Dean lived in North Etobicoke, so I had to take two buses to get to his condo. I didn’t know anyone else who lived in a condo—when I was a kid, we called them “condom buildings,” even before we knew what a condom was—and as I stepped off the bus in my stacked platform sandals, I was disappointed at the ordinary blah-beige tower bouncing up against the early morning clouds. As I approached the front entrance, hesitation tugged at my heart and slowed my feet.
No one knew where I was. I didn’t even have a cell phone because only doctors and drug dealers had mobile phones in the mid-1990s. You know that scene in Clueless when Cher and Dionne are walking down the school hallway chatting on their phones? That was meant to be a joke.
“Do I look nervous?” Dean asked, grinning as he ushered me into his apartment. “If I do, it’s because I was afraid that you wouldn’t show up.”
– Excerpt from “Fifty Dollars for the Powder Room”, my nonfiction essay, published in the Fall +Winter 2023/2024 issue of the Humber Literary Review. The issue is free to read online for the season, please visit the Humber Literary Review’s website here.
“Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.”
“This film is about the birth of Venus in Australia.”
Helen Morse (actor, Mademoiselle de Poitiers in Picnic at Hanging Rock)
Perhaps it is when we are young that we are the closest to being our dream selves. Once lost, a dream – like youth – can never be found.
I had these thoughts while watching Peter Weir’s ethereal Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film that can be described as “a mystery that remains a mystery”. Based upon the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay (who reportedly said that the novel came to her in a dream), Picnic at Hanging Rock opens with a title card informing us of the following:
On Saturday 14th February 1900 a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mt. Macedon in the state of Victoria. During the afternoon several members of the party disappeared without trace…
The film begins with girls in white nightgowns: long haired maidens washing their pretty faces in basins of pink roses; tightening each other’s corsets; counting Valentine cards; breathlessly reciting poetry; pressing flowers into booklets; gossiping and giggling; the mirrors on walls and vanity tables capturing themselves, capturing each other. “You must learn to love someone else, apart from me, Sarah,” the Venus-like Miranda gently admonishes her quiet, sensitive friend as she runs a brush through her long blonde mane before a looking glass. “I won’t be here much longer.”
Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Miranda will disappear. Unlike Alice, she won’t come back.
Postcard image courtesy of the Toronto Public Library, digital archives, public domain, Baldwin Collection of Canadiana
“I decided that short skirts are here to stay, and if we wear short skirts, we must wear short hair or we’re going to look top-heavy.”
Mary Pickford, as quoted in The Sunday Tribune, August 26th, 1928
One of Hollywood’s first international superstars, Mary Pickford began her career in movies in 1909, as an actress at the Biograph Company. Although she had been born in Toronto, Canada in 1892, on the site where the Hospital for Sick Children currently stands, she became known worldwide as “America’s Sweetheart”. Powerfully independent and possessing strong business acumen, Pickford went on to become one of the founders of United Artists (in 1919) and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (in 1927). To her fans and the public at large however, Pickford was “Our Little Mary” and “the Girl with the Golden Curls”.
In 1921, an article in the Border Cities Star stated that each one of Pickford’s curls was worth twenty thousand dollars; since she had twenty curls, “Mary Pickford’s hair is (worth) four hundred thousand dollars.” Reporting that one of her curls had accidently been snipped off during the filming of Little Lord Fauntleroy, the paper lamented that “with one of her golden ringlets missing, Mary Pickford has sustained an actual loss of twenty thousand dollars” (as the article notes, Pickford’s hair was not insured).
“I have to give up one entire day a week to my shampoo,” Pickford told the Lewiston Daily Sun in 1926, noting that she liked short hair on other women. “But the public knows me by my long hair and I could never screen with bobbed hair for my appearance would not be the same.”
But by 1928, with the dominance of sexy “flapper” stars such as Clara Bow and with the arrival of talking pictures, Mary’s long tight curls were beginning to look like a relic. More importantly, Mary’s mother, of whom she was especially close, died of breast cancer on March 21st, 1928. On June 21st of that year, a bereaved Mary walked into a New York City beauty parlor.
MARY PICKFORD CUTS HER HAIR!, screamed the headlines the following day. As reported by the Spokane Daily Chronicle:
“Mary Pickford had a big story for the papers today. Reporters swarmed to hear. ‘I’ve cut my hair,’ she exclaimed and the multitude gasped. ‘But what of the curls?’ demanded the throng when they had recovered their breath.
Spokane Daily Chronicle, June 22, 1928
That same day, The Daily Times published an article titled “Mary Loses Famous Curls: Movie Actress Joins Flapper Ranks in Bobbing Tresses While Doug Almost Weeps”. In it, Mary spoke of her husband Douglas Fairbanks’ reaction to her new hairdo: “Doug cried – or at least he looked as though he was going to – when he came in and found me brushing my bobbed hair.”
Her fans were none happier, as evidenced by the angry letters that Pickford says she received. “You would have thought I’d murdered someone,” she wrote in her memoirs. “And perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live.”
Image of Mary and her “bob” courtesy of the Toronto Public Library’s digital archives, public domain, gifted to the library by Miss Cara Hartwell
The glamour and the grit: Joan Crawford as the notorious Sadie Thompson in Rain (1932)
“I think if most critics knew how much it hurt the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second guess the way they write these things. (…) It is devastating when you are being institutionally told that your personal expression was bad. That’s something that people carry with them, literally, their entire lives and I get why. It f****ing sucks.”
“I hope they burn every print of this turkey that’s in existence.”
Joan Crawford (talking about her 1932 critical and box office flop Rain)
In 1932, US unemployment reached 24%; an estimated 15,000 WW1 veterans, many out of work, marched to the nation’s capital to demand the payment of their bonus for serving in the war; and Grand Hotel, a movie about beautiful, rich people won Best Picture. Grand Hotel is a good film but there were at least two other movies that came out that same year which were much more interesting: Tod Browning’s Freaks, which turned a gruesome fun house mirror on America to reveal who the real monsters are (hint: not the sideshow performers) and Lewis Milestone’s Rain, an unflinching brutal takedown of religious and moral hypocrisy. Both movies flopped spectacularly with critics and audiences alike when they opened in 1932. Today, they are considered masterpieces. Sometimes it just takes a while for people to “get it”.
There has been so much said and written about Freaks over the years that there really isn’t anything new that I can add to the conversation besides to say that if you haven’t already seen it, you most definitely should (but be prepared for it to haunt you for days and not for the reasons you may think), so this post will focus on Rain which, apart from Joan Crawford’s makeup in the film, has been less talked about.
Based on a short story by W. Somerset Maugham, Rain takes place on a South Pacific island where a ship of American passengers are temporarily stranded due to a possible cholera outbreak. Among the passengers are Mr. Davidson (Walter Huston), a bible thumping missionary; his equally uptight wife (Beulah Bondi) and Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford), a fun loving, brazen young woman who makes no secret of the fact that she’s a prostitute. What could possibly go wrong?
Lee Duncan & Rin Tin TinDiesel vom Burgimwald & John Reardonof Hudson & Rex
For almost fourteen years, I lived without television. It was less out of any kind of wannabe-intellectual snobbery and more due to the fact that when I moved into my first apartment, I just never got around to getting a TV hooked up. After my second move, it no longer seemed necessary; I’d already gotten along well without one and besides, I reasoned, I had probably already had my fill of “the boob tube” as a kid: in an attempt to escape drama at home and bullies at school, I crawled into the TV set as a child and stayed there, preferring the scripted scenarios and happy endings to a confusing and unhappy reality.
My TV-abstinence ended on Christmas of 2020 when my partner, Neil, gifted me with a digital antenna. Due to the location of my apartment unit, I’m only able to pick up a handful of channels: a few stations from Buffalo, sometimes PBS and TVO and usually CITYTV. In other words…
“There’s nothing on except Hudson & Rex!”
This was my lament during those early days of winter Covid-lockdowns, referring to Citytv’s homegrown show about two handsome detectives (one of whom happens to be a German shepherd). It hurts to admit it now, but at first I approached Hudson & Rex with a cynical eye (Canadians tend to be skeptical about our own talent). It wasn’t long however before I was admonishing Neil not to change the channel:
Rex does more than just take the bad guys down in slo-mo. In addition to sniffing out clues and solving crimes, he also comes to the aid of victims and the bereaved: carrying boxes of tissues and offering cuddles of comfort. One of my favorite moments happens in a recent episode in which the team finds out that a physiotherapist, whose murder they are attempting to solve, was also a sexual predator. Rex senses that Sarah, the team’s Chief of Forensics, is triggered by this news and he’s instantly at her side. “Our big furry empathy bomb,” Sarah calls him affectionately. This is why I love the show: as someone who struggles with PTSD, Rex is a comfort to me too.
“The dog embodies a rich, mythic sort of heroism, an empathy that is broader and deeper and more pure than what an ordinary human would be capable of,” author Susan Orlean writes in Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. My love of Hudson & Rex inspired me to pick up Orlean’s impeccably researched and immensely entertaining book, thus taking a deep dive into the history of dogs in movies and television.
The first movie to star a dog was the 1905 British smash hit Rescued by Rover, an early narrative film about a collie who saves a kidnapped baby. The movie was so popular that the name “Rover” (which was not a typical dog’s name prior to the film), became synonymous with “dog”. Studios quickly realized that movies with dogs “fetched” big bucks at the box office: there was collie superstar Jean the Vitagraph Dog and then Strongheart, the German shepherd with the sad, beautiful eyes who had a dog food named after him; Charlie Chaplin got a doggy sidekick and so did Harold Lloyd. Pete the Pup joined Our Gang in 1927 and even badass George Bancroft had a canine companion in the 1929 gangster movie Thunderbolt. One of my favorite on-screen dogs from the silent era is in the Nell Shipman Canadian adventure film Back to God’s Country (1919): a Great Dane named “Wapi the Killer”; an abused dog who is described by the title cards as “an alien without friends, hating the men who understand nothing of the magic of kindness and love, but whose law is the law of the whip and the club.” Only after he is rescued from these brutes by Shipman’s heroine does Wapi experience “a new miracle of understanding roused by the touch of a woman’s hand.” In Back to God’s Country, dog and woman rescue one another, thus fulfilling their shared dream of freedom.
In her book, Susan Orlean interestingly connects our affection for animals with the rise of industrialization:
“The invention of cinema came at the moment when animals were starting to recede from a central role in human civilization; from that moment forward, they began to be sentimental — a soft memento of another time, consolation for the cost of modernity.”
Susan Orlean, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend
Woman’s Best Friend: Nell Shipman in Back to God’s Country (1919)
But of all the canine cinema superstars of the silent era, not one was more beloved, influential or enduring than Rin Tin Tin.
“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote and I would add “most fickle” and “untrustworthy” too. A month that tends to make more promises than it keeps.
My father died on April 10th, thirteen years ago. The day before, I had been comfortably wearing a light, pink spring jacket. But it began to snow the morning my father died. Waiting outside for the bus to take me to the hospital, I shivered in my thin clothing. I had not expected the cold. I was unprepared.
Grief tends to take the form of the one we are grieving. Therefore the grief I experienced in the wake of my dad’s death was quiet, pensive and even comforting; like the man himself. And giving. Thirteen years gone and he still gives to me: like this musical box of his that my mother gifted me with last summer. A box that plays the tune to the Beatles’ “Yesterday” when it is wound. A box that contains nothing more than a couple of old pennies, a cat’s veterinary card from 1983, my grade two class photo, an old watch and a badge from his Navy uniform.
Treasures.
A reminder that we never truly lose the ones we love.
When you think of a Prohibition-era gangster, what image immediately comes to mind? Is it Al Capone and the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre? Is it John Dillinger being shot to death by federal agents outside the Biograph Theater? Or is it Edward G. Robinson, a cigar anchored between his lips, imploring us to “Be Somebody!”; is it James Cagney shooting his words out quicker than bullets from a Tommy gun?
For me it’s Robinson and Cagney, in Little Caesar (1931) and The Public Enemy (1931) respectively, who best embody the slick anti-hero in all of his brutal brilliance, better even than the real-life gangsters themselves.
But before Cagney and Robinson shook up the game, there was a different kind of on-screen gangster.
And he was mighty cuddly.
In Thunderbolt (1929), George Bancroft plays Thunderbolt Jim Lang, a gangster sentenced to death, who bides his time in prison by plotting revenge on the bank teller (Richard Arlen) who stole his moll (Fay Wray). If this sounds gritty, it isn’t – the intensely likable Bancroft is a cross between James Cagney and Oliver Hardy and the hijinks he gets up to in Thunderbolt have more in common with the latter’s comedy shorts with Stan Laurel than they do with The Public Enemy. In the New York Times’ 1929 review of the film, writer Mordaunt Hall describes Thunderbolt as “a musical comedy plot striving to masquerade as a drama.” But it isn’t the film’s plot that makes it interesting but rather when it was made: during Hollywood’s turbulent transition from silent movies to “talkies” (sound films), a period which has been well documented in films such as Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and most recently in Babylon (2022).
Joan Crawford in an MGM publicity photo for Grand Hotel (1932)
During Hollywood’s classic age, the MGM studio boasted that it had “more stars than there are in Heaven.” Even so, not one of their stars shone brighter – or harder – than Joan Crawford.
Just like Sadie Thompson, the character she expertly portrays in the drama Rain (1932), Joan Crawford was both passionate and fearless. Fiercely independent, unapologetically ambitious and proudly bisexual, Joan challenged society’s expectations of ideal womanhood. The more of her work that I discover, the more that I come to admire her.
Born Lucille Fay LeSuer (her name was changed by MGM publicity head Pete Smith for obvious reasons), Joan Crawford was – no doubt about it – gorgeous, yet her perfect bone structure is not what I think of when I think of Joan; rather it is her strength and inexhaustible career drive which first come to mind. Still, her beauty was so intoxicating that in the 1927 Tod Browning film The Unknown, in which Joan plays a carnival worker who is terrified of being touched by a man, it’s totally believable that Lon Chaney amputates both of his arms in the hopes of scoring a chance with her.
“Crawford was weaned on abuse and rejection,” Mick LaSalle writes in his excellent book Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood. “Two daddies deserted the family before she was ten. While still a child, she cleaned toilets in a boarding school for girls and was disciplined with a broom handle.”
Joan’s career spanned five decades and five important periods of film history: silent movies, the Pre-Code era, the Code era (aka “classic Hollywood” or “Hollywood’s Golden Age”), television and finally, the so-called “hagsploitation” and B-movies of the 1960s.
Of them all, her silent movie period is my favorite, probably because these films seem to exist in an impenetrable bubble, safe from the slings and arrows of Mommie Dearest. Yet even in the B-movies that she starred in at the end of her long career – films that she later admitted she knew were mostly terrible – Joan always gave it her all, never once phoning it in; as if she still had something to prove. Perhaps she had never really left Lucille behind.
The following quotes about Joan, from some of her contemporaries, reveal the complexities of a woman whose legacy is as complicated as her star power is enduring.
Editor’s Note: Although “Meet Me at the Soda Fountain” tends to focus on films from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, I do sometimes let a film from the later part of the 20th century slide through – hey, if TCM can do it, so can I! 😉
Gremlins (1984) will always hold a special place in my heart: it’s the first film that I ever saw in a movie theater. My parents took my sister and I to see it at the old Cineplex Eaton Centre when we were kids. At ages four and six respectively, we were so young that our sneakers barely touched the sticky floors and when Spike (the leader of the Gremlins) leapt out of a Christmas tree, my sister literally jumped out of her seat.
“That’s it!” my father exclaimed. “We’re going home!”
I feigned annoyance at my sister for causing me to miss the rest of the movie but the truth was that I was petrified of the “little green monsters” too. For at least the next five years, I would sleep with the covers pulled tightly over my head so that “the gremlins couldn’t get me”. (And to this day the Johnny Mathis Christmas song Do You Hear What I Hear? fills me with unspeakable terror).
“I thought it was supposed to be a kid’s movie,” my dad grumbled on the drive home. Well, Gremlins iskind of a kid’s movie and it also kind of isn’t. The film tells the tale of Billy (Zach Galligan), a wide-eyed teenager whose father gifts him with a mysterious (and adorable) pet for Christmas. The creature is a “Mogwai” (Billy’s father names him Gizmo) and he comes with three rules:
1. No bright lights, especially sunlight as it can kill him.
2. Keep him away from water: don’t get him wet.
3. Don’t feed him after midnight. *
Needless to say, the good-intentioned but slightly clueless Billy breaks all three rules and before you can say “holy night”, hordes of little green monsters, with a penchant for junk food and wreaking havoc on electronics, have descended upon the sleepy town of Kingston Falls on Christmas Eve.
Gremlins is one of those rare instances where contrasting (even conflicting) ingredients work together to create a compelling and satisfying treat: it is both a horror movie and a comedy. Its biting social satire works in spite of the fact that the movie contains a ridiculous amount of product placement (“Milk Duds…”) and was released on the heels of a huge merchandising campaign that included Gizmo dolls and Gremlins’ gummy bears (hence why my dad expected a warm and fuzzy kid’s flick).
The film has also proven itself to be prescient. Some of the characters in Kingston Falls express a fear of machines and redevelopment – today those fears are being actualized in self-checkout machines, automation and job loss and lack of affordable housing. Then there’s the very real horror of the disastrous effect that all of that post-World War II consumerism has had on our environment. “With Mogwai comes much responsibility,” Mr. Wing (Keye Luke) admonishes near the end of the film, “But you didn’t listen. And you see what happens! You do with Mogwai what your society has done with all of nature’s gifts.”
The moviecloses with Billy’s father (Hoyt Axton) warning the audience: “If your air conditioner goes on the fritz or your washing machine blows up or your video recorder conks out…before you call the repairman, turn on all the lights, check all the closets and cupboards, look under all the beds. Because ya never can tell – there just might be a gremlin in your house.”
Gremlins manages to be both a critique and a celebration of consumerism. Making it the perfect modern Christmas movie.
*If you can’t feed the Mogwai after midnight, when can you start feeding him? At dawn? At noon? Does anyone know? I annoy my partner every Christmas with this burning question.
Meet Me at the Soda Fountain 
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