Do you ever look back at the previous month and can’t remember what you did during it or if any of it was worth mentioning?
That’s me pretty much every month. Ha! But last month really was not terribly exciting for us and I think that is just fine.
We did celebrate Little Miss’s birthday at the beginning of the month. We took her roller skating with a friend and she also had a sleepover.
The Husband and I both remembered our grandmothers in October since they both had October birthdays.
Little Miss and I started taking art classes at the beginning of the month that will last another week and that has been fun. There will be a reception the week after next for the art the children produced in their class and then they will be on display at the library in town (which is also the county library because it is the only library in this tiny county).
I attended one of the adult art classes and will try to attend the last two. The instructor doesn’t really instruct, though, and I find drawing bottles absolutely dull, but I guess it gives me a bit of time to decompress and relax, away from responsibilities at home.
The Boy has also been getting back into art again. He drew these characters from various video games on the white board in his classroom at the technical school:
Our leaves changed rather slowly this year and did offer us some brilliant yellows and deep oranges. We still have a few on the trees, but for the most part the autumn winds have knocked them down. Little Miss and The Boy had one leaf-jumping day and then it became too cold. When it did warm up, we didn’t think about going back in the leaves again.
We had a mix of cold and warm weather in October, which sent our sinuses on a rough ride part of the time, especially last week when Little Miss and The Boy ended up with very short colds.
The Boy felt awful the day we took Little Miss trick-or-treating in a town about 30 minutes away so she could go with her friend and The Husband could take photos for the paper he works for.
Little Miss’s friend photobombing The Husband’s photo of the paper was one of my favorite moments of October.
The Boy and I sat in the car and listened to an audiobook he’s been enjoying while The Husband walked around town with her and her little friend, something he loves to do (don’t worry, I didn’t make him! Ha!).
By Sunday Little Miss was hit hard with the cold and on Monday she was absolutely miserable with a sore throat and pouring nose. On Tuesday she was better and was totally over it by Wednesday.
I thought I was going to get it as well but in the end, it somehow skipped me, other than a headache and minor sinus stuff on Monday.
As an example of the weird weather this week, yesterday it was 67 degrees and today it is 50. The day before yesterday it was 75. Today it is 50. I wish Pennsylvania didn’t have the yo-yoing weather it has. Pick one, Pennsylvania! Seriously, though, the nice and warm days were welcome, even if they felt a little odd to be having.
I’m looking forward to cooler temps in November that will leave me with an excuse to stay home, cuddled under a blanket. We will have to wait and see what happens and will make the best of it no matter what.
We have two birthdays to celebrate in November – The Boy’s first and then The Husband’s.
The Husband’s is on the same day as my brother and sister-in-law’s anniversary.
As for the rest of November, we don’t have a ton planned.
I will be finishing up the last draft of Gladwynn Grant Shakes the Family Tree and passing that on to editors and beta readers to read. I will be glad to have the project finished and plan to take a month-long break from novel writing and just enjoy some reading and movie-watching time in preparation for the Christmas season.
How did you October go? I hope it went well. Do you have anything exciting planned for November?
This is a blog link-up where we not only allow you to share your past posts but we encourage it. So share away!
I can’t believe we are at the end of October. It doesn’t even seem possible and our weather doesn’t seem to be showing that it is fall. We’ve been having above average temps. Today it was close to 80. Yuck! I do not like warm falls at all. One year about 9 years ago we had a super warm fall and winter. It was 80 degrees on Christmas Eve, which is unheard of in this area of the U.S.
I always talk about the weather on Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot day. I have no idea why. Maybe because it is better than talking politics, which I am so sick of I could scream and have actually screamed over recently. All the commercials, texts on my phone, signs in the town, and even entire tents being set up in the middle of our town. I have had it and I can not wait until it is all over!
Let’s move on to our most clicked posts for this week.
I’m so glad you are here and participating in our weekly link-up of family-friendly, fun, educational, interesting, crafty, fashionable, and whatever else posts. I hope you’ll tell your followers about our post (feel free to copy and paste the graphic) and visit the blogs in the link-up.
Now it is your turn to link up your favorite posts. They can be fashion, lifestyle, DIY, food, etc. All we ask is that they be family friendly. You can link up posts from last week or even from years ago. You can share up to three links each week.
We are always looking for additional hosts so let us know if you want to help out and we are also looking for more links from fashion bloggers so let your fashion bloggers know!
Originally, I was going to write about Practical Magic because Erin was watching the movie and I thought I would too. Then I watched Practical Magic and…plans changed. I’ll leave it at that.
Instead, I decided to rewatch the original black and white Dracula movie from 1931 and write about that. I will admit this movie is neither comfy or cozy!
At the beginning of the movie, we see a group of people traveling through a remote area – where it is we aren’t told but later the movie subtitles say they are speaking Hungarian.
One woman is reading about the area and says there are ruins of castles in the area that can be seen. She almost falls over as the carriage continues and a man asks for the driver to slow down.
“No!” one man declares. “We need to get to the village before sundown. It is Walpurgisnight, the night of evil.”
There are dark things afoot when the sun sets, he says.
Soon the carriage stops and we have one of the men telling the villagers that he isn’t going to stay in their village but instead is going to go up the mountain around midnight to meet a carriage and go on to the house of Count Dracula. The villagers are clearly upset at this news and urge him not to go. They tell him there are vampires at the castle of Count Dracula and, in fact, they come into the village and drink the blood of anyone who stays outside after sunset.
The man is determined though and off he goes, much to the disappointment of the villagers and carriage driver. One of the women even hands him a necklace with a cross and begs him to take it for the sake of his mother to protect him.
The carriage takes off over the desolate hills and next we see a clip of a man and woman climbing from a coffin in a dark basement or crypt and the man looking ominously at the camera, dark shadows all around him except for a spotlight on his dark eyes. The three women in long white dresses walk around inside the crypt, carrying candles.
This movie is 93 years old this year and still had shivers sliding up my spine. A foreboding atmosphere hangs over the scenes, telling the viewer that something bad is going to happen or the bad is going to continue to get worse.
The movie is shot very, very dark, which sometimes makes it hard to see what is going on, but the viewer can certainly tell that the man – R.M. Renfield (played by Dwight Frye) — is very nervous when the carriage pulls up in the rain to pick him up. He’s regretting his decision even more when he walks into the ruins of the castle. Renfield is there to arrange the lease of an abbey in London for the count.
The view of this castle from the inside is insane and if it was today, I’d say it was CGI, but this movie was made at a time when they didn’t have CGI. The inside shot when the man first walks in and sees the scope of this castle is mesmerizing.
I was shocked when I read that the scenes in the castle were shot in Universal City, California on a sound stage. The set was painstakingly built and the ruins of the castle were used for years in other movies, one article stated.
Much of the so-called special effects of the movie were created with fog, camera angles, and lighting.
The effects are in full force when a man walks down the long stairway, out of the dark shadows to meet Renfield.
“I am Dracula,” the man says, his face lit by the candle.
The actor who plays Dracula is, of course, Bela Lugosi, whose portrayal, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica is considered the definitive portrayal of Count Dracula. Bela’s version of Dracula is absolutely haunting. Old movie or not, the acting in this movie is done terrifyingly well.
Dracula is a character created by author Bram Stoker who wrote the novel of the same name in 1897. This movie was based on the 1920s stage production of the book. Lugosi portrayed Dracula in that production on Broadway, in 1927, as well.
According to the Encyclopedia Britanica web page, “[Lugosi’s] halting speech, in his own thick Hungarian accent, contributes to the frightening appeal of the film, along with its eerie atmosphere, long tension-raising pauses, and lack of music.”
That lack of music is quite chilling. Apparently, in 1998, Philip Glass was commissioned to score music for the film and it was added to a re-released version of the film. I watched the original film without the music and I prefer it that way. Much like black-and-white photography strips away the distractions of color, the lack of music in Dracula leaves the viewer even more immersed in the horror experience – undistracted by a melody or a tone of a musical piece.
“These first 20 minutes are predominantly silent – in fact, beyond a few snatches of Tchaikovsky and Wagner, there is no background music in the film at all,” TCM’s Rob Nixon writes. “A rising sense of dread is accomplished by the creaking sounds of coffin lids and by cinematographer Karl Freund and Director Tod Browning’s floating camera creating an atmosphere of mystical terror reminiscent of the German silent fantasies.”
When Lugosi comes down the stairs carrying a candle and announces, “I am Dracula,” in a very calm, but eerie voice, Renfield looks slightly relieved. Afterall the carriage driver drove off with his luggage, the cobwebbed-covered castle is bathed only in moonlight, and there are wolves howling outside. Surely this man will be leading him into the cozier setting in the upstairs of the castle.
When Dracula says the wolves are the children of the night, this should have alarmed Renfield more but, no, he continues on, even when he sees a large spider web and spider inside.
Things, of course, go off the rails for poor Renfield when he gets a cut from a paperclip and starts to bleed. This must have reminded the count he was a bit peckish because the look he gets on his face is pure obsession over the blood on Renfield’s finger. The cross that falls from around Renfield’s neck is the only thing that saves him in that moment.
Sadly, it won’t save him for long but I’ll let you find out what happens if you watch the movie, or if you don’t know the story.
Later in the movie, we will be introduced to Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) who will try to stop Dracula from his murderous feasting throughout London.
I won’t give the ending of the movie away but it was seriously not the exciting ending I was hoping for.
This film was filmed in 36 days for $341,191, just under the planned $350,000 budget. When the movie was first discussed, it was going to be a large, sprawling remake of the stage production, according to TCM.com, but the Great Depression hit and the movie had to be scaled back.
People on set say that Lugosi used to practice saying his lines and getting into character by posing in front of a mirror and tossing a cape across his shoulder. He spoke very little to the cast, saying only hello when he came in and goodbye when he left.
According to Nixon, Lugosi was typecast after Dracula to the point he couldn’t break into any other style of acting.
“Typecasting is an inherent danger for any star; for Lugosi, it crept strangely into his private life as well,” Nixon wrote. “For many years, he appeared in public in his trademark costume and demeanor, and was even buried in Dracula’s black cape. When he looked in the mirror, did he only see the Transylvanian count staring back at him? Or, like the vampire character he portrayed, did he see nothing at all?”
A note on him being buried in the cape: other online articles state that Lugosi did not request to be buried in the cape. His son and fifth wife chose to do so because they thought he would like it. Yes, you read that right. His fifth wife.
Anyhow, back to the movie – while it was directed by Tod Browning, some said that Freund was the actual director. Freund was an Academy Award-winning cinematographer for his work on The Good Earth from 1937 and at the end of his career filmed various television shows – including I Love Lucy.
In some ways Dracula holds up more than many films of today. The creep factor was definitely there – especially Frye’s manic/insane portrayal of Renfield after his interaction with Dracula. I don’t think it is a movie I will watch again because I could barely make it through it without wanting to flip to Anne of Green Gables to clear my movie-watching palette.
Have you ever seen this version of Dracula? What did you think of it?
If you want to read Erin’s impressions of Practical Magic, you can find it here.
Up next week for the Comfy, Cozy Cinema is Skylark, the second movie in the Sarah, Plain and Tall series. This one really is a comfy, cozy watch.
Here is our remaining list, including a group watch of Chocolat (date to be announced) that we will be writing about on Nov. 21. You do not have to write about the movie to watch with us.
We will be pushing play together on Chocolat and then chatting about the movie in our Discord group (The Dames), which you can join for free now here: https://discord.com/invite/J7qQ36Uf
If you want to join in and add a blog post you wrote about the movie you watched this week you can leave a link here:
Today is a Halloween freebie so I am making a list of the top ten musicians to listen to while reading that might also put you to sleep.
Diana Krall
My husband turned me on to Diana Krall and I used to play her music to help calm my son when he was a baby and to help him fall asleep. We listened to Diana up until he was probably 5 or 6 to fall asleep and he said the other day that he has a type of Pavloveyn response to her music because no matter where he is and hears it, he immediately wants a nap. I can say the same thing because one time The Husband and I were in Barnes and Noble (many years ago because we have not been to one in probably a decade) and Diana came on. I immediately looked at the comfy chair I was standing next to and considered a nap.
2. Frank Sinatra
The best album of his to listen to for reading or dreaming is The Wee Small Hours
3. Nat King Cole
Just about any Nat King Cole album will do but I love any of his albums with a lot of ballads on them for this purpose
4. Miles Davis
Kind of Blue is a good album choice for this one
5. Harry Connick Jr
Harry has some peppier albums so I stick with his more mellow tunes but one of my favorite albums of his is Red Light, Blue Light
6. Alison Krauss
You’re either going to relax or cry listening to her.
7. Rachael & Vilaray
A recent duo for me suggested to me by The Husband
8. Michael Buble
Don’t listen to his fast stuff or you will have to get up and dance and sing because his music just makes people happy. Stick to the smooth, easy going songs or albums.
9. JJ Heller
I don’t remember how I discovered JJ Heller but I listened to her lullaby album to help Little Miss sleep and now when I hear songs from the album I burst into tears remembering those wonderful days of naptime with a newborn, infant, and toddler, cuddling and just connecting as JJ’s music played in the background.
I always imagine that heaven will just be full of those moments – reliving those special times with our children and loved ones over and over again.
10, Vince Gill
Specifically his box set These Days. This is another set of albums I listened to when The Boy was little. I love the jazz album for sleeping/reading and just every other album for anytime listening. I combined him and Allison for this clip — love this song.
Bonus:
Elliot James Reay
I discovered this guy while looking up these videos so I am adding him as bonus.
So how about you? Do you like to listen to music while you read? What are your go to genres or musicians? (I’d also add classical music to this list, personally, but didn’t choose any to share this time around. Maybe a future list!)
I’ve been reading through the original Nancy Drew books, which, as many of us now know, were written by around 28 ghost writers. These first books I am reading, though, were written by Mildren Benson using outlines given to her by either Edward Stratemeyer or his daughter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams.
The Secret of Red Gate Farm is number six in the original series and was first released in 1931 with some rewrites of it done in 1961 by Adams.
In this book we find Nancy caught up in a mystery that starts on a train while she and her friends George (female George) and Bess are coming home from a shopping trip.
Let’s start with the summary: “Nancy and her friends, Bess and George, meet Joanne Byrd on a train ride home. Joanne lives at Red Gate Farm with her grandmother, but if they do not raise enough money to pay the mortgage, they will soon lose the farm! Nancy, Bess, and George decide to stay at Red Gate for a week as paying customers. Soon, they learn about the strange group of people who rent a cave on the property. They describe themselves as a nature cult called the Black Snake Colony.”
Nancy Drew books are written simplistically in many ways but the storylines are not light by any means. There are subjects of abuse, criminal underworlds, abandonment, parental loss and many other hard-hitting issues.
This one was no exception. A young woman goes to the city to look for work because her grandmother is going to sell the family farm because they are losing money. While there she meets Nancy and almost gets caught up in a gambling ring of some sort when she interviews for the job and the interviewer is super, super creepy. I’ve watched too many movies and written up too many stories for newspapers so I imagined all the horrible things that would happen to this girl and Nancy while reading these scenes. It made me a bit lightheaded, but since it is a Nancy Drew book I knew things would turn out okay in the end.
Nancy decides she and her friends will go with the young girl back to her farm and pay to stay at the farm while also encouraging others to do the same. Nancy’s idea is like an early Airbnb. People can rent rooms at the farm and this will help the farm owners pay off their dept.
While there Nancy and her friends notice people in the woods, wearing all white, and dancing in the moonlight. This doesn’t seem like your everyday farming community activity so they ask Joanne’s grandmother what that is all about. The woman says she’s renting her land to a group of people to help avoid selling the farm but she doesn’t really know what they are doing up there. Can we say “RED FLAG”?
In addition to that craziness, there is also a man trying to buy the rest of the farm but the grandmother is trying to push him off until she sees if other options work to raise some money.
Despite the simple and fairly innocent way the Nancy Drew books are written, this one was a little creepy for me because of the cult angle.
Even with the simple writing, the dark subject matter leaked through and left me a little unsettled part of the time. People wearing white robes, dancing weirdly in the moonlight? Shudder!
Then Nancy and her friends decide to infiltrate the group at one point and I swear I was about to faint from the tension.
Nancy Drew books might be written simply but their plots still hold together well in my opinion.
Either Stratemeyer or Mildred had quite an imagination.
Have you read this one in the series yet or before?
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
The beginning of this week the weather was beautiful which led my dad to decide to take my kids for a hike along the old railroad tracks near his house two days in a row. I stayed back at my parents and helped my mom with cleaning the house.
The kids enjoyed walking the path where the train tracks used to be and my dad told them the history of where the station was and where the trains traveled. He also talked to Little Miss about where the old French mill used to be along the creek.
Zooma The Wonder Dog also loved the trip. She and Little Miss splashed in the creek and looked for fish, but didn’t see any.
The kids took some photos:
Two days later our little town was placed under a water boil advisory when there was a water main break. This made cooking and washing dishes a challenge, but we managed – not without complaint from me. The advisory was lifted on Friday, thankfully.
Last week I wrote a bit about our family’s cats over the years and barely scratched the surface of all the cats we’ve had over the years. I’ve decided I’m going to sit down one day this week and write about all the cats I can remember us having. Cats have such interesting personalities and each one seems to be different.
Mom and Dad’s cat Molly.
I also hope to write a blog post in the next month or so about the letters we have between my great-grea-grandfather and his brothers and mother that were written during the Civil War. They are very interesting.
What I/we’ve been Reading
The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood and The Anne of Green Gables Devotional by Rachel Dodge
Murder Handcrafted by Isabella Alan, which I have been sharing the wrong title of for a couple of weeks. So this one was good but also annoying. First, I didn’t know it was the last book in the series until I read some reviews. Second, there were some super weird typo and consistency issues that really threw me out of the story. I was surprised to see this because the book was published by Random House Publishing.
I really shouldn’t have been surprised because I’ve seen some errors like this before in Amanda Flowers’ books and Isabella Alan and Amand Flowers are the same person. There are so many books out by Amanda that I feel like they are trying to push them out way too fast and therefore letting quality slide.
Now, as someone who is independently published and has a lot of errors in her book as well, I’m not trying to act superior. I’m just surprised because so many readers are so negative about independently published books because of their supposed lack of quality but I am seeing that lack across the board in publishing right now.
In some ways I think the production of books needs to slow down and focus on quality over quantity. There are just too many rushed books out there.
All of this said I did enjoy the story of the book. I was, however, really annoyed to find out this was the last book in the series and she did not wrap up the love story between the main character very well (I mean they were still together so I guess that’s good at least) and left the storylines of other characters hanging. I still enjoy the stories and her writing, though, so this doesn’t mean I won’t read further books by her. Just not for a while.
I need to take a break from mysteries for a bit so I am going to try either Miracle in a Season by Sarah Loudin Thomas or Finding Lady Enderly by Joanna Davidson Politano
I haven’t read either of these authors before.
I decided to put The Cat Who Brought Down the House by Lilian Jackson Braun aside for now since I learned it was one of the later books in the series. I read one or two of those and they weren’t as good, and I think it might have been because Lilian was quite old by then and others may have been writing them or she was, and they just weren’t as good.
The Husband is reading Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.
Little Miss is reading Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone. At night we are sometimes reading The Four Story Mistake. During the school days we are reading Johnny Tremaine.
The Boy is listening to an audiobook – Tales From The Gas Station Part Four.
What We watched/are Watching
Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown. This was my first time watching this one and I found it very interesting. It sent me down a rabbit hole of reading the real story of John Brown and Queen Victoria.
For Comfy, Cozy Cinema with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs, I watched Dial M for Murder. If you want to join in on our movie marathon posts for the rest of October and November you can follow the list here:
You don’t have to blog about them if you watch them but if you do write a blog post about your impression about the movies, we will be adding a link up at the end of our posts.
On Nov. 14 we will be watching Chocolat as a group watch. We will be pushing play together at the same time and then chatting about the movie in our Discord group (The Dames), which you can join for free now here: https://discord.com/invite/J7qQ36Uf
On my own I watched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (original with Danny Kaye) this weekend and really enjoyed it. I loved the music and Danny Kaye’s performance overall. I watched an episode of the first season of Only Murders In The Building as well last week. I am really enjoying it and it’s hard not to binge watch it but I’m trying to wait for my husband to be home to watch it with me.
What I’m Writing
I am getting much closer to the end of the third Gladwynn book.
I released the description this past week, if you are curious:
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
This is a blog link-up where we not only allow you to share your past posts but we encourage it. So share away!
This week our temps were beautiful where I live in the beginning of the week. Last night they dropped 20 degrees, reminding us yet again we are in autumn. So I am under a blanket as I putting the finishing touches on my blog post.
This is a hard post to read but it is a very important read to understand what really happened in N.C. and why that area was hit so fast and that it is even worse than what the news has shown (which honestly is very little in my opinion). Keep this family in your prayers.
I’m so glad you are here and participating in our weekly link-up of family-friendly, fun, educational, interesting, crafty, fashionable, and whatever else posts. I hope you’ll tell your followers about our post (feel free to copy and paste the graphic) and visit the blogs in the link-up.
Now it is your turn to link up your favorite posts. They can be fashion, lifestyle, DIY, food, etc. All we ask is that they be family friendly. You can link up posts from last week or even from years ago. You can share up to three links each week.
We are always looking for additional hosts so let us know if you want to help out and we are also looking for more links from fashion bloggers so let your fashion bloggers know!
This week we watched Dial M for Murder (1954), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
This was a great follow up to Rear Window and I’m so glad Erin suggested both of these. I’ve been wanting to watch Dial M for Murder for years but just never got around to it with all the other great movies out there to watch.
Now that I’ve watched it, I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite Hitchcock movie of all time but I really did enjoy it. In some ways I thought things fell together a little too easily at points in this movie but the way they fell into place made me enjoy it – if that makes any sense. It might not make sense if you haven’t watched the movie but if you have then you probably know what I mean.
Here we have another Hitchcock movie with one of his favorite actresses, Grace Kelly. The movie also stars Ray Milland and Robert Cummings.
Dial M for Murder, based on a very popular play and screenplay by Frederick Knott, was made before Rear Window but both movies released at the same time. It was this movie that made Hitchcock decide he wanted Kelly for Rear Window.
First a little bit about the plot of the film. Tony Wendice is a retired professional British tennis player who is married to his socialite wife, Margot, who has had an affair in the past with American crime-fiction writer Mark Halliday.
Margot doesn’t think Tony knows about the affair. She burned all the letters she received from Mark when she broke it off with him. All the letters except one. She kept that one in her handbag and though we are never definitely sure what was in the letter, we know it was something that meant a lot to her.
Mark has now come to London for a visit and wants to see both Margot and Tony. They are set to go out to a performance together that night but Tony bails at the last minute and tells them to go on without him and have some fun.
Tony’s eagerness to stay home is what first clued me in that something a bit criminal was about to go down and go down it does.
Tony blackmails a former college classmate to kill Margot. Tony jokes with Mark later when he and Margot come home about how he, Mark, would know more about how to murder a person since he’s a crime writer.
Margo suggests that he and Tony write a book together after Mark is looking through all their clippings of all they did while Tony was a tennis pro and suggests Mark write a book.
“Yes, Mark, will you provide me with the perfect murder?” Tony asks.
Mark quips back, that his books focus less on the detecting and more on the crime itself. “I usually put myself in the criminal’s shoes and then ask what do I do next.”
Mark laughs and says he thinks he can plan a murder on his own but knows that in real life mistakes can be made. It’s not the same as it is in the book, he reminds Tony.
Tony is cocky though. He seems to think he’s a murder-planning master.
Foreshadow much?
My husband says that Hitchcock loved Grace Kelly for his movies and when I looked online that was indeed true. While I thought I had once read that Hitchcock had a strange obsession with Kelly, The Husband says it is more like he felt she was like his muse. That weird obsession thing was with another actress – Tippi Hedren.
To Hitchcock, Kelly was simply extremely beautiful and talented and he felt like there was no actress like her.
According to Offscreen.com, Hitchcock told Donald Spoto, who wrote his biography, that “The subtlety of Grace’s sexuality —her elegant sexiness— appealed to me. That may sound strange, but I think that Grace conveyed so much more sex than the average movie sexpot. With Grace, you had to find out – you had to discover it.”
Before concluding production on Dial M for Murder Hitchcock was already planning his next film – with Kelly in the lead. That next film was Rear Window.
Like Rear Window, Kelly wears some amazing outfits in this movie, by the way. The one that stands out for me is the red dress in the beginning. What a stunner.
I like what the writer on Offscreen said about the dress and the relationship of her outfits to scenes in the movie:
“Hitchcock starts the opening sequence at a breakfast table where Kelly is dressed demurely in a beige dressing gown; she reads a notice about the arrival of her lover on the Queen Mary; the ship arrives in dock; in seconds she is costumed in a red dress, embracing him in the flat where hours earlier she breakfasted with her supposedly unsuspecting husband. They are in the classic London flat but the picture presented is quite different as a result of clever writing, editing and colour coding. It also played on Hitchcock’s private perception of Kelly: he nicknamed her “the snow princess.”
I thought it was interesting that it was Cary Grant who told Hitchcock about the play version of Dial M for Murder, which debuted in 1952. Grant saw himself as the potential wife-killer, something Offscreen.com says Hitchcock always wanted Grant to play. Unfortunately Grant’s agents asked for way too much money so Hitchcock turned to Milland.
As a huge fan of Cary Grant I can honestly say I could see him playing the part Milland played, but Milland pulled it off in more dramatic fashion than I think Cary might have. Sometimes I have trouble seeing Cary in a dramatic role because even when I know he’s trying to be serious I think of his more playful movies and struggle to focus on him being the “bad guy.”
Milland, by the way, had won an Academy Award in 1945 for The Lost Weekend, so Hitchcock felt he was a good second pick.
Hitchcock chose not to change the play when he made the film and was quoted as saying this: “You buy a play for its construction. It’s the construction that makes it a hit. If you change that you’re ruining the very thing you bought. Just shoot the play.”
I thought this was ironic since he did change the endings of films that were based on novels he bought the rights to.
Have you ever seen this one? What did you think of it? Is it among your favorite Alfred Hitchcock films?
I was looking through a list of Alfred Hitchcock films the other day and I realized there are a ton I have never seen. I hope to make a marathon of his movies sometime soon.
Today’s topic is: How My Reading Habits Have Changed Over Time (submitted by Lydia @ https://lydiaschoch.com)
I don’t really know how to do this as a top ten list so I thought I’d just chat about it.
I started reading fiction fairly consistently when I was a kid and then even more when I was a teenager. When I was a “kid” – like under the age of 13 – I read books like the Little House series and the Chronicles of Narnia and sometimes I used a flashlight to finish a chapter because Mom had said I needed to go to bed and shut my light off but I didn’t want to go to bed yet.
I never read books quickly but I consistently had a book with me when I was a teenager. Back then I read mainly historical fiction and some clean/Christian romance. Now I read mainly mysteries – clean and cozy mainly.
In high school I got in trouble at least twice for reading in class. It’s not my fault my Roman-based epic was way more interesting than the football coach rambling about driver safety. Or a book from that same series (The Mark of the Lion series by Francine Rivers) was way more interesting than my history teacher who never really taught but mostly talked about football because he was the other football coach. Huh. Coincidence there? I think not.
I remember my mom came to a parent teacher conference, holding one of those books because we had picked it up at the local Christian bookstore (which only lasted about two years in our tiny community) and the teacher said, “Oh. Is that one of those books you got caught reading in class the other day?”
My mom, with her quick wit, said, “Yes, it probably is but it is based in history at least.”
I don’t think she meant that as a slam against that teacher but he was the one who used to start classes each year by holding up the text book and saying, “You can take this an use it to prop up a window.” Then he’d spend the rest of the year talking about who knows what from the front of the classroom with very little of it being actual history.
The only thing I remember from his class is how he told us all not to mess around with pimples and other spots on our skin because his mom had one she didn’t get checked and it was cancer. I don’t know if she died from it or not but that unlocked a new fear for me.
In college I mainly read textbooks. I didn’t seem to have time for reading fiction. I started working full time my senior year of college and there was no time for reading. I was taking classes twice a week and working like 60 hours a week, sometimes seven days. That’s about the time I killed my thyroid and my mental health but I was young and stupid.
I don’t really remember picking many fiction books back up again until a few years ago when I really got back into reading again. When I had my kids I was working full time at newspapers or writing blog posts or completely immersed in photography and homeschooling while taking care of kids. I didn’t take a lot of time for myself or to escape the stress of life by reading fiction. I wish I had because it would have helped all the stress back then.
Now I always have a hard copy of a book and my Kindle in my purse or with me wherever I go. I may not always read the book but I have it with me “just in case.” Instead of watching TV or surfing online all the time, I now carve out time for reading, even on the days I think I don’t feel like reading. I’ll find that once I start reading, I get caught up in the story and I start to relax and forget about all the things I was stressed about. I think I recently heard that reading even 15 minutes a day can help a person relax and reset their emotional state. Something like that anyhow. I don’t know – just go with it and pretend I’m smart. *wink*
Now that I am reading more, I have gotten caught up more than once with feeling like I have to read what other people are reading instead of what I want to read. It’s crazy that even at my age I can be influenced by what is popular or talked about a lot or what others say I should or shouldn’t read. Luckily, I have pushed aside a lot of that in the last year and now I really am reading what I want to read.
Sure, I see recommendations and sometimes I take them but I don’t just read a book because a lot of people claim it is good. Yes, I have read books that I’ve seen recommended a few times, but I don’t feel like I have to anymore. I do it because the book actually interests me.
Honestly, I find myself leaning away from books that are heavily recommended more than I lean toward them. I’ve been burned more than once by books that were supposed to be so amazing and then turned out to be complete duds or pushed agendas or morals that didn’t fit with mine.
Becoming an independent author opened my eyes to the publishing world and how reviews can be bought, essentially, or reviewers can be swayed to give a book a good review because they either don’t want to be excluded from other advanced reader groups or because they don’t be the one to step out of line and say, “I didn’t like this book everyone else liked.”
Before this year I was susceptible to getting wrapped up in all those “BookTok” (not on TikTok though. What a nightmare that app is!) “Bookstagram” drama sessions about – well, everything about reading. This year, though, I couldn’t care less what some Bookstagrammer says I should or shouldn’t read or what I shouldn’t or shouldn’t say on social media.
I read books, I share about the ones I like, I move on. Life is way too short to be so dramatic about reading. Good grief. Reading is for leisure and enjoyment. There was a time when only the rich could read books and then it became so everyone could read books as long as they had a good education and were taught to read.
Now we teach children to read at a young age so the world is opened wide to them. They can learn so much from books – fiction and non-fiction. This can be a bad thing, of course, if the subject matter is not age appropriate but in the vast majority of cases being able to read is a wonderful thing.
Because reading is a gift, I don’t believe we should try to finish books that don’t bring us joy. I do not continue reading a book I am not connecting with. A couple of years ago I made way too many commitments to read books and review them without knowing what I was really getting into. This year I have been reading books because I want to.
I read a couple of books for author friends and ran into trouble because the books were okay but they simply weren’t for me. Then what do I do? I don’t want to keep reading the book simply because the person is a friend if it is taking the joy out of reading for me. That’s why I’m now deciding that if I do read a book by an author friend, I’m not going to tell them I am reading it in case I don’t enjoy it.
Life is too short to read books qw aren’t enjoying. This is something I’ve heard said in reading circles again and again and it is something that we readers need to heed more.
Sometimes I do break my own “rules”, though. I’m reading one right now that isn’t one I’d probably finish if it was just me reading for fun, but I’m reading it to review for a magazine. Just because the book isn’t really for me, doesn’t mean it won’t be for someone else. The fact I am pushing myself through this book, though, has made me decide I probably won’t be doing reviews for magazines anymore unless I have already read the book first and enjoyed it.
My motto the rest of this year and next, therefore, is to read what I want and review it only if I want to.
I hope I can keep up with that because taking the pressure off something that should be done for enjoyment and relaxation is what I really need in my life right now.
How has what and how you read changed over the years?
