Incendiary Blonde

Betty Hutton was a native Michigander. You knew she had grown up in Detroit because she called her mother's 1920s illegal drinking establishment a "blind pig" instead of a "speakeasy."

I liked Betty Hutton before I even knew her as "Betty Hutton." I first saw her years ago in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and I liked her in it, but I didn't know she had made any other movies, let alone the fact that she was one of Paramount studio's biggest stars in the 1940s. I only knew that she was funny and the movie was funny, but then I pretty much put her out of my mind. Then a few months ago I happened to be flipping through the channels and stopped on TCM for a moment, and Annie Get Your Gun was playing. I hadn't planned on watching a movie that night, but it only took a few minutes of Hutton -- so manically exuberant, and yet so achingly vulnerable -- that I couldn't turn away.

Betty was the type of performer who gave a hundred and ten percent every time, and then added another twenty percent for good measure. Bob Hope called her a walking vitamin pill. In a lot of ways her energy and over-the-top style seemed driven by desperation, by a woman who so wanted to entertain and make people happy that she would do it at any and all costs. There's something endearing about that, though, about a woman so desperate to please that she lays everything on the line, she holds nothing back. I know she endeared herself to me.

Of course, Betty was more than just an irrepressible ball of energy who belted out novelty songs like "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief." Watch and listen to her perform a song like "They Say It's Wonderful" from Annie Get Your Gun and get a glimpse into the quieter Betty, the Betty of longing and fear and love and sadness.

I was shocked and saddened to read about her death, but I take heart that she had a conversion to Catholicism several years ago, and I pray for the repose of her soul. Rest in peace, Betty.

Odds and Sod's

• I've got my T.V. Pick of the Week up on the sidebar, and my choice this week was Medium's newest, "Mother's Little Helper." Patricia Arquette is a great and underrated actress and the show usually delivers solid, though sometimes predictable, horror/mystery. What makes each week so interesting, though, is the way the show plays with things like animation, music, sound, color, etc. The first episode of the season had Bridgette (Maria Lark), the middle sister aged somewhere around 10, having dreams like her mother, only in the form of a kid's cartoon. One of the most disturbing murders I've ever seen on network T.V. involved a cartoon monkey. This week's episode opens with what quickly becomes recognizable as a dream as we see Ariel (Sofia Vassilieva), Alison's (Patricia Arquette) oldest daughter, attending a dance with a cute boy and they are being called up as the dance king and queen. Slow-mo kicks at this point, as the kids and teachers cheer Ariel on to her triumph. It's unmistakably an allusion to Carrie (Brian DePalma, 1976). After the bucket of pig's blood drenches Ariel, she begins the anticipated telekinetic freak-out, and Alison wakes up from her nightmare obviously disturbed. Of course, Ariel is having the same dream, only in her dream, it's flower petals and not blood that fall from above. The gimmick of the show is that Alison can see dead people and has dreams that are communications from murder victims about how they died. The other gimmick is that her daughters (at least the two eldest), have the same abilities, only not as pronounced as their mother's. The DePalma/Carrie homage at the beginning was a cute, funny little joke about Alison's fears for her daughters and their (often unwanted) powers. What surprised me about the episode was that the opening wasn't just a minor cinematic joke, but a stylistic foreshadowing. Later, when both Alison and Ariel are having dreams of the double murder of a mother and daughter, Alison dreaming from the mother's perspective, and Ariel from the daughter's, we see the events in split screen -- that very signature style of Brian DePalma. The opening of the episode worked not only as a great character moment for Alison (how perfect that the fears of a Gen-Xer with a "gifted" teenage daughter would manifest themselves as a modified version of the signature scene from Carrie) -- as well as a set-up one of the story lines of the episode, Ariel's anxiety over the spring dance -- but it also foreshadowed the stylistic choice to show the audience the murders through split-screen. Overall, I guess I'm just a sucker for this type of cinematic in-joke. It was fun.
• I didn't pick the new episode of the The Office this week (for Pick of the Week) because The Office is so awesome week in and week out that I've just come to expect it and have ceased being "wowed" by its awesomeness. Does that make sense? (Although, being a JaMichael shipper, mon, almost pushed this episode to Best of the Week for me, and I loved Dwigt's tenderness with Pam.)
• Can't wait for new seasons of 24 and Rome! January 14, baby!
• This month on TCM, Jean Arthur is the featured star. I've loved her since I first saw You Can't Take It With You about ten years ago. But I was shocked, shocked! to find out recently that she was born in 1900! That would have made her 38 when she was in YCTIWY. I always thought she was probably early 20s in that film. Apparently not.
• I haven't seen The Good German yet, and I want to, but I remember reading some article online that mentioned Soderbergh's idea that The Good German would be the film Michael Curtiz would have made if he didn't have to worry about the Production Code (ah, here's where I read about that, not a direct quote unfortunately; scroll down to read the comment that mentions Soderbergh's idea re: Curtiz and the Code). But don't we already know what filmmakers of that era would have made without the Code?
  
• And since we're on the subject of the Hays Code, I watched The Miracle of Morgan's Creek this weekend and the dvd had a couple of documentaries, one about the movie and the Production Code. One of the commentators said that the Code was, in a way, a kind of form that directors had to adhere to, like the form of a sonnet, and that this form often made them think creatively and ended up enhancing their work. This is something I've often thought myself -- that rather than being limiting, the Code was a way for filmmakers to find creative answers to things they wanted to put in their movies. We certainly wouldn't have had some of the hilarity of Morgan's Creek without the Hays Code as comedic target. The Good German, from my reading of other critics, sounds like a poem with fourteen lines, just with the rhymes in all the wrong places.