“Three for the Show” (1955) is one of the best and sexiest of the 50s musicals. Betty Grable, Jack Lemmon and Gower Champion are super. I love the Swan Lake ballet with Marge Champion and the tropical/congo number is quite memorable. I had my doubts about a Columbia musical but this one was worth the 15 cents at Goodwill I spent and even more!
Meanwhile, I bought a D Theater D VHS which (like advertised) won’t play on my VCR. This is a totally phantom system. What a discovery!
THE SHINING
Before they moved into the haunted hotel, Jack and Shelley were inadequate parents. In the opening scene, the kid is engulfed in smoke from Shelley’s cigarette and soon we learn that Jack, when not working on his novel, is a drunken abuser.
So when all hell breaks loose in the Colorado mountains resort hotel, we don’t have much sympathy for the hapless couple.
Director Stanley Kubrick borrowed generously from wide angle techniques Gregg Toland used in RKO’s “Citizen Cane” so that everything is in focus in the long shots down the endless hallways to hell.
Reviews are dismissive of “The Shining” in Halliwell’s book, but audiences ate it up in 1980. “Here’s Johnny!”
GAY PRIDE 2017
Appropriate for the Gay Pride celebration underway today, I am reading Clive Jone’s autobiography, “When We Rise” where we learn how he rose from street hustler to a resourceful leader in the 1970s Gay Rights Movement.
For those of us who didn’t live in California in the Seventies, there’s more than we need to know about local political figures in this book. Jones can thank Milk for pressuring him to stay in college and get a degree. He later achieved political prominence as an aide to a Democrat legislative leader.
Jones’ book would have benefited from economical editing. The title is the basis for the ABC documentary which aired in February.
JOURNALISM 101
When I was a teen watching “Teacher’s Pet” at Spokane’s Fox Theater with my friend Paul, little did I know in 1958 that I would pursue a journalism career. Professional virgin Doris Day portrays the professor who uses the same overhead projector to critique students’ news writing that my instructor used in Journalism 101. Gig Young is a college psychology professor who can’t hold his liquor.
Writers Fay and Michael Kanin crafted an insightful exposition on the importance of a college education for aspiring journalists. It’s the “old pro versus the egghead” story and the later prevails. The romance between Day and Clark Gable as the city editor is curious but then maybe Gable still had some fans from his Rhett Butler days 18 years earlier.
“Teacher’s Pet” is remembered for Mamie Van Doren’s torrid bump and grind in “Girl Who Invented Rock n’ Roll.” Ms. Van Doren later got a college teaching appointment in Allied Artists’ comedy “Sex Kittens Go to College,” where a computer selects a stripper to head the mathematics department at a small college.
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