Anne Baxter@100

#AnneBaxter100

Conversations with Classic Film Stars : Interviews From Hollywood's Golden Era by James Bawden & Ron Miller: "Anne Baxter was a prodigious acting talent from a prestige-heavy family—her grandfather was America’s leading architect, Frank Lloyd Wright—and always seemed destined for greatness. She began acting at age eleven and went on to study with Russian actress Maria Ouspenskaya and America’s Stella Adler. She made her Broadway debut in Seen, but Not Heard in her early teens and her movie debut at seventeen. While still a teen, she worked with Orson Welles in his 1942 masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons. Baxter will always be remembered as the conniving Eve Harrington in the 1950 All about Eve, for which she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, but she already had won a 1946 Supporting Actress Oscar as the sad alcoholic in The Razor’s Edge. Baxter also wrote a best-selling memoir, Intermission: A True Story (1976), which detailed her unsuccessful attempt to live in the Australian outback with second husband, Randolph Galt...."

 Baxter, a teen newcomer to Hollywood in 1940. Photo by Frank Powolny; courtesy of 20th Century-Fox.

"Yes. I was fourteen and was already too busty to play an eleven-year-old."

Perry Mason@90

“…Our whole reasoning on the problem of crime and criminals, of law enforcement, of police and even of penitentiaries, is completely cockeyed.

We can discuss the matter in terms of dollars and cents, but primarily crime isn’t an economic problem. It’s a problem that strikes at the character of the nation. The more we permit crime the more we are letting character become corrupted, the more we are encouraging dangerous thinking, and the more we are sacrificing potential future good citizens to the forces of contamination and degradation which turn them from potential assets into moral and economic liabilities.

It is time we woke up.” (from Erle Stanley Gardner''s 'The Court of Last Resort: the true story of a team of crime experts who fought to save the wrongfully convicted')

 शाळेत असताना पेरी मेसन (अर्ल स्टॅनली गार्डनर) यांचे मिळेल ते पुस्तक मिरज येथील मंगल टॉकीज जवळच्या संगम(?) वाचनालयातून मिळवून किमान दोनदा तरी वाचले आहे. 

त्या पेरी मेसन यांना २०२३ साली ९० वर्षे प्रसिद्धीला येऊन पूर्ण झाली. 

 

 Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) and Della Street (Barbara Hale)

Joseph Heller@100

Today May 1 2023 is 100th birth anniversary of Joseph Heller

"He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt."

Well, he died....

मिस्र पंच...'Abou Naddara'...Twin Sister of 'The Avadh Punch'?

On July 27 2011, I wrote "Shallow People Demand Variety. Even in Cartoon Captions".

Following example illustrates how even cartoons need not be different, just like cartoon captions!

In a wonderful essay 'The Egyptian Satirist Who Inspired a Revolution', Anna Della Subin and Hussein Omar write about James Sanua, founder of 'Abou Naddara', in The New Yorker dated June 6 2016. 

Subin and Omar write:

"...In the three years since Sisi overthrew the democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi in a military coup, public dissent in Egypt has been violently muted. State police have raided newspaper offices, and journalists have been imprisoned, N.G.O.s expelled, and hundreds of suspected activists forcibly “disappeared.” Yet, in April of this year, the streets of Cairo broke out in protest once again when Sisi announced that he had given a pair of islands in the Red Sea to the government of Saudi Arabia. On the surface, the fate of the uninhabited islands would seem to have little impact on the daily lives of Egyptians. But to many observers the news seemed like proof of the hypocrisy of Sisi’s regime. The President himself had amended the constitution to prohibit the country’s ruler from ceding Egyptian territory to foreign powers; the gift of the islands coincided with Saudi Arabia’s promise of an oil deal and $1.5 billion in investment. It was easy to feel as if Sisi were now selling off bits of Egypt to the highest bidder. On April 9th, the exiled satirist Bassem Youssef tweeted in Arabic, “Roll up, roll up, the island is for a billion, the pyramid for two and a couple of statues thrown in for free.”

There is a cartoon from the late nineteenth century that conveys the very same scene. In it, Egypt’s leader sits at a table in front of the Giza Pyramids, wielding an auctioneer’s hammer, as a crowd of interested foreign buyers looks on. “Lovers of antiques, the pyramids and the Sphinx are for sale in cash. The currency is pounds,” he cries. “A la uno, a la due, by God people, bid!”..."

Egypt’s leader auctioning off the Giza Pyramids to a crowd of foreign buyers.

  Artist: I don't know, 'Abou Naddara' (1878-1910), May 30 1879

All this reminded me of India's 'The Avadh Punch' (1877-1912 , 1916-1936). I have written about it on August 26 2007 here.

Is it just a coincidence that two great magazines dedicated to satire were launched by two great ancient civilizations around the same time?

'Swadeshi movement and the boycott of foreign goods'

 Artist: I don't know, The Avadh Punch, November 16 1905, Courtesy: Niyogi Books