If it's true that I have a team of spirits that follows me around all day influencing me, then there's an 80 year old in there somewhere. Reading PG Wodehouse and Rumpole, and watching Nelson Eddy & Jeanette MacDonald movies.
When I was in my teens my mother was in law school, and in the summer I'd visit and we'd live what she coined the "nouveau pauvre" lifestyle. Eating Boston broils, expensive ice cream, and renting movies every night.
Her video store had a collection of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald movies. Not being 98 years old, I'd never heard of them before and I fell in lurv. All this running around serenading people = hi-larious. People complain that Eddy couldn't act his way out of a paper operetta, but I thought he was = hi-larious.
My favorite movie was New Moon, but Rose Marie contains their most famous song: When I'm calling yoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu... It's a song that our Mountie, Nelson, teaches Jeanette. At the end of the movie he's leading away her fugitive brother, whom she's been harboring, and she tries to call him back by singing the song to him. "Will you answer toooooooooooooooooooo?"
My mother would sit on the other end of the couch reading her mystery novels, and occasionally taking in the Goings On. When this scene played she was shocked -- shocked! -- that it was actually touching. (Even through Eddy's hi-larious acting. *Spins around on horse!*)
3 comments:
I larf at how the Hollywood Mounties are always riding about doing Police Stuff in their dress red uniforms... Now THAT's good research and screenwriting! (not) ... the same high quality movie making where a DC3 aircraft lands on a grass airstrip and the tires go "chirp, chirp" in the sound track .... oh yeah!
I hate musicals but I can read Wodehouse with you all day.
@anon - That's part of the beauty of 1920s movies. Research smesearch!
@JJJ - These are worse than musicals, they're operettas! With operatic-ish singing!
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