BEFORE: I hope everyone had a great Valentine's Day, and if you didn't have someone loving you, I hope that at least you took the time to love yourself. You can interpret that statement any way you want. We're halfway through February now, but my romance chain still has a long way to go, nearly another month before I switch thematic gears. But I've got to get there first - and with my new criteria for programming as films that I've been very curious about, let's just say that effect is extremely high for tonight's selection.
Tom Kemp carries over from "Mermaids" - why do I get the feeling he's another local Boston actor, like Rex Trailer was? Kemp's been in "Gone Baby Gone", "Mystic River", "Shutter Island", "Black Mass", "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past", all films that shot in Massachusetts. He even had a part in the recent remake of "Little Women", which also was filmed up there. (I can't link to "Little Women" now, but it's part of my plan for April.)
Over on Turner Classic Movies, Spencer Tracy links from "Bad Day at Black Rock" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 15)
6:15 am "A Guy Named Joe" (1943) with _____________ linking to:
8:30 am "The Facts of Life" (1960) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 am "Top Hat" (1935) with _____________ linking to:
12:15 pm "The Gay Divorcee" (1934) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 pm "Three Smart Girls" (1937) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 pm "The Uninvited" (1944) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "The Philadelphia Story" (1940) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "A Lion in Winter" (1968) with _____________ linking to:
10:30 pm "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991) with _____________ linking to:
12:45 am "Taxi Driver" (1976) with _____________ linking to:
3:00 am "Young Frankenstein" (1974) with _____________ linking to:
5:00 am "The Merry Widow" (1952)
For once, I've seen the majority of tomorrow's films, 7 out of 12. Now I'm grateful I watched all those films a few years ago with a certain famous dancer from the 1930's, that came in handy here - I've seen "Top Hat", "The Gay Divorcee", "The Philadelphia Story", "A Lion in Winter", "The Silence of the Lambs", "Taxi Driver" and "Young Frankenstein". Programming more movies made after 1970 also helped me out a great deal, I'm up to 61 seen out of 183, another perfect third, or 33.33%.
THE PLOT: The story of psychologist William Moulton Marston and his polyamorous relationship with his wife and their mistress, which would inspire the creation of the super heroine Wonder Woman.
AFTER: This gentleman's name comes up in trivia questions all the time, because he was responsible for three famous things: 1) creating the character of Wonder Woman, 2) inventing the polygraph test and 3) being part of the first couple to consider their relationship status as "It's complicated". And this was decades before Facebook was even a thing. The first two things kind of go hand-in-hand, if you think about it, because Wonder Woman has a golden lasso that forces criminals and super-villains to tell her the truth, which is essentially a polygraph test in comic-book form. But there's so much more to Wonder Woman than just the rope, there's the whole bondage thing, the being raised in a society of women with no men (umm, we're still trying to figure out the logistics of that one) and the fact that she then became a powerful woman in a male-dominated world, who often masqueraded as an army secretary, in a more submissive role.
Now, when Superman puts on a suit and lives part of the day as Clark Kent, or Bruce Wayne puts on a cape and cowl and calls himself Batman, we don't think that much about it - but then when Wonder Woman lives a double life, the whole concept of gender politics comes into play, and it's a very different ball game. Why would the very strong Princess Diana of the Amazons dress down and put on some glasses and pretend to be average, humdrum Diana Prince? But wait, because we haven't even scratched the surface here - the early Wonder Woman comic books were filled with bondage, erotic subtext, homo-erotic subtext, and what are superhero costumes but fetish gear? It turns out that the earliest "Wonder Woman" comics were just one step removed from "Tijuana Bibles", which were kind of like the 1930's version of porn movie parodies. People back then didn't have x-rated movies just a few clicks away on the internet, so they had to pass the time with print cartoons of Popeye getting it on with Olive Oil, or Clark Gable doing Greta Garbo or whatever.
Wonder Woman was essentially fighting crime in a bustier and skirt for many years, then in the 1970's the TV show with Lynda Carter changed that to a corset and hot pants. (The comics gave her long pants for a couple of years in the early late 2000's and sales naturally tanked...) Somewhere between Wonder Woman, Batgirl and Charlie's Angels in the 1970's I became sexually aware - I probably developed a superheroine fetish before I even knew what a fetish was. Can you blame me? Wonder Woman was practically falling out of her very tight costume, I was smitten in the age of "jiggle TV" (there was also "Three's Company" and "The Dukes of Hazzard", but really, no show was more blatant about it than "Wonder Woman".)
But to understand the character, you really have to go back to the early comic books, of 1941. (Many of the comic books from the 1930's and 1940's are rare and very valuable, not just because they feature the first appearances of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc. but because so many comic books got recycled during the paper drives of World War II.). And to understand the reasons behind the character, you have to look at the personal life of the character's creator, and now it's an established fact that William Marston lived for several years with two women in what we now call a polyamorous relationship. Back in the 1940's this situation was regarded as either an abomination or "getting extremely lucky", depending on your politics or religious affiliations. And if you didn't know the French term "menage a trois", then in the 1930's slang I believe it was either called a "devil's threesome" or a "lucky Joe".
Before he was a comic-book writer, William Marston was a psychologist and college professor, but the scandal of his relationship eventually cost him his teaching position at Radcliffe, and he had neglected to patent his innovation of testing changes in someone's systolic blood pressure to determine if they were nervous under questioning, which became an important component of the polygraph test. The tradition holds true to this day, that one can only become a comic-book writer by failing miserably in at least two other careers. Nobody ever sets out to become a comic-book writer, this is true, it's always the "Hail Mary" desperation pass in someone's life. Artists, sure, they go to art school and many famous artists have drawn comics but writers? Please. If they were real writers they'd be writing books without pictures in them.
Marston succeeded with his "Wonder Woman" character because he had great inspiration, and insight into the minds of two women - I don't think many other comic-book writers have slept with one woman, let alone two. And never two at a time - you prove to me that another comic-book writer had a threesome and I'll give you my Justice League trade paperbacks. It's safe to say that Marston was the only one, ever. And then the damn fool got lung cancer and didn't even hang around on Earth to enjoy the relationship situation he created for very long. Seriously, everybody smoked back in the 1940's, they gave cigarettes to soldiers and even cartoon characters promoted them on TV - and somehow that was all OK, but sleeping with two women wasn't?
Despite the elaborate lie that Marston, his wife and his mistress told the neighbors, that Olive's husband had died, and the Marstons gave her a place to live out of pity, eventually people figured out that more was going on than met the eye. After all, Olive's kids probably looked a lot like Mr. Moulton, and any visitors to the house might notice that there was only one adult bedroom, with a bed big enough for three (their mattress size was called "King plus Double-Queen"). The movie takes a few shortcuts here, by having one neighbor walk into the house unannounced to bring them some chili or something, only to catch them involved in an afternoon costumed role-play situation. NITPICK POINT: Who just walks into someone's house if nobody answers the door, back in the 1940's, no less? And who has a little "afternoon delight" with the wife and mistress without making sure that the front door is locked?
Another N.P. concerns the fact that this polyamorous situation is portrayed as something of an open secret, like everyone in the neighborhood seems to be interested in figuring it out - but I think in reality they did a better job of hiding this 3-way relationship, because it only was revealed in print many years later, and you'd think that if everyone knew about it at the time, it wouldn't have been such a shock later on when it was revealed in the 1980's. Plus the details of their bedroom situation are probably mostly speculative.
So according to this film, public shame broke up their happy little family, but after Marston's cancer diagnosis, he tried to bring Olive back into the fold - and after his death, Elizabeth and Olive stayed together as a couple for many years, until Olive died in 1985. And Elizabeth Marston lived until age 100, so I guess the takeaway here is do whatever (or whoever) makes you happy, and if anybody's got a problem with that, they can go take a flight in an invisible plane. Even if you live to be 100, life's too short to deal with any haters telling you who you can and can't sleep with.
Also starring Luke Evans (last seen in "The Girl on the Train"), Rebecca Hall (last seen in "Holmes & Watson), Bella Heathcote (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Connie Britton (last seen in "Beatriz at Dinner"), Monica Giordano, JJ Feild (last seen in "K-19: The Widowmaker"), Chris Conroy, Oliver Platt (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Maggie Castle (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Alexa Havins, Sharon Kubo, Allie Gallerani (last seen in "I Am Michael"), Christopher Jon Gombos, Christopher Paul Richards, with archive footage of Adolf Hitler (last seen in "Darkest Hour").
RATING: 7 out of 10 sorority pledges
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Don DeFore, Lucille Ball, Eric Blore, Alice Brady, Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey, Katharine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Peter Boyle, Richard Haydn.
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