Watching "Casablanca" again and fascinated, as always, to watch how it confirms Humphrey Bogart as a brave new romantic lead. Everything feeds this perception: its not just how Ingrid Bergman looks at him (as he has said): it's how everyone, including Claude Rains, looks at him.
"Isn't this wine a little bitter?" asks Joan Caulfield, a blur of blondeness. "Dry is the word," answers Claude Raines, who has poisoned her. Why did nobody tell me about "The Unsuspected"? It exaggerates the formula of "Laura," and out-camps camp. Why, here's Audrey Totter and Hurd Hatfield!
It was that final fantasy of entering the afterlife that most enchanted me when I belatedly read C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles for the first time -- the idea of moving "farther up and farther in": "You couldn't tell whether he was swimming or climbing." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/b...
I woke up to headlines that somehow made me flash on Cyd Charisse singing (or lip syncing) "I see a new sun, up in a new sky" in "The Bandwagon." Savor the moment.
Trending: retrospective rue. "I regret everything I've ever done or said," says Jennifer Lawrence in a NYT interview. The restaurateur Keith McNally has entitled his (excellent) memoir "I Regret Almost Everything." Why all the remorse? Would Edith Piaf feel the the same today?
Oh, it's evidently National Cat Day. So I suppose it's a good moment to say how much I have come to cherish and admire cats. They are so very companionable and, like us, perverse and capricious. And the luxury of just looking at a cat...A cat's acceptance of one is always flattering.
From reading Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mystery "The Red Box" (1937), I have learned that "ritz" can be a verb -- as in "You're in no position to ritz the cops." It means, per Webster, to behave superciliously toward, snub. I intend to use it in conversation as soon as possible.
Happy birthday to Catherine Deneuve, whose presence in film often suggests that the imp of the perverse is never more unsettling than when it hijacks classic beauty. See: "Belle de Jour," "Tristana" (Bunuel), "Mississippi Mermaid" (Truffaut), and - shudder -"Repulsion" (Polanski).
It's the birthday of the atomic Rita Hayworth, whose glamour blazed through the 1940s. When she was in "Gilda," my father, a night editor at an N.C. paper, arranged with the cinema across the street for his staff to drop in each evening to watch Hayworth sing "Put the Blame on Mame."
And it is the birthday of Oscar Wilde, who wrote the most perfect comedy in the English language (with "Earnest") and asked us to celebrate our contradictions. He anticipated so much: the ascendance of the autonomous public image, the cult of celebrity, the religion of style.
It's the birthday of Angela Lansbury, whom I first saw hurrying down the aisle of the Winter Garden, looking like alacrity incarnate. She said, "Sing out, Louise!" And suddenly there were tears of delight in my eyes. It was my first "Gypsy," and my first encounter with its peerless star.
Farewell to Diane Keaton, who brought a new. awakening rhythm to every performance she gave, with cadences, inflections and reactions that hadn't been seen in American film. Her charm and her style were original; her emotions ran deep. This will feel personal to many people.
Feeling happy shivers as I romp through recent seasons of "Inside No. 9," the Pemberton and Shearsmith anthology show. Love its creators' giddy avidity in sampling the darks arts of storytelling, from true crime docs to commedia dell'arte, in pursuit of the "gotcha!" punchline.
Stumbled tonight into the 1967 "Camelot," and whoa! -- it's a Harper's Bazaar fashion shoot, with an elfin Arthur and a mod Guenevere striking rueful, sensual poses against snowfalls and castle walls. What I retained from childhood: Redgrave's raw, tear-blotched face at the end.
