Sass Mouth Dames Film Club Series 12

Sass Mouth Dames Film Club Series 12: Fashion Behind the Scenes.

Megan McGurk introduces four outstanding woman’s pictures.

Tickets through Eventbrite

Neptune’s Daughter (1949)

Thursday, 7 November

Esther Williams looks as comfortable wearing a power suit and glasses behind a desk as she does performing water ballet in a turquoise pool. Esther plays a canny swimsuit designer who balances performance with style for a competitive market. Aside from the executive-level challenges, will she be able to keep her man-hungry sister (Betty Garrett) out of trouble?

A Life of Her Own (1950)

Wednesday, 13 November

On her way up as a cover girl, Lana Turner takes advice from a former top model played by Ann Dvorak. At the cusp of forty, Dvorak’s character now only receives the brush-off from men who are always in search of the next fresh face. Lana remains wary around a bossy agent and men who try to get her into bed. She intends to halt her career trajectory for Ray Milland, but is he worth it?

I Can Get it For You Wholesale (1951)

Thursday, 21 November

While Susan Hayward works as a mannequin modelling frocks for department store buyers, she builds a competitive portfolio of original dress designs. She poaches the best tailor and the best salesman for her team and opens a budget dress brand. Once their venture becomes successful, George Sanders enters the house like the snake in the garden, whispering promises of her name on haute couture. Does she jettison her partners for high fashion ambition?

It Started in Paradise (1952)

Thursday, 28 November

Eve Harrington looks like a veritable candy striper devoted to good works compared to the ruthless backstage machinations of a prestige fashion house in London. What happens when Jane Hylton is keen to develop her own style, except the old-fashioned name on the label expects her to produce more of the same? Drama in high fashion runs on cycles much in the way of florals for spring. The new Elizabethan Age fashion show is not to be missed.

Sass Mouth Dames Film Club–One Night Only

The More the Merrier (1943)

Screens Thursday, 27 June

Brooks Hotel Cinema, Dublin

19.00-21.00

Popcorn included.

Tickets available through Eventbrite

Join Megan McGurk for a once-off summer night for Sass Mouth Dames Film Club.

In this war-time screwball comedy, you could mistake the housing crisis in Washington D.C. for the current situation in Dublin. Jean Arthur advertises a flatshare which results in a queue down the block, an all too familiar sight today. Jean gets more than she bargains for when an elderly gent (Charles Coburn) insists on taking the vacancy. Things grow more complicated when he rents half of his room to tall drink of man-water, Joel McCrea. When a swoon merchant and his propeller take up residence, a sass mouth dame falls hard.

The regular film club series returns in September.

Sass Mouth Dames Film Club Series 8

Join Megan McGurk for a sterling collection of Pre-Code woman’s pictures. Let’s revisit an era when Hollywood took women on the screen and in the audience seriously.

Sass Mouth Dames Film Club Series 8 meets each Thursday night in January at 7.00, in the Brooks Hotel Cinema, Drury Street, Dublin.

Only a tenner in!

Tickets through Eventbrite.

Our Blushing Brides (1930)

3 January

In woman’s pictures, a reliable formula presents a cautionary tale of three women who seek to make their fortune. Set in a department store among women who work behind a counter, or model clothes as ‘mannequins,’ they pool resources in flat shares and skip lunches to afford clothes. Joan Crawford, Anita Page, and Dorothy Sebastian bide their time on stingy wages while they fend off a pack of society wolves. Joan Crawford tries to keep her friends from falling for the cheap lines pick up artists use. The picture includes fashion show sequences featuring swoonworthy designs by Adrian.

Safe in Hell (1931)

10 January

Next time you hear someone make a sarcastic comment about ‘Hollywood endings’, as a shortcut for saccharine fade outs, point them in the direction of Pre-Code Hollywood pictures like Safe in Hell. In one of the most notorious Pre-Codes, Dorothy Mackaill protects herself from a customer’s assault, and afterward, hides out in a Caribbean bolthole to avoid extradition. At first, she thinks boredom is her worst problem. When she accepts an invitation from the men who loiter in the hotel lounge, they compete for her as though she were a roast chicken at the end of forty day fast. William Wellman’s production reminds us that women are never safe when men are around.

Vanity Street (1932)

17 January

Helen Chandler, tired, hungry, and homeless, smashes a window so she can at least have three hots and a cot in prison. A police detective (Charles Bickford) takes pity on a woman down on her luck. He offers a meal and his sofa, and then gets her a job in a chorus line. The real star of this picture though is Mayo Methot, better known for being the third Mrs Bogart. Mayo Methot had a gift for playing characters who learn difficult truths about things like inconstant lovers and the fleeting nature of youth and fame. She lays bare the emotional contours of women who have been tossed aside. Not to be missed.

Ladies They Talk About (1933)

24 January

During a bank heist, Barbara Stanwyck gets pinched. She doesn’t squeal on her boyfriend’s criminal rackets. She hopes to gain the influence of a popular radio preacher she grew up with, and have the sentence suspended. The plan doesn’t work, so she joins the women’s prison as a ‘new fish’. Stanwyck proves a quick study for how to manage a dame looking for a fight. The scenes behind the walls resemble a sorority house more than the hoosegow. Despite a carceral effect, women on the inside mitigate their grim plight with decorative touches applied to their uniforms and jail cells. You can’t keep a good dame down, even when she’s behind bars.

Heat Lightning (1934)

31 January

Where do you go after you’ve had enough of men and life in a chorus line? If you’re Aline MacMahon, you get as far away as possible–the Mojave desert. She opens a filling station and café with her younger sister, played by Ann Dvorak. Wearing overalls, with her mermaid tresses tucked under a bandana, MacMahon limits her worries to heat, rattlesnakes, and keeping her sister out of trouble. Then one day an old flame (Preston Foster) shows up, on the run from the law. Suddenly the great big desert is too small. Cornered, with a siege mentality, a resourceful dame does what she must. To lighten the drama, Glenda Farrell and Ruth Donnelly trade barbs. Director Mervyn LeRoy doesn’t waste a moment in this 63-minute gem.

SASS MOUTH DAMES FILM CLUB SERIES 7

Megan McGurk presents a brand-new series of Pre-Code woman’s pictures.

Series 7 may be abbreviated, but three platinum blonde sass mouth dames provide a cure for what ails you. And I’ll return to screening five films for Series 8, each Thursday in January, 2019.

Join me in the Brooks Hotel Cinema.

Seating is limited, so book in early.

Tickets available through Eventbrite.

As You Desire Me (1932)

8 November, 7.00

You may be tempted to roll your eyes at the idea of amnesia used as a plot device, but Greta Garbo teases out subversive possibilities from a familiar trope. Without the encumbrance of memory and identity, a woman might become a bit reckless. She can turn platinum, sing on stage, demand more champagne, and juggle a retinue of admirers. Chief among the men who queue for Garbo is Erich von Stroheim, playing one of his all-time best scoundrels. Out of nowhere, Melvyn Douglas appears and claims to be Garbo’s long-lost husband. Does she trade a life of independence and intrigue to settle down with a dashing man in a uniform?

Blonde Venus (1932)

29 November, 7.00

Often imitated yet never equalled, Marlene Dietrich’s opening nightclub act still has the power to shock and enthral audiences. Wearing a platinum afro wig, with an African American chorus line, Dietrich’s playful revue mocks stereotypes about race and gender. The nightclub routine provides relief from Dietrich’s day job as wife and mother. After her husband (Herbert Marshall) suffers a health crisis, Dietrich struggles to be the sole provider for the family and pay for expensive medical care. She makes the ultimate sacrifice by having sex with Cary Grant for money. Nice work if you can get it.

I’m No Angel (1933)

6 December, 7.00

Mae West saved Paramount Studios from bankruptcy with racy hits such as Night After Night (1932) and She Done Him Wrong (1933). Box office receipts gave West the clout to develop the stories she wanted to tell. In this case, for her third picture for the studio, she indulged a life-long fantasy to play a lion-tamer. Before West graduates to snapping a whip in a cage around magnificent beasts, she plays a cooch dancer. While the men watch her shimmy, she takes stock of their jewellery. After the show, West stages a one-woman clip-joint to collect rings, tie pins, and other baubles that catch her eye. The picture includes the immortal line, ‘Beulah, peel me a grape’, a request which inspires micro-level pampering for ambitious sass mouth dames.

Dolly Tree’s Cellophane Bridal Veil for Man-Proof (1938)

By: Megan McGurk

What are your favourite bridal looks on film?

The organdie gown with floral spray buttons that Joan Crawford wears in Love on the Run (1936) captures the mood of a garden wedding. It moves like a spring breeze.

Ginger Rogers looks like a Madonna in a starry halo, one of many bridal ensembles she wears to play a serial runaway bride in It Had to Be You (1947).

Gene Tierney’s husband Oleg Cassini created a classic romantic confection for her wedding scene in The Razor’s Edge (1946).

But try and find another duchess satin turtleneck gown onscreen, with a wimple, that carries a forty-foot plastic veil, like the one Dolly Tree designed for Rosalind Russell in Man-Proof (1938). There’s nothing else like it in the history of cinema.

Forget sweetheart necklines, or lace, or beading, or any other detail that’s so last century by comparison.

There’s no traditional promise in Roz’s wedding look.

Rather than opt for demure or dainty, Roz looks remote and inaccessible, bolstered by satin and luxe plastic.

Dolly Tree created something more complicated than expected, something myth-bound, like a labyrinth with a Minotaur at the centre. It announces ‘unwrap me at your peril’.

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