Jun 17, 2022
In our inaugural Jean Arthur Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we join Gladys Georgianna Greene as she signs on at Columbia Pictures, two years before her star-making team-up with Frank Capra. Her first two films for Columbia, Whirlpool and The Most Precious Thing in Life, are a couple of curious weepies with missing-parent plots that allow Arthur to play first the daughter, then the mother, but never the love interest. First, Dave gives us an account of why Jean Arthur is so important to him, and Elise explains what it has to do with Shakespeare's Rosalind. Then, in our Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto segment, we briefly discuss the first two Kinuyo Tanaka films where she takes on a real auteur role, Forever a Woman, based on the true story of a poet who died of breast cancer, which we saw as a kind of cross between Dark Victory and My Left Foot, and the political epic The Wandering Princess, which shows the events of WWII from the perspective of a Japanese noblewoman who marries into the Manchurian puppet dynasty.
Time Codes:
0h 01m 00s: Prolegomenon To All Future Jean Arthurs
0h 31m 06s: WHIRLPOOL (1934) [dir. Roy William Neil]
0h 59m 47s: THE MOST PRECIOUS THING IN LIFE (1934) [dir. Lambert Hillyer]
1h 31m 02s: Fear and Moviegoing in Toronto – Kinuyo Tanaka’s FOREVER A WOMAN (1955) & THE WANDERING PRINCESS (1960)
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* Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the 2020s
* Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive)
* Read Elise’s piece on Gangs of New York – “Making America Strange Again”
* Check out Dave’s new Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist’s 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!
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