Eleanor Divina, Part 1
Hello again everyone and thanks so much for taking a minute or 4 to join me here. I think it’s high time I pay tribute to goddess—backslash—actress, Eleanor Parker. Most especially in light of how often I’ve referred to her canny balance of control and chaos in playing the part of Deborah in William Conrad’s screen adaptation of Norman Mailer’s An American Dream.
But, I’ve been fascinated by this woman’s fever dream style ever since I can remember. So, I’m going to turn back the hands of time for a post or three here. I sincerely hope that you’ll trip with me—avoiding injury, of course, to nuns, family doctors home visits and staying home from grammar school—those good old days when a boy’s rising body temperature worked like a kind of Petrie dish for cultural seedlings to take root and grow watered by the sweat of his feverish brow. God bless a youthful immune system’s circuitous journeys.
And so...
Once upon a parochial school sick day, I was permitted to perch in front of our family television set with dry toast, tea, my engraved pewter baby juice cup and Dialing For Dollars with Ed Miller on Channel 7. Mr. Miller was a school vacation staple in our home from the time I was in first grade. And to see him on a sick day was a little like watching an adult movie—I refer to the kind of trigger your imagination television content I heard from my upstairs bedroom that came from the living room TV during my parents evening unwinding downstairs—that melodramatic adult stuff of which dreams are made of...The kind of content that a star like Eleanor Parker could cast a siren’s spell with.
Ms Parker’s probably best remembered these days for her mythic take as the Baroness Elsa von Shraeder in The Sound of Music. As is the case with this musical, she provides just the right balance of schlag to compliment the most treacly cinematic confection. But, she’s also a master of churning cream to solids in the most substantive films she’s starred in. Along with only a handful of actors that come to mind, she has the crazy knack—the indiscernible craft to bridge cinematic intimacy with theatrical bravura. I’m always offended by someone’s dismissal of work as effortless. If it appears as such, it’s due to considerable effort to make it seem so. And, there’s nothing effortless in being able to pull this kind of objective thing off. Certainly not with the subjectivity that comes with developing honest characterizations.
But, I digress...
Let me just say that this kind of tightrope walk is one that Eleanor Parker succeeded in performing—without teetering towards stridency—all throughout her forty year career.
More thoughts on Eleanor next time.
Until then, and as always...
Be Well.
And stay engaged.
Bye bye for now.
