Nice article about MGM musicals and contributions of MacDonald and Eddy
…Plus a beautiful picture from “Maytime” to download!
Charlie Ruggles profile – Jeanette and Nelson mentioned
If you enjoy actor Charlie Ruggles you will enjoy this interesting biography about him:
Whether appearing in an elegantly crafted Ernst Lubitsch film such as Trouble in Paradise (1932) or Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) or Howard Hawks’ brilliant Bringing Up Baby (1938) or in a series of fourteen fitfully funny domestic comedies with Mary Boland (seen below at the right with Charlie), the actor delivered his neatly polished performances with a captivatingly casual air. His versatility as a supporting player lightened everything from a 1939 pastiche of a Russian musical in Balalaika with Nelson Eddy to an early ’60s sex farce with Sandra Dee, called I’d Rather Be Rich (1964)–all made more palatably entertaining by his honeyed voice and gentle presence. He was often asked to play put upon, hapless and occasionally beaten men, (a character that probably evoked a feeling of sympathy among struggling audiences in the ’30s). Yet there was invariably a remarkably consistent equanimity to his portrayals. Playing henpecked husbands, butlers, valets, rejected suitors, or occasionally lecherous fellows, he remained a man who hung onto his civilized identity–sometimes by a thread. Ruggles seemed to derive real pleasure from his portrayals of would-be lotharios the most; gently mocking the unprepossessing, not so rampant male of the species.
Nelson Eddy remembered…still a Mountie!
Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald may have made the Royal Canadian Mounties famous but the plaudits for the horsemen are fading away. The rigid standards that an aspiring recruit had to reach to become a Mountie once upon a time have long gone, sadly diminished by the many concessions made to meet recruitment goals.
In the writer’s opinion, this once elite force no longer ranks as such. Consider the shameful action of the Mounties at a major airport in 2007 when a poor, Polish immigrant, waiting in the International Arrival area for his mother, unable to speak English, confused and agitated after a long wait was tasered and jumped on by no less than 3-4 officers. He died.
And news reports about the recent atrocity that occured on a Greyhound Bus travelling in Western Canada indicates that a witness who sat next to the accused killer and was a friend of the victim, could only be later identifed by the Mounties as ” Stacey”.
And no, they didn’t know her name, address or where she was.