classic movie impressions

Summer of Marilyn: Some Like it Hot

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 5 Comments

Last week the days got away from me and I completely forgot to watch my Marilyn movie, let alone write about it.

I’m back this week, though, talking about Some Like It Hot with Marilyn, Jack Lemmon, and Tony Curtis.

This was a crazy, hilarious, insane film that had me gasping and laughing through the entire thing. It was released in 1959 and directed by Billy Wilder.

It was something I needed as I’ve felt like my brain has been racing lately with worry and a rushed feeling.

The movie takes place in 1929 with booze being smuggled into a funeral home that is actually a speakeasy.

They are musicians – Jerry and Joe.

The speakeasy gets raided and they don’t get paid

They need money so when they hear that a band needs a couple of replacement girls they decide they need to become women – or well, sort of anyhow. Tony nixes that idea though and says they need to take another job instead but when they go to pick up the car, they witness a mob murder. Now they are forced to dress as women and get as far away from Chicago as they can, which in their case is Florida with the female band.

They buy the clothes and the wig and the makeup and board the train.

That’s when they meet Marilyn, a.k.a. Sugar.

Sugar is a bit of a drinker and they can’t help checking her out, but trying to pretend they aren’t checking her out.

Marilyn sings and dances in this one and shakes a lot which Jack and Tony very much enjoy. Jack, in fact, says he would like to have a cup of that sugar. This is the movie where Marilyn sings, “I Want to be Loved By You” with THAT dress. The one that had to be filmed partially in the dark because it sort of looks like she’s half naked, even though there is fabric there.

It is clear early on that Sugar is an alcoholic who needs her booze. At one point, she sneaks into Jack’s bed looking for booze, which, of course gets him hot under the collar. While it’s Tony that keeps reminding Jack that he is supposed to be a girl, Tony himself gets a bit attached to Sugar himself. When he learns that Sugar dreams of meeting and marrying a millionaire, he decides he’s going to find a way to be that millionaire for her.

While pretending to be a millionaire he does a hilarious impression of Cary Grant, which just cracked me up, especially when he said to Jack later something like, “Of course I’m faking it. No one really talks like that.”

On and on the craziness went on in this movie until my head was spinning with it all and with laughter.

There are a lot of sexual innuendos in the movie, including one where the band leader says,  “A reminder to all you boys out there, all my girls are virtuosos and I intend to keep it that way.”

When Tony reminds Jack that he’s a guy and not a girl, he tells him, “Jerry, there is another problem. Like what are you going to do on your honeymoon?”

That questions ends up being a bit rhetorical as Jack’s character says they haven’t decided where they will go on their honeymoon yet.

According to information online, the movie was made for $2.9 million and made $49 million. Overall since the time it was released, it has made $83 million internationally.

My husband said he read that Marilyn could not stand Jack Lemmon so I Googled to see if this was true. According to the site Slashfilm.com, it wasn’t really that she didn’t like Jack, she just didn’t like anyone at that time. She was lashing out at a lot of people and they got caught in the crosshairs. She was abusing medication at the time and dealing with depression. I guess it is fitting that her character was an alcoholic since she was one in real life at times too.

She was also pregnant during the making of the movie and later went on to have a miscarriage after filming ended. I believe she had a few during her career and I’m sure this was part of her issues during the filming.

She and Tony Curtis actually dated in 1949, which I found interesting. It was only for a couple of months, according to Curtis.

Jack said he liked Marilyn, but felt sorry for her because he could tell she was troubled. He had less scenes with her than Curtis and didn’t have to deal with her habitual lateness as much.

Wilder was completely frustrated with Marilyn through most of the filming because she often could only get through a small amount of dialogue part of the time, after showing up late, according to a couple of articles. She cost the production half a million dollars with all her delays and he made it clear to her he was not happy with her when he held a cast party when the filming was done and did not invite her. She decided she didn’t like him either and told his wife to tell him to do something very anatomically impossible for a person to do with himself.

Years later he said that he didn’t have issues with Marilyn as much as she had issues with herself. He also said that her discombobulated and erratic behavior actually led to some adlibbed moments that made the movie a classic. Still, I think he would have preferred they didn’t have to write her lines on the inside of drawers because her brain was so addled from drinking too much and taking pills.

Wilder and Marilyn did make up before she passed away, especially because he still considered her a brilliant actress despite the issues she had during filming.

A bit of trivia from IMBd:

  • Some people asked why Curtis was so much better at walking like a woman or having female mannerisms than Lemmon and he told an interviewer it was because he tried so hard to be a female he was very tightly wound and overthinking it. Lemmon, on the other hand, “ran out of his dressing room screaming like the Queen of the May,” kept much more of his masculine body language.”
  • Tony later said that he asked Wilder if he could imitate Cary for his stint as the millionaire in the movie. Wilder liked it and they shot it that way. Apparently, Grant saw the parody of himself and stated, jokingly, “I don’t talk like that.”
  • Marilyn wanted the movie to be shot in color (her contract stipulated that all her films were to be in color),but Wilder convinced her to let it be shot in black and white when costume tests revealed that the makeup that Tony and Jack wore gave their faces a green tinge.
  • Marilyn didn’t originally didn’t want to play Sugar. She said, “I don’t want to play someone who can’t tell Daphne and Josephine are really men dressed in drag.”

Another tidbit that I pulled off Wikipedia was that this movie was made without the approval of the Hayes Code, which was a code in the “old days” that determined what could and could not be in movies. It wasn’t long after this movie was released and became a huge success that the Hayes Code was discontinued.

Oh, and I did figure out that the name for the movie comes from the music when Tony asks if Marilyn plays her music hot and she says she does and he says he likes his music slower but “Some Like It Hot.”

Have you seen Some Like It Hot? What did you think of it if you have? Let me know in the comments.

Up next I’ll be watching The Seven Year Itch.

After that I will be watching:

July 20: Monkey Business (because it’s Marilyn and Cary together)

July 27: All About Eve

August 3: The Misfits

Summer of Marilyn: Niagra

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 4 Comments

This summer I am watching Marilyn Monroe movies for fun. I was supposed to watch Some Like It Hot this week but The Husband (this is a silly nickname I give my husband for the blog) wanted to watch Niagara so I said we should go for it since I’d never heard much about it.’

It was not the romantic or screwball comedies I’ve watched so far from her so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was a little nervous it was going to be super dark but it was more intrigue than darkness.

The Husband calls the movie light noir. He also pointed out that she was only in about 35 minutes of the movie but believed she completely stole the show, which I agree with now that I’ve seen it.

This movie is one of the first major acting roles Marilyn had, and she doesn’t use her signature breathy voice which answers the question I had before – that breathless speech wasn’t her normal speech. It was simply her signature voice. I liked hearing her normal voice because the other way she speaks is so fake to me and grates on my nerves. That could be because I have seen so many parodies of her over the years.

This movie came out in 1953 and from what I can see, quite a bit of it was actually filmed at Niagra Falls. It was directed by Henry Hathaway.

The other stars of the movie, who were in it even more than Marilyn, were Joseph Cotton, Jean Peters, and Max Showalter.

The movie starts with Marilyn’s husband at the falls in a place I’m pretty sure you can’t stand at anymore if you were ever allowed to in the first place. The man travels back to a cabin right next to the falls and I really wanted to know if that is a real place because the idea of a room overlooking the falls seems awesome to me. I can imagine it might also be loud, though.

I looked it up and it turns out the cabins are not real.

According to IMbd, “The Rainbow Cabins were not real cabins, they were movie sets built exclusively for the film at a cost of over $25,000. They were built in Queen Victoria Park directly across from the American Falls. The stone structure located by the Rainbow Cabins was torn down, but a similar one can be found in the same park at “Rambler’s Rest.””

The man returns to his room where Marilyn has been smoking a cigarette but then quickly pretends she is asleep which already eludes to the fact that she may not be what she seems.

We move over to a couple who are visiting Niagara Falls both for a delayed honeymoon and to meet up with the owner of the company the man works for after the man won a contest. They reserved a certain cabin but Marilyn and her husband are still in that cabin. Marilyn (Rose) convinces them to let her and her husband (George) keep the cabin because she says her husband is suffering from PTSD from the Korean War and had been in a psychiatric hospital.



The couple reluctantly agrees to move to another cabin, but they will continue to run into Marilyn (Rose in the movie) again and somehow get swept up in the crazy drama that will begin to unfold shortly after they meet her.

While sightseeing at the falls, the wife spots Marilyn making out with a man who is clearly not her husband and realizes there is a lot more to the story of George and Rose.

That becomes even more clear when Rose wanders into a party being held at the cabins, places a record on the player, and George doesn’t like it so he breaks the record.

The wife (Polly) goes to the cabin to help him take care of his hand which he cut on the record and he tells the couple that he met Rose while she was working as a barmaid. She is considerably younger than him, full of life and he thinks she hates him because of all his issues.

Pretty sure the couple (The Cutlers) didn’t want to know all that but, well, there they had it.

Things start to go off the rails pretty quickly for George and Rose and, sadly, for the couple trying to just have a nice holiday. I won’t give away too much but there is a murder plot and mistaken identity and – well, you just have to watch it to believe it. It’s pretty crazy.

I will give away that I really wanted to punch Mr. Cutler about three times in this movie. Maybe five. I, in fact, dislike Mr. Cutler so much with his goofy smile that I didn’t even bother to look up what the first name of his character was while writing this blog post. I don’t even remember the name of it.

The guy was so dismissive of his wife’s concerns the entire time that by the end of the movie I was rooting for a full-fledged divorce. One day I’ll write an alternative ending to the movie where she tells him she’d be better off without him because he acts like she’s a crazy, hormonal woman all the time.



According to Wikipedia, the idea for the film came from Walter Reisch who eventually wrote it with Richard Breen and Charles Brackett. They said most films that take place at the falls are romantic, but Reisch wanted a film with murder in it.

Monroe was suggested to play a main role by the head of Fox Studios, Darryl F. Zanuck. According to Wikipedia, Reisch liked the idea but when Zanuck suggested she play a villain, he wasn’t so sure.

“According to Reisch, “We thought that was a nice idea until there came a second telephone call that he wanted her to be the villainess, not the girl… My God! Here was the prettiest girl in the whole United States of America! But he insisted it was a great idea, so we finally did it. We didn’t know whether she would like it, but she had no objection, whatsoever—on the contrary.”

A bit of trivia:

  • Jean Peters who played Polly Cutler had originally been suggested for Marilyn’s role, but by the time the movie started to get made, Marilyn’s popularity had grown and Peters was switched to play the wife. (No big deal because the wife got more screen time anyhow).
  • According to IMbd, even though she had a starring role, Marilyn Monroe was still under contract to 20th Century-Fox as a stock actor at a fixed salary, so she actually made less money than her make-up man did.”
  • During filming of the shower scene, director Henry Hathaway had to keep yelling at Monroe to keep away from the shower curtain and away from the lights as she insisted on being naked (as she was under the bed sheets at the beginning of the film). To pass the censors of the time, the scene was darkened in post-production.
  • Canadian officials didn’t like the film because they said it gave Niagara Falls a bad name by focusing on a murder taking place at it.
  • The “Letterman Hospital” that Rose mentions at the beginning of the film, saying George was a patient there, was Letterman Army Hospital at The Presidio of San Francisco. Built in 1898, it cared for returning wounded soldiers from every major conflict, especially World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. It was closed in 1994, the Army base at The Presidio was decommissioned in 1995 and the buildings of the hospital were demolished in 2002.  2005 Lucasfilm opened its headquarters on the site and named it the Letterman Digital Arts Center. (source IMbd)

Overall, if you haven’t already guessed, I enjoyed this film. It had me biting my nails and hooked until the end. While it did exploit Marilyn’s beauty and there were those moments of men gawking at her like they’d never seen a woman before like in other movies, it was still a great storyline.

If you want to read another review of the movie (which I didn’t agree with) you can click here.

Another review is here.

If you want to read about Marilyn’s fashion in the movie you can click HERE.

Up next for my Summer of Marilyn will be Some Like it Hot which was the movie I was going to originally watch this week. I was going to watch Niagra next week, though, so I just switched the two around.

After that, I’ll be watching:


July 13: The Seven Year Itch

July 20: Monkey Business (because it’s Marilyn and Cary together)

July 27: All About Eve

August 3: The Misfits

Summer of Marilyn: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 8 Comments

I am watching Marilyn Monroe movies for the summer.

I have a confession.

I think she might annoy me a bit.

I know. Isn’t that awful?

It’s just that her breathy voice and the weird things she does with her mouth are so distracting to me. I know. Sacrilege to any hardcore Marilyn fan.

Maybe all her little gestures are annoying to me because I am a heterosexual woman and none of that does a thing for me.

Regardless, I’ve heard so much about her over the years, I figured I should actually watch her movies and see if she was any good or not.

So far, I have watched two of her movies all the way through and have decided that, yes, she was a good actress, but she was also put in a lot of stereotypical roles because of her large chest and pouty lips. I am hoping not all of her movies were like that, but these first two on my list here.

Of course, I have only watched the screwball comedies she was in so they would focus on her beauty as part of the plot points.

This week I watched Gentlemen Prefer Blonds with Marily and Jane Russell.

The movie starts with Marilyn getting proposed to – well, she’s getting a ring at least – by a bit of a nerdy man. That’s a theme in her movies – she’s always attracted to nerdy men with glasses.

As I started to watch the movie, I remembered I have seen it before. It has been years since I have seen it, though, so I totally forgot it was a musical. I should have remembered since it is the movie where Marilyn performed Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.

Anyhow, the movie continues with Marilyn and Jane, who are showgirls, deciding to go on a cruise to Europe. The women are also best friends even though they are very different. Marilyn (Lorelei in the movie) likes a man to be rich and buy her diamonds while Jane (Dorothy) likes a man to be fit and doesn’t care about wealth.

HyperFocal: 0

They both like to make men watch them, however.

There is a lot of skin shown in this movie, including a scene where Jane dances with members of the Olympic team who are also traveling on the ship to Europe. They are wearing only tiny, skin-colored shorts, the entire time. Little Miss asked, “Why are those men naked?” I realized at that moment that watching the movie with her in the room might have been a bad idea, even though it is way more tame than the movies out today.

There are several ridiculous moments as a private detective follows Lorelei on behalf of the father of her fiancé, who thinks Lorelei is simply a gold digger. The private detective and Jane fall for each other, which, of course, complicates things. There is also this whole thing about Lorelei trying to con an old, rich, married man out of a diamond tiara and later being taken to court to answer for the theft of it. Then there is that sexy dance scene in court by Jane, which was totally bizarre to me, but supposed to be funny. I’m such a prude – I just found it disturbing.

When I watch Marilyn movies and see how absolutely gorgeous she is, I am one, jealous, but two, aware of what it took to get her to that place of beauty because I once read an article about all the plastic surgery, dental implants and other physical changes she had to read that perfection.

As I watched the movie I also wondered if her movie voice was really her voice. Like is that how she talked when she asked for a fresh towel at a hotel or asked her assistant to get her a cup of tea? Or did she yell at people with a thick accent – like a Brooklyn or Boston accent? “hey! I’m walkin’ here! Whatreya’ doin’”

I mean, why did she talk like that? Was it considered sexy back then? I find it a little annoying today but that’s probably because I’ve heard so many parodies of her voice.

After a Google search, I learned from Vogue magazine that the breathy, whisper she spoke in was something she used to overcome a childhood stutter. She kept it for her acting and it became her signature voice. So, yes. It was her real voice and she used it in her everyday life. Not like Michael Jackson who totally faked that high voice, but I digress….

Now, When I saw Marilyn sing that famous song, I wanted to know if it was her voice so I Googled that too. The answer was yes and no. She did most of the singing, but an actress and singer Marni Nixon actually supplied part of the notes – the higher notes – which are the notes I thought weren’t hers.

Jane Russell matched Marilyn in this movie with her talent and humor. I do believe she was the better singer, but she and Marilyn were such a fun pair and worked well together.

The bottom line is that I liked the movie, but, as a self-declared prude, there is a lot I could have done without. For one, I didn’t need to see Marilyn and Jane in such skimpy clothes so much. I definitely didn’t need to see all the cleavage and I found myself rolling my eyes more than once at these women essentially using their bodies and sexuality to get what they wanted. Men were portrayed in this movie as too stupid to think when the women were around because, according to the movie, they were both too hot to handle. Men couldn’t be around them without melting into a sexually aroused mess.

I know that some will say that a movie like this was needed to show that women can be in control too and use their sexual prowess to get what they want – like men have been doing for years – but I don’t like it when either sex does that. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t have some fun watching the movie. It just wasn’t my favorite movie because the whole theme of “Marilyn and Jane are hot so men will fall over them” just was overplayed and overused in my opinion.

If you would like to watch the movie I am sure you can find it streaming, but I also found it on Youtube here:

Next week I will be watching Some Like It Hot, which is another screwball comedy with Marilyn, Jack Lemon, and Tony Curtis.

If you would like to join in watching the movies with me, here is the rest of the schedule for the Summer of Marilyn:

July 6: Niagra

July 13: The Seven Year Itch

July 20: Monkey Business (because it’s Marilyn and Cary together)

July 27: All About Eve

August 3: The Misfits

Summer of Marilyn: How to Marry A Millionaire

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 11 Comments

Two weeks ago I watched How to Marry A Millionaire and decided that weekend I would watch Marilyn Monroe movies for the summer, similar to how I watched Paul Newman movies last summer.

How to Marry A Millionaire stars Marilyn, Lauren Bacall, and Betty Grable and was considered a screwball comedy.

It was released in 1953.

It follows the story of Schatze Page (Lauren), Loco Dempsey (Betty), and Pola Debevoise (Marilyn) who are all looking for ways to marry a rich man and live the high life.

Or at least that’s the goal when the movie starts.

As we progress into the movie, we see the goals of the women begin to shift based on the men who they end up meeting along the way.

Each woman works on snagging a rich man and to do that they need a home base, so Schatze finds a home to rent from a man who is out of the country. She’ll need money to pay for the rental, though, so she begins to sell off the fancy furniture in the home, even though it isn’t hers.

Eventually, she and the other women will meet men who they decide they can snag and marry. Schatze meets William Powell, one of my favorite “classic Hollywood” actors. He’s 30 years older than her and a widower. More importantly, he’s rich.

She sets out to make him her own, but there’s a man named Tom who is trying to get her attention. She wants nothing to do with Tom, though, since he’s poor and won’t support her high-end needs.

Marilyn’’s character meets a wealthy businessman who is also a crook and she’s about to run off with him when she gets on the wrong plane and meets the man who owns the apartment on the plane. The apartment owner, it turns out, is trying to escape the IRS.

Betty’s character meets a married man and thinks she’s on her way to a Elk’s Club meeting in Maine, but has actually been invited to his personal lodge. She tries to leave when she realizes what is going on, but comes down with the mumps and is quarantined. While there, and after the man she came with becomes ill himself, she meets a poor but charming forest ranger and has to decide if she wants to pursue love or money.

Betty was supposed to be the star of the film, according to some articles, but, of course, Marilyn ended up with top billing.

According to the blog, Classic Movie Hub, Fox created the movie using anamorphic lenses developed by Henri Chretien in France. These lenses “expanded the audience’s peripheral vision by creating a panoramic, curved screen triple the size of a conventional screen,” according to the blog. This was in an effort to combat the rise of televisions in the American home.

Fox had two things to compete with television with this movie – Marilyn and these new lenses. They made a movie called The Robe first with the technology, however, because they felt that movie would appeal more to a wider audience and was more family-friendly.

The Robe was about a Roman centurion who commanded the unit responsible for the crucifixion of Christ.

(I think it is interesting that the woman in this photo by Lauren’s name looks nothing like her.)

Marilyn originally wanted Betty’s role since that role had more “snappy lines.” Playing Pola would mean playing a nearsighted woman who felt insecure wearing her glasses and often slammed into walls when she took her glasses off. Marilyn wasn’t confident in her comedic skills and wanted to back out, but the director convinced her to continue and she managed to pull it off amazingly well.

Lauren Bacall was already a well-known actress at this point and I felt she really held the group together.

In some ways I felt Marilyn did overshadow the others with her performance and not just because of her beauty. She pulled off the quirky-plus-innocent role well.

I felt like Lauren was out of place in a comedy but that’s probably because I am used to watching her in Noir-type films with Humphrey Bogart (who she later married).

Betty impressed me with her comedic skills and matched Marilyn’s quirkiness. I guess Lauren was more of the “straight-man” in the trio.

I loved William Powell in this. None of the other men really stood out to me, but that may be because William was so sweet and doted on Lauren’s character even though he really should have known she was a gold digger. And because I have a soft spot for him after watching him in the Thin Man movies.

I won’t share the ending of the movie, but I will say that the women redeemed themselves from their selfishness as the movie progressed.

As for stories from the set, the Classic Movie Hub blog relayed that Lauren and Betty were annoyed that Marilyn was late on set a lot and there were other minor snits between the three women.

From the blog: “When the three female stars assembled on the soundstage for the first time, the press awaited a mushroom cloud of conflict and cattiness or, at least, Grable’s bitter resentment of Monroe. However, Grable immediately embraced Monroe and ceremoniously told her, “Honey, I’ve had mine. Go get yours. It’s your turn now.” In response to Bacall grumbling about Monroe’s tardiness, Grable said, “Honey, give it to her. Let’s listen to records until she gets here. It’s her time now. Let her have fun.” Before long, Bacall found herself also feeling protective of Monroe.

I think this is my first time watching a movie with Marilyn all the way through. I enjoyed it and am looking forward the other films, though I know at least a couple of them are much darker than this one.

The next movies I plan to watch and when I plan to write about them are:

June 22: Gentlemen Prefer Blonds

June 29: Some Like It Hot

July 6: Niagra

July 13: The Seven Year Itch

July 20: Monkey Business (because it’s Marilyn and Cary together)

July 27: All About Eve

August 3: The Misfits

Next Classic Movie Impressions feature: Summer of Marilyn

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 1 Comment

I am going to be doing another Classic Movie Impressions feature this summer and so far, I am offering it up for whomever might like to jump in during the rest of June and part of July.

Erin from Still Life, with Cracker Crumbs is too busy in June for this feature and I know Katja has been busy as well, but the invitation for her to join in is totally there.

Anyone else who wants to join may do so as well and at any point. You don’t have to watch or write about all of the movies to be a part.

Now, onto who I am featuring this summer.

Marilyn Monroe.

So yes, the feature will be called A Summer of Marilyn.

If you have been following this blog for a while, you know I featured Paul Newman for my summer movie watching last year and Cary Grant for this spring.

I thought I should choose an actress this time around and decided on Marilyn when I discovered how many of her movies we own on blu-ray. I’ve also been a little fascinated with Marilyn because of how Hollywood really abused and used her until there was nothing left of her. It’s a story with a sad ending but I guess I am looking for some happiness she might have experienced in the making of at least a couple of these movies.

I’m going to kick off the feature this Thursday with How To Marry A Millionaire, which I watched on that wonderful Saturday where I had where five hours to myself with no responsibilities and no one else to care for.

If you want to quickly watch it, or have already seen it, and want to jump in, go for it. Or you can share a post later and just link to mine and I’ll let readers know you’ve shared your views too.

Without further ado, here are the movies I plan to watch and the dates I plan to blog about them on:

June 15: How To Marry A Millionaire

June 22: Gentlemen Prefer Blonds

June 29: Some Like It Hot

July 6: Niagra

July 13: The Seven Year Itch

July 20: Monkey Business (because it’s Marilyn and Cary together)

July 27: All About Eve

August 3: The Misfits

Spring of Cary: Suspicion

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 6 Comments


Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and Katja from Breath of Hallelujah and I have been watching Cary Grant movies this spring.

Up this week was Suspicion.

This one starred Cary and Joan Fontaine.

It was released in 1941 but takes place in 1938 and is based on a 1932 novel called Before the Fact by Frances Iles.

As soon as you see who directed the film – Alfred Hitchcock – you know this isn’t going to be your regular, happy-go-lucky Cary Grant film.

Here we are again with Cary playing a playboy named Johnnie , which I guess was the popular bad boy name back in the day. Or potential bad boy. This time he is Johnnie Aysgarth.

He meets Lina McLaidlaw (Fontaine) on a train by chance. Or is it by chance?


He sees her again at the horse track, where he is well known.

When he asks the women crowded around him who she is they tell him that she’s not really up his alley.

His response? “I’m a little bored with people up my alley.”

He’s clearly looking for a new conquest.

He’s very excited to meet her and she’s, of course, taken by him because, well, hello. It’s Cary Grant and he’s very delicious in this movie. He even knows she’s taken with him by the fact he finds a newspaper clipping featuring a photograph of him that she’s saved and placed inside the book she is reading.

(An aside: as a glasses wearer, I do think it is unnecessary that she keeps taking off her glasses to look more attractive. That is a minor issue, of course.)

At first it appears that Cary is really pursuing Joan in this film.

The question is why? He seems to have some underlying reasons for his apparent affection,

The movie seems very light hearted and he seems very charming and even full of humor.

But here seems to be something more sinister going on. You can feel it rumbling under the surface.

That rumble starts when Johnnie circumvents a trip to church by demanding she go on a walk with him instead. We immediately cut to a scene of them struggling.

“Now what did you think I was trying to do, kill you?” he asks. “Nothing less than murder could justify such a violent reaction.”

Whoa. Say what?

He claims he just wanted to touch and fix her hair. “Your hair has such exciting possibilities that I became passionate.”

Oh. Okay. Creepy.

He’s very handsy and touchy, even showing her first hand where her occipital maxillary bone is by reaching inside the top of her shirt to touch it. Like um…dude. Back off.

He even tries to kiss her on the hill outside the church and they barely know each other. Very forward and if I were her I would have slapped him but it’s clear the woman hasn’t had a lot of male attention in her life so she is wary, but is clearly eating up his pushy behavior. This is the first time he calls her “monkey face” which becomes his affectionate term for her throughout the movie. One I find irritating and degrading.

When he walks her back to her parents house he tells her he’ll see her at three that afternoon. She says she’s busy but then she hears her father saying she’ll never get married because she’s just not marrying material, she turns around and kisses him hard on the mouth.

From there her obsession begins and she starts pursuing him more than him pursuing her.

Now we, the viewers, are thrown onto a path of constantly wondering what this guy is really all about.


Her father suggests that he is wild and this seems to intrigue her even more. Now she wants him even more and begins calling him and sending letters. All of them go unanswered.

It’s actually a bit sad how desperate she becomes.

She finally meets up with him at a dance and all the girls rush to him but he has eyes only for her. He swings her out onto the dance floor and then out the door where they escape in his car.

“Have you ever been kissed in a car?” he asks.

“Never,” she says.

“Would you like to be?” he asks.

This all seems romantic for the most part, but, yet . . . something is just off.

He seems to be choosing someone who isn’t used to dating or attention from men for a purpose.

The camera angles in this movie are so well done – like all Alfred Hitchcock movies. Spinning cameras while they are kissing and panning out and in at the most interesting times. Then there is the play with light and shadows. They create such foreshadowing and a feeling of foreboding, especially toward the end of the movie when Lina really starts to question the motives of this man, who she incidentally marries.

After they marry, she’s whisked off to Europe for tours and excursions that blows the mind of her usually timid self.

Johnnie must have money, she thinks. He spent all this money and rented a beautiful home for them. But then Johnny asks for her help in paying a friend back $1,000 that he borrowed for the honeymoon and the red flags start flying everywhere. She ignores all those red flags and steps all over them.

I’m not going to give away too much about the movie in case you have never seen it but there is a lot of dark behavior by Cary in this movie and even though he is handsome and charming he is also inconsiderate of others and emotionally manipulative when it comes to his wife. Eventually he’s also outright abusive.

There is also way too much denial from this woman for most of the movie. I feel for her and how she was completely swept up by Cary’s charm, but I have to admit I might have done the same. I mean, that smile. Come on. So captivating.

One of the many odd things about this movie is apparently everyone is supposed to be British and it’s supposed to be in England but almost no one has a British accent.

I found it interesting that Fontaine won an Oscar for this movie and that it was the only Oscar won by any actor in a Hitchcock film. I was shocked that Cary didn’t win and wasn’t even nominated for his role because I really thought he did a phenomenal job of being both charming and creepy.

I also thought it was interesting to see a woman dressed as a man at one of the dinners with a local crime novelist (whose books Johnnie loves to read and that’s all I’m going to say about that. Ahem.), which was not common in movies back then. A blog says that the woman dressed as a man is the female novelist’s wife or partner, but I have no idea. I suppose that’s what is implied but it wasn’t the main focus of that scene.

The film, according to an article on Wikipedia, shows what happens when Hollywood transfers a novel to film because this film changed the intent of the book. The book’s message was about how a person feels knowing they might be murdered. Again, not to give away the end of the movie, this was changed in the film under pressure from the studio and it’s something that Hitchcock was not happy about and apparently complained about for years.

It was his own fault, though. He caved under the pressure and let the screenplay writers write the ending the studio wanted. It is not the same ending as the book and now I want to read the book and see how it differs.

This was definitely my favorite of the movies we watched other than Holiday.

Next week is Notorious, which is another Hitchcock film and that will round out our Spring of Cary features.

I don’t know if we will do a Summer of … whomever or not yet. I am considering doing one on my own but…I haven’t really committed yet.

So, if you want to read Erin’s impressions of Suspicion you can do so HERE and you can read about Katja’s views HERE.

Spring of Cary: Operation Petticoat

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 7 Comments

For Spring Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumb, Kajta of Breath of Hallelujah, and I have been watching and writing about Cary Grant movies. I always add this disclaimer: the movies we watched were chosen because I had never seen them before, not because they are his best. I was trying to watch movies of his I had not seen so thought I’d do a challenge similar to my Summer of Paul last summer.

Now, with that disclaimer out of the way, last week we delayed writing about Operation Petticoat because Erin and I both had busy weeks and felt frazzled. We found out later that Katja also had a weird week so that worked out well.

Okay, now back to the movie, which is a comedy and that is really what I needed last week and still need this week. I find it surprising that this movie, out of all of Cary’s movies was actually the highest grossing of his career at $9.3 million. It was extremely popular when it was released in 1959 and is still considered the highest-grossing comedy of all time. Crazy, right?

Anyhow, we open with Cary Grant in a naval officer’s uniform.

This is actually a photograph from the end, but close enough.

At this point, I pause and sigh as I admire the view. I pause the film for a moment and sigh again.

In a world where men are being feminized more and more, it is refreshing to see a real man looking like a real man in uniform. Again, in case you don’t understand what I am saying, he does look nice in a uniform.

Now, on with the show.

Cary is an admiral in the Navy in the beginning of the movie. He’s gone back to a submarine that he was once the captain of. He finds his way to the captain’s cabin and waits for him to arrive and while he does he reminisces about when he was captain and all the craziness that happened one day in the beginning of the U.S.’s involvement in World War II.

Here is a bit of background and plot of the movie from Wikipedia so I don’t have to explain it all in my awkward way.:

“In 1959, U. S. Navy Rear Admiral Matt Sherman (Cary Grant) boards the obsolete submarine USS Sea Tiger, prior to her departure for the scrapyard. Sherman, her first commanding officer, begins reading his wartime personal logbook, and a flashback begins.

On December 10, 1941, a Japanese air raid sinks Sea Tiger while she is docked at the Cavite Navy Yard in the Philippines. Lieutenant Commander Sherman and his crew begin repairs, hoping to sail for Darwin, Australia before the Japanese overrun the port. Believing there is no chance of repairing the submarine, the squadron commodore transfers most of Sherman’s crew to other boats, but promises Sherman that he will have first call on any available replacements. Lieutenant (junior grade) Nick Holden (Tony Curtis), an admiral’s aide, is reassigned to Sea Tiger despite a total lack of submarine training or experience.”

Nick, in fact, has so little experience he walks up in an all-white dress uniform and talks about all the mundane and unimportant things he did for the admiral. None of it includes being at sea.

Nick does have another talent – ideas for how to get supplies that the captain will need to get his ship running again.

His ideas are “less than proper” shall we say and it turns out the admiral’s aide isn’t a waste of space after all. While the commander thought he was soft, it turns out he’s a real con-man, which is what is needed to get the submarine back on its way to Australia.

Nick strikes deals with ex-cons, witchdoctors, and many others to make sure they can get their supplies or help.

While out to see they find an island on and on that island are nurses who were stranded there when their plane had to land in an emergency because they were being fired at by the Japanese.

Cary/Matt isn’t really very interested in taking the nurses on his ship of all men, but the men, of course, are thrilled.

Many suggestive and flirty comments begin at this point, especially between Nick and Second Lt. Barbara Duran who he offers his pajamas to on her first night aboard.

In this moment things become quite bawdy (though not dirty) when she says she couldn’t possibly take his pajamas and he says it is totally fine as long as he is not in them at the same time. When she asks what he’s going to wear he says, “I’ll take the bottoms, if you like the tops. Do you like the tops? You can have the bottoms if you want.”

Oh, dear.

Matt tries to take the women to an army base but the Army says they can’t take the women without the proper orders because the Japanese are closing in. It is because the Japanese are closing in that Matt allows Nick to set up a casino-like operation where enlisted men can bring them the parts they need and get paid for them. The hull was damaged in the initial attack and the torpedo man would like some paint to fix the chips and nicks in it. The only issue is that they can’t get their hands on any gray paint so they finally settle on red and white. We all know what color that makes so eventually the hull is painted – yes, pink.

As you can imagine, this makes the submarine a perfect target and creates even more hilarious moments on board as they try to make their way to safety. The real problem with the pink submarine and then some repairs that still need to be taken care of, is that eventually, their own side doesn’t know that it is them. I won’t tell you how they finally let the U.S. Navy know it’s them and not the Japanese, but let’s just say it involves some unmentionables.

A little bit of trivia from Wikipedia: Tony Curtis took credit for the idea for the movie because he joined the Navy during World War II to work on a submarine partly because he had seen Cary’s movie Destination Tokyo. After the war and after he became a star, Tony said he’d love to be in a movie with Cary where Cary would be a submarine captain.

An actress who was going to be in the movie actually pulled out because she felt there were too many sex jokes. She was probably right, but the jokes were still way tamer than the jokes that are in movies today.

One risqué quote that did crack me up from Cary was, “It’s like watching a striptease. Don’t ask how it’s done. Just enjoy what is coming off.”

The U.S. Navy supported the movie and allowed it to be filmed around Naval Station Key West, which is now called the Truman Annex of Naval Station Key West. The submarine was portrayed by three different World War II-era submarines.

I kept being too technical watching this movie and saying “You can’t bring a submarine up and down like that.”

My husband had to keep reminding me that this is meant to be a goofball comedy. “It is a typical Blake Edwards comedy.” Which I guess means that Blake Edward created crazy and unrealistic comedies.

And, yes, in case you are wondering or don’t know, the show Operation Petticoat (which I have never seen) was based on the movie.

Overall I really enjoyed this movie and it came at a time I needed something silly.

To catch up on what Erin thought of the movie you can find her blog here (the post might be late today) and you can find Katja’s blog here (her post might also be late but it will be up later).

Here is the original trailer

Next up to finish up Spring of Cary:

Suspicion (May 25)

Notorious (May June 1)

I’d love to do a Summer of Bogart and watch Humphrey Bogart movies, but I haven’t run that by Erin or Katja yet. I’ll see what they think. Maybe I’ll do it on my own for fun.

Spring of Cary: Holiday

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 7 Comments

Here we are to another week of Spring of Cary where Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are watching Cary Grant movies for the spring. Katja from Breath of Hallelujah is joining in when she is able to.

I chose the list of movies from the ones of Cary’s I hadn’t watched before.

Our movie this week is Holiday and it was released in 1938, so it was one of Cary’s early films.

The movie kicks off with Johnny Case (Cary) coming back from a visit out of town where he says he has fallen in love with a woman and is going to marry her.

His friends don’t believe him and think he’s going to be destitute with a woman and her family leaching off of him.

They have nothing to worry about because when Johnny goes to the address that the woman he wants to marry gave him he finds out her family is super duper rich and live in a house that looks like, as he describes it, Grand Central Station.

The potential bride-to-be, Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), lets him know she’s from the famous, well-to-do Seton family. She also tells him that her father will expect him to start working with the company and become a businessman and Johnny really isn’t sure that’s something he’s interested in. He just wants to have fun. Like he told his friends at the beginning of the movie:

“She wants the life I want, the home I want, the fun I want.”

But does Julia really want all that? We will have to find out.

After Johnny first arrives at the big, fancy house, Julia tells Johnny she’s going to go to church and tell her father about them, and on their way out the door, in walks Julia’s sister Linda (Katherine Hepburn), who is very intrigued with this man her sister says she’s going to marry. It is clear that Linda has an entirely different spirit than Julia. A much freer spirit.

Linda wants to make sure that Johnny is good enough for the sister she loves. Deep down she doesn’t want Julia to get married. We learn later that one reason she doesn’t want Julia to get married is because she doesn’t want Julia to move out of the house and have a home of her own, This will leave Linda alone to be bored and unsure of her own future. For now, she’s simply rattling around in the big house where the men in the family and their goal of succeeding is the main focus and she is expected to attend business parties.

Early on we learn that Julia and Linda’s mother has died at some point in the past, but she was a fun mother who wanted her children to stay somewhat grounded so she had a playroom built in the house that featured more common furniture and the tools each child needed to explore their passions in life (a drum set, paints, and workout equipment for example).

Johnny isn’t very interested in impressing the patriarch of the family. He wants to work for a bit to save some money and then take several years off of work and go back to work when he learns why he’s been working his whole life. This is what he tells Linda, saying he wants to take a bit of a holiday in between his working years. The term “holiday” is sort of a British term to me but I know he means a type of break or vacation.

Linda likes the sound of that because she’d like to take a holiday from her rather mundane life where she feels like her family has lost touch with – well, each other. She longs for the days when her mother was alive and everything felt more real and wasn’t all about money.

Linda can tell right from the beginning that Johnny is a free spirit and while Julia is nice, she is not a free spirit. She is a “this is the way we’ve always done it and it needs to be done this way still” type of person.

As much as Linda is worried about Johnny ruining Julia’s spirit, she also seems worried that Julia will do the same to Johnny.

It all comes to a head at the New Year’s Eve party where Julia and Linda’s father announces the couple’s engagement but Linda refuses to come to it because she was going to throw a smaller, less public, and more intimate party for her sister instead.

The sisters also have a brother, Ned, who keeps himself liquored up to deal with life.

This was really just a fun movie and I absolutely loved Katherine Hepburn in it. Critics called this her comeback movie after she had developed a reputation with RKO Pictures as being box office poison. I feel that in this movie she really showed them that they made a mistake. One critic in 1938 said the same, writing, “”If she [Hepburn] is slipping, as Independent Theatre Owners claim, then her ‘Linda’ should prove that she can come back–and has.”

She was sweet and touching in this movie and just pulled me into Linda’s world so easily. She and Cary had an amazing chemistry and as much as I liked Cary in this movie, I was mesmerized by her performance and simply impressed with his.

I really enjoyed Cary’s youthful exuberance in this movie. According to Wikipedia, he was 34 when the movie was made. He just seemed more chipper and happy in this movie than the previous movies I’ve seen him in. Since Cary was much younger in this movie, he was able to pull off a lot more of the physical comedy. Katherine got in on some of her own physical comedy during at least one scene.

This was one of four movies that Cary and Katherine were in together. The others were Bringing Up Baby (I absolutely recommend this one), the Philadelphia Story (I also recommend this one), and Sylvia Scarlett which The Husband just realized we have on DVD in a collection of Cary movies.

Incidentally, the director of the movie, George Cukor, almost cast Irene Dunne in the movie, which was the actress who was in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife with Cary. In the end, though, he chose Hepburn, which, as I mentioned above, did worry some in the industry.

I enjoyed this movie more than any of the others we have seen so far. To me, Cary and Katherine are simply a winning combination.

To see Erin’s impression of the movie hop on over to her blog (later Thursday for this week. She’s been delayed.)

I don’t know if Kajta will have a post today or not but if she does you can find her blog here.

Next up in our lineup for movies to watch:

Operation Petticoat (May 11)

Suspicion (May 18)

Notorious (May 25)

Spring of Cary: An Affair To Remember

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 8 Comments



I am watching Cary Grant movies with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs this spring. I picked movies of Cary’s I had not seen before.

I love this graphic Erin designed!!

Today we are discussing An Affair to Remember from 1957, which was nominated for four Oscars.

In this movie, Cary plays Nick Ferrante, a “international playboy”. He is a man who likes to date rich women – as many as he can at a time it seems.

As the movie starts, though, it appears that he is finally settling down. It’s worldwide news when he becomes engaged. He’s on a cruise, though, where there is a lot of women available to him and it’s there that he meets Terry McKay portrayed by Deborah Kerr.

He can’t seem to break himself from the habit of picking up women,so he starts with picking her up as well.

“You saved my life,” he tells her. “I was bored to death. I didn’t think I’d find one attractive woman on this boat. . . . I said to myself, ‘Don’t beautiful women travel anymore?’ And then I saw you.”

Then he proceeds by essentially trying to get into her pants. Excuse me for being blunt but he suggests they find something fun to do and he is her cabin. She, however, lets him know that she is romantically involved with someone. He keeps trying to get her to cheat and, well, eventually, that will happen with a few kisses, but nothing beyond that, as far as we are shown anyhow.

We see from the beginning that the connection is real, but then I did find myself wondering how real it was with two people who were willing to cheat on their romantic partners, especially the one who is used to moving from woman to woman. That’s the cynical side of me, of course. I mean they weren’t actually married yet.

They do try to stay away from each other on the ship but no matter where they go, they seem to bump into each other.

It is a literal bumping incident at the pool that leads Nick to invite Terry to meet his French grandmother during a stop by the ship in France. His grandmother adores Terry and Terry adores her and her beautiful villa. Terry learns more about Nick that makes her fall for him even more. He’s an artist, but he always destroys his paintings because they are never good enough, his grandmother says.

It’s at his grandmother’s that Terry breaks out her singing voice and shows she has hidden talents as well. But the ship horn is blowing, and they have to leave the grandmother, much to the grandmother and their sadness.

Terry clearly doesn’t want to love the grandmother because then she has to admit she’s falling for man who is not the man she has been romantically involved with and if she can’t have Nick, then she can’t have the grandmother either. But she does love the woman and  . . . yes, Nick.

An additional challenge for the now blossoming couple is that Nick is a famous socialite and everyone on the ship is watching them to see if they really are a couple so they can gossip about it.

Soon the cruise will be over, though, and they need to decide what they are going to do about their newfound love for each other. That’s when Terry decides they need to get their lives in order in the next six months and then if they both want the relationship, they will meet at the top of the Empire State Building in July.

They each go back to their lives, and we follow their journeys there until July. They both pursue their real passions in life during this time – art for Nick and singing for Terry. They both also change during this time, finding out what is real and most important in their lives.

You’ll have to watch the movie if you want to know if they meet or not, but if you’ve ever seen that one scene in Sleepless in Seattle, you probably know what happens. Or the gist of it. It really is a classic ending and I have my opinions on it, but I don’t want to share so I don’t ruin the ending for anyone who hasn’t seen it. All I know is that I wanted to yell at the screen a couple of times and that I had to wipe my eyes a bit.

I enjoyed this movie a lot more than My Favorite Wife. I did not expect Kerr to sing two or three songs in it, since it wasn’t a musical, but the songs were very nicely done. Overall, I felt the movie was well done. I did feel the ending was a bit rushed and would have liked to have learned a little bit more about what happened after it.

This movie was directed by Leo McCarey who also directed Cary in The Awful Truth, which, if you remember from my previous blog post about The Awful Truth, was a director that Cary clashed with originally. Cary didn’t understand McCarey’s style of directing, which included simply telling the actors the gist of the scene and then having them improvise. Cary eventually warmed to McCarey’s style and even expressed disappointment that he was not in McCarey’s movie Love Affair from 1939. He was so disappointed he talked McCarey into remaking the movie, which is what An Affair to Remember was, according to Wikipedia.

Cary and Kerr did improvise many of their lines and many of those were what appeared in the film according to trivia on IMBd.

Another bit of trivia on IMBd that I found interesting:

“Deborah Kerr plays Terry McKay, previously played by Irene Dunne in Love Affair (1939), of which this film is a remake. Both were directed by Leo McCarey. The year before this film was made, Kerr played Anna Leonowens in The King and I (1956), also a role that had previously been played by Irene Dunne in the black-and-white classic Anna and the King of Siam (1946). “The King and I” is a musical based on the same book.”

Next up for our Spring of Cary feature is the movie Holiday with Cary and Katherine Hepburn.

After that we have:

Operation Petticoat (May 11)

Suspicion (May 18)

Notorious (May 25)

To read Erin’s impression of An Affair to Remember, hop on over to her blog.