What? Doris Day's career needs reconsideration?
I am still working my way through the Globe and Mail's book reviews. Keith Garebian, who writes as if he was too young to be around for either Doris Day or Grace Kelly movies, reviews biographies of these two actresses.This stunning sentence appears in his review:
Santopietro helps us understand why Doris Day deserves reconsideration
More department of Huh? for me. Doris Day was a brilliant performer in a whole series of very entertaining and well-written and performed films through the 50s and 60s. Her range was enormous. (Actually, writing this, I begin to wonder why she is even included in the same review as the much less illustrious Grace Kelly.) What consideration needs to be reconsidered?
My guess - Garebian just does not have much experience of her work.
Listen to this:
Biographer Tom Santopietro probably exaggerates her excellence (ranking her above Streisand and Garland, and only below Ella Fitzgerald)
Seems to me Santopietro has it just right. Of course Garebian dos not argue the position.
Oddly later he makes this concession:
Her diehard fans included the great singer Sarah Vaughan, writer John Updike and film critic Molly Haskell.
More power to them!
And then there is this very odd passage:
Santopietro is also devastatingly witty, as when he describes how I'm Gonna Ring the Bell Tonight is the "first musical number in history to start off with the conjugating of French verbs to the accompaniment of celery sticks," or when he mocks the Warner Bros. fantasy version of early-20th-century America, where "women happily tend house all day, the men seem to work at banking jobs that are never actually glimpsed, and there is nary a trace of poverty." Day was, of course, part of this invidious, false nostalgia, but her warm, sincere personality shone through even dross to make her the type of optimistic, idealized woman Americans wished they knew.
Man this bespeaks at least dullness. Anyone who watched Doris Day films, which on the surface displayed exactly what is being described here, with no sense of the satire they all embodied (think about who was making them!) is a person with only one level of ability to interpret. Was not Rock Hudson (also a magnificent actor) her major co-star.? Can someone at least try to look a level down?
Doris Day is one of the great performers and people of the last 50 years. (Do not even mention Grace Kelly beside her name.)
posted by Alan Adamson @ 7:56 AM
1 Comments:
This is like when people dismiss 1950s sitcoms as sexist and dated. In fact, if you watch them and pay attention, it is clear that the women run the households and the husbands are just bumbling fools. And June Cleaver's voice, for example, was always dripping in sarcasm.
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