Doris Day was born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff 89 years ago today. Hard to believe, isn't it? I don't know what more I could add to the great body of information there is out there about her (including her excellent memoir, Doris Day: Her Own Story), except to express my admiration for her talent and perseverance in the face of stupid marital and professional choices.

I think she's a lovely human being with a beautiful voice who has had to navigate complicated roles and a messy personal life for at least six decades. I could listen to late 1940s Doris for hours. She just melts my heart.

I first became aware of Jan Sterling in one of my favorite films, Caged (1950) starring Eleanor Parker and Agnes Moorehead. She played a dizzy inmate called Smoochie who wore cute little pigtails. I thought she was marvelous and it's been a mystery to me why she didn't get better parts after that.

She had an unworthy role in the Thelma Ritter vehicle, The Mating Season, only a year later and watching her I thought how tough it must have been to be so blonde. Apparently, she got an Oscar nomination for her role in The High and Mighty, a film I guess I should see again, because it keeps coming up over and over again.

Here she is in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents story, "On the Nose," as a compulsive gambler. And the dope who plays her husband winds up on Little House on the Prairie as the guy who runs the sawmill some 15 years later, so it all works out in the end.

The other day I ran across the program to a private film festival my friend Monica and I held at her place on Shotwell Street in San Francisco some time in 1994. It was called "Nearly the 100th Anniversary of Going to the Movies" and we screened 15 movies in one day, with a half hour break in the middle to bestow Agnes Moorehead with the first (and only) Lifetime Achievement Award for Hollywood's Scandalously Neglected. The award was to have been forever after known as "The Aggie" and we never did it again, which in itself is scandalous.

It is time to set things right. I am hereby resurrecting the Aggie Awards, since it is Oscar Season and they've stopped parading the Hollywood Elders Miraculously Still Alive on the actual show.  Date and details to follow once I've had a chance to gin up interest.

Meanwhile, I'll start the ball rolling with two lists of contenders for Scandalously Neglected Actor and Scandalously Neglected Actress — and a chance for you to throw a name in the ring.

Now the boys...

Here is the program that started it all. Looking back, I'm pretty impressed with how many studios and eras we covered. It was a 12-hour extravaganza with two rooms going at once: one for features (the first seven pictures in the slideshow) and one for diversions. There may have been some drinking.

I've always liked and respected Ida Lupino, but watching her in Beware My Lovely propelled her to new heights in my estimation. The movie — produced by her production company — had me right at the very spooky opening sequence, when Robert Ryan discovers the body of his employer in a broom closet and flees across a rail yard. Soon he comes to the home of a war widow (Lupino) and begins doing odd jobs around the house. When his character, Howard, asks to hang his coat in a cleaner closet, it hit me: this was the same story as "To Find Help," another Agnes Moorehead tour de force from Suspense I had heard years ago on The Big Broadcast (WAMU 88.5)  while driving home from Brooklyn one dark and stormy night. It was so good that I sat in the car outside the house (after a 5 hour drive, mind you) just to find out who played the creepy young man. It was Frank Sinatra.

On screen last night, all things started to play out just as I remembered in the radio play with one or two modifications  to great effect (I kept a wary eye on the dog, for instance). It's a terrific, terrifying, and extremely well-acted film and I recommend it highly.

Coincidentally, seeing this movie only confirmed my feelings about "Sorry, Wrong Number" the radio play versus Sorry, Wrong Number the film, which I watched on YouTube yesterday just to make sure. I can see why people who haven't heard the Suspense broadcast would give the movie high marks — it's scary, gorgeously shot, and well acted; however, as an adaption it comes across (to me) overwrought with unecessary exposition and introducing sympathies that distort the dramatic effect of the original. It is a good movie — just not a good adaptation.

Beware My Lovely is both. Please see it.

I'm going to go ahead and say it...the movie's no good!

Really, don't bother.

I present for your listening pleasure, the West Coast broadcast of "Sorry, Wrong Number," written by Lucille Fletcher and first broadcast on Suspense, May 25, 1943. There was a dramatic flub at the end of the East Coast (first) version, so I am posting the second airing for those of you who have never heard it.

All eight recordings of the radio play are available for download. By 1944, the phone number the desperate woman was trying to reach was changed from MurrayHill 7-0093 to MurrayHill 4-0098. Why? I have not idea, but I find it interesting.

Just want to point out that it's very different from the film. You really want to kill Mrs. Stevenson in the radio version.

Let me count the ways. 

But I gotta make it quick today, so I'll just list some good lines from the  Stanwyck Two-fer from last night at Noir City 9.

In case you can't read them, here are the quotes highlighted on the movie poster:
     ** "Where have I failed you as a husband?"
     ** "You're not even a woman anymore...just another dame with the 'fever'!"
     ** "I picked her up in an alley...with a pair of loaded dice in her hand!"

Some pretty dire pronouncements, don't you think? And poor Robert Preston — so strapping a guy for such a tiny mustache.

And a couple choice bits tweeted by anniebacon (a person I've never met, but who, noir-like, I now follow):
     **  Better than gambling:  "Spitting half a mile...and a two-inch steak."
     ** "I'll take a lush any day. At least a lush passes out sometimes."

Listen, I'm still on the fence about this movie on account of Agnes Moorehead scaring the pants off me when I first heard the broadcast in my Middle School AV Room. The woman who wrote the original "Suspense" play, Lucille Fletcher, also wrote the screenplay, which you think would help, but I'm just too in love with the original.

Still, Barbara's hair is much better in this picture than in The Lady Gambles. That Jane Wyman cut is  the least flattering hairdo ever; it works on no one.

I was going to write about Among the Living, which was the second feature of yesterday's program at Noir City 9, but can really only focus on the irony of the title and the coincidence that I was *just* talking with a friend about a different film shot in a radioactive desert that quite possibly contributed to 91 of 220 cast and crew developing cancer; 46 of whom died from the disease, including Susan Hayward, one of the stars of Among the Living.

That film was The Conqueror, a Howard Hughes venture shot just a grenade-propelled-stone's-throw away from a wildly active U.S. nuclear bomb test site.

Frances Farmer, another star of Among the Living, also died of cancer, but I'm guessing that was the least of her worries.

__  A film I've never seen, nor do I have any interest in seeing (even though Susan Hayward was in it...I mean look at her...) , The Conqueror is notorious for having been the putative reason for the untimely demise of a number of Hollywood stars to cancer, who, during the filming of this crappy picture, were exposed to  the radioactive fallout from months of above-ground nuclear testing — about 11 detonations having occurred a year before shooting began.

An article in People Magazine (11/10/1980) goes into more atomic detail about the filming of The Conqueror, including the moving of 60 tons of radioactive dirt by Howard Hughes back to the studio for use for retakes — on top of the 13 weeks of location shooting in the hot zone.

Anyway, Howard Hughes said he felt real, real bad about it later.