Scottie: What’s this doohickey?
Midge: It’s a brassiere! You know about those things, you’re a big boy now.
Scottie: I’ve never run across one like that.
Midge: It’s brand new. Revolutionary up-lift: No shoulder straps, no back straps, but it does everything a brassiere should do. Works on the principle of the cantilevered bridge.
– Vertigo, 1958
R.I.P., Barbara Bel Geddes.
Maggie the Cat is Dead!
She’s also amazing in Lamb to the Slaughter, an “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” episode directed by Hitch himself. Adapted from a Roald Dahl story it deals with a suburban housewife who kills her husband by beaning him with a frozen leg of lamb. She then roasts it and serves it to the nice detectives who’ve come to investigate the case.
She’s also great in Max Ophuls’ Caught scripted by Arthur Laurents.
David,
How awesome that you remember her in that! It was truly a very good episode of AHP, and Bel Geddes played it very well (sympathetic at first, then kind of giggly and off-kilter later on).
And Tin Man, you’ve earned esteem points in my book for the Vertigo quote. In fact, I think I’ll break out the DVD for it tonight and watch that excellent film yet again (too bad she doesn’t have a bigger role in it).
I’ll always remember her in Dallas. She was the matriarch of my childhood, and much warmer and down to earth than Jane Wyman on Falcon Crest.
Heh.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I was sure she’d died many years ago. Maybe I was thinking of Barbara Stanwyck.
Mike, you probably ARE thinking of Stanwyck, who’d played the matriarch role on THE COLBYS, the unsuccessful DYNASTY spin-off, and passed away shortly afterward.
I grew up watching her on Dallas, and never saw any of her movies other than Vertigo, by which time she’d already begun the transition to matronly roles, so I always had trouble wrapping my mind around the thought of her as Maggie the Cat. But one of the obits I saw yesterday had a 1949 photo of her, and wow! it suddenly made perfect sense.
One of the weirdest moments in “Vertigo” is her last scene, with that painting. I don’t even want to admit how many times I’ve contorted in some dark corner going “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”