Matinee Musings: Lady of Burlesque

Lady of Burlesque
1943 / 1:31
Tagline: “Mirth! Murder! Melody! Mystery! and Girls! Girls! Girls!”
[internet archive]

Barbara Stanwyck slips into Dixie Daisy’s sequined skin with a verve that feels like liberation. Forget the noir siren or the ruthless schemer - here, Stanwyck is earthy, commonsensical, and gloriously unpretentious. Dixie isn’t clawing her way to the top so much as shimmying there, armed with a grin and a gag. She sings, she dances, she cracks wise, and suddenly an opera house turned burlesque palace hums with her electricity.

But success breeds venom. Enter Lolita La Verne, a redhead with a temper hotter than footlights, and Princess Nirvena, a White Russian with hauteur to spare. Both rivals wind up strangled, and Dixie - our accidental femme fatale - must pivot from pratfalls to peril, sleuthing her way out of a noose of suspicion.

William Wellman directs with his trademark robustness, giving the backstage chaos a pulse that’s equal parts grit and glitter. Edith Head’s costumes - feathers, sequins, and audacity stitched into every hem - are practically characters themselves. Arthur Lange’s score, Oscar-nominated, swells and swoons like a knowing wink to the absurdity of it all. Yes, Michael O’Shea’s Biff Brannigan can grate - his wisecracks clang like cracked cymbals in 2026 - but maybe that’s the point: burlesque thrives on noise, on excess, on the gaudy collision of artifice and appetite.

The film’s pleasures are tactile: the authentic seediness of the setting, the backstage antics that teeter between silly and sly, the one-liners that land like water balloons. And those costumes - outlandish, unapologetic, a parade of fantasy. Really, what more could you want, even if you're a fashion ignoramus like me?

Perry Mason 159: Rear Window

Note: It is impossible to examine Raymond Burr’s Pre-Mason Oeuvre without a look at his most memorable movie part among the general public. By 1954, Burr had played an evil goon (I Love Trouble, Abandoned, M)  or sadistic gangster (Raw Deal, Red Light, Borderline, His Kind of Woman) or corrupt professional fixer (Unmasked, FBI Girl, Mara Maru) but he was also persuasively gruesome as a psycho private eye (Pitfall), commie spy (Walk a Crooked Mile, The Whip Hand), and serial date rapist (The Blue Gardenia). So Alfred Hitchcock figured Burr would be a natural as the heavy in this suspense movie.

 Rear Window
1954 / 1:52
Tagline: “YOU won't be able to tear your eyes away from this window!”
[internet archive]

In this movie Raymond Burr plays Lars Thorwald, a salesman of wholesale costume jewelry in the Big Apple. His wife is chronically ill. She is not patient in her suffering but seems ever demanding and never satisfied. Lars is a bad neighbor in that he tells people in the shared court to shut up and leave him alone. Nor is he a good husband because he apparently telephones his girlfriend, for which his wife mocks him. Mr. and Mrs. Thorwald bicker all the time because the “in sickness and in health” clause that they slip in when people are too young and dumb to know the serious implications of “in sickness” does not mean anything to Lars though with his curly grey hair you’d think he’d be old enough to know what an ageing couple have to deal with.

On one rainy night Lars is observed leaving his apartment three times, carrying something away in his sample case. He is also observed wrapping a butcher knife and small saw in newspapers. And his wife with the health challenges is nowhere to be seen in the apartment. Lars is also spotted wearing the look a man has when he's afraid he's being watched.

The observer of The Bickersons and this curious activity is a photo-journalist Jeff (James Stewart) who is laid up with a broken leg due to an on-the-job accident. His insurance nurse (Thelma Ritter) warns him not to be so curious about and observant of the people in the various apartment buildings around the court, because her trouble detector is flashing yellow.

But Jeff is rather a dumb guy so he ignores the nurse’s sensible advice. We movie-goers can safely conclude Jeff is dumb because he refuses to marry Lisa (Grace Kelly) who is smart, sympathetic, considerate, funny, steely, and looks movie-star bodacious in anything she wears. Lisa wants Jeff to move from photo-journalism to fashion and portrait photography because she loves him so much she doesn’t want to see him hurt again and wants him in the Big Apple where she works in the fashion industry. Jeff calls her vision of their future “nonsense,” which hurts her deeply but he doesn’t seem to notice. He is also unsympathetic to the loneliness of a middle-aged woman neighbor and the artistic frustrations of young composer. Jeff is also merely amused when he observes a ballet dancer doing what Lisa calls a woman’s hardest job, “juggling wolves.” Jeff has no respect for people, no feeling for the crosses other people have to bear.

Because of his observations of Lars’ odd nocturnal activities, Jeff comes to think Lars knocked off his poor afflicted wife. Jeff persuades Lisa and his nurse that he’s on to something, like murder. Jeff is not so successful convincing his war buddy Doyle (Wendell Corey) who is a police detective. At least until the climax.

It’s really daring of Hitchcock to make a huge indoor set of apartment buildings around a court, but make us movie-goers feel we are watching a tiny little claustrophobic world consisting of Jeff’s apartment and Lars’ apartment. We see most of the action across the court but sigh with relief when we can see action a bit closer through Jeff’s telephone lens, called a “portable keyhole” by the nurse.

It is also daring to trust the audience that they will understand in mime a cranky disabled person (Irene Winston) making demands and needing constant care. As the couple mimes incessant quarrels, we can see Burr’s body language express impatience, frustration, and the contempt the hale and hearty feel for the weak and fragile. Burr of the heavyset stature has the physical bulk that’s communicative but his facial expressions tell volumes too. We agree with the nurse when she says that he gave “an expression such that he'd never get a loan at the bank.” We can also see Lars thinking, calculating, trying to control his anxiety about being caught and brought to account. And when he confronts Jeff, he croaks in a tight desperate voice, “You want money? I don’t have any money! Tell me what you want.”

Reviewers have said many times how great the acting is so I don’t need to do that again here since the focus here is on Brother Ray. It’s not illogical that this non-Mason part is the for which Raymond Burr is best remembered since Rear Window was probably the most popular picture he appeared in as the heavy. That he worked with other famous directors – Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang, Andre De Toth, Jacques Tourneur – is known nowadays only to buffs of film noir like us. One wonders if nowadays Burr would be remembered only by we happy few if William Hopper had won the part of Perry Mason or Fred MacMurray, who was offered the part of Our Favorite Lawyer, decided he didn’t want to deal with the grind of a TV series making 30 episodes a year.

As for the connection with the Perry Mason TV series, Wendell Corey appeared as the victim, an obnoxious oil man, in TCOT Unwelcome Well, one of the better episodes in the last season, which did not have many good outings.

Pre-Mason Raymond Burr
Please Murder Me (1956) [internet archive] [my review]
I Love Trouble (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Sleep My Love (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Ruthless (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Pitfall (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Walk a Crooked Mile (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Raw Deal (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Station West (1948) [my review]
Red Light (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Abandoned (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Borderline (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
Unmasked (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
The Whip Hand (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
Bride of the Gorilla (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
M (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
His Kind of Woman (1951) [internet archive] [my review]                
FBI Girl (Nov 1951) [internet archive] [my review]
Mara Maru (April 1952) [internet archive] [my review]
Horizons West (1952) [internet archive] [my review]
Blue Gardenia (1953) [internet archive] [my review]
Gorilla at Large (1954) [internet archive] [my review]
Rear Window (1954) [internet archive] [my review]

The Nones of Ann Harding: Her Private Affair

Note: Mary Astor said nice things about Ann Harding in her autobiography, calling her a “vital woman” and a “fighter.” Joan Crawford said “I cherish Ann's companionship more than any other person I have ever known," raving about Ann's "radiance," "beautiful soul", and "lack of pretense." Barbara Stanwyck said in 1934, “I have always hoped that my own work showed the same degree of sincerity.”

Her Private Affair
1929 / 1:15
Tagline: “Her guilt will either destroy her or set her free”
[internet archive]

This early talkie opens with Ann Harding’s restless hands and her melancholy distressed look as she talks on the phone. Got me hypnotized?

Totally. Tell me anything. I can believe anything Ann Harding for an hour and change.

Vera is on the telephone with a former love interest Arnold (Lawford Davidson). Arnold is a womanizer that wants money from Vera for a bundle of indiscreet letters. Tonight. Vera goes to her husband (Harry Bannister) for the money but doesn’t tell him why she wants it. He can’t come up with it at such short notice so Vera decides to see Arnold in person to tell him he’s going to have to wait until the next day. When Vera skips out of Carmen between acts and finally meets Arnold, a terrible accident happens, proving once again that just keeping a handgun in the house is bad medicine.

Ann Harding plays a decent person who is so refined that she is too good but the unhelpful guilt over the terrible accident puts her under strain. Not telling her husband, not coming clean, and not clearing up the legalities from the get-go put her under more strain. With no music in this early talkie, Ann Harding conveys with her voice Vera’s marital, ethical and legal anguish and the subsequent changes, good and bad, to her character and behavior. Life being the funny, funny riddle it is, after the terrible accident, she becomes a kinder, more humane person.

Harding’s voice - trained for the stage - was an attraction to an industry that suddenly needed gorgeous actresses that could deliver a line properly. Harding’s precise diction is a tad old-fashioned and theatrical in our 2026. Good actresses salvage iffy lines and so she persuasively manages histrionic lines like “I can't make you happy. I must go away. I must leave you.” She’s faltering and afraid but not making a scene. Her voice gets across Vera’s unquiet heart and sheer bewilderment this whole incident has happened to her, who’s never done anybody any harm ever. At the New Year’s Eve party, perfect is her voice with its quaver of agitation, haunted by guilt.

For me, a beguiled movie-goer with enthralled tolerance for Ann Harding’s thespian decisions, Harding seldom overacts in this picture. And when she does overdo it, it’s not showing off. Ann Harding is never false. Your milage of course will vary. The call depends on the degree to which a movie-goer is hypnotized by Ann Harding. For me, the answer is “Totally.” I can do anything Ann Harding for an hour and change.

This movie was based on a Broadway play that flopped. Nevertheless, Hollywood was hoovering up talky dramas with sophisticated people in ritzy surroundings. This movie was shot in a stagey, staid way so actors could stay close to microphones. I thought the courtroom scene and the New Year’s Eve Party were shot with some vague sense that they were making a movie, and so was the opening shot, which features only Harding’s hands. But the intention of giving The Folks the illusion this is how the people who go see Carmen live and love is more important here than cinematic values.

This movie, Harding’s second film, was a success with the audiences and served as a foundation of her stardom. Maybe in the early talkie days, one strong performance in a picture was enough to satisfy audiences. Battling guilt and social pressures resonated with audiences – even conformists are subject to spells of the guilts sometimes and have their skirmishes with The Combine.

People could also relate to the situation in which the husband works too much, which undermines the stability of their marriage by making the wife feel disregarded. People could also relate to married people sticking together for better or worse. Folks back then probably nodded their heads when Vera tells her husband, “I like the feeling of belonging to you.” Nowadays some people would be uncomfortable with “Belonging to you is a feeling I like;” it’s just not the way some people would say they like the feeling of comfort, safety, and being valued by the other person. Expressions change, feelings don’t.

Perry Mason 158: TCOT Demure Defendant

Note: From 1956 in the 50^th Perry Mason novel receptionist Gertie finally gets described in Chapter Seven. She looks like Connie Cezon! Stand-in for Bette Davis! Meanwhile, the big clue shows up fashionably late, so readers have zero chance of beating Mason to the punch. He barely gets it himself before springing the solution like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

The Case of the Demure Defendant – Erle Stanley Gardner

Nadine Farr is beautiful, but beauty doesn’t stop the nightmares. The dread. The guilt that coils in her gut like a live wire. For professional help, she goes to Dr. Logbert Denair - a name that sounds like it belongs in the year I was born. He prescribes talk therapy under sodium pentothal. Truth serum. Nadine talks. Too much. She says she poisoned her uncle. She says she tossed the cyanide bottle into a lake. Denair records every word on reel-to-reel tape.

Now he’s sitting on a confession that could ruin lives. He doesn’t want to hand it to the cops. He doesn’t want to bury it either. So he calls Perry Mason. Mason listens, calm as a surgeon. He tells Denair patient statements are privileged - but evidence of a crime? That’s another story. Mason warns him: truth serum can twist reality. Delusion isn’t admissible. Before anyone runs to the police, someone needs to dig deeper. Denair hires Mason to do the digging.

From there, the ground shifts. This 1956 case is a maze of secrets and sharp turns. Mason ends up accused of fabricating evidence - Hamilton Burger grinning like a wolf while he says it. Mason gives advice to hapless fools unwary enough to consider selective spilling:

Get this straight. You’re dealing with a murder case. No matter how awkward the truth is, you can’t fabricate a situation that will meet all of the requirements. You can’t get a falsehood that will dovetail with all of the facts. Sooner or later all of the other facts will be known. If your story doesn’t dovetail you’ll have to change it. If you change it under pressure the truth will then be ten times more awkward.

For a few chapters, it looks bad. Real bad. Gardner pushes Mason to the edge before pulling him back in the final pages.

TCOT Demure Defendant isn’t cozy. It’s clinical, almost surgical, in how it dissects fear and guilt. Gardner plays with the ethics of psychiatry, the fragility of memory, and the law’s hunger for certainty.

Fans of Perry, Della, and Paul will love the ride. New readers? Maybe not. Gardner’s tricks with evidence can feel glib and pat, like sleight of hand. But if you want a Mason novel that flirts with psychological suspense, this one delivers.

The Kalends of Ann Harding: Paris Bound

Note: This 1929 movie asks the question whether married couples can have a relationship with other people outside the marriage but remain committed to the marriage. Apparently in our culture every generation for the last century has to hash this issue out, given we still see on Reddit stories like “I proposed an open marriage, but I regret it.” Maybe antique movies with enduring themes will still have relevance for us post-moderns: literature is news that stays news, said Ezra Pound.

Paris Bound
1929 / 1:16
Tagline: “Is Love Crushed by Marriage?”
[internet archive]

This is the film version of the 1927 play by Philip Barry. He was known for exploring the intersectionality of love, marriage, and sex among the young, healthy, and wealthy. This seems to be one of Barry’s lesser-known plays and Hollywood never re-made this film version like they re-made Holiday, The Animal Kingdom, and The Philadelphia Story.

The wedding ceremony of Mary (Ann Harding) and James (Fredric March) seems to be an event that no one wants to attend. The guests look dubious, as if they were wishing they were someplace else. James’ former GF Noel is so obviously repining that the other guests tell Jim to give her a talking to, to snap her out of her decline. Jim is always restrained with her but Noel tells Jim that she is his heart and soul. Theatrical Noel also tells Mary that Mary has the wisest eyes Noel has ever seen.

As I said, the guests look stricken, like they were digesting a frightening diagnosis. This is strange because in the opening scene, her first scene ever in a motion picture, in a wedding dress, Ann Harding looks stunning. Breath-taking. The headpiece and veil make her look like she has descended from the Empyrean to show us funny-looking mortals something … wonderful. After almost one hundred years, in a brutalized monochrome print Ann Harding’s oval face radiates timeless elegance, with luminous eyes, refined features, and a serene expression. Her classic beauty blends intelligence, warmth, grace, and quiet strength, leaving a memorable impression today. The only other entrance that made me gape and gabble like this was that shot of Grace Kelly alighting from a cloud before broken-legged Stewart in her first scene in Rear Window.

Anyway, enough babbling. Jim and Mary promise never to quit each other though they grant “sex attraction” for third parties will happen. This kind of open-mindedness is often expressed by Barry’s characters until the fat is in the fire and characters conclude keeping more traditional attitudes leads to less mess in personal relations. Barry’s claims, I think, are that monogamy means fewer hurt feelings and thus in the long run exclusivity is more conducive to peace of mind.

To continue, they have a child and Mary plays her piano looking soulful and thoughtful (and few actresses do sad and pensive better than Ann Harding). Every now and then Jim has to take the big boat to Europe for six weeks at a time. He works for a publisher who has a stable of expatriate American writers so he needs to visit the Riviera to confer with them.

Mary is decidedly not a soldier about these lengthy separations but stays home for the sake of their toddler son. Thunderheads appear when Mary gets inadvertent word from Jim’s sister that circumstantial evidence suggests Jim and Noel met on the Rivera for discreet adult play. Mary wretchedly works with composer Richard Parrish on their ballet. Without conviction, she lamely argues that married people need vacations from each other once in a while. Richard however falls in love with Mary and declares his love for Mary. Poor Mary - when it rains, it pours.

This is an early talkie, so the sound in the IA print sounds muddy in places, has drop-outs and random noise, and an annoying echo of various words and phrases. Also the staging is static, not cinematic at all. The acting is sometimes histrionic – emphatic, earnest, with diction to ensure that theatre-goers in the back rows will catch every word. I think Fredric March and Ann Harding, both stage-trained, are natural in this early all-talking movie - they both know how to deliver a line.

European Reading Challenge #7

 I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia - Orlando Figes

This monumental study of Stalin’s Russia is more than a chronicle of the Soviet era; it is a social history of the entire twentieth century in Russia. Orlando Figes reconstructs decades of deprivation, hunger, fear, and state terror through archival documents and the voices of ordinary people. His narrative captures how politics and economics penetrated private life, shaping families and identities under relentless pressure.

The book’s title refers to those who learned to “whisper” in order to survive - a metaphor for lives lived in secrecy and fear. Figes animates these lives with vivid detail, showing how repression seeped into kitchens, bedrooms, and even thoughts. Communal apartments, for example, were not merely a solution to housing shortages but instruments of surveillance. In shared kitchens, “even the tea kettles have ears.” A careless joke could lead to denunciation, interrogation, torture, and exile to the Gulag - or worse. Under such conditions, silence became a survival strategy, and public declarations of loyalty masked private despair.

My own understanding of these stories is sharpened by time spent in Riga in the early 1990s, where I met survivors of deportation and exile. They spoke of friends thrown from trains into the Siberian wilderness; of years spent forgetting their native tongue; of relatives killed in ways too brutal to repeat. These encounters echo Figes’s portraits of resilience and resignation.

One of the book’s most unsettling themes is complicity. Terror made nearly every citizen feel like both victim and accomplice. Denunciation could eliminate a rival or secure a coveted apartment. Ideological zeal - fueled by class hatred and fear - turned neighbors into informants. Yet, paradoxically, many victims continued to venerate Stalin, writing poems of devotion even after losing loved ones to his bloody regime. Figes probes this contradiction but admits its mystery: why do people cling to the author of their suffering? One survivor offers a grim rationale: “We would have fought the same way anyway… because it’s easier to tolerate violence from our own people than from foreigners.”

The book’s first half - covering collectivization, the liquidation of kulaks, and the Great Terror - feels deeper and more cohesive than the postwar chapters. Still, Figes’s attempt to frame the war as a dividing line is compelling. Postwar society, he argues, remembered not the suffering but the unity forged against Hitler, even as repression persisted in subtler forms.

The final chapters examine reactions to Stalin’s death: hope tempered by dread, as no one knew what would follow. Survivors had adapted to fear so thoroughly that its absence was disorienting. This is perhaps the book’s most chilling insight - that human beings can grow accustomed to any cruelty. State terror, given time, becomes ordinary.

The Whisperers is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Russian society and the psychology of survival under totalitarianism. Its absence in Russian translation - and Figes’s status as an “un-person” there - speaks volumes about its power. Like his earlier Natasha’s Dance, this work combines scholarly rigor with narrative grace, but here the tone is darker, the questions more haunting. How does a society endure decades of violence and still whisper words of love to its oppressor? Figes does not offer easy answers.

Perry Mason 157: Cool & Lam and Connoisseurs

Note: As a child of the Sixties, I’ve always believed that what’s neglected or off the beaten path is cool. If something becomes wildly popular, I suspect it must have lost some of its edge - though I admit there are exceptions, like The Name of the Rose, a work of philosophy that somehow managed to be a best-selling novel.

Cool & Lam and Us Connoisseurs

Erle Stanley Gardner’s Cool and Lam books? They’re the B-side of his career, the deep cut we hardcore readers brag about knowing while everyone else hums the Perry Mason theme. Mason was Gardner’s platinum-selling run of singles: courtroom pyrotechnics, nice clothes, and a TV franchise that ran longer than many marriages. Radio, comic strips, articles in TV Guide - Mason was the brand, the icon, the guy who made courtroom pyrotechnics look like a well-tailored suit. America ate it up because America loves a hero who wins on logic and showbiz and never sweats saving the innocent from The Combine.

Cool and Lam? Forget it. No TV blitz, no radio soap, no Hollywood movies however bad. Just two oddballs in print: Bertha Cool, a bulldozer dripping in diamonds, and Donald Lam, a bantamweight disbarred lawyer who solves cases by seeing the legalities sideways. Try dumping that into mid-century American living rooms on Sunday night versus Bonanza. In the late Fifties and early Sixties America wanted its morality without nuance and its courtroom drama reassuring. Cool and Lam were built for laughs, for folks who grokked Catch-22 and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Cool and Lam lived where ethics fray and human folly struts buck naked. That’s not prime-time material; that’s cult territory.

Branding killed them, too. Mason was marketed as the lawyer-detective supreme, a beacon of brilliance and virtue. Cool and Lam? They were the cool older cousins who unexpectedly show up at the family Christmas party and show signs of having an anarchic sense of humor fueled by psychedelics. Publishers and studios pumped Mason like he was the cure for polio, leaving Cool and Lam to hustle on their own dime. Result: Mason becomes a household deity; Cool and Lam roam the shadows.

And yet - here’s the kicker - the cognoscenti know better. We dig Cool and Lam because they punk the hard-boiled formula. Lam’s wiry intellect jousts with Cool’s blunt-force pragmatism. These books don’t have a narrative arc like Mason novels; they riff on ambiguity, nothing stays still for long. Writer Scott Bradfield brilliantly nails it:

Mason bends the law (within limits that the law allows), but he doesn’t break it. Cool and Lam, on the other hand, treat the law with almost brutal disregard: they lie to the cops and their clients and disturb crime scenes by removing (sometimes destroying) significant evidence and planting fake evidence and alibis. They seem to assume that the law  -  like the many grifters and con games they encounter, from salted gold mines to rigged slot machines, automobile insurance fraudsters, and insider trading - is just a game. And that whatever laws they don’t break were probably broken to begin with.

Families implode, business ethics wobble, and Gardner implies "A free mind, my friend, doesn’t get tangled up in nonsense not in its power. Be the Lam: see clearly, act kindly, and don’t let prejudice or anger drive the bus. Pack four virtues in your pocket and don a calm expression that says, ‘I’ve seen worse.’" If Mason is unpredictable but trustworthy Brubeck, Cool and Lam are bebop - fast, crooked, and sly while being kinda dumb. 

Bottom line: if you crave complexity, irony, and a worldview that doesn’t come shrink-wrapped in excellence, Cool and Lam are your jam. Mason may own the marquee, but Cool and Lam own the underground. And that’s where the real music plays, for we happy few anyway.