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Dana Dunbaugh Burnell

~ I write. I drift my gossamer way, eyes averted, through your keyboard. . . on my way to the refrigerator. Shall we make a pie, darling?

Dana Dunbaugh Burnell

Category Archives: Film & Storytelling

The 5:17 to an Ass-Kicking: Million Dollar Baby

01 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Film & Storytelling

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Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman

mdb1

Moody, yet Macho.

We’ve all been reading about Eastwood’s new movie, a particularly Clintian broth boiling machismo down to the savory whiff of destiny. The 5:17 to Paris promises us heroes who’d been in training all their lives, unwittingly and otherwise. It sets itself up as a comforting alternative to our current reality, a world in which to be American is to be ready–and not ashamed. I’ll see the movie, and lick the popcorn butter off my fingers, and remember a time in which that seemed a possibility. ‘Cos it sure doesn’t feel that way anymore.

But all the publicity made me think of my favorite Eastwood movie, one seasoned with the regret and loss of age plus the transformative zest of friendship. Plus pie. And that’s Million Dollar Baby. 

I once read an article in London’s Evening Standard in which a journalist took England’s most famous female boxer, Cathy Brown, to see Million Dollar Baby. Brown had recently knocked out Hungarian Viktoria Varga after just two rounds– exactly the type of fight Hilary Swank’s character, Maggie, excels at in the film. I’ve seen the film again recently and nowadays it’s even more satisfying to watch Swank swing out a meaty arm and knock someone senseless. I just wish we could CGI a #metoo tattoo on her knuckles.

Continue reading →

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The Great and Powerful Roz

06 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Film & Storytelling, Golden Age Hollywood, Uncategorized

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Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell

Hey, Brother–Can You tell ’em I’m no Lady?

Just now, while flicking Jungle Red fingernails through the spammed questions I receive for this blog, I noticed the sort of query I usually relish (since it would lead us straight to Kenneth Anger territory– I am worryingly familiar with that dirty turf).   The question was: “Could you tell me more about classic Hollywood’s grubby underbelly?” 

Why yes, friend, I could.  I absolutely could be a tour guide though Hollywood Babylon, leading you by your soft hand as we stroll by the “Hollywood” sign, where Peg Entwhistle jumped from the “H” to her death in 1932.  Then we’d wander near the house David Niven and Errol Flynn shared, which some wag* nicknamed “Cirrhosis by-the Sea.”  I could talk about Harlow’s Hubby’s death dildo and Jeff Chandler’s yen to wear polka-dot dresses.  Or about how Bogart used to hide under tables while his wife Mayo got into bar fights.  I could talk about all kinds of salacious useless crap, and quite often do.

But, dear reader, not today.  Today my nails are sharp but my spirit is yielding. Today I choose not to focus on the weary negativities of life, the injustices, imbalances, and the thrush-inducing mornings-after the night before.  So I won’t do a tour of syphilitic Hollywood, and not only because that’d be one lo-ong essay to write of a lovely October day.

Today I want to talk about lighter and rarer things than a rollicking dose of the clap.  Instead I want to discuss a truly great comic performance:  A great Female comic performance that is more balls-to-the wall than any other piece of acting in that annus mirabilis of 1939, and which should’ve put all that sexist nonsense about “Are Women Funny” to rest before WWII.  As if Mabel Normand herself didn’t do it decades before. . . Continue reading →

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A Surrealist Poet, Francois Truffaut, and Jane Russell’s Nipples Walk into a Bar. . ..

28 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Film & Storytelling, Golden Age Hollywood

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Francois Truffaut, Howard Hughes, Jane Russell

You Have Complaints, Howard?

You Have Complaints, Howard?

Let’s all enjoy the moment when, in 1958, Francois Truffaut made a sudden leap from high art to low neckline. In a graceful segue, France’s premier filmmaker and critic, pivoted from a quote by Guillaume Apollonaire (France’s great surrealist poet of World War I), to Howard Hughes’ obsessive presentation of Jane Russell’s nipples. Now that is an impressive display of dexterity!  Shall we? Mais Oui!

L'Américain est un idiot quand il s'agit de graisseurs! (Trans: Hughs is a Dolt.)

L’Américain est un idiot quand il s’agit de graisseurs! (“Hughs is a Fathead.”)

The Postscript from the end of Truffaut’s Von Sternberg Essay in The Films in My Life, on Howard Hughes’ Production Notes: 

. . .Paraphrasing Guillaume Apollinaire without realizing it (“Your breasts are the only shells I love”*), Hughes demonstrates in the following memo what happens when an actress’s brassiere undergoes aerodynamic design analytics: Continue reading →

0.000000 0.000000

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“Whatever Happened to Baby Jane”? Another Unncecessary Remake, That’s What!

08 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Film & Storytelling, Golden Age Hollywood, Uncategorized

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Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Liza Minnelli, Meryl Streep

Is a Remake Sacriligious? Even if it gives us more Crazy to Love?

So it’s official, and has been for a month or so.  Whatever Happened to “Baby Jane”?  It’s Getting a Remake.  Which seemed to me to be one of the silliest decisions I’ve encountered since Hollywood tried to remake The Women and ended up pouring bong water over the embers of Meg Ryan’s career.

But naturally they’re at it again.  It’s clear they’ll never learn, because here’s a little sample of Hollywood logic for you:  “The idea is to make a modern film without modernizing the period.  It needs to resonate the golden age of Hollywood.”  These words were uttered by Walter Hill, who was chosen to be the director of this remake.  The man is doubtless an artist, whose upcoming Stallone film, Bullet to the Head, will rival Grand Illusion for delicacy and depth.  How the hell could anything resonate the golden age of Hollywood more thoroughly than Bette Davis impaling herself on Joan Crawford’s falsies, before kicking her to the head? 

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NYC Films on the Green, Summer 2012: OSS 117, Cairo Nest of Spies

04 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Film & Storytelling

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James Bond, Lubitsch, New York

Cairo, Nest of SpiesI never understood the allure of James Bond films–or rather, I never understood why the hell anyone would admit to being a fan of  such pendulously dull male adolescent fantasies.  I’d get it if these films had been screened like nudie films used to be, in select ares of Times Square, where those burdened with a shameful yen for cartoonish dialogue + farm hand’s ideas of fancy living could go see ol’ Jimmy drive his purty car and spar with follically challenged villains.  But who’d have thought such heavyhanded silliness would become so culturally entrenched?

But as usual, my sense of what will be admired and duplicated is wrong wrong wrong.  And (she points out with a girlishly raised index finger) I was born too late to get all jazzed up by cold war hi-jinks in the cinema.  The early 60s were a fermentative and frightening era, and Jimmy B’s smug suavity calmed WWII victors’ fears of just what the fuck the Communists were percolating behind their Iron Curtain, while here in capitalistic society men were wrapping their minds around the honestly world-changing fact that women could now actually have sex without getting pregnant, and quite frequently chose to do so with people other than their husbands. . .but still.  “Plenty O’Toole?” “Pussy Galore”? 

Yawn.   Continue reading →

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The Wilde World of “Nothing Sacred”

15 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Film & Storytelling, Golden Age Hollywood

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"Nothing Sacred", Dietrich, Lombard, Selznick, Wilde

Love.

Stephen Fry as Wilde

I like any chance I get to think about Oscar Wilde, and there are surprisingly frequent opportunities in life to do so:  Whenever one gives in to temptation, sees ghastly wallpaper, or greets a widow with newly blonded hair.  Anytime you encounter someone so improbably youthful that you assume they have a ghoulish self-portrait in their attic.  Whenever you write in a diary, or stay in a cheap hotel room in Paris, or leave your family to run across town to spend time with a pretty, mean-spirited young lover whose daddy is a Marquess and an inventor of boxing rules.  Whenever someone in this world cannot find it in their hearts to believe that small-minded people are out to destroy them, and ends up doomed by their optimism. 

But most often, and increasingly, one thinks of Wilde whenever brackened, unformed life lurches from the primordial mire and shapes itself. . .into an imitation of art.  As happened in New York recently.  (Ah!  New York–the place where Wilde, upon his first visit, informed customs officials that the only thing he had to declare was his genius.  See?  Dude’s everywhere.) Continue reading →

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Twentieth Century Tweets: The Hollywood Telegram, Part I

30 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Film & Storytelling, Golden Age Hollywood

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Academy Awards, Albert Brooks, Cary Grant, Gloria Swanson, Noel Coward, Samuel Goldwyn

You wouldn’t think, at first glance, that Albert Brooks and Cary Grant were soul mates.  Cary Grant was the epitome of urbanity and screwball aplomb, and has been stated by no less than David Thomson to be the best film actor of the 20th Century.  Brooks is a poodle-haired multi-talent with the demeanor of an anxious suburbanite and the eyebrows of an off-duty drag queen.  He’s not really in my time-period of expertise, but his tweet this week got me thinking about Twentieth Century tweets:  Telegrams.  And made me realize that both Grant and Brooks are masters at epigrammatic blasts of comic retort.

In case you haven’t heard, Brooks tweeted a response to the lack of a 2012 Oscar nomination for his celebrated performance in Drive, referencing the most mocked acceptance speech in the Academy’s history. Brooks tweeted, “You don’t like me.  You really don’t like me.”    Continue reading →

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I’m the One. . .

16 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Film & Storytelling

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Barbara Stanwyck, Billy Wilder, Golden Age Hollywood, Hollywood, Joan Fontaine, Noir, Novelists, Preston Sturges, Self-Styled Siren

. . .sidling shyly in the doorway, pausing to pretend to admire the decor.  When really I’m just vetting out the room, getting a handle on the dress code, the temperature, taking a measure of the ol’ joie-de-vivre.  In short, this is my first time here.  And I’m not sure what to say, other than that you look fabulous (love the hair)–and most of all that Continue reading →

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  • Mutti Dearest. Daughter Dullest.
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