A subtle celebration of love (Chawa Pawa)

When you watch Uttam Kumar romancing Suchitra Sen on the silver screen you suddenly feel a stab in your heart. A piercing pain for something joyous that alas shall never ever be. Such was the beauty of this evergreen pair that reached the pinnacle of success in Bengali moviedom. Such beauty can be only once. And such indelible and deep was the impression of this onscreen couple that no lover

Trivia Answers - Women in Men's Jammies

I'm impressed by how you folks notice the little things, and especially to our Caftan Woman, who certainly knows her PJs like nobody's business.  The answers to Monday's pictorial trivia are:

A - Jean Arthur, checking herself out in the full-length mirror as Ronald Colman watches.  They're his pajamas, and this is "The Talk of the Town" (1942).

B - Alexis Smith donning Bing Crosby's pajamas for a wrestling lesson in "Here Comes the Groom" (1951).  We talked about this movie a few weeks ago, and that's when the idea for this stupid trivia post occurred to me.

C - Patricia Ellis, wearing Oliver Hardy's jammies, but still maintaining her lady-like demeanor by not taking off her hat, in "The Block-Heads" (1938).  I have to hand it to you here, Caftan Woman, I thought this would be a difficult one.

D - Finally, we have Claudette Colbert in Clark Gable's pajamas from "It Happened One Night" (1934).  She's off to use the showers "and things".

Hotch potch (Basant)

What can possibly go wrong with a romance that stars the inimitable Shammi Kapoor and the charming Nutan? I'd say, a lot of things. If you are not sure of what you want your film to be--- a fresh love triangle, a sad drama or a thriller, if you do not have any idea of how to weave different elements together, if you lack the art of copying from other films craftily and if you allocate too much

What's a Rich Girl to Do? - prelude

For the next couple of posts, beginning on Thursday and concluding next Monday, we’ll be discussing a peculiar predicament of wealthy women in the movies. They are either married for their money, or murdered for the same.

Since most of us don’t have to worry about these extra burdens of extreme inherited wealth, this scenario is one of fantasy, as fanciful as the “madcap heiresses” whose lives were also impossible to identify with, but who we might accept more affably as equals simply because they were so fun and so goofy.

What happened to those other rich girls, the freewheeling spoiled brats who charmed us with their irresponsibility? The wonderful Carole Lombard in “My Man Godfrey” (1936) or Claudette Colbert in “It Happened One Night” (1934), those two madcap heiresses with moxie whose silliness got us through the hard knock life of the Great Depression, they are gone.

They grew up, and grew serious, or perhaps we shrugged them off when we finally learned the value of money ourselves, now that we had a little, in the post-War years. The films we’ll use to examine the plight of the rich girl who is pursued for her fortune are “The Heiress” (1949) and “Invitation” (1952), and both give us an interesting twist on the empowerment of women, both economically and emotionally, who are otherwise vulnerable in mirror reflections of society one hundred years apart.

Then we’ll examine the rich wives whom their husbands intend to murder with the films “Dial M for Murder” (1954) and its remake “A Perfect Murder” (1998). Though usually for purposes of this blog, anything that happened after 1960 didn’t happen, a brief foray into the 1990s will make an interesting contrast to show what has changed in film audiences' expectations for rich girls in the decades between then and now.

Some things, clearly, have not changed much for the rich girl. In the post-war tradition of the movies, she’s still a meal ticket, dead or alive.