things i've watched, edition 1

I just saw a horrifying trash bag commercial. It was for Glad, and either I wasn't watching closely and so missed the details preventing the horrific sight I did see, or my goodness. The sound wasn't on, so perhaps the narration would have explained why a scene of a truck, barrelling down a curving mountain road and then falling off the edge of a cliff into one of the new stretchier Glad trash bags, why that was not something from a shocking and diseased advertising mind.

I saw a very short old movie last night that I had thought I would write about today, well yesterday now, and you see I didn't. It was on late, about now, but yesterday. I had seen the description in the cable on-screen guide, and not only did it star Myrna Loy, but she was trying to murder Irene Dunne! So I couldn't resist. I have an unaccountable distaste for Irene Dunne. Something about her teeth, when she laughs. They are very nice teeth, that's not the problem, it's that she seems to use her teeth, like they are among her top acting tools, not even just when she's smiling or laughing, when she opens her mouth to speak there they are, both top and bottom, shining out at us as if they equal charm and goodness. Sometimes I do like Irene Dunne though, even when her mouth is open, and that makes my sometime-dislike of her all the more incensing.
So the guide said Myrna Loy was on a rampage trying to murder old schoolmates, including Irene Dunne, and how she tried to kill them all was THROUGH HYPNOSIS. Only about an hour long, early '30s I believe, and oh that Myrna. Get 'er, Myrna! CLICK HERE FOR MORE

Myrna was a very bad person in this movie, though, and I ended up having to side with Irene. I mean, Myrna wanted to kill Irene's little boy. Who was absurdly cute with absurdly nice hair. Tsk, Myrna. At one point, Myrna gets her boyfriend/Irene's chauffeur (I don't believe I know how to spell chauffeur, shame) to give the boy a birthday present, which was a bouncy rubber ball, in which was a fucking bomb. Irene put it with his other presents, on the top shelf of his closet, and OF COURSE he was going to try to pull it off the shelf once Irene was gone, and though it's an old movie and there were limits back then, usually, on the carnage they allowed, they'd killed off an extremely personable lady already, who laughed very realistically and had a nice apologetic kind of lilt to her eyebrows, gee I liked her, but they killed her, so who knew their limits?
The boy did pull down packages, but luckily, not the bomb box. He was scared from the other falling boxes so thankfully stopped trying to get at the new present.
In addition to the attempted child killing, the Myrna-or-Irene sympathy dilemma was complicated by the fact that Myrna was supposed to be half-Indian--like, from India--and she was on her murdering rampage because, well because she was crazy, but also since Irene and the rest of the former schoolmates had been mean to her on account of her outsiderness--her ethnicity. That on top of all the other shitty things she had to go through for not being white were reason enough for rampage. I'm saying, for her. There's this great part toward the end, where she's confronting Irene and spelling all this out, and Irene says something like, "It's been horrible I know, but can you really say it justifies murder?" and Myrna, hilariously matter-of-fact, says, "Yes, I can." It's a beautifully logical exchange of dialog. Of course Irene has to ask, because she is so good and sane, and of course it's justification enough for Myrna. Silly Irene, the nutter's killed about 8 people already!

Not exactly logical is Myrna's murdering process: once she'd learned about hypnosis from a Swami and used his name to send out dire predictions to all the schoolmates, she killed the Swami and then...used hypnosis and/or more direct means to make the predictions come true. I'm still not clear on what all was involved in the murdering. What else was I doing at the same time? I think I was writing some paper. But it was interestingly frightening, the way the schoolmates were being told they would kill themselves, and they laughed it off, but then didn't, and what a weird thing to make a bunch of people become afraid of themselves.

So it's bizarre, in a great way, is what I am saying. A bad movie, indeed, especially with the whole exotic/Asian/evil/crazy subtext, and Myrna not being Asian at all, but then she has her kind of sad monologue with Irene about prejudice, and I don't know, it's 1930something, what're ya gonna do? Because also there are moments that utterly charmed me, like when the chauffeur jumps out of the car he's driving Irene in and she has to steer and the ball bomb is in the car with her, or at the end when the Swami's REAL prediction, for Myrna, about falling off a train, is about to come true--ok, so there's a bunch of stars, and Myrna stares up (how she has time when she's being pursued by cops, I don't know) and then one of the stars blinks, and then ZOOMS THE FUCK DOWN FROM THE HEAVENS, as if it wants to annihilate her, and she like doesn't even bat an eye at this hallucination. She looks out on the tracks, and then the dead Swami's face comes flying up at her, intoning dire things, and kind of twisting back and forth a bit, and not just for one second, but repeatedly, and her face is calm, maybe her eyes a bit intense but she's stoic, and then WHAM, out she jumps, landing flat and dead on the tracks as we in the train speed away and then can no longer see her. And go back to watching the detective and Irene flirt a little more...though now I can't remember how that turned out either.

Here is the allmovie summary. I swear I never saw all 13 women, more like 5. The summary likes Julie Haydon--I can't remember the character my favorite played, but I'd bet that's her. You know, the personable lady with the eyebrow lilt.
I think it is her. Here is a picture--looks younger than who I saw, but similar.



Stupid Myrna.