. Delicious.
Does this mean I can now start referring to Katharine Hepburn as “noted cinema thespian/extreme skateboarder”? I suspect not, but f*ck it. As far as I’m concerned, of course it does!
Am I going to use the pleasingly surreal sight of Katharine Hepburn on a skateboard as an excuse to what I do believe to be the most indisputably batshit insane picture of Katharine Hepburn ever?
Estimated budget of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow as according to Box Office Mojo? $70 million. Total worldwide box office of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, again, as according to Box Office Mojo? $57, 958, 696; in other words, just shy of $58 million. If you’re going to be an accountant about it, I guess that makes Kerry Conran’s loving homage to Classic Hollywood film serials, kitschy sci fi aesthetics, and New York City architecture in the late 1930s (seriously, the scene where Gwyneth Paltrow goes into Radio City Music Hall is an instant Art Decorgasm) something of a box office failure. Not an outright bomb, for sure, but also not about to get Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow 2: 2 Late for 2morrow greenlit any time soon. BOOO, 0bviously. Obviously? Obviously.
If I’m going to be completely honest about these sorts of things, I must admit that my first introduction to Marlene Dietrich–and naturally the beginning of my obsession–didn’t come from Dietrich and director Josef von Sternberg’s first film together, The Blue Angel. Hell, I can’t even claim to have come around when I saw her infamous same-sex kiss in von Sternberg’s Morocco, which forever boggles my mind that they were able to get Dietrich in a tuxedo kissing another woman past the censors in 1930, during an in-class screening of The Celluloid Closet. No no, I first swooned for Marlene Dietrich thanks to a Mercedes Benz, this Mercedes Benz commercial to be exact:
Nothing puts me in the mood to caterwaul “DAAAVID!” quite like the delightfully crazy-eyed focus that Katharine Hepburn brings as she attempts to pop an olive into her mouth while wearing one of the most decidedly bonkers veils I’ve ever seen in my all-time favorite screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby. I mean, have you seen the masthead? I wasn’t simply punning on Dirty Dancing, y’all. No no, think of the masthead as a multi-layered, metatexual tapestry of terrible punnage that looks like a four-headed ouroboros (one for each of the leading ladies in Sex and the City 2). Seriously, I’m not sure anything will ever be as egregious as the one-two pun(ch) of “Abu Dhabi Doo!” and “Lawrence of my labia,” and it should probably remain unknown if such a pun exists, but much like Judy Garland or Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in the following clip from Bringing Up Bay:
I’m well aware that Alfred Newman’s booming score ads a certain melodramatic je ne sais quoi that a single frame can’t do justice; nevertheless, there’s something to be said for the unsettlingly austere gaze with which Gene Tierney’s Ellen Berent spreads her father’s ashes (back and forth, back and forth!) on horseback in John M. Stahl 1945 adaptation of Ben Ames Williams’s Leave Her to Heaven. That, and those lips. Seriously, either I’ve got an asexual fetish for crazy ladies in red lipstick, or dazzlingly red lips are Technicolor color coding for “psycho bitch.” Either way, I love it.
And as usual, don’t hesitate to click to enlarge and appreciate the fabulousness of it all.
Because you can’t appreciate the Humoresque sweet without having to taste Humoresque sour, and because I can never get enough Joan Crawford (particularly until I’ve finished reading David Bret’s epically salacious Joan Crawford: Hollywood Martyr) here’s Joan Crawford’s Helen Wright shedding a single tear of profoundly agonized longing for her violinist lover, Paul Boray (John Garfield). He’s playing the Liebestod from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, she’s drowning her sorrows as she listens to him on the radio, and my head’s exploding from having a moment appeal to the Crawford queen AND the opera queen in me.
In case you’ve ever been curious, here’s a picture of Randolph Scott and Cary Grant enjoying dinner:
It should come as neither a secret nor surprising that I find Cary Grant to be as ridiculously sexy as I find donut bacon cheeseburgers to be ridiculously delicious, and of course I’ve heard the rumors that he and fellow actor Randolph Scott were a lil’ bit (to borrow a word from David Bret, author of the thoroughly trashtastic–and highly recommended by me–Joan Crawford bio, Joan Crawford: Hollywood Martyr) lavendar, but I never realized what a hot piece Randolph Scott was. Seriously, if Cary Grant just so happened to be thinking about how much Randolph Scott’s mustache tickles instead of how delightful the chicken was when that picture was taken, could you really blame him?
ANYWAYS, Betty White was on The Joy Behar Show last night, and that Newsweek storythat never dies came up as a topic of conversation, at which point Betty White inadvertently revealed that Cary Grant was probably thinking about Randolph Scott’s “mustache” after all. Here’s the video from over at Queerty:
Beyond the singular pleasure that comes from watching a pitch perfect, classic Hollywood melodrama or the preternatural pleasure that is all but inevitable when witnessing Bette Davis’s deeply moving turn as Charlotte Vale, there are plenty of smaller pleasures to be gleaned from Now, Voyager. Pleasures like Bette Davis wearing the most fabulous movie hat to end all movie hats:
Seriously, Bette Davis’s hat gives all other movie hats hat envy. Particularly Kate Winslet’s hat from the beginning of Titanic. It’s a movies-with-narratives-that-prominently-feature-cruise-ships thing.
And here’s Bette Davis knitting while wearing the sort of sunglasses that make me long for a time when sunglass–and the rest of the world–stood for things that really mattered. Namely glamour:
Some people might say that it’s those sunglasses cover up those Bette Davis eyes. Everyone will say I should get off the stage for writing such an embarrassing pun.
Oh! And I’d be remiss to not mention the greatest Now, Voyager gift of all:
From a still for the 1932 film Letty Lynton, here’s Joan Crawford epitomizing 1930s glamor in front of the most glorious Art Deco revolving doorway I’ve ever seen:
I’d like to imagine that this is the gay man’s version (or at least this gay man’s version) of Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates, but that might count too much of a good thing even by Heaven’s standards, so I can be willing to settle for just the doorway.
Here’s Joan Crawford’s cameo in the 1949 Doris Day vehicle It’s a Great Feeling:
Or as I like to call it, “Joan Crawford in furs, birthing cinematic Postmodernism.”
And then there’s Queen Bee, which leaves me without many words whether it’s as a single image:
_02.jpg "Annex - Crawford, Joan (Letty Lynton)_02")
