Great Moments in Gayness: Smells Like "Gardenia"

Team Experience is celebrating Gay Pride with their favorite moments in gay cinema... although since it's the cinema sometimes it's Gay Shame! Here's Michael going wayback for some devious fey villanry in a noir classic... Happy Gay Pride Week Everyone!

Sam Spade’s secretary tells him there is a Joel Cairo to see him. She hands Spade a business card. He sniffs it and shoots Effie a look.

“Gardenia,” she says, identifying the scent. [more...]

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Visual Index ~ Double Indemnity's Best Shot(s)

From the moment they met it was murder."

The fact that Barbara Stanwyck never won a competitive Oscar could drive anyone to the deadly deed!

For this week's edition of Hit Me With Your Best Shot we asked fellow denizens of the web to look at Double Indemnity with us. If you click on any of the still's selected as "Best Shot" after the jump it'll take you to the corresponding article, eleven of them in total.  This movie is a stone cold fox. 

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"just the way you want it..."

...straight down the line."

Don't cross Barbara Stanwyck. Get all up in your noir this week with the classic Double Indemnity (1944), available on Netflix Instant Watch., Amazon Instant Video, or for purchase on iTunes.  We'll see you back here Wednesday night (5/1) for the next "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" episode. Join us!

Other Big Dates in Early May...
5/2: Summer Movie Madness kicks off with Iron Man 3 and big buckets of popcorn will be consumed right here.
5/7: Team Experience, which recently picked the best new millenial directors, returns with a list of the Best... nah, we won't spoil it ahead of time but trust - you won't want to miss it!
5/8: A mini 'Katharine Hepburn Fest' kicks off with a "best shot" for Summertime. We'll look at a few other movies, too.
5/10: The Great Gatsby. I'm worried but you know we'll be discussin'

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Possessed"

We return to Season Three of the collaborative series Hit Me With Your Best Shot with not one but two tales of love-madness. I hadn't meant to pair them but I was so late with Possessed and it was time to bring the series back with The Story of Adele H. So there they were, two brunette screen goddesses Joan Crawford and (today's birthday girl) Isabelle Adjani, double-teaming me with their crazy-making sob stories of unrequited love. We'll cover Adele H tomorrow (yes, I'm running behind) but tonight, the first of these two Best Actress Nominated pictures.

Possessed (1947)
This 1947 noir stars the inimitable Joan Crawford as Louise, a woman who we meet after the events of the picture have taken place, wandering around in a daze looking for a man named "David". She is soon in a mental hospital and her back story, the story, begins to emerge. David (the dependably caddish Van Heflin), as it turns out, is the love of her life who she met while both were under the employ of a rich businessman. Louise, a feminist's nightmare, tosses aside all her dignity to veritably beg David to love her back and when he won't, she marries the boss instead and spends the rest of the movie obsessing over David and prone to jealous rages over her step-daughter's budding romance with her former lover. Louise is one of Crawford's most famous Victim roles but the actress is sly enough to also understand that Louise is enough of a masochist to also qualify her as the Film's Villain. The movie's best passage takes on a dream-like quality which is appropriate since Louise is a walking nightmare. 

Crawford Goes Mental after the jump!

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Take Three: Ida Lupino

Craig (from Dark Eye Socket) here with Take Three. This week actress and director  Ida Lupino

Ida Lupino a "sensation" circa 1941

Take One: The Bigamist (1953)
The Bigamist probes unseemly marital behaviour and stews on moral sorrows. At its centre is Edmond O’Brien toing and froing between two wives. But behind the camera as director, and in a supporting role as O’Brien’s second, San Francisco wife Phyllis Martin, is Ida Lupino. Her unfussy direction creates lean drama and her performance beautifully matches it, with nary an unnecessary furtive glance or superfluous line spoken. She’s a woman bored on a bus tour of Hollywood stars’ homes, chatted up by O’Brien’s depressed bigamist Harry Graham. 

 

Edmond as Harry: Haven’t you any interest in how the other half lives?
Ida as Phyllis: No, not particularly. I’m just crazy about bus rides – gives me a chance to get off my feet.”

Phyllis is smart, practical and wryly humorous. She’s world-weary enough to spot a chancer, but curious enough to give him his chance. Yet, she’s not someone to be taken advantage of. She’s part good-time gal, hired by a failing Chinese restaurant to perk up business that she herself acknowledges she’s failed to do, and part susceptible single girl. It’s clear she wants companionship, so she involves herself unknowingly in an already-married man’s emotions. Lupino deftly conveys just the right levels of guarded vulnerability and earthy pluckiness.

Lupino directed herself twice on screen prior to The Bigamist in Outrage (1950) and Hard, Fast and Beautiful  (1951) – but only in unnamed, uncredited cameos. Here she creates for herself a memorable emotionally driven character which she nails with snap and skill. With the cheeky shrewdness of a Hollywood pro, the perfectly cast Lupino gives herself the film’s best part.  As a director she clearly knows what kind of performance style the part requires; as an actress she fulfils the role with elegant yet slightly spiky precision. 

Two more takes after the jump...

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