Film Meme

Naomi over at Old Lady of the Hills has done a film meme that I thought I'd try. You're supposed to name three classic moments in films that made you buy something or think something or do something that maybe you shouldn't have.

I don't know if I'll follow this exactly, or just focus on 3 films that impacted me in some way.

As a child, I loved Saturday and Sunday either really early in the morning or late afternoons if I could get in front of the t.v. set to watch old black and white movies. Anything that included any of the Barrymore siblings (Ethel, Lionel, John) was perfect for me.

Portrait of Jenny(1948) starring Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotton, and Ethel Barrymore.


I came across a film with Ethel Barrymore in it one day and sat down to watch. Now, not only was this a good movie, it "spoke" to me. I completely identified with the storyline and the main character, "Jenny." As a young child, I felt out of place, in my family, in my town, my time. I don't know why, but I always felt like I was born too soon or too late. I didn't fit in my time period. So when I saw Portrait of Jenny and the little girl recites the lines: "Where I came from, nobody knows, and where I am going everyone goes." I was hooked, because even as a child, I felt like, I was somewhere special before I was born, but nobody knew it, and that I held some secret about life, death, time, and knew where we'd all be going eventually. Yes, I was an odd child, very odd child. Anyway, I digress.

So Portrait of Jenny is a David O. Selznick movie about a little girl (Jenny) and a starving artist (Eben). When Eben first meets Jenny, she's a little girl. Each subsequent time he runs into Jenny, she appears to have grown up more quickly than is normal. Jenny asks Eben to wait for her while she grows up. What Eben doesn't discover until the end of the movie is that Jenny is from another time and has already lived and died before his lifetime. Jenny keeps coming to him through time. This spoke to my out of place and time feelings. It also spoke to the hopeless romantic in me that true love transcended time and space. Which also triggered my thirst for reading fantasy and time travel literature, which really didn't need much prodding but this movie helped it just the same. For me as a child, to know that some adult wrote this story, made me know I wasn't alone. Someone else thought this, believed this, maybe even experienced it. Maybe there was something to it.

Brigadoon (1954) with Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, and Van Johnson also had this "love transcending space and time" theme to it and is another of my favorite movies.

Okay, onto the second movie that impacted me (not necessarily in any chronological order)

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

This movie is a life saver for a young child growing up in a difficult home who not only felt out of place and time, but at times wished she'd never been born. The message of this movie was important to me as a child, and even more so as a young adult when I faced a number of my own George Bailey moments. Each life is important, and each one of us, no matter how insignificant we believe we are, we matter to the people and the community around us.

Now, just to show you I'm not all serious and in my head, and as nod to Naomi's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" sunglasses, when I saw this next movie, I had to have the red shoes!

Candies brand made the shoes, but of course there were no red shoes at any stores near me, so I had to settle for the sedate tan shoes.












How are you supposed to be a teenaged sexpot and drive a particular HS Quarterback to distraction in tan shoes I ask you?! Ugh! I survived and the shoes eventually broke. Oh well, at least for a little while I pulled off the Olivia Newton-John look PG-13 style. :-)