Rodeos & Man Bait
Recently, the Arizona Diamondbacks gave pitcher Madison Bumgarner a five-year, $85 million contract. They did not know that he secretly participates in team-roping events at rodeos, which he’s been doing on the sly for years under the pseudonym Mason Saunders. It’s all done while riding a horse, so it isn’t as dangerous as broncbusting and other stuff. There’s nothing about it in his contract, so it would be interesting to see how it would play out if he were injured while aridin’ an’ aropin’.
Last night Movies!, channel 5–2 on over the air antennas in NYC, ran Born to Be Bad (1950), which I’d never seen. It’s only relation to film noir is that it’s in black and white, but so what if it was a stretch of the Thursday Night Noir theme. I’m happy to see any movie for the first time, especially one that has a stellar cast. Although the intrigue leads to upheaval, it does so in a more true life way than the mayhem that concludes noir. It is deft and subtle in its psychology, surprising for Hollywood fare. Joan Fontaine is/was excellent as a master manipulator, always smiling and praising. Of course, movies could only go so far back then. It would have been been cool if Fontaine had been in a bra, suggesting she’d just cheated, sort of like Janet Leigh ten years later in Psycho (1960). Then again, it is easily assumed. The screenplay was adapted by four writers from All Kneeling, a novel by Anne Parrish. Another surprising aspect, given the era, was the almost complete lack of smoking. I kept waiting for the actors to light up in much the same way I expected a plot turn toward murder. And Robert Ryan was suave and unusually upbeat as a writer, so different from the mean persona for which he was famous, whether he played a good guy or a heel. Zachary Scott, Joan Leslie and Mel Ferrer were the other principal players, and Hollywood stalwarts Bess Flowers (913 credits) and Irving Bacon (542) actually had speaking parts. It was directed by the under-rated Nicholas Ray, who also did In a Lonely Place (1950), one of Bogie’s best performances, and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), both of which I consider classics. Born to Be Bad was released just months before the similarly themed and vastly superior All About Eve, so I doubt it influenced Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed that classic. Although Fontaine won an Oscar for her performance in Suspicion (1940), she may be more famous for her feud with her sister Olivia de Havilland, a two-time Oscar winner. Sadly, she took it to the grave, passing away at 90 in 2013. Her sister is still alive, having eclipsed the century mark. Clearly, they were working with amazing genes. Here’s an over the top poster from Born to be Bad, a gross exaggeration of how it actually plays. The term in the upper left hand corner jumped out at me.
According to her profile at Wiki, Anne Parrish published 20 books, many of them children fare which her brother illustrated. She passed away in 1957 at 69. I hope one of her other novels comes my way via a donation to the floating book shop, so impressed was I by the defy characterization in the flick.
The floating book shop continued its recent positive run on yet another unusually mild February day. My thanks to the young woman who bought seven books in Russian, which included three volumes of Pushkin; and to the other who overcompensated me for Idioms, non-fiction on American English, and a beautiful pictorial of the Broadway musical The Lion King, the first she ever saw; and to Mark, who purchased Kapp to Cape: Never Look Back: Race to the End of the Earth by Reza Pakravan, and Last Wish the Controversial and Courageous True Story of a Mother’s Dark Victory and a Daughter’s Love by Betty Rollin, and Twist of Faith : The Story of Anne Beiler, Founder of Auntie Anne’s Pretzels by Anne Beiler, and non-fiction about French Bohemians first published in 1901, the title of which escapes me; and to the sisters who bought three books in Russian; and to the woman who chose The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan; and to the woman who did a swap of books in Russian.
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