All tagged Shelly Winters
Up until a few months ago, my experience with the film noir genre was minimal. On a Facebook page dedicated to classic film, I found a thread discussing film noir and saw how passionate many of the writers were about it. I decided to give it a try. What an amazing world of film I had been missing. For my maiden voyage into film noir, I decided to watch The Night of the Hunter. Truth be told, I had been doing research on a stage musical based on the film, so I was killing two birds with one stone. The film was stunning, chilling even, in ways I had never experienced.
When it was originally released as a film, the Disney movie musical Pete’s Dragon was mostly dismissed by the critics. Many thought the film was too long (it does run 128 minutes) and many found Helen Reddy’s performance as the character “Nora” to be cold and detached (she isn’t the warmest of Disney characters), but her story is about a woman trying to be strong in the face of personal loss, who only begins to melt when a young orphan comes into her life. Seldom has a character in a Disney film been played with such complexity, and even if it does cast an icy pallor on the story, it is appropriate in telling “Nora’s” portion of the story. I have always had a deep affection for Pete’s Dragon and, considering how much I hear it maligned by critics and historians, I come in contact with a lot of people who also grew up loving this film.
With the death of the dryly sarcastic and always funny Jayne Meadows yesterday, I cannot help but to think back on the 1985 TV movie musical Alice in Wonderland in which she appeared as The Queen of Hearts. For any of you who grew up with this inception of the Lewis Carroll classic, you understand the deep affection I have for this tuneful, completely cheesy, almost Vegas-inspired version. Packed to the hilt with B list celebrities of stage and screen (and the occasional game show panel member), this two-part TV movie event felt like The Love Boat had crashed into Wonderland, spilling its decade’s worth of guest stars onto the colorfully designed soundstage. For me, it was a little slice of gaudy heaven.
