Last night, Zasu Pitts was back in "Miss Polly"(1941), playing the starring role of Pandora Polly, a single woman (not quite a spinster) living next door to the town busybody, somewhere in middle America. The shrew in question is "Minerva Snodgrass" (Kathleen Howard), who is also single and runs the town's Civic League like a fascistic Puritan. She's out to make sure no one has any fun, especially the young people, whom she intends to keep chaste, and so restaurants and movie theaters close at 6pm, and there are no lights in the city parks, to discourage teens from going there at night. She's shut down every modern clothing store. Even the speed limit has taken a hit - as the movie opens, a man is pulled over by an obnoxious cop for doing 14 in a 12mph zone.
But if Minerva minds (and enforces) everyone's business, Pandora Polly is the opposite. She keeps to herself, though she doesn''t live alone. The narrator describes her female housemate as her "companion" which nowadays would mean something different, but in this case they both seem straight (hetero), and there's also a live-in handyman/gardner, who's a bit of a screwup. He's always inventing contraptions that malfunction, like a combination lawnmower/gopher-smoker-outer, that ends up running wild through Minerva's flower garden and filling her house with smoke. Minerva's daughter "Barbara" (Elyse Knox) is in love with a nerdy boy named "Eddie" (Dick Clayton), whose relationship to Miss Polly is never stated. Is he a boarder? Possibly. But he's always at the house and he's in love with Barbara Snodgrass and wants to marry her. The problem is that Minerva keeps Barbara locked away in her bedroom and refuses to let her see Eddie. So, the handyman invents a zipline complete with a full-body sling to snag Barbara from her bedroom and whisk her through the windum into Miss Polly's house. You can imagine how well this goes over with her mother Minerva.
Well, at about this time, Pandora Polly and her companion and the gardener are concerned that Eddie and Barbara will never be able to get married because Barbara can't bring herself to stand up to her mother. Then Miss Polly remembers an elixir her grandpa concocted and kept in the basement. He was a timid man, but one day he drank the elixir and it changed his life. As Miss Polly puts it, "he suddenly he had a lot of pep in his step". The way she describes it, the elixir sounds like a combination of Vitamin E, Viagra and Ecstasy. She and her companion go down the basement to see if they can find the bottle amidst a hundred others that are gathering dust and cobwebs. They and the gardener try out all kinds of different drinks, but none seems to work, until Miss Polly sips something and is transformed. She goes from being a nervous Nellie to a happy-go-lucky Love Bug. Suddenly she's skipping down the street. She stops at the clothing store to buy their most fanciful dress and hat, then heads for the latest Civic Group meeting, where Minerva is trying to shut down all the madness caused by her daughter's love affair with Eddie. The town is rebelling against her tyranny, and from there the last 12 minutes of this 44 minute movie unfolds as a fable on hypocrisy, as Miss Polly takes the stage to encourage the citizens to fall in love. A note on the movie's running time; it's one minute shy of our 45 minute limit on what constitutes a full-length film versus a Short, but we'll excuse it this time because the script is developed and the characters are well-defined in the time allotted. During her speech, Miss Polly exposes the secrets of all the "straight-laced" townsfolk at the meeting, mentioning incidents from their pasts that she was witness to. She isn't recounting these tales out of spite; it's just that she's high on the Love Elixir and can't help herself. The deeds are innocently described (they're mostly of the "making out behind the bleachers" variety) but because Minerva has sought to portray her crusade as Holier Than Thou, it rips the mask off her moral authority.
As the film's star, Zasu Pitts gets to display a wider range of personality traits than she did in "The Crooked Circle," in which she was basically scared witless the entire time. Here, she's nervous again, but also goofy, self-assured, and rebellious by turns, and in contrast to the bull-in-a-china-shop persona of Minerva Snodgrass, it makes for a lively comic pairing. Almost stealing the show is Slim Summerville as "Slim" the gardener, who has to run for his life when Minerva is slipped some of the love potion at the end of the movie, and sets her sights on Slim as her first conquest. Yikes! "Miss Polly" is a minor comic gem in it's caricature of small town nosiness and the inherent characters therein. I give it Two Big Thumbs Up and a very high recommendation. The picture is perfect and appears to have been restored, so don't miss it! ////
The previous night we watched "Nancy Drew, Reporter"(1939), starring the vivacious Bonita Granville and featuring a variety of characters that gives it broad appeal. In other words, it's not just for teenaged girls; this is a top notch crime flick with comedic underpinnings, and as it opens, Nancy Drew is just starting college and majoring in journalism. On a class assignment, she and a group of fellow students visit the newsroom of the local paper, and the editor - a jaded sort - gives them all trivial and hypothetical stories to report on (the construction of a goldfish pond, etc.), in the hope they'll go away. He tells the students, "stay away from the news business, it's no business for young ladies." Nancy is the only one who isn't discouraged. She has the gumption to go after a real story, and when she overhears a radio report about a just discovered murder, she steals the crime scene address off a reporter's desk and goes there herself! Chutzpah definitely is not a problem for Nancy, who finds evidence, in the form of a metal can containing photography chemicals that may bear the fingerprints of the killer. But they turn out to belong to a female photographer who has nothing to do with the crime. Still the woman is jailed for the murder. Nancy vows to prove her innocence by catching the real killer herself.
She's a natural at this game and has the instincts of a crime reporter in her blood, and now that she's hot on the murderer's trail, she enlists her next door neighbor "Ted Nickerson" (Frankie Thomas)), a lanky, enthusiastic kid and a photographer himself, to help her solve the case. He accompanies her when she gets an interview with the jailed woman, and that leads them to a semi-pro boxer named "Soxie Anthens" (Jack Perry), a real thug, who may either be the killer or know who is. All kinds of hijinx follow, including Nancy setting up Ted as an up-and coming amateur fighter, in order to get him in the ring with Soxie. On top of that, Ted has a bratty 13 year old sister named "Mary" (Mary Lee) who's a complete hooligan, and along with her even younger friend "Killer" (Dickie Jones), they intrude upon and interrupt everything Nancy and Ted are trying to accomplish. There's a great scene at a Chinese restaurant, where the brats worm their way into dinner with Nancy and Ted, who can't pay their bill as a result and end up having to sing for their supper. Little Mary Lee steals the show and turns out to be quite a song and dance star. But the movie belongs to Bonita Granville, who's so great in the role that we're gonna watch the entire series if Youtube has it. John Litel plays her Dad, a renowned defense attorney who ends up taking the case of the accused woman, but it never goes to trial, because......I can't tell you.
I never saw the popular Pamela Sue Martin "Nancy Drew" TV series that began in 1977 as a collaboration w/ "The Hardy Boys" (featuring combo-star Jameson Parker Stevenson). I was a Charlies Angels guy at the time, and while the series might've been pretty good, I think this movie has to be considered the benchmark for the overall Nancy Drew franchise. It verges on screwball comedy in places, but never loses the crime thread. The energy keep building and the younger kids - the brats - steal every scene they're in. Two Huge Thumbs Up for "Nancy Drew, Reporter". It's highly recommended and in fact it would make a great double bill with "Miss Polly", though the movies are entirely different. In any event, the picture is once again razor sharp and I guarantee you'll like Nancy Drew. ////
That's all for this evening. My blogging music has been both Matching Mole albums, and my late night listening was Wagner's Complete Piano Music. I didn't know he composed for the piano, and his pieces are very simple and sedate compared to the majesty of his operas, but I enjoyed them. Having finished Peter Guralnick's "Last Train to Memphis", I am now beginning part two of his Elvis biography, "Careless Love" The Unmaking of Elvis Presley," which obviously promises to have an unhappy ending. Finally, they recorded Sunday's church service, so if you want to, you can see me singing with the choir. Our song is "Ride On, King Jesus." and it begins at the five minute mark. I was not in front of a microphone, and so the recording picks up the voices of the sopranos more than it does the tenors, but if you listen closely you can hear me. The link is: https://youtu.be/tUE9xFIOejg
You might have to copy and paste it, because I don't think it will be clickable on the blog, but check it out if you feel like it. It's best viewed and listened to on a laptop with headphones, and I am visible near the right/center of the screen :)
I hope your week is off to a good start and I send you Tons of Love as always.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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