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.

Last year a friend of mine from work asked me what my favorite movie was — a question that is impossible to answer with just one title — so I gave her a list of inflected suggestions to pursue on Netflix. Upon review, I see I was on a kind of Preston Sturges kick, but by and large, I support my recommendations.

And I present this year-old list to you, herewith, arranged by mood.

Stage Door (1937)
If you don't come away with a better appreciation of Ginger Rogers after this picture, I will never speak to you again. [Netflix]





** The Philadelphia Story (1940)
There is nothing wrong with this movie. Best supporting performances by Virginia Weidler and Ruth Hussey. [Netflix]

** Holiday (1938)
Cary Grant acts with his face. [Netflix]

** The Women (1939)
L'amour L'amour. If you've never seen Mary Boland, see her in this. I even like Joan Crawford in this movie. [Netflix]

** The Little Foxes (1941)
Oh Dan Duryea, you're such a pig. This is probably my favorite Bette Davis movie. [Netflix]

** A Letter to Three Wives (1949)
Just good, clean, weird fun with a dash of Thelma Ritter. [Netflix]

Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944)
I really REALLY need to be in the mood for this one. Betty Hutton sets my teeth on edge generally, but she's kind of sweet in this. Maybe because she doesn't sing this time. [Netflix]



**The Lady Eve (1941)
Barbara Stanwyck and an heir to a beer empire. It writes itself. [Netflix]

** Ball of Fire (1941)
Not-So-Snow White and the Seven Aspergery Academics. [Netflix]

** I Love You Again (1940)
William Powell is my boyfriend. [Netflix]

**The Awful Truth (1937)
Funniest divorce ever. [Netflix]

** Gold Diggers of 1933 (uh...1933)
Again, I really need to be in the mood, but Joan Blondell is lovely. [Netflix]

** Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
"What's wrong with the way I talk?!" [Netflix]

**Swing Time (1936)
Lovely. Never ever change. [Netflix]

** Gay Divorcee (1934)
Stupid Hays Office. [Netflix]

Titanic (1953)
Spoiler: the ship runs into some trouble.

Barbara Stanwyck is fabulous and Robert Wagner is a hot, grinning fool with a wild shock of bangs. [Netflix]


**Penny Serenade (1941)
Manipulative and heart-wrenching, even though you kind of want to throttle the little girl. [Netflix]

** The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Myrna Loy is truly the best at portraying a real wife. A real stylish, classy, and gorgeous wife, but real. [Netflix]

** A Matter of Life and Death/Stairway to Heaven (1946)
Technically a romantic comedy, but it makes me cry like a little girl. [Netflix]

** Dawn Patrol (1938)
Pilots lived on average 20 minutes during the Great War. That's all I have to say. [Netflix]

** Dark Victory (1939)
You'll cry just listening to Humphrey Bogart's Irish accent. [Netflix]

** Kings Row (1942)
Ronald Reagan's Hamlet. [Netflix]

** Wuthering Heights (1939)
Bleak, but less so than the book. [Netflix]

** World of Apu (1959)
Beautiful grief. [Netflix]

Black Narcissus (1947)
You will wonder why you've never heard of Kathleen Byron. [Netflix]






** Night of the Hunter (1955)
Spoiler (not): Shelly Winters winds up under water again. [Netflix]

**Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
This is the first movie that truly frightened me when I was a little girl. [Netflix]

** Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Gloria Swanson was approximately my age when she made this picture. Just saying. [Netflix]

** Sudden Fear (1952)
The star of this movie is the dictaphone. But seriously, how could Joan Crawford think a hunk of man like Jack Palance was in it for love? [Netflix]

** In a Lonely Place (1950)
Gloria Grahame is great in this picture, but she was trouble (TROUBLE)  in real life. She's also in Sudden Fear, above. [Netflix]

** Diabolique (1955)
Ohhhhh, scary. Scary scary.  You just have to accept that the "ingenue" is past quarante. [Netflix]

** M (1931)
A terrifying story beautifully told and brilliantly acted. If you really want to mess yourself up, watch this and Freaks as a double feature. [Netflix]

Oh heavens there are so many others. I've neglected the Japanese and Germans (apart from M), but I'll save them for another list. Let me know if you want more. I could do genre as well.

There's a department store in Bath, Maine, called Reny's, that sells — along with Everything Else in the World — criminally cheap  (because they're almost certainly bootleg) DVDs of astonishing and obscure films. The stack I'm looking at right now includes:

     **The Woman Hunter (1972 CBS Movie of the Week), starring Barbara Eden

     ** Kansas City Confidential! (1952): "It Explodes Like a Gun in Your Face!"

     ** A double feature with Susan Hayward in Tulsa (1949) and Jane Russell in The Outlaw (1943), which I guess makes it a quadruple feature, hyuk hyuk

PLUS
     ** The Great Guy (1936), starring James Cagney as a tough-as-nails agent of New York's Bureau of Weights and Measures.

But the film we watched last night was Incubus (1965), starring Canadian sensation, William Shatner, because who wouldn't want to see Shatner in the Between Years — post-Brothers Karamazov, pre-Star Trek — in a film described in drop shadow on the back of the DVD as:

"Utterly bizarre, yet strangely compelling, this artsy horror film demands to be experienced..."
Genre: Horror / Classic Black & White
English Subtitled

English subtitled? OK, maybe it's a Spaghetti Gothic. Come the credits, my friend, Clarke (also a product of the UC Berkeley Linguistics Deparment) and I start to wonder which the hell country this film was made in. There were plenty of Italian-looking words, but what was that Slavic "j" doing there? Croatian, maybe? Some speculating then lapsing of interest, then on comes the picture, something that would like very much to be Bergman and Fellini and Polanski all rolled into one. Then the characters started speaking and we snapped to attention.

"That's wrong! That's all wrong! That's a feminine article with a masculine noun and if this is some Slavic language why does that sound like a neuter German accusative word form?!" Then it hit me: Oh my god, I think this is in Esperanto!

Yes, Esperanto, the Klingon of the Gay 90s. The movie got instantly better from then on with Clarke and me waxing obnoxious over the insane, awkward regularity of the language and making Esperanto-inflected cracks to each other for the rest of the evening.

As an experiment, Esperanto was a lovely idea — one of international brotherhood and cooperation and is, indeed, quite a simple system to pick up, and as such, made it a target of totalitarian dictators who tend not to go for that sort of thing. Someone on Wikipedia writes  that Hitler, whose birthday, coincidentally, was yesterday (122 years young), even mentioned Esperanto in Mein Kampf "as an example of the kind of language that would be used by an International Jewish Conspiracy once they achieved world domination."

Of course, I read that and thought, "Surely Hitler would have used a definite article to describe any kind of International Jewish Conspiracy."

Here's a clip from Incubus.

For more artificial and superior linguistic fun, I give you SpongeGar (I apologize for the ads and the Nickelodeon sales monster):

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.

I post this out of love for Steve Hayes' love of damned good movies. Another tribute to the star that was Elizabeth Taylor. And Katharine Hepburn. And Monty Clift.

Here is the Tired Old Queen at the Movies presenting Suddenly, Last Summer. Thank you, Steve.

Before Keith Olbermann ruined James Thurber for me forever, he did right by continually calling Glenn Beck "Lonesome Rhodes" Beck. And it was funny every single time.

I just finished watching A Face in the Crowd (1957), which I hadn't seen for at least 15 years, because I'm still pretty mad at Elia Kazan. As a picture, it's about 30 minutes too long and pretty heavy-handed. Andy Griffith could have been directed better (everything will be Kazan's fault, you'll see) and he shouts an awful lot, but otherwise is pretty good. As the woman who makes and breaks him, Patricia Neal turns in a terrific performance and kept reminding me, oddly, of Kate Winslet every now and then. She's a marvelous actress and plays Marcia Jeffries complicated and vulnerable. Oh and Walter Matthau is in it too.

You can't beat the picture for prescience and if you want to feel extra stupid about why Fox News is possible, you should watch it. But you can probably stop after you see Rhodes all alone at the big table.

Let me say one or two words about Lee Remick. I've been in love with her since The Omen, but I never knew she could twirl a baton. Golly.

I've already done the Birthday of the Week, but today is Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's birthday and the guy was great. What can I say? Sure, the scandal was hideous and dreadful for all concerned — lurid and career-ruining — plus the woman died and everything.

Anyway, anyway... I used not to care much for slapstick at all and especially avoided the kind where the big joke was about being fat or drunk, so I didn't come around to Arbuckle until my early 20s — and then only just, because he hung around with my girlfriend, Mabel Normand.

Then last July I saw him in "The Cook" at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival with Buster Keaton and  became a true fan, as I hope you will too if you aren't already. Remember, all the stunts are done by the actors and the dog. The whole thing's a ballet.

Enjoy. But don't try any of this at home.

Part I

Elizabeth Taylor was 10 when she made her first film, There's One Born Every Minute, (1942) and was only 12 when National Velvet made her famous. One of the few child stars of the time to enjoy progressively more success as she grew older, Elizabeth Taylor had a long and impressive career —  starring in more than 50 films, at least 20 television appearances, and taking home two Oscars.

Much will be said about her over the next several days, but I remember her fondly as Amy in the wretched June Allyson version of Little Women, and pretty much anything she did with Montgomery Clift.

Elizabeth Taylor died today at the age of 79. Her last birthday was on the day of the 83rd Academy Awards and I hope she had a wonderful evening (in spite of the show and being in the hospital).

Just last week I posted a clip of one of her early cinematic turns as little orphan Jane's only and, sadly, fatally consumptive friend in the 1943 film Jane Eyre. Here she is a scant five years later in the trailer of A Date with Judy (1948).  I leave it to you to marvel at her development.

Listen! National Velvet, Lux Radio Theater
(Broadcast February 3, 1947 — It's nearly an hour, so make some popcorn)

I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to write about Virginia Weidler. As the smartest, most regular-looking, cleverest girl in the room, she meant the world to my sister and me. We loved her like a great friend for many years. She was the closest thing to a real person in the classic films we adored and one couldn't help but watch her and hope she'd say or do more.

If you haven't seen her in anything, you must see The Philadelphia Story. Then maybe Young Tom Edison. She's good if less herself in The Women, but that's not her fault.

By the time she was 17, Virginia had made 45 films and had been in the business for 12 years. She retired shortly after Best Foot Forward, a wise move, got married and had two children. She died in 1968 at the age of 41.

Here she is as a rabid autograph hound in her penultimate picture, The Youngest Profession (1943). Her line, "What's more important, Walter Pidgeon or liver and onions?" has become something of a motto for me.

Virginia Weidler would have been 84 today. Happy Birthday, Buddy.

An interesting quote lifted directly and wholly from IMDb:
[When asked about her career in later years,] Virginia would always change the subject as quickly as possible without being rude. She never watched her old movies or replied to requests for interviews. Although she was never one to criticize, I think our boys got the impression that their mother didn't think very much of the motion picture industry." -- Lionel Krisel, Weidler's husband

I first became aware of Edward Everett Horton through "Fractured Fairytales," then F-Troop,  then Fred & Ginger movies (which are glorious, but basically cartoons). It wasn't until I caught Holiday on some late show that I realized what a wonderful actor he was.

According to IMDb, the man had some project going every year from 1922 until 1971, the year after his death at the age of 84. If you've heard him or seen him, you've loved him.

Happy Birthday, Edward Everett Horton. Every time I think of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, I hear him call her by her real name, Tusinelda Wolfenpickle, but can't for the life of me confirm that with YouTube.