RIP Joan Fontaine

by Tony Dayoub

"At age 108, flying around the stage in Peter Pan, as a result of my sister cutting the wires. Olivia has always said I was first at everything; I got married first, got an Academy Award first, had a child first. If I die, she'll be furious, because again I'll have got there first!"

-Joan Fontaine, when asked how she'd like to die.

Well, she came pretty close. Joan Fontaine died this weekend at the age of 96. I found out last night while I was strolling with my family in Midtown Atlanta, less than a few hours after posting a small tribute to Peter O'Toole. Her death caps off a week in which we lost O'Toole, Eleanor Parker, Audrey Trotter, and Tom Laughlin. But in many ways it's Fontaine's passing that touches me most personally.

Born to Be Bad (1950)

by Farran Smith Nehme (aka The Self-Styled Siren)

The Siren has been wondering what it would have been like to kiss Nicholas Ray in 1950.

From this you should not deduce that the Siren has a crush on the man. She likes her sex symbols on the louche side, but not quite that louche. Still, as she watched Robert Ryan lay one on Joan Fontaine for the sixth or seventh time in Born to Be Bad, the Siren found the thought crowding out all attempts at more formal analysis. Back goes Fontaine’s head, way back, so far back Ryan could undoubtedly have told us whether she still had her wisdom teeth. Up go Fontaine’s arms as Ryan embraces some part of her that the camera is tactfully cutting off. Down comes Ryan’s mouth on hers, until you can see that he doesn’t part his hair. Just before the Siren started in on her Ray-kissing reverie, she was reminded of the morning that she was watching a backyard bird-feeder and saw a hawk close its talons on a chickadee, then fly off to have its own breakfast elsewhere...

CONTINUE READING AT SELF-STYLED SIREN

Nicholas Ray Blogathon: Born to Be Bad (1950)

by Tony Dayoub

A lot of the fun found in Born to Be Bad, a minor film by Nicholas Ray to be sure, is in watching Joan Fontaine subvert her sweet screen persona to play the manipulative Christabel Caine. From the moment she bursts into the life of her publisher uncle's employee, Donna (Joan Leslie)—the jaded city girl Christabel is staying with until she gets her footing in San Francisco—small-town Christabel's default mode of advancing in society is a sort of clumsy, saccharine method of laying love-traps around vain, rich men whose latent attraction to her blinds them to her motives. What else can explain how Donna's fiance, Curtis (Zachary Scott), is the only one to fall for the excessively honeydrippy Christabel?