Jean Louis Loved Muffs

Muffs were a fashion accessory from the old days. Really, they were. These “nests” or “little barrels”, as they were called, were made of sable or skunk or musquash (aka muskrat) among other materials, and they kept the hands of fine ladies cozy from as early as the 15th century. Sometimes these charming hand warmers did double duty and carried a latchkey, a tiny dog, or a pistol.

Renowned costumer Jean Louis designed fabulous muffs for Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle and Rita Hayworth in Tonight and Every Night. In addition to a fuchsia muff, Kim wore opera gloves of the same colour in BB&C to accent her burgundy dress. That outfit was topped by a hooded cape of deep wine-red that flashed fuchsia lining when she walked. An enchanting look for a beguiling witch.

Jean Louis also designed the famous black silk gown for the striptease number in Gilda. There’s no muff in sight for this costume. The black opera gloves are all that get removed before Rita Hayworth’s troubled heroine is escorted from the stage. But the muff Rita sports in Tonight and Every Night had purpose beyond style – it hid Rita’s pregnancy.

In a career full of amazing frocks and headdresses and muffs, a standout was Marilyn Monroe’s rhinestone encrusted Happy-Birthday-Mr-President gown, which she had to be sewn into. Jean Louis was nominated for an Academy Award 14 times and won but once, for Judy Holliday’s chic threads in The Solid Gold Cadillac.

The Chairman of the Board

12 years ago this month Ol' Blue Eyes checked out. This is my koo-koo tribute to Frankie and his wild, knocked-out, groovy cinematic oeuvre.

Suddenly, the Man with the Golden Arm (not The Oscar) was Out on the Town with all the Guys and Dolls in High Society getting Higher and Higher and feeling Young at Heart. Take me Out to the Ball Game, he demanded, then took the Road to Hong Kong and went Around the World in Eighty Days on Von Ryan’s Express, traveling From Here to Eternity with The List of Adrian Messenger which read: Ocean’s Eleven, Robin and the 7 Hoods, Sergeants 3, and 4 for Texas, those latter 4 being: Pepe, Dirty Dingus Magee, Pal Joey, and Tony Rome. All of them wanted to be The Manchurian candidate but only Some Came Running and none were dancing the Can-can. Not as a Stranger he prepared to Meet Danny Wilson but instead Johnny Concho showed up. With his Marriage on the Rocks and Never so Few on his Carousel, Johnny called The Detective who found a Lady in Cement and assumed there’d been an Assault on a Queen. He needed that like A Hole in the Head so he set The Tender Trap to catch The Naked Runner whom he suspected was also The Kissing Bandit, and wouldn’t that be Double Dynamite? Meanwhile The Devil at 4 O’clock declared The Pride and the Passion to be The First Deadly Sin which Cast a Giant Shadow over The Miracle of the Bells and Cannonball Run II. And while It Happened in Brooklyn, he declared: Meet me in Las Vegas in The House I Live In because that’s where None but the Brave and Kings Go Forth. Till the Clouds Roll By, Come Blow Your Horn and Step Lively, for The Joker is Wild. Anchors Away.

Every single movie that Sinatra made - good, bad, ugly - is in the above paragraph.

The Farm

I once worked on a movie called The Farm. It starred Colin Farrell and Al Pacino. Fortunately its name was changed to The Recruit for release. I wouldn't have wanted that Hollywood formula flick to get confused with the excellent short The Farm. Fortunately for filmmaker Tom Henry, the fate that befell Cronenberg and his compellingly original and amazing movie Crash (thanks to Paul Haggis and his derivative and less than amazing movie Crash) will not repeat itself in this instance. Watch The Farm - I've heard Pacino makes an uncredited cameo appearance (he was being sheepish). Bleat.

Vargas Goes Mum

I’ll be back - just like Jane Froman in With a Song in My Heart (Walter Lang 1952) except that my legs are fine and I can’t sing and I’ve never entertained the troops (?)

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when - okay I do know where: right here but I really don't know when.

Sayonara (Joshua Logan 1957)
Farewell My Lovely (Dick Richards 1975)
Goodbye Mr Chips (Sam Wood 1939)
Bye Bye Birdie (George Sidney 1963)
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman 1973)

See you in the movies!

Preposition Cinema Part 5: Up, Down, Over and Out

Bringing up Baby (Howard Hawks 1938)
Downhill (Alfred Hitchcock 1927)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman 1975)
Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947)

And with that Vargas takes a brief break from speaking.

Preposition Cinema Part 4: ON

Right On:
Miracle on 34th Street(Geroge Seaton 1947)
On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan 1954)
Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock 1951)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean 1957)
Knock on any Door (Nick Ray 1949)

Preposition Cinema: Part 3: TO

Much To(o) Marvelous:
To Sir With Love (James Clavell 1967)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Richard Mulligan 1962)
Mr Smith Goes to Washington(Frank Capra 1939)
Mr Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra 1936)
To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks 1944)
To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock 1955)
An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey 1957)
To Each His Own (Mitchell Leisen 1946)
Witness to Murder (Roy Rowland 1954)
From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann 1953)
Passage to Marseille (Michael Curtiz 1944)

Hope to Lamour to Crosby:
Road to Singapore (Victor Schertzinger 1940)
Road to Zanzibar (Victor Schertzinger 1941)
Road to Morocco(David Butler 1942)
Road to Utopia (Hal Walker 1946)
Road to Rio (Norman Z. McLeod 1947)
Road to Bali (Hal Walker 1952)
Road to Hong Kong (Norman Panama 1962)

Preposition Cinema Part 2: IN

In Like Flynn:
Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti 1971)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai 2000)
Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci 1972)
A Place in the Sun (George Stevens 1951)
In Credible:
Love in the Afternoon (Billy Wilder 1957)
In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray 1950)
The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang 1944)
An American in Paris (Vincent Minnelli 1951)
Stars in my Crown (Jacques Tourneur 1950)
Singing in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly 1952)
Christmas in July (Sturges 1940)
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch 1932)
Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu 1948)

Preposition Cinema: Part 1: OF

Cream Of the Crop:
Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne 1945)
Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962)
Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming and King Vidor 1939)
The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford 1940)
Woman of the Year (George Stevens 1942)
Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks 1941)
Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick 1957)
Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock 1943)
The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton 1955)
Touch of Evil (Orson Welles 1958)
The Saga of Gosta Berling (Mauritz Stiller 1924)
The Talk of the Town (George Stevens 1942)
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog 1974)
Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston 1948)



Kind Of Fabulous:
The Pride of the Yankees (Sam Wood 1942)
Birdman of Alcatraz (John Frankenheimer 1962)
Of Human Bondage (John Cromwell 1934)
In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison 1968)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols 1966)
The Sound of Music (Robert Wise 1965)


Also Of Note:
The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg 1928)
Confessions of an Opium Eater (Albert Zugsmith 1962)
Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky 1948)
Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett 1977)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes 1976)
Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway 1947)
The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler 1945)
Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger 1959)
Of Regret:
The Birth of a Nation (DW Griffith 1915)

I love old movies and I love this old earth. This is where those two loves intersect...

Smoking. They’re always doing it in the old flicks, lending mysterious atmosphere and romantic ambience to plot twists. Oblivious to the damage it would eventually wreak on lungs and environment, the stars of the golden age puffed away. Bette Davis, one of cinema’s most famous onscreen smokers, had to hide her character’s nicotine habit in 1942’s Now Voyager. But by movie’s end, Charlotte Vale (BD) has come a long way, baby, and that includes public smoking. Her lover (played by Paul Henreid) famously lights two cigarettes at the same time, one for himself, one for the lovely Charlotte.

But if they were polluting the air with tobacco smoke in the old days, at least they get points for how they lit their cigarettes: wooden matches and shiny lighters. Witness Kirk Douglas’s wiseacre newsman in Ace in the Hole (1951) as he holds his unlit match to a typewriter carriage then flips the return: zing and the carriage ignites his match. His fag is lit and everyone knows what a smartass the new reporter is.The cigarette lighters of yesteryear were souvenirs, collectibles, keepsakes. They had sentimental and/or monetary value. They were sometimes beautifully designed and often inscribed. James Stewart unwittingly “steals” one from the wedding loot in the wealthy household of Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn) in The Philadelphia Story (1940). The refillable lighter was a valued piece of property not to be discarded, unless of course, it was the only clue to identify one as a murderer, as in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.

But rue the day lighters became disposable. Plastic lighters are part of the detritus that is turning our oceans into what Capt. Charles Moore has called “plastic soup”. Plastic is not biodegradable. And under 5% of all plastics get recycled. Under 5%! The rest ends up polluting the environment, most noticeably our oceans. Albatross chicks are dying at an alarming rate and dissections have shown bird stomachs full of bottle caps and other plastic items such as lighters. The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) would have cried over the fate of these beautiful winged creatures.Plastic got a boost after the end of WW2 when Life magazine rejoiced with a cover story titled: Throwaway Living. But for a while glass remained the container of choice: milk still arrived at your door in glass containers. In 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean stands exhausted by the refrigerator running a cold milk bottle over his forehead. And in Mr. Lucky, Cary Grant delivers big bottles of water for the office water cooler. No nasty plastic water bottles in sight, of course. Mildred Pierce (1945) has only real dishes in her restaurants including the porcelain coffee cups. And in countless domestic scenes groceries are brought home in paper bags, not indestructible plastic bags.


We had no idea what the full impact of Mr. Robinson’s one word of advice to Benjamin Braddock would be when in 1967’s The Graduate he uttered: “Plastics.” Objects made of plastic so thoughtlessly discarded are ruining our world. There are alternatives that we must embrace and soon. Remember that hot phone call between Donna Reed and James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)? So sizzling was it that you might have forgotten Sam Wainwright on the other end of the line extolling the future of “making plastics out of soybeans”. Sam was onto something. Hee Haw!


Planet in Focus International Environmental Film & Video Festival opens this week in Toronto. Oct. 21-25, 2009.

"Planet in Focus produces Canada’s largest and longest running environmental film & video festival. Its mandate is to produce an annual event that screens and promotes outstanding and compelling films and videos covering a broad range of environmental themes and issues by Canadian and International filmmakers. Our mission is to promote the use of environmental film and video as a catalyst for public awareness, discussion, and appropriate action on the environmental, ecological and social health of the planet."
www.planetinfocus.org