Diversions

How, then, is Kay fighting off the boredom? For entertainment we have watched a few movies and some television, played some Scrabble, perused the Internet, and read part of Carmilla, by Sheridan Le Fanu, one of Kay’s favorite authors. Yankee Doodle Dandy and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes were our two movie choices. The first was our apt selection for the Fourth, and thoroughly entertaining, though it lacks much in the way of dramatic arc to carry it through its length. This is understandable, though. Made in the early days of World War II, and screened for its subject George M. Cohan in the weeks before his death, it plays more like a revue, or perhaps like a feature-length tribute for a life-time achievement Oscar, or, I suppose, Tony. It is certainly a piece of propaganda, though I don’t mean that slightingly, because the things it elides – Cohan’s first marriage and divorce, the deaths of his mother and sister, his objections to a Broadway labor agreement – do not counter its essential argument that America is a great place and worthy of praise even by those who struggle to rise to the top. The last elision probably does counter that argument, in the eyes of some, and probably makes him a villain, and perhaps it objectively does so – I’ve not investigated the details – but as an actor and a producer, Cohan knew both sides of the argument and seems to have lost a lot for his stand, including much of his acting career. In any event, whether my ambivalence about unions is correct in this case, the movie contains some great dance numbers, some stirring patriotic songs, and Cagney’s charisma. It’s worth seeing.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was exactly what we needed the day we watched it, I believe Wednesday. We needed silly escapism, and that’s what we got, though daft and mercenary never reach so near the sublime as they do in Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee. The IMDB quote list for the movie doesn’t seem to have the ones I laughed at the most, though of course now I’d have to re-watch the movie to remember them. These, though, will do:

Daft (said of a diamond tiara):
“You DO wear it on your head. I just LOVE finding new places to wear diamonds.”

Mercenary (in conversation with the father of her fiancé):
Esmond Sr.: Have you got the nerve to tell me you don't want to marry my son for his money?
Lorelei Lee: It's true.
Esmond Sr.: Then what do you want to marry him for?
Lorelei Lee: I want to marry him for YOUR money.

What I also found interesting about the film was the dirty sensibilities that were there for those who wanted to find them, censors be damned, such as the sly one-liner uttered by an Olympic athlete when asked which girl – Monroe or Jane Russell – he’d save from a sinking ship: “those girls couldn’t drown,” reminding me of my father’s advice to lay hold of Dolly Parton should I ever find myself on a leaky vessel with her. These sneaky one-liners seem to have been all over certain films of that time, along with an absolute fascination with adultery: cf. The Seven Year Itch (1955), The Apartment (1960), and A Guide for the Married Man (1967). While adultery is almost always rejected in these films, they seem like a foreboding, a straining against the reins, that makes the advent of the Seventies and Eighties unsurprising. The one-liners I enjoy – I was raised on dirty jokes and can find nothing wrong with them, within some limits; the clear interest in adultery I regard with less comfort and no sympathy.

The only other observation I have on the film is this: Marilyn Monroe is a clearly superior screen bimbo to poor Jayne Mansfield, depressingly similar as were the eventual denouements of their lives.