Americans are all talking about the Comey testimony. There was so much to say about it that my morning Washington Post experience became physically awkward; quote-packed stories leaked below the fold again and again, causing structural instability when I folded the paper and tried to balance it on the tippy top of a Jenga-like pile of cookie pans so I could stand up straight whilst reading it. Standing up straight is what we Americans must remember to do, now more than ever.
As harrowing as that game of chicken I played with gravity was, I was generally able to keep my cool during the whole ticking-time-bomb situation. Not so with my perfunctory thumb scroll through the day's Guardian headlines.
A current TV program was described ominously as "Breaking Bad meets Steel Magnolias."
I tried to remain unflappable in the face of the facts on the ground, but it was a losing battle. Did we not all agree, just a few short years ago, to keep those two intellectual properties from meeting? I don't care for the term "cockblock," because of my Richter-Scale-measurable amount of good taste, but perhaps "schlockblock" will serve. I liked Breaking Bad, but Steel Magnolias was the kind of film that gives chick flicks a bad name. I thought there had been a collective agreement to give SM the Jane Eyre treatment, by which I mean locking it up in a windowless room and sliding table scraps under the door periodically, when Olympia Dukakis is overheard grumbling.
Lest you tar me as a typical man, and dismiss my criticism as meaningless, I offer you this-- I doubt there's anyone alive who is carrying around more admiration than I am for the screwball comedies of the 1930s, where actresses forgotten today regularly pulled off the kind of magical performance that is bungled with regularity by today's charmless screen stars. The day that a modern actress is fit to even say aloud the holy names of Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, and Carole Lombard will be a red letter day indeed. (I'll concede that Sandy Bullock has come close to their level at times, particularly when matched with Hugh Grant.)
But Steel Magnolias is not that kind of film, a film where men and women alike can sit down and enjoy the amusing battle of the sexes played out on the screen, a script having been written by artists, rather than generated by a malfunctioning scriptbot, or even a high functioning chimp.
No, I'm sad to report that SM was more in the nature of what they used to call a "monster rally," where Dracula and the Wolfman and the rest of their ilk would suit up for a sort of All Star Game, and see which grade Z thespian would emerge the winner by elbowing Lon Chaney, Jr. out of the frame. (Not as easy to do as it might sound, due to Chaney Jr.'s low center of gravity and rum-bumptious inertia.)
Thus, we were confronted with a stink bomb where cruelly photogenic pseudo-actresses rubbed shoulders with the once-glorious battleship Shirley MacLaine. Now, I'm a Shirley fan. Shirley came in during a time when the great screwball comediennes were still lingering in our collective memory, and in some cases actually physically lingering at Trader Vic's and the Nut Brown Derby. She had every bit of their gravitas, and brought an Actor's Studio level of seriousness to her plucky airhead roles. Now, I imagine women of today may be rolling their eyes at my suggestion that we need to return to the era of the goofy ingenue and pretend that's all women should do in films. That's not what I believe, but neither do I buy the fiction that a strong woman character means strong woman acting. You can take Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, and Bette Davis in the many films where she attempted to fill out the card of an entire monster rally all by herself. I'll take Shirley in the Apartment, and Shirley in The Trouble With Harry, and Shirley in just about anything from her halcyon days. Or salad days. Some kind of days.
With her youth spent in a string of films where she had to distract you from various male legends without raising her voice above kittenish Kim Novak volume (an actual numerical decibel setting, according to Hollywood soundmen), Shirley arrived on the set of SM more or less loaded for bear. I suspect she didn't even have to go into second gear to make us forget Daryl Hannah, the adorable but less-than-great Sally Field and the still-overrated Julia Roberts, as none of them would have been able to scare Eve Arden, or for that matter, Kaye Ballard.
And since that time, Shirley has continued in the curmudgeon-in-winter roles, where she continues to show Candice Bergen how it's done. I believe she has a new film approaching, if it hasn't already landed, where she gets to traipse around bedeviling civil servants while forging a two-hanky bond with a sassy urchin.
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