Olivia Killingsworth

I’ve been watching a lot of older films lately. It’s partly an earnest effort, as a modern American actor, to further educate myself about my artistic ancestry—to better understand those who have gone before me, instead of constantly comparing myself to my contemporaries. And it’s partly an excuse to curl up on the couch with some popcorn and a cute date, and write snarky posts about it later.

Midnight (1939)

Claudette Colbert is brash, beautiful and charming as a witty American chorus girl who gets stranded in “Paris” (I’m putting that in quotes because this movie is clearly not set in the ACTUAL capital of France, but in some fantastical 1930s Hollywood place called “Paris”, where everybody speaks English and their accents sound closer to Brooklyn than Bordeaux). Luckily, she is immediately rescued by a very nice cabbie (Don Ameche as a sweet, handsome, non-DeNiro taxi driver). But since he’s so sweet and handsome and good, she starts to fall in love with him—uh oh! So, commitment-phobe that she is, she runs away while he’s getting gas and sneaks into a fancy party, passing herself off as a baroness. Posing among the hoi polloi, she draws the attention of a millionaire (John Barrymore, stealing every single scene he’s in), who decides to set her up to break up his wife’s affair with another man. Everybody—the chorus-girl-cum-baroness, the millionaire, his wife, and her lover—goes off for a weekend in the country (like you do when you’re rich, or pretending to be). Whereupon Ameche shows up unannounced, threatening to steal Colbert’s thunder… and also her heart! SURPRISE! And also her heart. Hilarity and romance ensue.

All I can say is: HOW COME WE DON’T HAVE ACTORS LIKE DON AMECHE ANYMORE? He’s so handsome! And dashing! And talented! And charming! And funny! I feel like this is perhaps who Brad Pitt is trying to be? But he is not succeeding? George Clooney MAYBE comes close. Maybe.

Also, John Barrymore was such a talented actor, even his eyes are ridiculously expressive. I mean, just look at this photo:

HE IS GOING TO DEVOUR HER WITH HIS EYES, PEOPLE.

Madame Curie (1943)

Greer Garson, who is beautiful and looks like she could be Meryl Streep’s mom (Meryl Streep’s HOT mom), plays famous lady scientist Marie Curie, and Walter Pidgeon is her husband Pierre, and they have the worst case of NERD LOVE ever. I’m not kidding: they seriously do that thing where they walk all over Paris (or “Paris”, I should say, because this movie is also set in that fictitious French city where no one speaks French) passionately discussing physics and math and totally geeking out, only to realize “Wow, we’ve just spent the whole afternoon together and I’m a man and you’re a woman and we’re both single and good-looking and we connect on so many levels and isn’t that—uh, okay then, I’ll see you back at the lab tomorrow <sigh>.” His marriage proposal to her is SO nerd-tastic: he lays it out like a scientific argument, appealing to her rational mind, carefully detailing all of their compatibilities, expounding on their logical suitability for each other as man and wife, as well as scientific collaborators—not even ONCE saying how he actually feels about her. But Pidgeon is so good that you can tell how crazy he is about her anyway. Plus, she has googly eyes for him too, so she says yes—DUH.

This film manages, amazingly, to tell a truly passionate love story without a whole lot of kissing and heavy petting: they do some serious hand-holding (So PG!) and there’s an occasional peck on the forehead (oh my stars!), but that’s about it. They’re just so in love with each other’s brains that we don’t really need to see them in any steamy embraces—we get the point. That sweet, sincere, nerdy love also sets you up for the heartbreak of Pierre’s death later on, which was so sudden and shocking that my date and I both yelled “WHAT?” at the screen, and he went fumbling for his iPhone to look it up—like, the filmmakers must have added that for melodramatic effect, right? But Wikipedia confirms that Pierre Curie was indeed killed in a street accident in 1906, and his wife was understandably devastated and inconsolable afterward.

But they also discovered radium and won the Nobel Prize. So there’s that.

So what about you? Which classics do you like? What films of yore do you like to curl up with on a rainy summer night?

Tags: acting, movies

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2011 at 9:24 am and is filed under Classic Movie Club. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.