Train of Thought

Walking home from the movies tonight, I found myself thinking of the movie FAME. And I sort of stopped right on the street and thought, "Wait. How did you get here? How the HEll did you get to FAME?" So I retraced my thoughts, and this is what I came up with.

• On the way to the bus, I'd purchased this week's NEW YORK magazine, largely for the short article about Montgomery Clift's house in Manhattan going up for sale. That got me thinking about how, in From Here to Eternity, Donna Reed and Montgomery Clift were more believable as a hooker and a heterosexual, respectively, than Deborah Kerr was as a working-class American. (Okay, so Donna Reed's character was turned into a "dance hall hostess" for the movie, thanks to the Hays Production Code. She was still a hooker, for all intents and purposes.)

• Thinking about Clift's homosexuality and Deborah Kerr, my mind moved on to the film Tea and Sympathy, which I saw a few months ago on TCM, and starred Kerr and John Kerr, who were confusingly not related. John Kerr plays a character who may-or-may-not-be gay. Critics of the film (and the play) say that its key message is flawed; the point is never that it's okay to be homosexual, but that it's okay to have traits that unfairly pin you as a homosexual by the community at large.

• Critics had the same problem with The Children's Hour, which I also saw on TCM. Shirley Maclaine, in the documentary The Celluloid Closet, expresses her disappointment that her character's attraction to Audrey Hepburn's character isn't explored more.

•One of the key roles in The Children's Hour is played by Veronica Cartwright, a prolific young actress of the early 60's who also appeared in a Twilight Zone episode titled "I Sing the Body Electric." (She plays a young girl who, while mourning her mother, rejects the idea of a robotic grandmother.)

• This led me to think of the kick-ass finale to the movie Fame, a song called "I Sing the Body Electric." One of the soloists is a pre-bald, pre-ER Paul McCrane.

And that is how I got from Montgomery Clift to FAME. Clift-Kerr-Maclaine-Cartwright-McCrane

Is it me, or do all those names seem like anagrams of each other?