Cinema Tuesdays {Bachelor in Paradise}

From 1961 it's Bachelor in Paradise, an amusing comedy with a zippy score by Henry Mancini.

Bob Hope plays A. J. Niles, a best selling author of various books on how the Europeans live, from the perspective of a bachelor. You know, books that are clean enough to get published but just dirty enough to sell. Niles is a confirmed bachelor who lives to do hands on experiments and he hasn't been back to America in over ten years.

But then he's called back to Washington. It seems that his business manager hasn't filed his income tax for over ten years and has skipped town, along with all of Bob Hope's money. The IRS now wants over a half a million and wont let him leave the country.

So, his publisher has an idea. Why doesn't Niles write a book called "How the Americans live" and he can go undercover to do research but no experiments. You see, in the time that Niles has been out of the country, millions of Americans have moved into the suburbs, or tract housing, instead of living in the cities. And it just so happens that the publisher has invested in a housing development in California called Paradise Village and he will arranged for "Jack Adams" to rent a house there.

So Jack goes to California and who should be the co-manager of Paradise but Lana Turner playing Rosemary Howard, also a confirmed bachelor. Notice how they've put Rosemary in boring suits and tall, unmoving hair in order to show that she's put her business career ahead of marriage and children and therefore can't look pretty and feminine.

This is Tom, the blowhard boss of Paradise. He built Paradise and thinks it's the bee's knees and doesn't think of anything else but maintaining the reputation of Paradise. He also doesn't like the idea of a bachelor living in Paradise.

Jack tries to put the moves on Rosemary but she's not having any of it.



This is the house that Jack rented.
It's also Rosemary's house, but he doesn't know that yet.
And it's not pink.
It's California Coral.









These are Jack's new neighbours, Linda and Larry as the typical American couple. They met at university (her degree is in Romance Languages) married right after graduation and quickly had two kids.
In their third movie together, it's Paula Prentiss and Jim Hutton (who was also in Walk, Don't Run and Ellery Queen -the greatest show you've never heard of)

So, Jack settles into observing life in the American Suburbs.
At the Drive-In.

In the neighbourhood.

At the grocery store.

He also runs into Janis Paige, who's playing Dolores. She's married to Tom, only he's cheap and has left her for Paradise. So she sits around all day, being miserable and drinking.

Tom doesn't like the reports he's been getting from the neighbourhood gossip. Housewives wearing lipstick and pretty dresses in the middle of the day! And going to Jack's for a group meeting every afternoon! In Paradise! It's outrageous! Why don't you do something about it Rosemary, before I drop dead from the shock of having a bachelor in the suburbs!

Only, Jack isn't fooling around with anyone. Whenever he takes Dolores out, all she doesn't is drink and sob into her vodka about how cruel Tom is being to her.

But he does finally manage to take Rosemary out to the local tiki room.

The meetings he's been holding with the girls are just about giving advice to them in order to help them get their husbands to pay more attention to them. He really just wants to help, might be because of Rosemary.

He then gets reports as to the response to his suggestions, which vary greatly and uses the findings to help him write his book.



Of course, not all of his suggestions are well received but it does show just how bored the suburban housewife is that she'll try anything.

He then gets Rosemary to be his part time secretary by pretending to be writing a book in the style of A. J. Niles.

Of course the husbands all leap to conclusions about what their wives are doing all day with Jack.
See Jim Hutton doing one of the better drunk scenes in movies.

The husbands then present a petition to Tom to get Jack thrown out of Paradise.
But Rosemary wont do it, so she gets fired.

And then turns up in a white dress in Jack's doorway (shades of The Postman Always Rings Twice anyone) to offer her services as a full time secretary.

So she shows him how much the American past times, like baseball and bowling have changed since he left the country.



And then, just when he's about to propose marriage, the phone rings.

The IRS has found his business manager in Mexico and A. J. Niles is no longer broke.

He then talks to the cameras about his new book and everyone in Paradise watches.

He goes back to Paradise, but Rosemary is upset and turns him down.

And then the wives turn up to offer their support for his new book.

And then the husbands form an angry mob.



The divorce case allows for a wonderful cameo by Agnes Moorehead as the judge.

"I could tell there was something going on by the way she was wrapping the garbage"

So, it's up to Rosemary to save those three marriages, but how will she answer Jack?


Here is the trailer:


Bachelor in Paradise was only released on a VHS. It's isn't on DVD. Nor is it coming up on TCM and hasn't been shown on TCM since I taped it last summer. It's also not available as a torrent. I don't know if it will be released anytime soon or where to find it. Of course you could always send me a note.

Vintage Novels {Goodbye to Berlin}

I have read Goodbye to Berlin several times and each time that I read it, I'm always struck by the profound sense of sadness that permeates Isherwood's narrative. Amid his tales of the Nowaks, Landauers, Sally Bowles and the eccentric tenants of his landlady's house and his observations of gay night clubs and Communist meetings is the overwhelming sense of Weimar Berliners being lost in the present and being unable to bare the thought of what the future holds. Throughout the book, Isherwood the narrator hints that the future of Berlin will be dark and will suddenly change overnight (which it did in 1933 and this was published in 1939). But throughout his interactions with the characters, one can see that Berliners chose to ignore the inevitable future of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles holding out for only so long under an unstable government and instead turned towards living in an excessive, voluptuous panic of a sin city in the present. Even the characters who saw the danger posed by that failed hack artist in Munich chose to ignore what would come because Berliners were more concerned with doing whatever was necessary in order to eat and pay this week's rent. Isherwood is a keen observer and recorder of the general feeling and atmosphere of post-war Berlin, but he is an even better recorder of the wide spectrum of the city's populous during a time which will never and could never be repeated.

Out of all the characters that Isherwood encounters, the most famous and the most interesting is Sally Bowles. She is the embodiment of the Lost Generation. The female version of Jay Gatsby, if you will. And yes, Liza's performance in Cabaret is accurate in terms of capturing her personality for all of her faults. What makes Sally so fascinating is that she's living for today, in her velvet shoes and green nails, but she is always so sad since she had no concern for the future. I suppose that's what makes Sally so interesting to read and to meet a Sally in real life; she is fun to be around and you never know what she might think of next, but you can't stay around her forever since she keeps repeating her mistakes.

From the heights of the wealthy merchants to the debts of the working class families, and the artists and performers in between, Isherwood travelled seamlessly through them all as the young Englishman abroad and faithfully (more or less) tells of the characters that he met during his years working and living in Berlin. What he left us was a highly readable primary source of what it was like to live in Berlin in the days before it changed and with it, the world was changed.

At times, the narrative is funny, shocking and we wish to know more about what happened to the characters. But through it all is there is the sense of sadness that seeps through the characters words as we read it knowing that this lively city cannot last and we know what will happen all too soon. But it still remains one of the most important books that anyone who wishes to fully understand the twentieth century must read.

Goodbye to Berlin was adapted twice, first as a Code movie I Am A Camera (which I haven't seen but heard that it was terrible) and second as Cabaret, which is a great adaptation and faithfully recreated the flavour of Berlin as best as they good and Liza actually did wear vintage clothing in the film, which she picked out herself.

There was also a fascinating three part documentary series that the CBC did a couple of years ago on inter-war Paris, Shanghai and Berlin called Legendary Sin Cities, which you can "download" or you can buy it from Mr. Amazon

Cinema Tuesdays {The Thrill of It All}

From 1963 comes this brilliant satire about Modern American Life in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century.

See Television in Simultaneous Colour and Black & White!

See Soap Suds Attacking Small Children!

See Doris Day... Not Singing!

This is Mr. and Mrs. Fraleigh. They're finally going to have a baby after trying for twenty years.

Isn't that nice.

This is Mrs. Fraleigh's obstetrician Dr. Gerald Boyer (as played by James Garner) and his wife Beverly.

The Boyers have a lovely house outside of New York, with a backyard, wonderful decorations, a garage, two kids who don't fight with each other and ZaSu Pitts as a housekeeper.

Bev and Gerry are invited over to a dinner party at the Fraleigh house, but everyone has to wait until old Mr. Fraleigh is finished watching TV.

He's watching the Happy Soap Play of the Week, which is actually the same play every week but with different costumes and always stars Carl Reiner (who wrote the screenplay) calling the same woman a tramp.

Old Mr. Fraleigh likes to watch the commercial. This is Spot Checker, starlet and the Happy Soap Girl. Clearly the ad men hadn't gotten the memo that women and not men buy the household goods.

Bev then tells an amusing story about using Happy soap on her daughter. Old Mr. Fraleigh then offers to pay her over $300 to tell the same story on next week's television show. Turns out that he owns the Happy Soap Company.

Which leads to Bev practising in front of the mirror while rockin' this housecoat.

I love little Maggie's dress.

Since the play of the week is performed live, the commercial is live too and Bev charmingly stumbles through it.

See Bev bottle her own ketchup!

Turns out the commercial is a success and Mike shows up the next day to offer her Spot's old job. Happy Soap will pay her $80,000 for a one year contract. $80,000 is a fair amount of money now, but in 1963 it was a heckuva lot of money, as you can tell by James Garner's expression.

Check out the monogram on the back of her robe and her flowered shower cap.

Bev wants to take the job because she doesn't feel like she has any outside interests apart from being a mother, the wife of a doctor and making ketchup. So she cries and Gerry lets her take the job.

Nice cape.

Gerry doesn't like her being in New York late on a Friday night, especially since he can't reach her and then she comes home late.

Why is it that when a housekeeper leaves in a huff in the middle of a night, she always wears a moth eaten Mr. Fox?

Bev likes being the new Happy Girl.

Gerry doesn't. He feels that she is neglecting her wifely duties, and he is on call 24 hours and someone has to look after the children.

Pyjamas are great, but look at how Bev does At Home Casual.

Gerry also doesn't like being called Mr. Beverly by his wife's fans.

Although, the great thing about being famous is that you can always get a table in a crowded restaurant.

He also doesn't like that the kids haven't seen Mommy all day except for on TV.

Happy then introduces a new detergent that can be used on clothes, dishes and pool tiles and then they get a Tuesday night show so that Bev now has to work two nights a week, plus shooting print ads during the day.

Bev comes home to find out that Mike is building a pool in what used to be the backyard, courtesy of the Happy Soap Company.

But she forgot to tell Gerry, who drives into the pool.

Gerry's had enough. He has to convince Bev that if she doesn't quit her job and return to being a housewife in the suburbs, their marriage will end. So he enlists the help of his secretary.

And then he pretends to come home drunk.

And mumbles "Gloria".

This is my favourite dress in the movie.

The climax comes when Mrs. Fraleigh goes into labour in the middle of a traffic jam and Bev and Gerry work together. Believe it or not, but Mrs. Fraleigh has just given birth in the back seat of the limo. Clearly she either has super powers or the best darn make up in the world.

Click here for the trailer

Daily Outfit and an Announcement

Remember this sweater that I made a couple months ago that was inspired by this movie?

Well, I made another one and this time I added pom pom bracelets around the edge of the cuff ribbing. Yay!

And now for a few announcements.

First: This month's theme for Cinema Tuesdays will be comedies about the Suburbs. And by Suburbs, I mean the post war housing developments populated by nuclear two car families, "Honey, I'm home", secrets, newfangled washing machines, bright colours, bored housewives, kids playing outside, zombies and Doris Day.

I think that the Suburbs theme will nicely compliment the theme I have in mind for March also.

Second: I've finally realized that I have completely run out of room in my closet. I've known that I would run out of room for a couple of months now and my temporary solution of just buying more hangers wont work anymore. So, I've decided to not buy any clothes this month and to assess by wardrobe and to sell the clothes that I don't need/wear that much on Etsy. It also helps that I spent nearly all of January's clothing budget buying up all of the illegal light bulbs I could carry on the bus.

That's a sentence I never thought that I would write.

It will be hard to go thrifting and into vintage stores without buying clothes, which is why I'm going to focus on adding to my collection of novelty brooches, which are very hard to find here.

I do have three exceptions to the "no clothes" rule: the perfect yellow cardigan (surprisingly difficult to find), this coat (which I've been looking for since I stopped growing ten years ago) and of course adding to by collection of vintage fur coats for $50 or under.

On the bright side, I've just realized that I haven't bought any new (as in never-been-worn-before) clothes for two and a half years! I'm not doing that for sustainability reasons, I just want to see how long I can keep it up for.

And if you see any clothes of mine that you would like, you are more then welcome to make me an offer.

"Who's On First" by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello is one of the most brilliant sketches ever written. This is the original radio broadcast of it and it's probably the best rendition of it.