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1. Coot Veal and Cot Deal make $486 every day Posted: March 30, 2012 at 11:06 PM (#4093498)If you're young and smoking, quit while it's relatively easy.
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'Carole & Co.': Reach for a Lucky, financially sweet
'Carole & Co.': Reach for a Lucky, financially sweet
Good article, TerpNats, and I see you've got it posted on one of my favorite film websites, Carole & Co.
A long time ago I hauled the first 15 years of LIFE magazine (1936-51) down to my old GF's family beach house in Delaware, and spent an hour or two a day reading them for the better part of a month. There's no better way to get inside the collective white middle class mind of the 30's and 40's than by browsing through nearly 800 issues of LIFE. There's nothing remotely like it today.
And yeah, those cigarette ads were something. Next to that famous "Her Singing Coach Advised A Light Smoke" Lombard ad for Luckies, my favorite tobacco endorsement was one by Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt's daughter, also for Lucky Strike. She was still alive in the 80's and living in Georgetown, and for about a month I displayed that ad in my book shop's front window with a sign that said "The Georgetown Book Shop salutes famous Georgetown residents", or something like that. I have no idea whether she ever saw it.
There's a good chance that later this year, The Hollywood Museum will hold a Lombard exhibit, and I hope to assist the curators in creating a timeline and providing information on some of the items. One of the curators organized a Jean Harlow exhibit that's been there for more than a year.
Lol.
"Skoal, brother!"
#5: the one that most surprises me is Williams. I didn't know he smoked, and in his autobiography, he mentions his respiratory fragility.
Christopher Columbus, does that mean you're the one posting as VP in the TCM forums? I sort of vaguely recall your posting here in some of the movie threads, but I never connected the dots. I guess I just assumed that VP was a woman, but then I don't post on TCM nearly as much as I do here, and the only person there I have a real handle on is the incredible Eugenia H with her Stanwyck posts.
In any case, Carole & Co. is right up there with "Self-Styled Siren" and "Noir of the Week" as one of my three favorite movie blogs. I am totally impressed.
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#5: the one that most surprises me is Williams. I didn't know he smoked, and in his autobiography, he mentions his respiratory fragility.
Morty, the fact that Williams endorsed Chesterfields doesn't necessarily mean that he actually smoked them, or even smoked at all. There certainly was no law back then that required anyone to use the product he endorsed. TerpNats points out in his movie blog that Jack Benny had no love of Jello, even as he endorsed it.
But to give you an idea of just how strong the pull of the cigarette culture was back then, the back cover of The Sporting News had a Chesterfield ad every week for many years, and you could count on one hand the number of repeats of the same player they had in any given year. In addition to baseball players, those ads featured football players, golfers, tennis players, coaches, movie stars, doctors, and even the then-famous Willie Mosconi, who was at the time considered the Babe Ruth of pool.
Better than that, whenever a Giant hit a home run at the Polo Grounds, Russ Hodges would slide a carton of Chesterfields down the foul screen to deliver to the heroic batter, and Chesterfield would match it by sending gift cartons of their harmless product to----the local VA Hospitals. I sometimes wonder what sort of comparable cultural practices we engage in today will be looked upon with the same degree of horror and fascination (or nostalgia) that the cigarette culture was 60 or 70 years ago. It's an interesting thought experiment, but I'm sure we'd all be stabbing wildly in the dark in trying to guess at it.
I realize that about advertisements and endorsements in general. I should have written that I would be surpriseed if he did smoke--although, then, I'm kind of surprised that he would endorse a product he didn't actually use. But, come to think of it, I doubt that he drank much root beer. He would have probably been more concerned about whether it was a quality product. One of the galling things about the Quaker Oats thing, he wrote, was that he really liked Quaker Oats, so he was particularly willing to endorse them, but he never says he wouldn't endorse something he didn't actually use--even condoms (remembering the ad you linked previously).
To be rated alongside the Siren is high praise indeed -- she's the gold standard of classic film blogs.
I post as andym108 on that site, and although I didn't start commenting there with any regularity until last year, I'm sure I must have replied to at least a few of your posts by this time, since I see that VP19 handle almost every time I visit TCM. Sure is a small world.
Earl would be far healthier today if he had quit football and kept dipping Skoal.
My Mom (a dentist) sent him a polite note back ca. 1980, reminding him that dipping causes mouth cancer, kids looked up to him, etc.
He did not respond.
I'm a huge fan of Barbara Stanwyck. My all-time favorite actress.
Williams gives me the impression of being one of those grand old conservatives in the best sense that now seem to have gone extinct--James Stewart, John Ford (although I think he always said he was a Roosevelt Democrat), Barry Goldwater, Churchill, John Wayne to some extent. To them being a conservative was an ideal that obligated you to get beyond yourself. It wasn't a way of low-balling the opposition, of holding that you didn’t have to be any better than the worst of my adversary. When James Stewart enlisted in the military in March 1941, essentially forcing them to take him, it was something he had to do for himself--but he had to do it by sacrificing himself for something and for other people. The guy had just burst into super stardom and had just won the Academy Award--you might say, too, he voluntarily took a cut in pay from about $300K a year to 30 dollars a month. It didn't matter to him at all. It's hard to imagine someone doing that nowadays.
Williams and the Pumpsie Green press conference, the coming to the aid of Mudcat Grant in that New Orleans hotel incident, the speech at the HOF. He didn't have to do any of that--he felt he had to because of a sense of right and wrong that went beyond hidebound ideology or politics. If you're community cannot validate your value to it, then why have any allegiance to it?
They're not petty partisans. Williams when he came back from Korea gave an interview (well, maybe he didn't know it was an interview--it was some bloviating in a bar or restaurant, I think, although I don't think he was much for drinking or nightclubbing in his playing days) in which he said some rough things about Truman and the Marine Corps as to Korea. He later apologized, and got a letter from Truman telling him not to worry about it--that he, too, had been known to lose his temper and say stuff he later regretted. Williams gladly conceded that that was might big of the President to take it that way. Can you imagine people on the opposite side of the political fences these days giving the opposition their due?
Stanwyck as actress is without peer. She, too, was a conservative in the best, if not perfect, sense.
I'm a huge fan of Barbara Stanwyck. My all-time favorite actress.
AFAIC there's no American actor or actress who compares to Stanwyck for a combination of "naturalness" and versatility. She doesn't have the dominating screen presence of some of the others (Davis and Grant, just to name two), but better than anyone else, she knew where the fine line was between dramatic effect and overplaying the role. I've probably seen over 50 of her films by now and can think of at most 2 or 3 clinkers, and in those few exceptional cases the problem was with the script and not Stanwyck.
While it's tough to measure precisely, Stanwyck also seems to be the consensus favorite actress among those who post regularly on TCM. And if you've never visited the TCM forums, Eugenia H is simply a national treasure. She began a Stanwyck thread barely half a year ago, and since that time there've been over 2,000 replies, the majority of which are Eugenia's.
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Morty,
Good post and good points. I've often thought of just how much the "old" Hollywood was split down the middle in political affiliation, but it's also interesting (to me, anyway) that when I think of my favorite actors and actresses from that period, they wind up almost exactly 50-50, with maybe even a slight edge to the conservatives and Republicans. Not just the biggies like Stanwyck and Gable were in that group, but also some of my favorite character actors like Edward Arnold and Adolphe Menjou, who was actually (later) a member of the tinfoil hatted John Birch Society. Stanwyck kept her political profile extremely low, but apparently she was heavily influenced for a while in her views by her first two husbands (Frank Fay and Robert Taylor), and in fact one of her bigger disappointments was losing out to Patricia Neal for the leading female role in (Good God) The Fountainhead, one of Hollywood's all-time unintentional self-parodies.
While today's Hollywood is probably more (elite) left-leaning compared to its old self, there are couples that split politically. Lombard was far more politically liberal compared to the relatively apolitical Gable, but they were crazy about each other, just as liberal Goldie Hawn is for libertarian Kurt Russell.
I was struck by that seeing him in the commercial compared to the news stories of recent years saying that he pretty much can't walk any more.
It's sure a long way from this to this.
She had an incredible emotional range and showed a good deal of versatility in the roles she played--from innocent/vulnerable to ball-busting hard, from lower class ingenue to cynical sophisticate, from extraordinary to ordinary person.
In this way, her range and versatility, she reminds me of Stewart, and like him you have to pay attention because she's so authentic you think she's just playing herself. But when you think about it--who was the herself?
Pat Tillman.
Yes, too bad. Comedy or drama, they could have made it work. She worked with some very good actors/stars. MacMurray is one (as you point out, very underrated); others are Fonda, McCrea, and Cooper. But she never made a movie with Cary Grant (that might of been some screwball enterprise) or Stewart or Bogart, and only co-starred with Gable and Cagney in pallid vehicles on the downside of their careers.
Thanks for pointing that out. I was probably engaging in a little sentimental back in the good old days fartism.
Joe Louis.
Ray Robinson.
I'm still a trifle peeved that illness denied Powell a chance for the male lead in "Ninotchka"; nothing against Melvyn Douglas, but Bill would have given that part a bit more texture, and Garbo would not have been able to overwhelm him as she did Douglas. Furthermore, Powell never made a talking movie with Lubitsch (though I believe he appeared in one of Ernst's U.S. silents).
Stanwyck did appear with Gable early on, though. Remember "Night Nurse"? (You must certainly remember seeing Stanwyck and the luscious pre-Code Joan Blondell in their underwear.)
She had an incredible emotional range and showed a good deal of versatility in the roles she played--from innocent/vulnerable to ball-busting hard, from lower class ingenue to cynical sophisticate, from extraordinary to ordinary person.
There's one more film of hers that goes in the Drama category, but is almost in a class of its own: So Big (1932), where Stanwyck plays a teenaged daughter of a gambler who dies young, gets shipped off to an Illinois farm to teach the farmer's children, and then becomes a widow with a small boy whom she raises against all odds and hardship. By the end of the movie she's a woman in her mid-to-late 40's who looks even older than that, having sacrificed herself for her son's education and career every bit as much as she sacrificed herself for her daughter in Stella Dallas, but without the sense of humiliation or degradation. Every stage of her life in this remarkable film she portrays as if she'd lived it herself, which was no mean feat for what was then a 27 year old actress.
She played a somewhat similar and even more extreme role in The Great Man's Lady, where by the end of the movie she was in her 80's or 90's, but that movie bit off more than it could chew, and while Stanwyck was solid, the script wasn't really up to the cast.
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Boxers got into the act too.
Joe Louis.
Ray Robinson.
Of course the only way anyone would ever have seen those two particular ads back then would have been if they'd been a subscriber to a "race" magazine like Ebony or Sepia. I don't think that any companiy used black celebrities to endorse products in the white press, other than once in a while in an otherwise all-white group endorsement, until sometime in the mid or late 60's.
Stanwyck and Powell together, combined with the right screenwriter, could have made a mark every bit as indelible as Nick and Nora, who are easily the greatest long-running screen couple in Hollywood history. (/ducks)
I'm still a trifle peeved that illness denied Powell a chance for the male lead in "Ninotchka"; nothing against Melvyn Douglas, but Bill would have given that part a bit more texture, and Garbo would not have been able to overwhelm him as she did Douglas.
Totally agree with that. I haven't seen many of Powell's post-Thin Man movies, but the only truly awful film of his I've seen is a total clinker he made with Elizabeth Taylor, The Girl Who Had Everything. It was almost a shock to my system to see him playing what was essentially an uptight old fuddy-duddy, even if he may have had the right instinct about Fernando Lamas.
Stanwyck did appear with Gable early on, though. Remember "Night Nurse"? (You must certainly remember seeing Stanwyck and the luscious pre-Code Joan Blondell in their underwear.)
That was one of her many great pre-codes, and one of the raunchier ones. It's also one of the few times I remember Gable cast as a pure villain, with no redemptive qualities of character. If you want to see a great point and counterpoint, try watching that one before or after Laughing Sinners, a pre-code movie with Joan Crawford where Gable plays a Salvation Army worker!
She did do a nice little comedy with a Powell-type actor, Herbert Marshall, Breakfast for Two. They worked well together, I thought. Marshall is mostly forgotten, but he made the great Trouble in Paradise, where he's so smooth he's frictionless, yet immensely likable. With his voice and elegant manners he was made for talkie romantic comedies. Too bad he was born in 1890, and thus was in his forties when talkies got under way. Had he been born later, he'd a had a longer career as a leading man. Indeed, the same can be said of Powell himself, only two years younger than Marshall.
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