Good Night, Sweet Prince

We have lost Val Kilmer.  I'm so broken up over this.

Val Kilmer was my first modern Hollywood crush, thanks to Batman Forever (1995).  I was fifteen when that came out, and I fell for him immediately, and then watched both it and Willow (1988) repeatedly throughout my teens, followed by a deep obsession with Tombstone (1993).  Over the years, I have loved so many of Val's movies.  I also really enjoyed his memoir, I'm Your Huckleberry.  

I'll be posting a list of my top ten favorites sometime soon.  For now, I'm just really sad.

"The Avenger" (Bonanza) 1960

I will be blunt: the reason this is my favorite Bonanza episode is because of the guest star.  Vic Morrow is a dear favorite of mine, and I absolutely love getting to watch him play a good guy in a western.  He was in quite a few classic western shows, but almost always playing the heavy, sometimes playing very sinister and nasty baddies indeed -- and I enjoy those in a certain way, but not in the way I enjoy seeing him play a good guy.

I remember watching this episode for the first time in my teens, watching it with my whole family as part of our weekly Friday Night Movie Night family time.  I went in knowing he was the guest star and being pretty sure he was going to be the bad guy because that was how it had gone with all the eps of other westerns I'd seen him in.  You can imagine my delight when he proved to play not a bad guy, but not even an antagonist!  He plays a hero!  Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen!

A stranger (Vic Morrow) rides into a town that positively drips ominous foreboding.  No people on the streets.  A saloon filled with toughs who are raucously celebrating the completion of a gallows in the middle of town.  Bad stuff is about to happen here.  Bad stuff has already happened here.

And then we discover that the two men in jail who are going to be hanged that night... are Ben and Adam Cartwright (Lorne Greene and Pernell Roberts).  Those yahoos in the saloon are eager to dance and spit all over their graves.  The stranger finds this disturbing, but he's a quiet guy not looking for trouble.  At least, not looking for this particular trouble.

Actually, he's looking for a group of men who lynched his father and killed a lot of other innocent townspeople a few years ago in Lassiter, Kansas.  Because he never shares his name in this episode, folks take to calling him Lassiter after the town he keeps talking about.  

Thanks to his family history, Lassiter is very sensitive to wrongful hangings, even when they're carried out by the law and not by a lynch mob.  He becomes convinced that Ben and Adam are innocent.  Their conviction hinged on the testimony of one scared hired man and one angry young woman -- and the hired man has been murdered, while the young woman is seeking to punish the Cartwrights for her father's death whether they were actually guilty of killing him or not.

Vic Morrow plays Lassiter with exquisite gravitas.  He's calm, steady, soft-spoken, and unflinching in his quest to find his father's killers and bring them to justice.  He doesn't waste a single movement; every flicker of his eyelids, every sideways glance, every raised eyebrow speaks as much as his dialog ever does.  This is a man who will not fail, and the audience knows it.  The people of this town know it.  Even Hoss and Little Joe Cartwright (Dan Blocker and Michael Landon) realize it, and agree to let Lassiter try to save their father and brother first before they start throwing lead at everyone in sight.

Obviously, Ben and Adam don't hang.  Obviously, the guy trying to get them hung is one of the men Lassiter is trying to find.  Obviously, Lassiter's calm logic and insistence on seeing truth and justice served are what save the Cartwrights.  There aren't any huge surprises here... unless you are used to seeing Vic Morrow play baddies in westerns, and discover to your great joy that he is playing a very good guy indeed here.

Honestly, "The Avenger" doesn't really feel like a typical Bonanza episode... because it wasn't.  It was supposed to serve as a pilot for a spin-off series starring Vic Morrow.  Another pilot of sorts was filmed as an episode of the lesser-known show Outlaws, with Morrow playing the same character and tracking down another of his father's murderers.  But the network never picked the show up.  

Part of me is sad about that, because Lassiter is really cool, and I would love to have a whole western show starring Vic Morrow to watch over and over and over.  But part of me is okay with it, because if Vic had made a success in that show, he might have been under contract when they started casting the series Combat! (1962-67) and unable to be in that.  And that would have been horrible, because that is my favorite TV show of all time, and his character, Sergeant Saunders, is my favorite fictional character ever.  So, I just keep enjoying this episode every now and then and don't mourn too much over the series never happening.

You can watch this episode basically anywhere because it's in the public domain.  It's easy to find on streaming platforms, YouTube, DVD, etc.

This has been my contribution to the 11th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon hosted this weekend by A Shroud of Thoughts.

A Little Kitchen Project

I made a coffee bar in my kitchen!  When my mom started living with us part-time last fall, I bought a Keurig because that makes it really easy for her to get her first cup of coffee even if she wakes up long before me.  But the Keurig and its coffee pod storage took up a lot of space on my counter -- space I couldn't use for anything else anymore.  Not only that, but reaching coffee mugs in the cabinets was tricky for my mom, since she has Parkinson's and that affects her balance and movements.

So, I decided to make a coffee bar to make coffee and mugs more accessible for my mom, and also for any guests.  Now that she lives here part of the time, we get a lot more guests because her friends from near and far like to come out and spend some time with her.  I figure it's nice to not make guests wonder how your coffee maker works, where you keep your coffee grounds, if you have creamer, and so on.  Everyone can figure out a Keurig pretty quickly, especially an ultra-simple one like mine.

Long, long ago, when our first baby was less than a year old, we bought a huge old dry sink at the Salvation Army.  It was a perfect changing table for many years.  Once my kids outgrew diapers, it became a combination extra kitchen storage space below, and a catch-all for my stuff above.  In the past few years, it's transformed into a sort of strategic planning zone where I could keep my bullet journal, stickers, letters that need to be answered, and random things I needed to deal with in the immediate future.

In other words, it had become a giant mess:

I knew it could be ideal as a coffee bar.  It's a little lower than my counters, so my mom can easily reach everything there.  It's not huge, so she should be able to stand in one place and access everything.  It was originally a dry sink, so it's easy to clean and not a stranger to moisture.  All I had to do was clean it all off, rehome everything that I had been storing on top of it, and pick up a few small accessories!

Yeah, it took me about two weeks to do all that.  But, it's finished at last!

I already had the cute sign that says "Coffee and friends make the perfect blend."  I picked up a rubber mat to go under my Keurig and make cleaning up spills easier.  I bought a mug tree online.  I picked up a couple of new mugs at the thrift store so that Mom and guests could have some drinkware choices.  And I used a gift card that I won in a giveaway to buy a cute little mug-shaped basket to hold flavored coffee creamers.  So, now I have a coffee bar!  

I also ordered a mini table-top trash can, but that has been delayed in shipping, so I'll have to change this up a bit once that arrives.  Still, I'm really happy with how it turned out, and I hope it makes mornings easier for my mom when she's staying here and more fun for our future guests.

Fun New Author Interview

Just a quick link to an interview with me that Donna Jo Stone shared today on her blog, Almost an Author :-D  We chatted about the unique challenges and strengths of writing fairy tale retellings and writing for a YA audience.  Hope you enjoy it!

Were They the Best Years of Our Lives?

I picked up The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) off the shelf at the library a dozen or more years ago because I saw it had Myrna Loy in it, and I really like her. I love movies involving WWII, soldiers, and the 1940s, so I figured I’d give it a try. 

At that time, I mostly knew Loy from the Thin Man movies she made with William Powell, which are hilarious and snarky and fun. So I think I kind of expected that this movie would also be a lighthearted way to pass an evening on my night off from work that week. I didn’t expect it to surprise and awe me. I didn’t expect it to be a serious and soul-searching. I didn’t expect it to wow me. 

But, boy, am I glad it wasn’t what I expected. 

The Best Years of Our Lives follows three American servicemen as they return to their hometown after World War Two. Made in 1946, when some GIs were still returning from “over there,” it is an unflinching look at the frustrations, hardships, joys, and fears involved in reuniting fighters with families. 

Former Army sergeant Al Stephenson (Frederic March) comes home to his wife Milly (Myrna Loy) and kids Peggy (Theresa Wright) and Rob (Michael Hall). They welcome him eagerly, if a little awkwardly. It will take some time for them all to readjust to each other, they know. Al gets his old job at a bank back, but he doesn’t feel like he fits in either there or at home anymore. Everyone wants life to go back to being just as it was before, but he’s changed too much to feel that’s possible. He seeks solace in alcohol. Milly sees this and is worried, but stalwartly supports him however she can, helping him to work through his worries and doubts subtly and kindly. 

Former Air Force captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) comes home to his parents who live on the poor side of town and idolize him, and to Marie (Virginia Mayo), the wife he acquired during a quickie wartime marriage. She wants him to be the same heroic, charming, fun guy she married two years earlier, but he’s changed. They don’t call it this, but Fred suffers from PTSD. He has horrible nightmares and withdraws from his wife and others around him. Unable to get his old job back, he becomes a lowly salesman at a drug store. Marie constantly berates and demeans him for getting such a lame job, for being boring, for not throwing money and attention at her constantly. 

Former Navy sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) has it the hardest. He returns home to a loving family and his devoted fiancée Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell), the literal girl-next-door… but he returns home without his hands. Fiercely independent, and yet physically dependent on others for so many things, Homer chafes at the love, the pity, the kindness, and the stares that meet him everywhere. He doesn’t want Wilma to marry him because he thinks she deserves better. He even considers taking his own life so he won’t be a bother to those around him anymore. 

Played by real-life double amputee Harold Russell, who lost his hands in an accidental explosion during WWII, Homer Parrish is nothing short of inspiring. He has two artificial limbs with hooks on them that enable him to eat, drink, write, smoke, play the piano… but not stroke Wilma’s hair. Not button buttons. Not tie shoes. Not do a hundred everyday things that Homer thinks are important. 

As their lives and the lives of their loved ones weave together in a myriad tiny ways, Al, Fred, and Homer come to rely on each other for support, understanding, and encouragement. All three of them understand what it was like in the war, what it’s like to come home, what it’s like to want to fit in, but fail. Together, they work to raise each other above their problems and see that maybe the years they spent apart from their families weren’t the best years, but that maybe the years to come will be the best years, if they can only allow themselves to live them.

(This post originally appeared in Femnista magazine on September 7, 2019.)

"The Iron Mistress" (1952)

Happy 9th Alaniversary to me :-D  I shall celebrate by reviewing Alan Ladd's biopic about James Bowie, the legendary frontiersman and inventor of the Bowie Knife.  

(Quick aside:  I always thought that a Bowie Knife and an Arkansas Toothpick were the same thing, but it turns out they're slightly different styles of hunting-and-fighting knives... which were both originally made by the same knifemaker in Arkansas.  Huh.)

The movie opens with Jim Bowie (Alan Ladd) leaving his Louisiana backwoods home for the first time to go sell his family's lumber in New Orleans.  In New Orleans, he gets tangled up with the aristocratic de Bornay siblings, Narcisse (Douglas Dick) and Judalon (Virginia Mayo).  He quickly falls for the spoiled and scheming Judalon; Narcisse tries to warn his new friend away from his sister, but of course, Jim Bowie's not thinking with his head at the moment.

Nothing Jim Bowie does convinces Judalon he's worthy of her love.  She doesn't dig poor guys.  Oh, she enjoys kissing him from time to time, and flirting with him, but no, she could never love a poor man.  So, Jim goes home, works hard, and gets rich.  When he encounters Judalon again, he's on an equal economic footing with her... and she's married.  But Judalon claims she's trying to get a divorce.  Jim believes her, of course.  

And then there's this whole thing involving horse races where Jim enters a horse race, and his horse wins, and all the aristocrats refuse to pay their gambling losses unless he can prove he owns the horse.  Insults and challenges ensue, and Jim ends up attending a duel as the second for a friend.  The duel is a set-up, an ambush to kill both Jim and his friend because they just don't belong in the fancy New Orleans world, no matter how rich they get.  

The movie does a reasonably good job recreating the Vidalia Sandbar Fight here -- a real-life event where a duel turned into a brawl.  Jim Bowie gets shot, then stabbed with a sword, but cuts down his opponent with a special knife he had made to his specifications.  Oh, and he still has the other guy's sword sticking out of him when he does it (which is historically accurate). 

Judalon reneges on her promise to leave her husband for Jim Bowie.  He leaves for Texas, hoping to find a new purpose for his life.  But he's ambushed on the way and left lying on the road, presumed dead.  There, he's found by Senorita Ursula de Varamendi (Phyllis Kirk), who takes him to her family's home so he can recover.

It turns out Ursula's father is the Governor of Texas.  She clearly would like to get together with Jim Bowie, but he is still obsessed with Judalon.  He leaves Texas, saying he's going to wrap up his business affairs in New Orleans, but Ursula can see it's really so he can have one final chance to find and woo Judalon.

Bowie encounters Judalon and her husband Phillipe (Alf Kjellin) on a riverboat.  Phillipe is a terrible gambler and desperate for money.  When he loses a huge sum of money to some card sharps, Jim saves the day by exposing the cheaters and getting Phillipe's money back.  Judalon tells her husband she's leaving him for Jim.  Phillipe decides to ambush Jim in his cabin on the boat.  There's another guy called Black Jack Sturdevant (Anthony Caruso) aboard the boat and planning to kill Jim too because of reasons.  (I kind of left out his whole part of the plot, but he's been after Jim Bowie for a while now -- and he stole Jim's knife.)  

Now, we all know that Jim Bowie died during the siege of the Alamo, not on a riverboat, so obviously, he survives the ambush.  And he finally realizes that Judalon has never and will never love him, that she's a scheming opportunist and liar.  He is through with her at last, and heads back to Texas to marry Ursula (also historically accurate!) and start a new life there.  And he tosses his special knife in the river on his way out for symbolic emphasis.

While the main plot of this whole movie is made up (everything involving Judalon, basically), it does at least hit some facts here and there.  It's one of those "well, this COULD have happened" sorts of movies.  And it's a good time -- lots of knife fights and duels and brawls, Alan Ladd looks gorgeous throughout, and he even gets to do some stunts.  The two things that you would think most likely to stretch your credulity -- that fight where he kills a guy while he's got a sword is sticking out of his chest, and the fact that he married the governor of Texas's daughter --  are totally true.  

Is this movie family friendly?  Basically.  There's a lot of hand-to-hand violence and some gunplay, but it's all very '50s-style and non-gory, non-scary stuff.  Judalon clearly is untrue to her husband, and even kisses Jim after she's married to Phillipe, but it's very tastefully handled and could even be a good talking point for parents and children about what marital infidelity is.

You can easily find The Iron Mistress on DVD, but I don't know that it's streaming anywhere.

We Love Musicals Week -- Giveaway Winners + Wrap Up

Well, here we are at the end of another blog party.  This was such a fun one!  I'm still catching up on reading posts, but the ones I've read so far have been lovely :-)

If you have any last-minute posts you want to contribute, you are not too late!  Here's the link-up widget once again:

And here are the winners of the giveaway:

Prize One:  a used DVD copy of Guys and Dolls (1955) -- Chloe the Movie Critic

Prize Two:  a used DVD copy of Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) -- Ivy Miranda

Prize Three:  a used DVD copy of Holiday Inn (1942) -- Amanda O.

Prize Four:  a used DVD copy of Oklahoma! (1999) -- Crystan R.

Prize Five:  a Newsies sticker sheet -- Nicole B.

Prize Six:  a My Fair Lady vinyl sticker -- Gill J.

I will be alerting the winners by email this evening, so please keep an eye on your inboxes!

I hope you've all had lots of fun this week!