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Film: Teacher’s Pet
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’ve never been as entranced of Clark Gable as I’m evidently supposed to be. I don’t mind Gable in general, but I don’t specifically seek his movies out. I’ve got nothing against him, but I’ll sit down to a weak Cary Grant or John Garfield movie in a heartbeat. With Gable I’m somehow less impressed with his onscreen persona. This is probably the reason it’s taken me this long to get to Teacher’s Pet, which I watched today when I finally realized that NetFlix has it streaming but doesn’t have it on disc. What I expected was a creepy rom-com featuring a Clark Gable nearing 60 trying to woo a mid-30s Doris Day. Fortunately, that’s not really what we get here.

James Gannon (Clark Gable) is a hard-bitten newspaper city editor in New York who is convinced that the only way to learn the trade of a reporter is to start at the bottom, get a few swift kicks in the backside, and learn the ropes the hard way, through work and practice. Therefore, he’s not even amused when he is contacted by a local college and asked to come as a guest to a journalism class. He responds with a rude letter and is then upbraided by his boss. It turns out the paper’s publisher is a big fan of this local college, having received an honorary degree from them. Gannon, thus, is forced to go and eat a little crow. This is despite his discovery that the professor for this class is (gasp) a woman.

Trial of the Century

Film: Miracle on 34th Street
Format: HBO Go on rockin’ flatscreen.

Everyone, or almost everyone, has a favorite Christmas movie, at least in the U.S. where Christmas is pretty much universally celebrated. Gun to head, I’d cite Die Hard since it takes place at a Christmas party, but for Christmas-centric films, I’d go with A Christmas Story. It’s difficult to discount the singular joy of older holiday films, though. Of those, It’s a Wonderful Life is almost certainly the most commonly cited favorite, but there is a minority like me who prefer Miracle on 34th Street.

I find it difficult to believe that there are people unfamiliar with the basic story here, but just in case, I’ll offer a quick rundown. Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara) is the divorced mother of young Susan (Natalie Wood). Doris works for Macy’s, and among other things, is in charge of the Thanksgiving Day parade. The Santa Claus she has hired for the parade has turned up drunk, so she hires a replacement on the spot. The problem is that the replacement calls himself Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) and truly believes himself to be Santa Claus. Despite this, he is immediately hired to be the Macy’s Santa Claus in the store.

Grace Under Pressure

Film: The Country Girl
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

It’s always a little bit of a surprise to me that I like Bing Crosby as an actor. I do, though. Crosby is easy to like, especially when he’s playing a nice guy priest or a lovable rogue across from Bob Hope. This made The Country Girl an interesting experiment for me. I like Crosby, but I’ve only seen him in musical and light comic roles. How would he fare in an actual drama acting alongside Grace Kelly and William Holden?

I didn’t expect a drama, honestly. This is the only straight drama I know of in Crosby’s career, although I’m sure there are others. I know him from films like High Society, Going My Way, and the “Road to…” movies. Playing a washed-up alcoholic actor feels out of his wheelhouse, and yet that’s where we are. In a sense, there’s an interesting parallel between the film’s story and the film’s reality. In the film, a Broadway production depends almost entirely on the performance of this has-been actor while The Country Girl itself hangs entirely on the performance of a guy best-known and most comfortable crooning over a piano and cracking jokes at the camera.

Please Fasten Seat Belts

Film: Airport
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Genres and sub-genres start somewhere. In the 1970s (and yes, I know this from having lived through them), it seemed like every year came with a disaster picture, many of which were produced by Irwin Allen. As it happens, though, the original disaster pic, Airport, was not an Irwin Allen movie. This is the film that started the sub-genre that gave us films like Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, and The Poseidon Adventure. That’s either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your point of view.

Basically, this is a film that has the central conceit of giving us a typical day in the life of a major Midwestern airport. In this case, that means a blizzard, closed runways, and angry board of directors, protestors, an elderly stowaway, and a guy with a bomb in a briefcase. We also get a couple of failing marriages, a couple of affairs, and a grizzled maintenance man. In addition to serving as more than the daily suggested allowance of melodrama, Airport also serves as enough of a love letter to the 707 airplane that I suspect Boeing may have had a hand in the financing.