dual personalities

I came home early Friday afternoon because it was snowing and because I didn’t feel great. I went to bed and took a nap as the snow came down. I took it easy for the most of the weekend and watched several movies.

I watched Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda.

In my opinion, Henry Fonda was never better than when directed by John Ford, who managed to pull something out of Fonda that no one else got. He was terrific as young Mr. Lincoln. Why wasn’t he Oscar nominated? Well, this was 1939, remember, and so there was a LOT of competition.

I watched Titanic–the 1953 version starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyk. I really like this movie.

It has a clever plot centering on a runaway wife and her snob of a husband on the ill-fated maiden voyage of the Titanic. The minor characters are all well-played. The selfish, elitist jerk rises to the occasion and dies a hero in very believable circumstances. I loved Clifton Webb in this. Barbara Stanwyk turns in her usual polished performance. (You can always count on her, given good material.) Robert Wagner plays a 20-year old Purdue tennis player. In the scenes leading up to the ship hitting the iceberg, Wagner and his college friends are singing college fight songs in the bar. Guess which one they are singing at the moment of impact? Yard By Yard–the Williams College fight song! File that one away for trivia night.

I have never seen the 1998 blockbuster version of the Titanic story and I probably never will. I prefer this more modest, but nevertheless impactful, black and white version which won the Oscar for best original screenplay. It is a good story–climaxing with all those gentlemen on the deck of the sinking ship singing Nearer My God to Thee as their wives and children row away. You can’t beat that.

If that wasn’t drama enough, I also watched The Vikings (1958) with Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine as fighting norsemen.

Produced by Kirk himself, because he had wanted to play a viking since childhood, it is a technicolor spectacle of pagan manhood–rape, wreckage and ruin. There is a lot of violence in this movie–men are torn apart by wolves, staked and eaten by crabs, have their hands cut off and their eyes plucked out by hawks–but it is all done with lusty viking enthusiasm. Kirk gives it 110% as usual and (spoiler alert) dies with sword in hand. I have to say I enjoyed it, although Tony Curtis in hot pants is really no match for one-eyed Kirk and not all that believable/convincing as an Odin-worshipping warrior.

But I chose to suspend belief for the sake of enjoyment. The best part of the movie was the titles:

Very well done.

So from the sublime to the somewhat ridiculous, that was my weekend!

(By the way, I did drag myself to church on Sunday so that I could read the second lesson. It was a good one from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.)

Huzzah.

And the wee babes came over for dinner. They are more fun than a barrel of monkeys and just as exhausting.

“On Wednesdays we wear pink!”

Now we’re off to the races again…the rat race! If you have the day off (I do not)–enjoy! Have a good week!