Christopher...

...Columbus! I hope you've had a very pleasant weekend; it's the holiday I generally think of as "Oh, that's right - we have a day off on Monday" 'round about 3:00 p.m. on Friday.

Hot-Hot-Hot-Hot-Hot-Hot-Hot...Not

Remember my little Ann Sothern problem? Things haven't gotten any better.

Now, like all sensible people, I find people who talk about their dreams almost invariably incredibly boring. But of course my dreams are different. Especially this one, which has now popped up at least three times.

In this dream, I am planning to meet friends at New York's old Ballroom, once the most interesting cabaret room in town, for a special surprise. It's a surprisingly realistic dream, taking in my flat in Chelsea (four sordid rooms indeed), a walk up Ninth Avenue in what seems like an autumn rain, and arrival at my old stomping grounds.

The surprise, it turns out, is the act already under way when the doors open: the cabaret debut of Miss Katharine Hepburn, circa 1967 and resplendent in a jersey pantsuit number like one of those from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?. The song she is singing? Nothing else but that staple of 80s MOR radio, Ashford & Simpson's "Solid."

Words fail; fade to black.

Queen for Today: Katharine of Aquitaine

"I dressed my maids as Amazons and rode bare-breasted halfway to Damascus. Louis had a seizure and I damn near died of windburn... but the troops were dazzled..."

Monarchs have long provided the Big Hollywood Ladies with some of their plummiest roles - it's a tradition that dates back at least as far as 1912 and Bernhardt's Elizabeth I, and one that still intrigues - just ask Helen Mirren or Kirsten Dunst, both of whom have assayed (with wildly varying results) crowned heads in recent years.

Kate more or less played herself as Eleanor in The Lion in Winter - imperious, vulnerable, catty, and supremely wry. There are those who argue that was always the case with Hepburn's acting, just as those who would make the case - and a fairly plausible one, I think - that there's no reason not to think that Eleanor of Aquitaine was, in fact, fairly Hepburnische.

So I think we shall occasionally be looking in at these cases when celluloid royalty meets, in various ways, the real thing. This is one of my favorites; what are yours?

Go Ask Alice

Alice! Alice Blue Gown; to the Moon, Alice! And, of course, that dangerously curious Alice whose penchant for going down holes and passing through mirrors got her into such scrapes. Alices take many forms...

Mia, it turned out, had every reason to look this wary while playing Woody Allen's Alice. Now there's a story that didn't turn out well...

Neither does this one, particuarly - it's only a middling best-case scanario no matter what when the best you're going to do is Fred MacMurray. Am I the only one who finds this an almost painfully embarrassing picture to watch? Hepburn's Alice is just so raw, so needy, and so surrounded by horrors and buffoons.

This Alice is pretty raw and needy as well, but in an on-purpose gritty '70s cinema kind of way. Of course, it also created one of the least gritty sitcoms in television history, but much can be forgiven in the context of having also given rise to the character of Flo "Kiss Mah Grits" the Waitress.

Little got forgiven this particular incarnation of the Carroll book - it's remembered, if at all, as the movie that almost sank Paramount (along with the fledgling career of Charlotte Henry, its Alice), a misbegotten, over-elaborate attempt to recreate Tenniel's illustrations using awkward masks and ungainly costumes. I do like any picture that credits Edna May Oliver, Alison Skipworth, and May Robson above Cary Grant, though.

By contrast, this ... unique interpretation of the deathless children's tale is remembered, if at all, as one of the last of the quasi big-budget, 35mm pornos. It's not exactly an all-star production, although the musical numbers (!) were arranged and conducted by Hollywood staple Peter Matz, whose other credits range from Color Me Barbra to Lust in the Dust.

My only association with this one is that title perplexed me deeply as a child; it must have shown up on television at some point. A town ... like Alice. The only Alices I knew were Grandmother Muscato's cleaning lady, a tiny, sweet-natured Polish woman who seemed impossibly old to a six-year-old and, more my contemporary, our pastor's daughter, a rather more vinegary female. Neither seemed even vaguely municipal.

Similarly, neither had a restaurant, although at least one of them cooked.

And this is one that would not have turned up in my straitlaced little hometown...

While this one definitely did. I know many Carroll purists find this Alice even less appealing than other Disneyfications of the classics (to put it mildly), but I've always had a soft spot for it, even before it got brilliantly turned inside out (if you haven't seen the link, do go now - but come back!).

Another Alice turns up (if not particularly alive and well) in a latish addition to the "whatever happened" mini-genre that kicked off a decade earlier, in this case with Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon trashing their own reputations just like Crawford and Davis before them.

Even so, they didn't begin to go as far as some Alices. The subtext, by the way, of the teasing "See Alice's Trip in Psychedelic Color" tagline is that the balance of the (brief) running time is in glorious black-and-white. Apparently, this one is best considered less in relation to Wonderland than as a remake of Reefer Madness.

This was the first talking Alice, and it looks to have been just about as surreal as anything cooked up in Acidland. Great poster, but otherwise just about as obscure as can be - perhaps a result of having been distributed by the not-exactly-MGM Unique-Cosmos Pictures.

There are, of course, lots of other Alices, old and new, and on the horizon we have the prospect of Tim Burton's take on the tale. I have a feeling it will have more than a touch of Acidland itself...

Portrait Gallery: Eternal Kate, by Amsel

One of the first people I wrote about in the early months of the Café was the marvelous and too-little shouted about artist/illustrator Richard Amsel. I'm very happy to report that I've stumbled across a (relatively) new site chockablock with his works, well-known and less so, and even more excitingly, finished and as-published and, as with the TV Guide cover here, in process. Enjoy.

Birthday Girl: Kate of Kate Hall

...for you are call'd plain Kate,
And bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst;
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all Kates...

(The Taming of the Shrew, Act II, Scene 1)

Happy Birthday, Katharine Houghton Hepburn - 102 today, had she been even more long-lived, and of all stars, perhaps the most consistently surprising: perfectly beautiful and impossibly gawky; a great, subtle actress and a hopeless, mannered ham; a relentlessly private woman who refused to play the Hollywood game and still wound up on top; a strong-willed independent creature who subjugated herself almost masochistically to a chronic, possibly abusive, alcoholic.

In the end, who has a solider filmography, who a more glorious range of roles? Tracy Lord and Eleanor of Aquitaine; Terry Randall and Amanda Wingfield; Tess Harding and Rose Sayer. Oh, all right, I'll say it: she was yar.