My Movie Pick

Aah…a first pick. The pressure’s on. One of my all-time comedy favorites is director Preston Sturges’s screwball comedy The Lady Eve. It stars Barbara Stanwyck and, if you’ve read Touch of the Clown, you know she’s a performer I admire immensely. (My central character in that novel is named Barbara Stanwyck Kobleimer by her movie-mad father.) The film’s director is Preston Sturges, whose own life would have made perfect material for one of his movies. As a child he accompanied his mother, who was a close friend of Isadora Duncan’s, as she hobnobbed with the rich and the famous on her travels in Europe. Before he began writing plays, Sturges ran a French restaurant and, when he wasn’t doing that, focused on being an inventor (patenting, among other things, kiss-proof lipstick). During a slump in his career as a playwright, he discovered movies – and, in the 1940s, critics discovered and loved the films he wrote and directed. Slyly, Sturges tilted at a number of sacred American windmills including patriotism, the American family, courtship rituals, and the work ethic.

Preston Sturges only made a few films. By the end of the 1940s, his screen career had pretty well petered out. Maybe screwball comedies, which hit their stride in the 1930s with wonderful pictures such as It Happened One Night and Bringing Up Baby, had lost their appeal for a post-war audience that was settling in to an era of the grey flannel suit and split-level houses topped with TV aerials. The Lady Eve (1941), his third film, starred Henry Fonda along with Barbara Stanwyck. Fonda, whom we tend to remember for his serious roles such as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, is perfect mainly for the fact that he plays his part here as if there wasn’t a laugh lurking around anywhere. The ultimate straight guy.

So…what’s the story? Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck), her father Harry (Charles Coburn), and his partner (Melville Cooper) are a trio of card-sharks working an ocean liner that picks up a scientist on his way home after an expedition up the Amazon. That’s Henry Fonda – Charles Poncefort Pike – the son of a millionaire brewer. All the unmarried women on the S. S. Southern Queen are tripping over themselves, trying to win the attention of the shy, handsome snake expert but it’s Jean who literally sticks out a well-shaped foot and trips him, a prelude to a trip to her cabin to find her a different pair of shoes. Pike is instantly smitten (a smiling Jean observes: “You ought to be put in a cage!”). In the process of fleecing Charlie Pike at the card table, though, Jean falls head over heels for him and is about to give up her life of larceny to marry him when her shady career is revealed and Charlie dumps her.

An incensed Jean decides to seek revenge, and she does this by showing up in the Pike family’s social circle in the guise of “Lady Eve Sidwich,” an aristocrat visiting from England. She hasn’t tried to alter her looks (except for a veneer of high-tone elegance) and acts totally bemused that Charlie thinks she must be someone he recently met on a boat. Needless to say, poor Charlie falls in love all over again – but Jean isn’t about to put aside her appetite for revenge. “I’ve got some unfinished business with him – I need him like the axe needs the turkey,” she announces to her alarmed con-artist cohorts.

Telling you more might spoil the picture for you, but I’d love to chat with you about the film once you’ve had a chance to look at it. We could compare notes on favorite scenes.

My Book Pick

Shimmerdogs by Diane Linden

I’ve just been rereading Dianne Linden’s Shimmerdogs (Thistledown Press, 2008) and enjoying it all over again. I first had a chance to read the book while Dianne was working on the manuscript a few years back. Dianne is a poet with a wonderful eye for picking out the telling detail that will shift a setting or a character into a reader’s perception in ways that surprise and delight.

If you’ve read Linden’s well-received first novel for young adults, Peacekeepers, you will have met the characters in Shimmerdogs. Peacekeepers focused on teenage Nellie’s troubles with school bullies the year her mom, part of the peacekeeping corps, is away on a tour of duty in Bosnia. Shimmerdogs offers a parallel take on events through the eyes of Nellie’s little brother, Lester B. (Mike), who, at the beginning of the book, faints during a dog-washing pool-party but believes he has died and been brought back to life with the help of one of the dogs. It seems no coincidence to Mike that a white stray suddenly attaches herself to the family. Mike names the pooch Merit (a key word he likes from a framed certificate).

Reluctantly, the children’s bachelor Uncle Martin agrees to allow Merit to move in along with the kids while Mom is overseas. But Merit goes missing and a forlorn Mike finds some comfort visiting the dog next door and then the elderly Polish neighbor who owns the dog. As things go from bad to worse with Mike worrying about both his mother and his sister and his ailing new friend, he becomes convinced that a spirit dog is watching out for him. Doesn’t he even catch glimpses of it at times?

Linden uses Mike’s voice to tell the story – a voice that is candid, innocent and naïve and yet wise in the ways that a seven-year-old can often be. She manages to write from the child’s point of view without being sentimental or winking at the reader. Much of what Mike says will make you smile and, at times, laugh out loud. He has very definite ideas about what he can and cannot eat (no wrinkly food, please) and he is a keen observer of the peccadilloes of those who surround him (particularly Uncle Martin). I think you’ll fall in love with this kid.

What I think will also impress you is the way in which Linden is able to weave into Mike’s story some of the canine folklore and mythology that has come down to us through the centuries, and to play the narrative out against the more immediate backdrop of what happens to people during times of war. No surprise – Shimmerdogs was a winner in 2009 of a Governor General’s Silver Medal for Children’s Literature.