Back to School Clothes, 1965

 

From this picture can you guess which movie influenced back to school clothes in 1965?

Another clue...

And this darling third clue?

Naturally, it is the movie that for five years made more money at the box office than even Gone with the Wind.......

The Sound of Music!

I remember seeing the movie when it premiered at Nashville's nicest movie theater in 1965. How I loved it! RH and I had only been married a few years and didn't have any children yet but if I'd had school age children I most likely would have been wanting to dress them this way for the first day of school.

And that first day of school back then was always the day after Labor Day, not some barbarous day in August when we would have still been at Pleasant Green swimming pool or Myrtle Beach.

I loved the songs from the movie, still do. You still hear These are a few of my favorite things on Instagram, don't you? I think one of the most memorable scenes from the movie was So Long, Farewell when the von Trapp children bid adieu to their house guests one evening and disappeared one by one up the staircase, cute little Greti  going last. And then of course when the song is repeated at their performance at the Salzburg Festival when they bid adieu to the audience and escape  through the Alps to Switzerland. 

But back to fashion! Here are two more fall fashion pictures from my August 1965 issue of Ladies' Home Journal.

 

 and...

 I see a slight influence of the movie in the second woman's dress, do you? 

Would school children today be caught dead in these clothes?

Do you think the style will ever come back?

Did you ever wear a dress similar to these, as a child or as an adult?  

 

Now, Voyager and Bette Davis

 

With April 5th the birthday of my favorite actress, it seems the perfect time to share the book that my favorite Bette Davis movie is taken from. 

Now, Voyager by Olive Higgins Prouty was published in 1941 and just a year later Warner Bros. released the movie. While not Davis's best critical success by any means, it is the movie I must stop and watch every time TCM plays it. 

 

 It's no surprise that while the movie is fabulous, the book is even better. The movie screenwriter was wise enough to include much of the actual dialogue from the book, including the Walt Whitman lines Prouty used on the title page:

The untold want, by life and land ne'er granted,

Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.

If ever someone needed to seek their untold want, it was Charlotte Vale, far away from her domineering mother. While I cannot imagine a better actress to have played the part of Charlotte than Bette Davis, I was fascinated by Prouty's own word picture of her that she opened the book with:

She looked as if she might have recently been ill. She had little natural color, and no artificial color whatsoever. There was something that suggested old ivory about the cast and quality of her skin. Her cheek-bones were high and accentuated by hollows in her cheeks. her brows were black, well-defined, and extraordinarily far apart. Her hair was black--what could be seen of it. It was cut very short. Her eyes were the somber blue of late-blooming monk's-hood. She was dressed in the conservative good taste that is expensive. A navy blue costume, very plain and very perfect, with a small snug navy-blue hat on her close-cropped head. Over her shoulders hung the pelts of several little animals, probably Russian sable. She caused much comment among the other passengers because of the incongruity between her distinguished appearance and her wary manner.

For those familiar with the movie, you'll notice that the book opens with the transformation of Charlotte Vale after her stay in an expensive sanitarium following her nervous breakdown, while that part comes much later in the movie.

Olive Higgins Prouty wrote honestly about mental illness because she was a sufferer of it herself and I read online that she wrote very accurately about psychotherapy, something that few authors of the time did. 

And here in the rough draft that I wrote Sunday morning while watching CBS Sunday Morning is where my notes end because I went on to watch Face the Nation and Margaret Brennan's video call interview with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, including current news and pictures. 

I've often turned to books these last horrifying weeks to distract me from the news I cannot turn off. But even a book I loved like Now, Voyager cannot help when faced with such atrocities being committed against innocent people. I had to get up, go to my kitchen and bang pots and pans angrily together and when that didn't help, go outside in the cold but sunny day with BreeBree and James Mason and cry helplessly.

And life goes on here in America.

Last week I went to our local library for the first time in years. After organizing my bookshelves this winter I realized I should stop buying more books (most of the time) and start finding them at the library, one fabulous thing that is still free. 

I picked out three novels and a new Susan Loomis cookbook, which I later ended up ordering because there were too many good recipes to copy. Ha, so much for my good intentions! One new idea at the library was a rack of Lucky Day books, new popular releases that you could only choose one of, with no renewal.

I chose a new Anne Tyler book called French Braid.

 

My apology to Anne Tyler fans but I finally laid this book aside after three nights' reading, hoping it would get better (happier). It didn't.

Next I opened Sarah Addison Allen's First Frost, chosen because I think I remember liking her Garden Spells. Even it took awhile for me to warm up to but I ended up enjoying it, the ending especially. 

I need happy endings. 

 

I'm grateful to be starting a library routine again. So many of the new books I've bought the last few years have not been put on my own bookshelves but rather passed on or donated. Very few new authors join the books on my eight bookshelves to be read again and again. 

There's no hope for me. I like old music, old books, old movies. I won't say "old" actors but rather say "actors from the past."

Happy Birthday, Bette Davis!

From Ladies' Home Journal, June 1951, the original Bette Davis eyes.

Little Women Movies

I've not yet seen the new Little Women but if you have, please tell me what you thought about it. 

When I saw this picture of Jo and Laurie, I started thinking about the actors who played them in three previous movies.

 This must be how Norman Rockwell thought of them when commissioned to paint this full page color illustration for Women's Home Companion in the January 1938 issue to accompany Katharine Anthony's four-part biography of the author, Louisa May Alcott.

Honestly, not how I pictured either of them. What do you think? And what was Norman Rockwell thinking?

Not counting some television adaptations, I thought back to the three movies I've seen, from 1933, 1949, and 1994.

In 1933's version Katharine Hepburn played Jo and Douglass Montgomery played Laurie.  Despite the distinctive two s's in Douglass (is that how to type it-- two s's?), he left no lasting impression on me. 

Hepburn? She was okay, I guess. But Spring Byington as Marmee, never!

However, Edna May Oliver as Aunt March was inspired! Remember her in Pride and Prejudice as Lady Catherine? Same type and perfect. 

Then in 1949 came June Allyson as Jo and Peter Lawford as Laurie. I love June but think she belongs better in WW II movies as the soft voiced patient wife, not as Jo. Lawford wasn't bad as Laurie, but oh my goodness, handsome Rossano Brazzi as Professor Bhaer won my heart!

I liked Mary Astor as Marmee and Elizabeth Taylor was darling as Amy.  Whatever incredible genetics went to make up Taylor's eyes, I want some!

I admit to being partial to Winona Ryder as Jo in the 1994 production. I just think she played Jo right. And I thought Christian Bale was Laurie! Gabriel Byrne was good as the professor, Claire Danes as Beth, and Susan Sarandon as Marmee. Kirsten Dunst was perfect as spoiled Amy and Samantha Mathis, however unrealistically, turned into a lovely Amy grown up. Mary Wickles was a delightful Aunt March. 

The one character I've failed to mention is sister Meg. Why do we not really think of Meg? It's been years since I read Little Women and I can't remember whether the written character was as forgettable as the movie versions of Meg.

In the biography of Louisa May Alcott in the 1938 Woman's Home Companion, Katharine Anthony wrote a lot about Alcott's trip to Europe as paid companion to the invalid daughter of a wealthy family. On the trip she met a handsome Polish pianist named Ladislas Wisniewski. A lot is known of the time the two spent in Paris where he kissed her hand goodbye when she had to return to America, and it was assumed that the young man who was thirteen years her junior had proposed marriage.

Nothing is really known about why nothing ever came of it. 

Several American men thought themselves to be Laurie but Alcott herself later said that "Laurie was really Ladislas Wisniewski."

Have you seen the new Little Women movie? I'd love to know what you thought about it! 

Of all the Little Women movies you've seen, which did you like the best?

           Who was your favorite Jo? Laurie? etc.?

 

This one's for you, Tammy!

In my recent attempt to purge old emails, I accidentally deleted one from my dear blog friend Tammy. When you told Poppy and me about loving an old 1962 movie called "Rome Adventure" I remembered that I had once written a rough draft for a blog post on the very same movie, just another example over the years of the many books and movies we both love. 

Some of what we both love can be classified as great literature or classic movies. Rome Adventure isn't one of them, is it Tam? But we both have to watch it every time it runs on TCM. So here's my old notes on it, that never made it into a blog post. Please add yours to it, Tam, the things you wrote about in the email I accidentally deleted. 

Because, who says a blog post can't be an email, right? I'm becoming more of a blogger who chooses to make her own rules about her own blog. On with it...

"Rome Adventure," starring Troy Donahue and Suzanne Pleshette. Sorry, Suzanne, you were mostly forgettable in your role as Prudence. If Natalie Wood had not dropped out at the last minute, maybe Prudence would have stood out better in my memories of this movie. This movie for me is all about Troy. Well, Troy and Italy.

What girl didn't have a crush on Troy in 1962? Even being a newlywed I still retained my crush. When he appears on the Rome scene in light colored slacks, a red v-neck sweater and white dress shirt, collar open...let's just say there was no way I was turning this movie off. I mean, how Troy Donahue was that outfit!

By the way, do you remember him and Sandra Dee in "A Summer Place"? Where he and Sandra are holidaying on an island with their families and meet, fall in love and she gets--(whisper) pregnant? One of my favorite chic flicks of the early 60s!

Back to Rome: there's Angie Dickinson who tries to keep her twisted clutches on Troy during the whole movie. She is at her most beautiful, mysterious, cruel best in the movie. She reminds me of Mad Men's January Jones in her first season on the show. Didn't Angie have her gorgeous legs insured back then for $1 mil by Lloyd's of London?

Another memorable female character is Daisy, the American who owns a bookshop in Rome. There's a whole movie waiting to be written expanding her intriguing part, don't you think, Tam? And I loved seeing Constance Ford play her part because it helps me think of her sympathetically rather than as the frigid bitch mother of Sandra Dee in A Summer Place, which she did masterfully well. 

Rossano Brazzi, another heartthrob, is Roberto before he inspired Mitzi Gaynor to wash that man right out of her hair. His memorable quote from Rome Adventure:

"Woman's most important function in life is to anchor man."

Good grief, and double gag!

But the man is one handsome Italian sophisticate in this movie. I mean, Rossano Brazzi and Troy Donahue? With those two, it doesn't even matter that Al Hirt wasn't handsome. He is funny in his small cameo part and does he ever play that trumpet!

And then there's the song, right, Tam? I fell in love with "Al Di La" as sung by Emillo Pericoli and I know you did too, as per the accidentally deleted email.

Italy and the music were the actual stars of this film. 

And Troy Donahue. Sigh.........

Tammy, maybe we can take some Italian classes like our Greek Goddess and her daughter?

I wonder how old Troy Donahue is now? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAJQJhgD0xo