Art imitates life, sometimes very accurately. I got a big laugh last night watching the opening of
Who Was That Lady? (1960), which ran on Movies!, channel 113 on Cablevision in NYC. It stars Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh and Dean Martin. In the opening, Leigh, at the time married to Curtis, walks into his workplace and finds him kissing a shapely woman. Of course, Curtis was a notorious womanizer. The couple divorced in 1962. I spotted Joi Lansing’s name in the opening credits and wonder if she was the recipient of the liplock. I didn’t stick with the flick because I discovered that Ion TV has begun running the original
Law & Order on Wednesday night, and I am a great admirer of it. Anyway, whenever I encounter Lansing’s name I think back to the episode of
The Adventures of Superman in which she appears as a police sergeant. At the end she declares her desire for Superman, and Lois Lane, played by Noel Neill, says: “You got competition.” My friends and I, teenagers dominated by hormones, always laughed that she would dare put herself in the same league as such a bombshell. Lansing was a busy actress, amassing 102 credits in her short life. Tragically, cancer took her at 43 in 1972. Neil has 79 credits listed at IMDb, which counts only one of the 78 episodes of
Superman she did. She’s made seven appearances post-
Superman, all having a relationship to the iconic figure. 95, she is still alive. She was more talented than she’s given credit for, having been a night club singer before she broke big. In back to back years she had a small role in Oscar winners:
An American in Paris (1951) and
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952).
Think you’ve seen everything. Meet Gisele Marie of Sao Paulo, Brazil, a burka wearing Muslim convert who happens to be a heavy metal guitarist. I was sure it was a publicity stunt, but it seems legit. Here’s a one-minute clip of her playing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAW9NuJUs_c
On last night's premiere of season four of
Nashville, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler did a duet of
Crazy with Juliette Barnes/Hayden Panettierre. Fortunately, he did it straight, sans the screeching that has earned him a ton of money through the years.
My thanks to Alan, who bought Cliff Ryder's
Out of Time, the floating book shop's only sale of the day.
Vic's 3rd Novel: http://tinyurl.com/7e9jty3
No comments:
Post a Comment