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Happy birthday, Shirls. Seventy-two years young and still getting it done, regardless of how kitschy it's gotten or will get. I saw you in The Apartment Saturday night at the AFI Silver Theatre. There you are at left, all of 26 years of age, in the film's crucial moment. Your lover, selfish exec Fred MacMurray, recounts how his kind and considerate lackey (Jack Lemmon) told him off and quit his job. The poor lug was defending my honor, you think. Your eyes flare briefly with joy as you realize that maybe it's not the exec you love. "The nerve!" you utter, playfully playing along while preparing to make one of cinema's great love dashes [a movie mainstay about which I will blog soon]. Who else could've guided us through Billy Wilder's treacherous comedy of manners and suicides? One minute you're a pixie-ish, brazen antidote to Marilyn Monroe -- the next, a heap of satin-voiced vulnerability, ready to end it all. Nerve indeed.
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4 comments:
I'm excited for the love dashes post. Love those love dashes.
The Apartment--one of my favorite movies. I never tire of watching it. Fred M is also ideally cast.
Re: Fred M. I love the man. Absent-Minded Professor, which he made the year after The Apartment, is a great indulgence of mine. But he can be an awkward screen presence. His delivery of Double Indemnity's double entendres is borderline laughable. I love him regardless.
Hey!
Have you ever seen Gambit with Ms. Maclaine and Michael caine and Herbert Lom? It's a heist comedy from the 60s. Cool opening 15 minutes. But there's a part during the heist where Shirley the dancer is ultra sexy negotiating this security contraption to steal this head statue thingummy-- oh, I'm describing it beautifully, uh huh.
Anyways, there's no music to generate suspense (as far as I can remember), just Caine watching her try to squeeze into a small space and shimmy through these steel bars and not trigger these security beams... a cool sequence.
Yeah, she's great. Sigh.
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