Today is the second anniversary of our Dual Personalities blog! This is our 643rd post! Yay, us! Last year at this time we had 34 followers. Now we have 140! We are truly shrimps in the greater blogosphere, but we’re happy.
As you know, there is much in the modern post-modern world that drives me crazy, but I do like blogs. It is nice to know that Mrs. Blandings is out there in Kansas City and Amanda Blake Soule up in Maine. It is great to hear what’s up with Meg Frazier Fielding in Baltimore and Jenny Komenda out in Arizona. And of course I love to hear from daughter #1 in NYC and daughter #2 in Maryland. I do so look forward to hearing from all of them. So I hope we are not being immodest in thinking that we add our little light to the sum of light in the blog world.
Peter Seamus Lorcan O’Toole (born 2 August 1932) is an Irish actor of stage and screen. His mother was Scottish.
My dual personality and I became big fans of his after seeing him in the re-release of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) in 1971. We saw it on a very hot day in the summer. During the intermission, following heroic trekking across the desert, our mother bought us sodas at the movie theater for the first time ever. It was a Big Day.
Peter O’Toole has made some good movies, but his career has largely been a disappointment to me. Like his Irish compatriot Richard Harris, he started out strong, but dissipated by drink, his career has been spotty. We can only wonder what might have been.
However, I like him in Lord Jim (1965) and in How to Steal a Million (1966)–he and Audrey Hepburn made a lovely and well-matched pair. And I will always have a soft spot in my heart for his portrayal of the angels in The Bible (1966)–a pretty terrible movie much enlivened by his presence.
This angel reminds me of…Lawrence of Arabia!
So let’s drink a toast to Peter O’Toole (preferably with something with ice) and watch some favorite scenes from Lawrence of Arabia. Hut, hut, huuuuuuuuut!
A new month, a new calendar page and the end of summer in sight. For those of us in this flyover state it has not been a bad summer weather-wise. Indeed, we have had lovely long stretches of Michigan-esque weather. By this time, usually, we are counting the days ’til fall, but not this year. I am in no hurry for school to be back in session full throttle. I plan to enjoy the dog days that are left of summer 2013.
The August TCM star of the month is old Humphrey Bogart, film idol and Episcopalian.
As I’ve mentioned before, my mother had a preference for Warner Brothers stars, such as Bogart and Errol Flynn, because she went to see all those movies at the Lewis J. Warner ’28 Memorial Theater at Worcester Academy (which I blogged about here). Like my mother, I feel that same thrill when the Warner Brothers logo appears and their rousing theme is played at the beginning of all their movies. TCM is not showing anything that I haven’t seen a million times and my favorite Bogart film, The Petrified Forest, is not on the line-up, but oh well. They are all still better than anything you’ll see on network television–reruns and commercials!
Tonight, however, they are showing my second-favorite Bogart film Key Largo, which is also one of my all-time favorite movies. I just saw it again recently and it really is fabulous. John Huston and Bogart were a good team and the star is at his best, ably supported by Edward G. Robinson, Claire Trevor and Lauren Bacall. So be sure to tune in or (at the very least) set your DVR.
August 1 is also the birthday of Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891), American writer and author, of course, of Moby-Dick.
This would be a great month to read the great book! You know you’ve been meaning to. Here’s a little something to get you in the mood.
“There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:– through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’s doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.”
August 1 is the birthday as well of Jerome Moross (August 1, 1913 – July 25, 1983) who composed works for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, soloists, musical theatre, and movies. He also orchestrated motion picture scores for other composers. His best known film score is that for the 1958 movie The Big Country, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Original Music Score.
The winner that year in that category was The Old Man and the Sea, scored by Dimitri Tiomkin. Hold the phone! Are you kidding me? Jerome Moross was robbed! But why am I never surprised? Anyway, you might want to watch that movie–it’s a good one. It misses being a great western because of the annoying plot and the super annoying character played by Carol Baker. Nevertheless, it has some great people in it: Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Jean Simmons, and Burl Ives (who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor). And the score is probably the best ever.
So here’s to a good August filled with great movies and great books! Let’s all have a good one.
Here’s our birthday boy with probably the best present he ever got. Knowing his mother, she no doubt sold it at a garage sale when he was at camp, which may explain his latter-day hoarding tendencies.
Here he is a few years later celebrating at my parents house with my dual personality in a festive mood.
This year we’ll wish him a happy birthday at the boy’s new house. Sunrise, sunset.
“I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
Have a great 4th of July–celebrate responsibly! Read some Emerson!
Concord Hymn
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
And last but not least…Happy Birthday to our dear brother!
In honor of William Butler Yeats’ birthday, here’s a poem for June 13.
“The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939)
I
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
II
What can I do but enumerate old themes?
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?
And then a counter truth filled out its play,
The Countess Cathleen was the name I gave it:
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.
And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love
And not those things that they were emblems of.
III
Those masterful images, because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse, of the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
Enjoy the day! Clearly WBY knew how to party down.
Sunday is John Wayne’s birthday–so you know what I’ll be doing to celebrate!
Marion Mitchell Morrison (May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979) was born in Winterset, Iowa, but his family relocated to California when he was four years old.
A local fireman at the station on his route to school in Glendale started calling him “Little Duke” because he never went anywhere without his huge Airedale Terrier, Duke. He preferred “Duke” to “Marion”, and the name stuck for the rest of his life.
He attended Wilson Middle School in Glendale. He played football for the 1924 champion Glendale High School team. I think I read somewhere that he was president of his senior class. Of course he was. According to Wikipedia, he applied to the U.S. Naval Academy, but was not accepted. Well, their loss. Instead he attended the University of Southern California (USC), majoring in pre-law. He was a member of the Trojan Knights and Sigma Chi fraternities.
He found work at local film studios when he lost his football scholarship to USC as a result of a bodysurfing accident. Initially working for the Fox Film Corporation, he mostly appeared in small bit parts. His first leading role came in the widescreen epic The Big Trail (1930).
A star is born. Hello, John Wayne.
His career rose to further heights in 1939, with John Ford’s Stagecoach making him an instant superstar.
Wayne would go on to star in 142 pictures.
My “Top Ten”–make that Eleven–Best Films of John Wayne would include:
Stagecoach (1939)
3 Godfathers (1948)
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)
Rio Grande (1950)
The Quiet Man (1952)
The Searchers (1956)
Rio Bravo (1959)
The Horse Soldiers (1959)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
El Dorado (1966)
True Grit (1969)
Eight of these were directed by John Ford. What a great team! Has there been another like it in film history? I think not.
Three of these would be on my “Ten Best Movies of All Time” List.
There are so many other really good movies which do not make the top eleven, but are eminently entertaining. Consider:
Tall in the Saddle (1944)
Fort Apache (1948)
Red River (1948)
Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)
Hondo (1953)
Blood Alley (1955)
Legend of the Lost (1957)
The Comancheros (1961
Hatari (1962)
How the West Was Won (1962)
Donovan’s Reef (1963)
The Sons of Katie Elder (1965)
The War Wagon (1967)
The Cowboys (1972)
The Shootist (1976)
John Wayne is great at all ages, in all decades of his stardom. I contend that even a bad movie with John Wayne is entertaining and worth watching. And I always feel better after I’ve watched one.
I grew up watching John Wayne Theater on Saturday/Sunday afternoons. My parents were both John Wayne fans so we always went to the movies to see his newest film. The first “new” John Wayne movie I went to see at the movies was El Dorado. My mother was back east visiting her dying mother, so our father took my dual personality and me to see it. I’m sure if my mother had been home, we would have been deemed “too young”, but my father wanted to go, so he took us along. It was the summer after fifth grade (second grade for my sister!). It was so great. When I went home I looked up the poem “El Dorado” by Edgar Allan Poe and memorized it. I still know it by heart. Quelle nerd, I know.
When I was a graduate student at the College of William and Mary, John Wayne came to town to tape an appearance on the Perry Como Christmas Special. It was late in 1978. Completely out of character, I went down to Colonial Williamsburg, armed with my Kodak Instamatic, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Great Man. My guardian angel was with me that day. I ran into my hero coming out of one of the colonial shops. A small crowd was forming but people were respectful. I snapped a picture (where is it?!)–he was standing a few feet away. I started to cry. I could cry now writing about it. It’s silly, but it was just so great. He was very tall. He was kind and patient and smiled at everyone, even though he clearly was not well. He died the following June.
John Wayne’s enduring status as an iconic American was formally recognized by the U.S. government by awarding him the two highest civilian decorations. He was recognized by the United States Congress on May 26, 1979, when he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Hollywood figures and American leaders from across the political spectrum, including Maureen O’Hara, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Mike Frankovich, Katharine Hepburn, General and Mrs. Omar Bradley, Gregory Peck, Robert Stack, James Arness, and Kirk Douglas, testified to Congress of the merit and deservedness of this award.
On June 9, 1980, Wayne was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter, at whose inaugural ball Wayne had appeared “as a member of the loyal opposition,” as Wayne described it in his speech to the gathering.
So I know what I’ll be doing on Sunday–honoring old John Wayne by watching some of his movies. What is your favorite John Wayne movie?
Here’s a nice tribute TCM did with Harry Carey, Jr. (By the way, they are showing a whole slew of John Wayne films on Sunday starting at 6:45 a.m.–all war movies.)
Darin (May 14, 1936 – December 20, 1973), you will recall, was an American singer, songwriter, and actor of film and television. He performed in a range of music genres, including pop, rock, jazz, folk, and country.
When I was growing up, we had a 45-record of Darin’s 1959 hit “Mack the Knife”, which our mother loved. We accused her of listening to it too much and teased her about her uncharacteristic affection for Bobby Darin. My sister and I even had a dance routine worked out with specific hand gestures, which we would perform for years to come (and may have as recently as the boy’s wedding). Of course, we thought it was spectacularly silly and made much fun of Bobby Darin. But truth be told, we secretly liked him a lot.
He made some not-so-classic films with his wife Sandra Dee, but I do love Come September (1960), which stars Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida and, in a small part, Leslie Howard’s son, Ronald Howard.
Awkward, to say the least…
Bobby Darin was best when playing young, finger-snapping hipsters and he was not so great in serious roles. He memorably over-acted in the part of a shell-shocked soldier in Captain Newman, M.D. (1963) with Gregory Peck and Angie Dickinson, and was even nominated for an Academy Award. He didn’t win, of course, but it must have been a thrill for him. (At the Cannes Film Festival he won the French Film Critics Award for best actor. Zut alors!)
Singing was his real forte though and he became world famous for such hits as “Splish Splash”, “Dream Lover” and “Beyond the Sea”. He died much too young at age 37. Here he is singing his great #1 hit “Mack the Knife”.
P.S. Darin had a custom car built called the “Dream Car”, designed by Andy DiDia, which is on display at the St. Louis Museum of Transportation. It is, like its owner, pretty darn cool.
dual personalities 