Latest lake swimming

I got a new waterproof case for my phone, so I bring it along when we swim now.  This is Wildwood Lake, one of the lakes in Holly Recreation Area, yesterday:

And this is Big Seven Lake, part of the Seven Lakes, today:

Film review: Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

It's very confusing: there's a film starring Warren Beatty called Heaven Can Wait that came out in 1978.  I know I've seen at least parts of it at some point, and I remember the basic plot, and I also knew it was a remake.  So a while ago, I found that there was a 1943 Heaven Can Wait on the Criterion Channel, so we watched it.  But it has very little to do with the Beatty film.  Now I find that the real original version is called Here Comes Mr. Jordan.  But, just to be extra-confusing, it's based on a play called... Heaven Can Wait.  Anyway, you probably know the plot, but just in case: contending boxer Joe Pendleton is in training for the fight-before-the-title-fight but decides to fly there.  His trainer, Max Corkle, wishes he wouldn't, but as Joe says, (1) he isn't called "the flying pug" for nothing, and (2) he'll have his lucky sax along with him. 

Sadly, this isn't enough to save him: he's playing it while flying when some cable snaps and his (one man) plane goes into a nosedive.  Next thing he knows, he's standing on a cloud and a fastidious fusspot is telling him that he's dead.  He refuses to believe it until he's taken to a Mr. Jordan (played by the only actor I recognized, Claude Rains) who is overseeing a bunch of passengers from places like Australia and Finland boarding a large 'plane, which is parked on the cloud. 

Joe is convinced there has been a mistake, though, and on checking the lists, Mr. Jordan discovers that he's not supposed to be there until 1991 (then 50 years in the future).  Turns out that the fusspot is new on the job and snatched Joe from his 'plane just before impact, when he would've been able to pull out of the dive at the last minute.  They take him back to find his body but not only has it been removed from the wreckage, it's been cremated.  So they have to find a new body for him.  He is very particular, because, as he says, he was "in the pink" and he wants a body that can compete for the title.  However, Mr. Jordan is no fool and suggests the body of a rich man called Farnsworth, who was just then being drowned in his bathtub by his wife and secretary.  Joe didn't want to do it until he witnesses a beautiful woman, Bette Logan

(played by an actress I was unfamiliar with, Evelyn Keyes, whose main claim to fame other than this film was playing Scarlett's bratty sister in Gone With the Wind, but who later found fame with some very racy autobiographies detailing her many famous affairs) pleading with the wife and secretary to save her father, who has been set up by the deceased Farnsworth to take the fall in some scandal of his own making.  So Joe takes over Farnsworth's body and sets to work setting things right and training for the fight.  He also falls for Bette.  But alas, the wife and the secretary are not done plotting his demise...

Very entertaining.  The best character is probably Max,

whom Joe manages to explain his predicament to (he is convinced when he hears the now Farnsworth playing his favorite tune on Joe's saxophone and mangling it just as Joe always did).  Bittersweet ending, though, especially if you subscribe to a Lockean theory of personal identity...

(Incidentally, apparently the main actor, Robert Montgomery [whom we decided looked and sounded like a much less handsome Tony Curtis] was not only a well-known leading man, he usually played suave sophisticates, so his pug-from-Brooklyn act was really an act (and got him an Oscar nomination), he was also the father of Samantha from Bewitched.  Oh, and Evelyn described him as a "cold fish" in her scandalous memoirs, so obviously he was one of the few who was immune to her charms.)

Film review: The Cowboy and the Lady (1938)

Another one that's leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month.  It was (misleadingly) billed as a Western take on It Happened One Night (one of my fave movies) but turned out to be much milder on the comedy and dialing up the romance.  Gary Cooper, playing a rodeo cowboy called Stretch (and looking it - very skinny and looking twice as tall as everyone else) plays it a bit buffoonish at first (very monosyllabic and aw shucks), while Merle Oberon (another in a line of English actors in the 30s movies who are supposed to be Americans but make no attempt to disguise their plummy English accents) is the rich daughter of a presidential hopeful who is supposed to be staying out of trouble out of the spotlight down in Palm Beach.  She persuades her two maids to take her out on a triple date to meet cowboys and tries their numbered system to hook a man, number 3 of which is tell him a sob story.  So Stretch thinks the girl he's fallen for (and who has fallen for him) is actually the sole breadwinner supporting her deadbeat father and four young sisters, when in fact she's the daughter of the owner of the fancy house he thinks she's a servant in.  There's a romantic boat trip from Palm Beach to Galveston and a ship-board wedding, and Oberon gets to show she can do slapstick trying to clean out Stretch's tent in Galveston and getting wrapped up in the fly-paper.  But then she gets called back to Palm Beach, Stretch asks her to meet him at his home in Montana, and her deception starts to break down.  Cooper's best moments are up at the ranch in Montana, teasing "Ma Hawkins" (who doesn't appear to be his actual mother but is clearly a surrogate) by perpetually untying her apron strings when she's not looking, and getting everyone to go along with his play acting in his as-yet-unbuilt house. 

The ones that do most of the comedy heavy-lifting, however, are Stretch's cowboy pals (including Walter Brennan), the two maids (most notably Patsy Kelly) and Oberon's kindly uncle Hannibal (Harry Davenport), who is a Bad Influence because he thinks his go-getter brother keeps her cooped up too much.  A bit slow in places, but a pleasant diversion.  First Merle Oberon film I've ever seen and it prompted me to look up her life story.  Now THAT should be a film - and in fact, was going to be, I think.

Today's lake swim

Who is this man with the broad shoulders with you?

Film review: If You Could Only Cook (1935)

Another Jean Arthur, this time a thoroughly charming little (1 hour 11 mins) number about a rich car designer (Herbert Marshall) sitting down next to the suddenly homeless Arthur on a park bench as she combs the want ads for work

and somehow getting swept up in her plan to become a butler-cook pair for an eccentric rich man, who turns out to be a gangster ex-bootlegger with a Chico Marx-esque cod Italian accent (and a strange aversion to strong garlic, that doesn't seem to fit, but that is the reason that Arthur is hired as cook).  Arthur doesn't know who Marshall really is, of course, and he's supposed to wed a society figure whom we know only has eyes for his millions.  One of the funnier scenes is when he sneaks away the first night to learn how to buttle from his own butler, who lets slip some less than flattering opinions about him.  Will the fake couple become a real couple?  Well, duh.  But it's an entertaining (and brisk) journey, and the bootlegger turns out to have a heart of gold.

Swimming in lakes

Frederick and have been going on long walks every afternoon ever since the shutdown started, and now it's got hot, we combine that with swimming in lakes. Our tactic is that I bring along an inflatable raft, we walk for a while to get hot, then we pack our shirts and sandals into a giant ziploc baggie (you'd be amazed how big they go) and balance it on the raft while we swim. Then we walk for a bit more to dry off and go home. We've done this for years just at Seven Lakes, but we've expanded our geographical range. Here, for example, you see us at a lake at Metamora-Hadley:

This turned out to be a bit silly, because the water was about three foot deep and choked with weeds until we'd got at least a hundred yards out. The water was warm as bathwater. The only thing is, we swim in our hats and sunglasses and it seems to alarm people, as kayakers come over and ask us if we're okay. Today we were swimming in Big Seven Lakes and a lady who was kayaking with her husband paddled over and asked us if we needed anything. "A beer would be nice," I joked. Well, she took me seriously:

Film review: The Talk of the Town (1942)

Another Jean Arthur film, not to be confused with The Whole Town's Talking, which was the Edward G. Robinson one we just watched.  Neither of them are very informatively named, actually.  This one would be better named Menage a Trois, and is decidedly forward-looking (if it cops out a bit at the end).  Cary Grant plays the (strangely named) Leopold Dilg, who is a rabble-rouser in small town Lochester, who gets accused of setting a fire that burns down the local mill that he worked in, a fire that ended up so burning up the foreman that all that can be found of him is a small athletics medal.  He is, of course, innocent, but the owner of the mill is the local Big Man who owns everything, including the police and the judge of his case, so he sees the writing on the wall and makes a break for it.  While escaping, he badly sprains his ankle and seeks refuge in the boarding house that Jean Arthur is getting ready to rent out.  She's a teacher at the local school, the same one they were both kids together at.  She is familiar with the charges against him and is none too pleased to see him, but hides him in the attic.  Aggravatingly, the person she was to rent the house to, Michael Lightcap, the dean of a law school looking for a peaceful place to write a book, shows up a day early, in a rainstorm.  This is Ronald "Prisoner of Zenda" Colman, who was 50 at the time but plays someone who turns 40 in the course of the film.  So you guessed it, Jean Arthur is torn between two English actors playing Americans.  At first it seems obvious that she will fall for Grant (I mean, it's Cary Grant) but he is sardonic and distant, and while Colman starts out as a stuffed shirt, he melts considerably.  Terrified that Lightcap will find Dilg, Arthur arranges to stay overnight (borrowing Lightcap's pajamas),

and Lightcap assumes that it is her adenoids that are responsible for Dilg's titanic snores.  The next day a flood of people show up to disturb Lightcap's peace, including an old friend of his who happens also to be Dilg's lawyer (who is also convinced of Dilg's innocence).  Arthur tells him that Dilg is hiding in the attic and he persuades her (a) that it's the safest place for him, and (b) that she must find an excuse to stick around, so Arthur persuades Lightcap to hire her as combined cook/stenographer.  It is while she is filling the latter role that Dilg is so annoyed by what Lightcap is saying (he can hear it because he's snuck down to the kitchen, being starving) that he comes out to argue with him.  Arthur quickly claims that he is the gardener, Joseph, and it isn't long before the three of them are a cozy little unit, Lightcap professing his enormous affection for "Joseph" even more than for Jean Arthur's "Miss Shelley".  But things get complicated when Dilg's picture is plastered all over the papers.  Watch for an uncredited Lloyd Bridges as a local newspaperman, and the genie from The Thief of Bagdad as Lightcap's late-arriving valet, Tilney.  Subplots involve borscht with an egg in it, Lightcap's being offered a seat on the Supreme Court(!) and Lightcap pretending to woo the foreman's "grieving" girlfriend.  Which one of Grant or Colman will Arthur end up with?  You won't know until the very last seconds, I promise.

It's a bit over-long, and Grant has surprisingly little to do, but Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman are charming and there are some great supporting characters.

Baby Raccoon

This happened back on June 2nd, but I never got round to Blogging it.  Frederick and I went swimming at Holly Recreation Area and went for a walk afterwards to dry off.  I noticed something between the path and the lake that looked like a detached squirrel tail.  Against my better judgment, I poked it and it moved, and two little ears emerged.  It was a baby raccoon.  I thought I'd better leave it alone in case it was just wandering around, but it was still there about fifteen minutes later when we came back along the path, and it looked weak.  So I made the rash decision to take it home and see if we could nurse it back to health.  (I'd seen a dead adult the previous week near that spot and half wondered if that had been its mother.)  We did indeed take it home and tried to get it to eat, but it just wanted to sleep (mainly on Thomas) and sadly died the next day.  RIP Rocky.

Thomas said when I brought him home that I should've been warned against this by Calvin and Hobbes:

...and sadly he was right.

Haven Hill

 Highland Recreation Area is a large state park just round the corner from Thomas's old high school.  I knew about it when he was going there and visited some parts of it, but didn't really realize its full extent.  This past year we've really expanded our exploration of it.

 But this month we discovered something else about it: right in the middle of it is the remains of an old lodge that used to belong to Edsel (son of Henry, after whom a famous white elephant car was named)

 This intact building is just the lodge.

 Absolutely nobody was around on this day.

 Just so you know.

 This is about a week later.  We're approaching Haven Hill from another direction.

 Don't know what these are.  Feel free to find out and let me know.

Well that's nice.