Being Bad Never Looked So Good
APL tackles some Tough Guys and Feisty Femmes
By Kimberley Jones, Fri., Jan. 9, 2009
In addition to motormouths moving faster than the speed of sound, the film noirs and screwball comedies of the Forties had something else in common: bad behavior. There was drinking and brawling and betting on horses, women on the lam and men chasing after – with a ring or a tommy gun, depending on the genre. Also depending on the genre: whether or not that bad behavior went unpunished. For all their shenanigans, the men and women of the screwballs wound up wedded in the end; if they pulled the same stunts in a film noir, they were more or less bound to be plugged full of lead.
The Austin Public Library's Hampton Branch at Oak Hill will host a twice-monthly series through April that skips between the screwballs and the noirs, with a lot of the same names and faces skipping between programs. Shape-shifter Howard Hawks directed three films in the series (The Big Sleep, Bringing Up Baby, and Ball of Fire). Before there was Kevin Bacon, Hawks surely could have been a fine substitute for six degrees; almost every iconic face in the series – Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall – worked with him at some time or another. Edward G. Robinson starred in Barbary Coast for him, and he pops up twice in the APL series (albeit for different directors). Chewing a cigar and splashing in bathwater, Robinson thankfully doesn't get up for his introduction as exiled mobster Johnny Rocco in John Huston's Key Largo; he's far more avuncular and less keen for killing in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. That's the same Billy Wilder who co-scripted Ball of Fire, which starred the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck, three years before she was a bad-news blonde in Double Indemnity. In Ball of Fire, she plays Sugarpuss O'Shea, a jive-talking nightclub singer who hides out with a group of unsuspecting academics, led by Gary Cooper. About Sugarpuss, Cooper's stodgy housewife sniffs, "She's the kind of woman who makes whole civilizations topple." That may very well be, but it's a hell of a fun fall to watch.
Jan. 12: It Happened One Night (1934)
Jan. 26: Double Indemnity (1944)
Feb. 9: Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Feb. 23: The Big Sleep (1946)
March 9: Ball of Fire (1941)
March 23: White Heat (1949)
April 13: The Philadelphia Story (1940)
April 27: Key Largo (1948)
The APL film series runs second and fourth Mondays at 6pm at the Austin Public Library's Hampton Branch at Oak Hill (5125 Convict Hill Rd.). Admission is free. For more info, visit www.cityofaustin.org/library.
