ONE SUMMER

Bette Davis (noticing a hole in her sock): "Well, there's one piggy who'll be going to market in a shocking state of nudity!"--Dangerous

I finished One Summer yesterday and started reading One Summer, Bill Bryson's account of America in the summer of 1927. (Emerson said you shouldn't read a book that's less than a year old, but what the heck!) The first part is all about the race to be the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, which made Charles Lindbergh an instant celebrity, and the tabloid obsession with the case of the Window Sash Murder.  Bryson's writing is characteristically entertaining. (I've read a lot of his books.)

Last night I went to see Dangerous, Bette Davis' first Oscar-winning role, at the Lightbox.  I would have seen it with a Movie Meetup group, but I couldn't find them there.  It's about how successful architect Franchot Tone--a bargain basement Leslie Howard--falls for Davis, a broke stage actress with a "jinx" reputation, and commits all his money to putting her on Broadway, not knowing that she has a husband who won't divorce her. (If she told him it would be bad for the plot, of course.) It's conventional and boring, stuffed with the precious dialogue you often got in 1930s movies.  Frankly, it's the mannered performances that have tended to win Oscars.