{"id":265,"date":"2010-12-19T22:42:42","date_gmt":"2010-12-19T22:42:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/?p=265"},"modified":"2011-02-15T20:48:02","modified_gmt":"2011-02-15T20:48:02","slug":"september-2009-movie-and-book-picks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/2010\/12\/19\/september-2009-movie-and-book-picks\/","title":{"rendered":"January, 2011 ~ Movie and Book Picks"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Movie Pick<\/h3>\n
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Cover of The Lady Eve – Criterion Collection<\/a><\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Aah\u2026a first pick. The pressure\u2019s on. One of my all-time comedy favorites is director Preston Sturges\u2019s screwball comedy The Lady Eve.<\/em> It stars Barbara Stanwyck and, if you\u2019ve read Touch of the Clown,<\/em> you know she\u2019s a performer I admire immensely. (My central character in that novel is named Barbara Stanwyck Kobleimer by her movie-mad father.) The film\u2019s 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\u2019s, 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\u2019t 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> and Bringing Up Baby,<\/em> 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<\/em> (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,<\/em> is perfect mainly for the fact that he plays his part here as if there wasn\u2019t a laugh lurking around anywhere. The ultimate straight guy.<\/p>\n

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Image via Wikipedia<\/a><\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

So\u2026what\u2019s 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\u2019s Henry Fonda \u2013 Charles Poncefort Pike \u2013 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\u2019s 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: \u201cYou ought to be put in a cage!\u201d). 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.<\/p>\n

An incensed Jean decides to seek revenge, and she does this by showing up in the Pike family\u2019s social circle in the guise of \u201cLady Eve Sidwich,\u201d an aristocrat visiting from England. She hasn\u2019t 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 \u2013 but Jean isn\u2019t about to put aside her appetite for revenge. \u201cI\u2019ve got some unfinished business with him \u2013 I need him like the axe needs the turkey,\u201d she announces to her alarmed con-artist cohorts.<\/p>\n

Telling you more might spoil the picture for you, but I\u2019d love to chat with you about the film once you\u2019ve had a chance to look at it. We could compare notes on favorite scenes.<\/p>\n

My Book Pick<\/h3>\n
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Shimmerdogs by Diane Linden<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve just been rereading Dianne Linden\u2019s Shimmerdogs <\/em>(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\u2019s perception in ways that surprise and delight.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve read Linden\u2019s well-received first novel for young adults, Peacekeepers<\/em>, you will have met the characters in Shimmerdogs.<\/em> Peacekeepers<\/em> focused on teenage Nellie\u2019s troubles with school bullies the year her mom, part of the peacekeeping corps, is away on a tour of duty in Bosnia. Shimmerdogs <\/em>offers a parallel take on events through the eyes of Nellie\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

Reluctantly, the children\u2019s 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\u2019t he even catch glimpses of it at times?<\/p>\n

Linden uses Mike\u2019s voice to tell the story \u2013 a voice that is candid, innocent and na\u00efve and yet wise in the ways that a seven-year-old can often be. She manages to write from the child\u2019s 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\u2019ll fall in love with this kid.<\/p>\n

What I think will also impress you is the way in which Linden is able to weave into Mike\u2019s 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 \u2013 Shimmerdogs was a winner in 2009 of a Governor General\u2019s Silver Medal for Children\u2019s Literature.<\/p>\n

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