“Francie held one of the doll’s hands tightly. A nerve in her thumb throbbed and she thought the doll’s hand twitched. She almost believed the doll was real.” – from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)
On Halloween night 1989, I did two things that I had never done before: I stayed home while my sister went trick-or-treating and I watched my first genuine horror movie. The movie was Child’s Play (1988), about Chucky, a carrot-topped Corky-style talking-doll possessed by the spirit of a serial killer, and I was instantly transfixed. I don’t know what it was about this movie that fascinated me but I do think it’s interesting that I discovered it just after I had stopped playing with dolls myself. Not that I had wanted to put away my beloved Barbie and Jem dolls: at twelve years old however, it was what was expected of me. Up until then, I had lived in two worlds: my drab real life one and the exciting, colorful, “grownup” world of my glamourous dolls. Perhaps that’s why Child’s Play appealed to me: I liked the idea of one of my dolls coming to life, even if it was inhabited by the ghost of a deranged psychopath.
As children, we are encouraged to use our dolls to channel our hopes, dreams and ambitions – this is especially true when it comes to the marketing of Barbie. Infused with so much of our emotional energy, it’s not impossible to imagine a doll becoming sentient. In fact, one of the most famous doll makers of the first half of the 20th century, Madame Beatrice Alexander, was described by a journalist for the World Telegram thusly: “Not only does (she) put soles on her dolls, but she puts souls into them!”
“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.
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.
Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934)
Editor’s Note: Jeff Cottrill is a talented writer and spoken word artist. We met over a decade ago, as youngsters making our way in Toronto’s open mic scene. A fellow film buff, Jeff is one of my favorite people to talk movies with. So when he approached me about writing a guest post for the Soda Fountain, I knew it would be a great fit. Jeff’s debut novel Hate Story is being released from Dragonfly Publishing (Australia) in March 2022 and I was honored to read an ARC. Hate Story is a fresh, funny and original telling of the dark side of social media and internet shaming. Its heroine happens to be a movie blogger so the novel is sprinkled with lots of great references to classic and contemporary films. Read on for Jeff’s essay “Frank Capra: A Master of Comedy and Social Awareness”.
I wouldn’t give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn’t have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness. And a little lookin’ out for the other fella too.
James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
When many people hear the name Frank Capra today, chances are the only title they think of is It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). This movie is a timeless holiday favourite, but it’s a shame its reputation now outshines the rest of Capra’s filmmaking career – especially his pre-World War II movies, which are arguably better. Capra had a streak unmatched by any other director in the 1930s, winning three Academy Awards while helming classics like Lady for a Day (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), You Can’t Take It with You (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).
Frank Capra is my favourite director from this era – or maybe tied with Charlie Chaplin. There are two important traits Capra and Chaplin have in common: their impeccable comedic timing, and their passionate social conscience. Many critics have dismissed Capra as a corny sentimentalist, but it’s really the comedy that brings his work to life, propped up by the wit of screenwriter Robert Riskin and the sharp delivery of actors like Jean Arthur, James Stewart, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Thomas Mitchell, Lionel Barrymore and many others.
Take the whip-smart repartee that Gable and Colbert lob at each other in It Happened One Night. As Gable’s cynical reporter buses and hitchhikes across America with Colbert’s spoiled runaway heiress, the pair bicker and debate hilariously about everything from dunking donuts to piggybacking, with a speed and timing that surely influenced later romcoms. On the surface, the characters have nothing in common – but the energy they devote to each other reveals a deep connection, one of shared intelligent sarcasm, and you can’t help rooting for them to hook up.
Arthur and Stewart play off each other in a similar way in You Can’t Take It with You and Mr. Smith, and Arthur had a knack for portraying jaded professional women with a hidden compassionate side. In both Mr. Deeds and Mr. Smith, Arthur’s character starts off mocking and patronizing the naive title hero – but once she gets to know him, she not only falls in love with his sincerity, but also becomes his number-one supporter. It sounds like an implausible fantasy, yet Arthur makes it work by staying smart, funny, fast-talking and worldly even while yielding to her inner sentiment. She’s no pushover; she thinks for herself and owns full agency over her decisions, in a way that may surprise modern viewers who expect dated sexism.
All Capra’s best movies centre on the theme of an ordinary man (the “Little Guy”) winning out against the big guns of the establishment. This theme was especially potent during the poverty and social upheaval of the Great Depression, but I think it’s even more relevant now – in the wake of the recent Occupy movement, and in an era of high wealth gaps and billionaires playing space tourism. Every Capra classic features a relatable lone hero who stands up for bedrock moral values against the corruption, egotism and greed around him – the kind of hero people wished for in the ’30s, and the kind we could use now.
The sleek, white plastic tube of flame-orange wax called out to me from the bowels of the Zellers’ cosmetic aisle.
The year was 1988 and I was ten years old. At home, a large poster of Madonna, in character for Who’s That Girl (1987), hung over my bed: clad in fishnets, a leather jacket and fingerless gloves. More intimidating than the revolver in her hands was the stark red lipstick on her face. Fierce. Fabulous. I didn’t understand why the other girls at my school didn’t like her. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to wear lipstick too.
Every Saturday, my mother would go grocery shopping at the Kipling Queensway Mall and my dad would give my sister and I a dollar each to buy either trash or a treat at the mall’s dollar store or Zellers. But this Saturday, I didn’t feel like a chocolate bar or a bag of chips. I didn’t need another whoopee cushion or copy of Tiger Beat magazine.
I wanted that lipstick.
It didn’t matter that it cost a little more than the dollar my dad had given me. To my ten-year-old mind, that was an unfairness that could be easily corrected. And so, taking advantage of my then-mousy invisibility, I quietly slipped the coveted tube into the pocket of my Levi’s. I don’t remember feeling nervous or even giddy about it and I certainly didn’t feel guilty – that red lipstick belonged to me. It was mine. I did however make the colossal mistake of boasting to my sister about the steal, in proud whispers, on the ride home.
“Hey Daaaa-dddd,” she called out smugly. “Heather stole a lipstick!“
And so, before I knew it, I was back in the Zellers department store, handing over my swag and stammering out an apology to the bored teenage clerk whose only response to my foray into crime was a glassy-eyed shrug.
You know that dream where you discover a room in your house that you never even knew existed? Well, imagine that room filled with various 1930’s movie stars (including Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Butterfly McQueen and Pat O’Brien to name just a few) as well as Joe Louis, Ed Sullivan, Dick Clark, Richard Pryor, Busby Berkeley, Rudy Vallee and Colonel Sanders (yes, THE real Colonel Sanders), serving up his famous buckets of fried chicken while a young Monkees-inspired rock band restores everyone’s faith in America.
No, this isn’t a dream. This is The Phynx (1970).
The Phynx (1970) has been called the “Holy Grail” of bad movies but it’s not bad at all – in fact, I’d argue that it’s actually pretty groovy. The film was released in May of 1970 but Warner Bros.-Seven Arts pulled the picture after only a few screenings. As it was shelved so quickly, no movie posters were created (hence the banner photo of my physical DVD of the film, in lieu of a proper poster image). It would languish in obscurity in the vaults for forty-two years before Warner Bros. finally released the film on DVD in 2012, as part of their manufactured-on-demand Archive Collection.
But why did Warner Bros. pull this movie when so many worse films have seen wide release? Why, some may ask, did Warner Bros. make the picture at all? Fifty-one years later and counting, the riddle of The Phynx remains unsolved.
“Showgirls as a whole is filled with mirrors,” Adam Nayman writes in his brilliant book “It Doesn’t Suck. Showgirls” (ECW Press). Here, the 1933 poster for 42nd Street and the 1995 poster for Showgirls present as mirror images of each other.
One is a (seemingly) wholesome and widely beloved classic Warner Brothers’ movie musical, featuring visually dazzling song and dance numbers choreographed by the now-legendary Busby Berkeley. The other is a crass and tacky soft core MGM porn show whose title became a punch-line even before its release.
On closer inspection however, 42nd Street (1933) and Showgirls (1995) have a lot more in common than one may suspect. To paraphrase Truman Capote, it’s like the two movies grew up together in the same house and one day 42nd Street got up and strutted out the front door, while Showgirls sneaked out the back.
Although only one takes place in Vegas, both films were a gamble.
The lioness
Bares
Miraculous breasts
Old men
Fan themselves,
Tweet out for
Smelling salts.
Ripe and juicy
Pulchritude -
It's a little too much
For these boobs.
I have been a huge fan of TOpoet for a long time now and I am so honored by this lovely and thoughtful review of Filthy Sugar. Please check out the wonderful and insightful blog TOpoet.ca for books & music reviews, poetry, photography and the serialization of TOpoet’s novel Picture Perfect.
Heather Babcock’s Filthy Sugar is a noir window into a Wanda Wiggle’s life in the 30s – the writing is rich in hard-boiled dialogue, descriptions & situations. Set in the Toronto sex-trade of the time it is refreshingly non-judgemental, funny & at times sexy. Wanda does sort of wander through what we se of her […]
August 31st will mark 124 years since the first “moving picture” was shown in Toronto. This fateful event took place at Robertson’s Musee, a venue located at the corner of Yonge and Adelaide Street East. Robertson’s Musee sounds like it was a pretty lively place: a circus, wax museum, zoo and curio shop all-in-one. The moving pictures, a brand new attraction, were projected by a Vitascope.
I learned this fact from reading Doug Taylor’s fascinating book Toronto Theatres and the Golden Age of the Silver Screen (The History Press, 2014). Full of interesting tidbits – did you know that the Cineplex Odeon Eaton Centre was the first movie theatre to offer buttered popcorn? – and gorgeous b&w photos of Toronto’s long forgotten movie palaces, Taylor’s book is a must for any Toronto film buff. Also enjoyable are Taylor’s own recollections of his movie-going experiences as a child and a teenager in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
Reading Taylor’s book in 2020 is a rather bittersweet experience. When Toronto Theatres was published in 2014, many of Toronto’s movie houses were already nothing more than a memory, due in part to Netflix and other streaming and downloading services . Today, the few theatres that have survived are, thanks to Covid-19, in grave danger of becoming extinct.
Photo Caption: The Metro theatre opened in 1939, just before WW2. In 1978, the movie palace began showing soft-core “adult” films. The Metro closed its doors in 2013 and I managed to snap this photo of its marquee just before it came down in 2014. Today, the Metro is a rock climbing venue. (P.S. Isn’t my boyfriend cute?)
Taylor’s book has brought back movie-going memories of my own. The first film that I ever saw in a theatre was Gremlins (1984) at the Cineplex Eaton Centre. My sister had been so frightened by the scene where Spike (the leader of the Gremlins) leaps out of a Christmas tree that she jumped sky high out of her seat. “That’s it!” my exasperated 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.
Another cherished movie memory was seeing Jurassic Park at the Sherway Cineplex in 1993. If you were born after 1995, you probably won’t understand but at the time movie-goers had seen nothing like this: we were watching actual dinosaurs! Well, it felt like it anyway. I remember gaping at the screen, mouth open, in wonderment. It was magical and it was an experience that I shared with my best friend and a room full of popcorn munching strangers. Magical. Experience. You won’t get that sitting on your couch streaming Neflix.
Caption: Me attending The Toronto Silent Film Festival at the Fox theatre in February 2020 – also known as “the before times”. The Fox – originally known as the “Theatre with No Name” – opened on October 20, 1913.
It breaks my heart to think that future generations may miss out on this rite of passage. If you are concerned about the future of Toronto’s movie theatres, please visit Save Your Cinema.ca
Meet Me at the Soda Fountain 
You must be logged in to post a comment.