Sunday 22 February 2009

Sunday Night is.. Jane Russell, Hoagy Carmichael and Victor Mature





Victor Mature is lurking in the background, waiting to kiss Jane. Film: The Las Vegas Story (1952). I have a real fondness for Carmichael as a singer, preferably without much accompaniment, preferably swanning around the button as far as the precise note is concerned. It's Bing but much less slick. just a touch decadent. He described his unique, laconic voice as being "the way a shaggy dog looks…I have Wabash fog and sycamore twigs in my throat". (Wiki)


More on Carmichael:

The death of his three-year-old sister in 1918 affected him deeply, and he wrote "My sister Joanne—the victim of poverty. We couldn’t afford a good doctor or good attention, and that’s when I vowed I would never be broke again in my lifetime." She may have died from influenza, which had swept the world that year. Carmichael earned his first money ($5.00) as a musician playing at a fraternity dance that year and so began his musical career....

Republican who didn't care for FDR. Somehow you guess that from both face and voice.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hoagy Carmichael is terrific, but don't you also love Jane Russell? No need of feminism for this sassy dame: confident, tolerant, amused, teasing the boys with her magnificent bosom. Victor Mature looks quite undone. She was a keen church goer and once told Robert Mitchum, when filming His Kind of Woman: 'Even Christians have big breasts.'

George S said...

'Even Christians have big breasts.' Possibly as answers to prayer?

Victor Mature is quite a figure. If he wasn't so tall he'd be wider than he's high. What with his latitude and Jane's forward projection there would be little room in the average Otis lift.