Elizabeth, your hair looks beautiful in red, and you should take some close ups of yourself too, to contrast the red hair with your eyes and your skin tone. In fact, you might have to do a whole new "Dress" series, or something involving an all new color scheme, because you are so good with colors.
Man, now I am once again feeling compelled to color my own hair. :) I've still got a touch of the original brown but the grey is rapidly taking over and this cannot be allowed to stand.
You wouldn't happen to be coming to the Reseda area anytime soon, would you? :):)
I only ask because the lady who cuts my hair has always refused to color it. She says, "some men look good with grey. Leave it alone". But I disagree, haha.
Tonight I watched an especially wacky crime comedy called "It All Came True" (1940), starring Humphrey Bogart and Ann Sheridan. I found it in the library database after conducting yet another search for Bogie movies. Every time I think I've found them all, another one turns up, and this one was really wild, hard to classify actually.
I knew nothing about the film, had never heard of it, and during the first ten minutes I thought I was gonna be watching a typical Humphrey Bogart crime caper. He is the owner of an illegal backroom gambling club. As the coppers prepare to raid him, he and an assistant burn all their bookmaking records in a trash can and hightail it out a side door. Once outside, Bogie sees a former associate standing in the shadows. The guy is a stool pigeon. He has sung to the police and brought them down on Bogart's operation, so Bogie shoots him on the spot before escaping into the night with the nightclub's piano player, who just happened to be on scene when the police raid commenced.
Little does the piano player know what he is in for, because the gun Bogie used to shoot the stoolie belongs to the pianist. It is registered in his name. Bogie used it on purpose, in order to blackmail the guy. If the cops catch up to them, Bogie will say he saw the piano player shoot the informant. The gun belonged to him, game over.
The pianist is not a criminal, just a musician who took a job playing in Bogart's club. But now he is on the hook. Bogie tells him, "I need a place to hide out and so do you. I know your mother owns a boarding house across town. We're gonna stay there and lay low, got it"?
So far, you have a straight-up crime film, but once we get to the boarding house, things are set askew.
The pianist's elderly mother runs the house with her partner, another old lady played by Una O'Connor, an Irish character actress with a certain look whom you've seen in a bunch of classic TCM films. O'Connor has an adult daughter, played by the knockout Ann Sheridan, who is an actress trying to break into the movies, but at the moment she is broke, and is moving back into the boarding house herself. Sheridan is a firebrand, a liberated woman very sure of herself with personality to burn and a heart of gold. It turns out that she has known the handsome young pianist since childhood, because their two mothers have been co-owners of the boarding house all this time.
What the pianist doesn't know is that Sheridan, who he is secretly in love with, knows the gambling boss Humphrey Bogart from a past liaison.
All of the preceding storyline, however, takes a back seat to the sudden notification received by the old ladies that their boarding house is about to be repossessed by the bank if a loan payment is not immediately sent in.
It is at this "juncture", to use a George Bush the First word (and you must think of it as it was said by Dana Carvey), that the movie does a 180. Bogart comes out of hiding in his upstairs room with an idea to save the boarding house : turn it into a nightclub, and use the eccentric tenants as live entertainment.
Already they have a nutty European magician living there, with his trained dog. He is played by an actor named Felix Bressart, who appeared most notably in "The Shop Around The Corner" with Jimmy Stewart. He and his dog almost steal the movie, but there are so many other great characters who get their screen time in as well, like Zasu Pitts as a secretly man-crazy spinster.
The ensemble of actors do set up a club in the large boarding house, with suppers cooked for the patrons by the old ladies and entertainment provided by the kooky residents, the stars being Ann Sheridan, who sings to accompany the pianist, and the crazy German magician with his dog, who must be seen to appreciate his comedic talent.
Meanwhile, nervous nelly Miss Pitts, the resident who is both repressed and man hungry, has recognised Humphrey Bogart from a photograph in a "True Detective" magazine she is reading. Now she knows he is wanted for the murder of the stool pigeon at the beginning of our story.
This is one of those Golden Era scripts that I used to harp about a year or two ago, where whoever wrote it had to have a very advanced ability to develop a story, because of the constant forward movement of many different layers that are interwoven and will ultimately collapse upon one another as the plotline resolves.
The storyline is unconventional to be sure, and even I - a veteran movie watcher if ever there was one - was thrown a curve by the eccentricity of this film - but as always, whenever I see world class screenwriting I am always impressed enough to want to mention it.
There could never be a movie like this made today, one that combines the disparate talents of post-vaudeville actors like Bressart, or Jessie Busley, who plays the pianist's mother and who was born in 1869! (I looked it up). She may be the oldest actress (or actor) I have ever discovered on IMDB, born just four years after the Civil War ended. And my point was that you just can't find these types of character actors anymore, ones who possess an individual eccentricity that is wholly unique to themselves and that you can find in no other actor.
Well, I have probably gone way out on a tangent, but this movie is really great and worthy of the highest recommendation. Ten Stars, I say. I have long been a fan of Ann Sheridan, who had a short life and should have been a bigger star, and I think that in this film she was finally directed to the best of her ability and photographed to the utmost of her beauty. Even with everything else that is going on in "It All Came True" and all the many actors, this is really her movie. /////
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