"John, when you're kissing me, don't talk about plumbing."

I always forget about Christmas in Connecticut, showing now on TCM, and it's such a sweet picture. Barbara Stanwyck is so good at not knowing how to do anything remotely domestic. Plus S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall is in it, fresh from an earlier appearance on TCM this morning in the painful Never Say Goodbye (1946), with Errol Flynn, Eleanor Parker, and the precocious (see "painful") Patti Brady. I confess that I had been confusing him with Gregory Ratoff, Max Fabian from All About Eve, which was a terrible mistake.

No one can convey distaste for a man like Stanwyck. Or desire.

Speaking of which, she's about to pounce on the affable,  eligible Dennis  Morgan so I'm going to cut this short. But first, I've noticed two striking sociological oddities for  the time. First, an African-American restaurant worker defined the word  catastrophe for "Cuddles" Sakall without "dialect" and in an obviously well-educated way. Not bad for 1945. Second, the women who drop off the babies for the ruse are working women, unphased and unapologetic at having their kids looked after while they work at the war plant.

Interesting.

And short lived.

The only mystical experience I ever had was in India in 1996 and it involved Barbara Stanwyck.

I had just purchased a paperback biography of her from one of the many street book vendors in Bombay and was reading it in my hotel room — with the TV on, of course — when I got to the section about her career in Westerns. I laughed out loud when I read the name of the theme song from Forty Guns, "High Ridin' Woman with a Whip," when what did I hear clip-clopping euphoniously from the television...? Yes! The very same "High Ridin' Woman with a Whip" and the film Forty Guns. A cold chill ran from my left big toe up through my right eyeball.  From that day forward, I felt a special connection to Barbara Stanwyck. Too bad neither the film nor the book was very good.

Born on this day in Brooklyn in 1907, Ruby Catherine Stevens would eventually become everyone's favorite actress to work with — from the crew on up. A swell collection of photos and a fine homage can be found on the fansite, Barbara Stanwyck — The Queen, a nice break from Wikipedia.

Some of my favorite films of hers:

** Baby Face (1933). Girl from the wretched side of the tracks sleeps her way to the top of a very tall building.

** Stella Dallas (1937). If you don't cry at this movie, you're dead inside.

** Remember the Night (1940) and Ball of Fire (1941). They're pretty much the same movie, but both are very good.

** Clash by Night (1952). Source of my favorite line: "You want my life story, Joe, I'll give to you in four words: Big ideas. Small results."

And I guess Double Indemnity (1944), but only the way Steve Hayes tells it:

Ginger Rogers was a really good actress and I'm sorry that these kids today probably will only ever know her through that apt but aged saw "...did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels." Blah blah blah. If anyone ever has a chance to see anything of hers by accident, that is, which is terribly, shamefully unlikely.

For my money, you can't beat her in:

** 42nd Street (1933). I love this picture. It's silly and she's hilarious.

** Stage Door (1937). Such a good movie, it should have been made in 1939.

** Vivacious Lady (1938). And may I just say, oh my god, the chemistry between her and Jimmy Stewart is fantastic. You have to know how I feel about Jimmy Stewart to appreciate what that means.

Sorry, I didn't care for Kitty Foyle, but it was nice she got an Oscar. Read the book; it's much better.

Happy Birthday, Virginia Katherine McMath. You'll always be four years younger than Barbara Stanwyck and she never got an Oscar for acting — which is a SCANDAL, but not your fault.

Here she is on "What's My Line?" for the second of six appearances.

Before there was IMDb and Wikipedia, there was my sister, Jennifer. I have called her from truck stops, cocktail parties, and faraway countries in the middle of the night to ask something like "Who was that guy, UGH, you know him he's been in every noir ever, wears a white t-shirt, always snarling a little, not really handsome but kinda sexy in a murderous thug kinda way... It's killing me." And she'd say, "Yeah, Robert Ryan, what about him?"

Well she's come through again with "Tired Old Queen at the Movies," which she's been telling me about for a while now and which I keep forgetting to check out. Today she sent me a link to Steve Hayes (the Tired Old Queen) reviewing Double Indemnity. He does a great imitation of Stanwyck at 2:41 and later a surprisingly accurate Fred MacMurray.

My sister is never wrong.

Born on February 10, 1930, Robert Wagner is one of the few stars left who can claim a firm link to Hollywood's Golden Age. I first became aware of him in the mid 1970s as the ex-con-turned-P.I. in the series "Switch," with Eddie Albert and the lovely Sharon Gless, on whom I developed such an enduring attraction that I refuse to watch the show today in any available digital form, lest it ruin my memory forever.

In my late teens I saw Wagner in Titanic as the young college boy who develops a shipboard crush on Audrey Dalton, the daughter of Clifton Webb and my eternal mystery date, Barbara Stanwyck. He is dashing and sweet and believable and brave, and the film is better in many ways than its James Cameron mega-spectacularaganza remake whose only redeeming feature is Kate Winslet's fantastic (and rightly, effectively, and oft-highlighted) decolletage. Not only is the 1953 Titanic superior in storytelling and casting, it spawned a romance between Robert Wagner and Barbara Stanwyck that lasted several years until his marriage to Natalie Wood. And he had the class to wait 50 years to tell the tale.

The man has depth and humor and has carved out a long, profitable, and respectable career for himself and I salute him.

Observe his fine performance on "What's My Line" taped just a couple weeks after his 27th birthday on February 24, 1957. He does an admirable Clarke Gable, Jimmy Stewart, and James Cagney.

Happy Birthday, RJ.

Behold the exquisite beezer of Anita Sharp-Bolster (Uneeda Biscuit?), the common denominator of last night's double bill at Noir City 9. She played the sharp-tongued housekeeper in The Two Mrs. Carrolls and a sinister co-conspirator in My Name Is Julia Ross. Loved her.

The following trailer gives  away practically everything that happens in the movie (except possibly the extent to which Humphrey Bogart chews up and spits out the scenery), so I won't bother to sum it up.

Aside from Anita Sharp-Bolster (Amanda Hugginkiss?), there was not much memorable about this picture, except of course Ann Carter, shown here in her Bad Seed braids as the eerily precocious daughter of nutbag Humphrey Bogart.

I found the scene when young  Bea Carroll (Miss Carter) explains to her nutbag father (Old Man Bogart) why she doesn't feel as close to him as she does to her soon-to-be-murdered mother pretty touching. Alas, Little Ann Carter’s career was cut short by a bout with polio, which she contracted in her teens.

Silly picture, but kind of fun. George Macready (you may remember him from, oh, 2,000 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock presents, Paths of Glory, a coupla Twilight Zones — any part that could use an eight-inch facial scar) was a very entertaining psychopath, as was Dame May Whitty, his devoted mother.

I liked that Nina Foch didn't just accept that she was crazy when she woke up one morning among complete strangers who kept insisting that yes, she was married to that man over there shredding women's clothes with a pocket knife, his mother, and their servants, and not the new secretary hired the other day by the woman from the mysterious convenient agency, and  that she clung to the knowledge that she had only just the day before been Julia Ross, recently estranged girlfriend of a charming jerk called Dennis who knocked her up then went off to marry somebody else.

A B-movie breath of fresh air, really, but one I don't really need to see again. 

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.