#ann b davis

[haveyouseenthisseries-poll]

[smbhax]

From "The Icy Fingers of Jack Frost" in Tales of Suspense #45, September 1963. Stan Lee script, Jack Kirby (Iron Man), Steve Ditko (?), Don Heck (?) pencils, Don Heck inks, Stan Goldberg colors, Artie Simek letters. The linked GCD page notes "Happy Hogan is based on pro wrestler-turned-actor Nat Pendleton; Pepper Potts is based on actress Ann B. Davis." Ann B. Davis played housekeeper Alice in The Brady Bunch TV show (1969).

[goshyesvintageads]

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co, 1958

[duranduratulsa]

Now showing on DuranDuranTulsa's Television 📺 Showcase...The Brady Bunch: My Fair Opponent (1972) on classic DVD 📀! #tv #television #comedy #sitcom #thebradybunch #myfairopponent #RobertReed #riprobertreed #eveplumb #SusanOlsen #BarryWilliams #ChristopherKnight #mikelookinland #70s #dvd #durandurantulsa #durandurantulsastelevisionshowcase

[bitter69uk]

When Jayne Mansfield Met Alice the Brady Bunch’s Housekeeper! Let me put this forgotten fringe-of-show biz encounter in context. From Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn’t Help It (2021) by Eve Golden: 

“In May 1964 Jayne signed (at $4,000 a week) to bring two of Marilyn Monroe’s movie roles to the stage: the pathetic nightclub singer Cherie in Bus Stop (first played onstage by Kim Stanley in 1955) and wide-eyed gold digger Lorelei Lee in the 1949 musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (originated on Broadway by Carol Channing). Bus Stop, written by William Inge, required heavy-duty acting and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes required heavy-duty singing (“A Little Girl from Little Rock” and the anthem “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” among other songs – most of which were cut from the 1953 movie version). Jayne needed a good director; her acting ranged from brilliant to amateurish depending on the script and director she was handed. Bus Stop and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had good scripts, so she set about interviewing potential directors. Finding a seasoned professional who was willing to do summer stock might not be easy. Jayne was lucky, finding twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker Matt Cimber in her first round of interviews.” 

At the time, Mansfield was still married to Mickey Hargitay. Cimber would soon become Mansfield’s third and final husband. Her leading man (playing the part of Bo Decker) was Stephen Brooks. Hargitay was cast in a smaller role as the bus driver. Also in the cast: Ann B Davis (aka Alice the housekeeper from TV sitcom The Brady Bunch). “Jayne was not as advertised,” Davis would rage years later. “She was huge drunk. Bipolar. Unprofessional. And any claims that she was a genius - ha! She was about as bright as a chalkboard. Dumb as sin! She was not educated by any definition. She was a blowzy alcoholic. She could barely read lines and was awful to the rest of the cast and crew.” In case anyone missed the point, Davis continued, “She was vulgar, obscene and pathetic … that girl was a dark monster!” While touring Bus Stop, Mansfield told a reporter, “Right now we’re trying to arrange a 15-week tour with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” The mind reels imagining Mansfield interpreting Tennessee Williams’ “Maggie the Cat”!

[mrbopst]

[therealjohnstewart]

Ann B. Davis (Alice from Brady Bunch)

[allelitewrestlings]

All About Eve (1950) All About Mariah (2023─)

[citizenscreen]

Fun facts: Carol Burnett starred in the original Broadway production of “Once Upon a Mattress,” which closed on July 2, 1960. She was replaced by Ann B. Davis and Buster Keaton played the King on the first national tour.

[mythirdparent]

[anghraine]

A more coherent part of the adaptation+Darcy post I was threatening to release from drafts purgatory:

While I think all adaptations' versions of Darcy are pretty bad at representing Austen's character, though sometimes compelling in their own right, I think the various choices made are all ways of addressing the same problem with the character as written.

It's not a problem in the novel—indeed, I'd say it's a remarkable achievement there—but I think we don't always realize how extremely ambiguous the presentation of Darcy is through the first half of the novel. It's easy to read him as basically hostile because he was when he first appeared and because Elizabeth, our smart, likable POV character, gets stuck in that perception of him for half the book. So it's only on re-reading that most audiences realize Elizabeth drastically misread his real feelings and the original interpretation of his manner is thrown into question, at the very least.

But as I said in the other post, Austen plays fair: it is entirely possible to realize that Elizabeth is mistaken about some things (esp about how he feels towards her), it is possible to realize that particularly observant characters find his expressions and behavior difficult to interpret, it's possible to notice that we are rarely told how he's speaking or smiling, and scenes typically cut off before we can be told. And it's possible to notice the many issues with Wickham's account of him.

But it's also entirely possible to read everything he says and does as Elizabeth does, and the narrative gently encourages us to do so without often committing to actual description that would guide us in those ambiguous scenes. Austen might have, for instance, described his smiles in the Netherfield scenes as contemptuous, polite, or pleasant. But she just repeats that he's smiling while drawing very little attention to the fact and rarely committing to an indication of what his smiles or presentation of dialogue are like. So it's mostly up to us to decide, with the occasional (dubious in some respects) interpretation from Elizabeth.

And we're likely to reach different conclusions on re-reading—the earlier presentation of Darcy rewards re-reading a lot, because a lot of the time, we don't even realize how much we're not being told until the letter or even the Pemberley scenes, where Elizabeth identifies the smile we saw in his earlier scenes as the same one in the painting done during his beloved father's lifetime—making, say, the "contemptuous" reading very unlikely.

Now, getting away with that level of ambiguity and obscuring that the ambiguity is happening in the first place, as Austen manages to do in the novel, is both impressive and a hell of a lot harder in visual form. Not impossible! But if we see and hear him ourselves we're less likely to form judgments shaped by Austen's tricks of narration and Elizabeth's POV, and this typically involves commitment to a particular aspect of his presentation in the novel.

And if you think about it, the four major adaptations of Darcy are essentially committing to some part of his depiction.

Laurence Olivier's Darcy is smiling, witty, and charismatic—which are a part of his personality, but skewed so far out of proportion that he's virtually unrecognizable. And there's no attempt to obscure his place in the narrative as the actual love interest (I assume because duh, it's Laurence Olivier—but it was a pretty unrewarding role for him as written).

David Rintoul's Darcy is (in)famously "robotic"—the 1980 version of him leans into the withdrawn, inexpressive, difficult to read but clearly uncomfortable version of Darcy. The smiles in the earlier part tend to be tight, a matter of form, and/or unconvincing, by contrast to the later Darcy's comportment towards the Gardiners and Elizabeth, esp after the second proposal.

Colin Firth's Darcy is, well—okay, I'm biased because of my intense dislike for the 1995 production, but I do think it's also struggling with the same issue, but responds in the opposite way as the 1980. Where the 1980 tried to replicate the ambiguity in a way that retained Darcy's tendency towards a certain severity and dignity and mostly ended up at expressionless, the 1995 transforms it into visibly intense, sexualized brooding. This is coupled with Elizabeth's perception of Darcy's hostility being much more validated than in the novel; he snaps at her, most of his textual smiles are removed, even his letter is rearranged with an eye to half-dressed angst rather than the subtle charity of the omitted "God bless you", and generally his angst and passion!!! are played up rather than down ("I shall conquer this!!" / the melodramatic pond dive and shift in focus from Elizabeth's shame to Darcy being barely dressed / Darcy being grim in London, etc).

If the 1995 version of Darcy commits to Darcy's behavior being largely how Elizabeth sees it, the 2005 drastically reverses that. Matthew Macfadyen's Darcy is also struggling with passion, but tbh he seems like he's kind of struggling with everything. He's visibly consumed with anxiety, he's obviously shy where Darcy has to explain his discomfort or experience it as a POV character in the novel, he seems sweet despite occasional classism, and at times his arc seems more about learning to relax than anything else. That is, instead of representing Darcy as more or less accurately seen by Elizabeth, it leans into emphasizing the extent of her misunderstanding, with Darcy's behavior both more sympathetic than she sees it and clearly comprehensible if she weren't so biased against him (fwiw, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries also emphasizes Elizabeth's misjudgment to a considerable extent and deals with the ambiguity by keeping him literally offstage).

The point of all this is that there is a core issue of adaptation here—the difficulty of representing subtle novelistic ambiguity while making Darcy emotionally compelling at the same time. Adapted Darcys are often given extra scenes, altered dialogue, or (where described in the novel) altered mannerisms/emotions to try and achieve this. And all lean so hard into the aspect they choose to emphasize that they tend to sacrifice most of the rest of his personality to the interpretation they're committing to, and his feelings for Elizabeth tend to be incredibly obvious to the point that it sometimes strains belief that she wouldn't see them, even with all her investment in not seeing them.

I guess the thing is that I think just stopping with "this is an issue of the different media and can't be represented on film" is boring and underestimates the potential of film as a medium. There are plenty of performances that can only be fully appreciated on re-watching or re-listening to something with a fuller knowledge of what is revealed later. And to some degree, the adapters do have to choose how much they want to incorporate Elizabeth's perception of Darcy vs the bare narrative and what they're willing to give away about him to preserve what seems most important.

These are all active choices with actual significance, IMO. They imply priorities about the production and their production's take on Darcy that are intriguing in a way that gets lost by just giving them a free pass by way of the challenge of the medium.

[kwebtv]

From the Golden Age of Television

Season 5 Episode 12

The Bob Cummings Show - Bob Judges a Beauty Contest - NBC - December 16, 1958

AKA "Love that Bob"

Written by Paul Henning and Dick Wesson

Produced by Paul Henning

Directed by Bob Cummings

Stars:

Bob Cummings as Bob Collins

Ann B. Davis as Charmaine "Schultzy" Schultz 

Rosemary DeCamp as Margaret MacDonald

Dwayne Hickman as Chuck MacDonald

Nancy Kulp as Pamela Livingstone

Rose Marie as Martha Randolph

Sidney Miller as Roscoe DeWitt

Madge Blake as Florence Patterson

Robert Burton as General Patterson

Dorothy Johnson as Harriet Wyle

Peter Lawford as Himself

Bill Baldwin as Announcer

[loveboatinsanity]

[duranduratulsa]

Now showing on DuranDuranTulsa's Television 📺 Showcase...The Brady Bunch: Click (1971) on classic DVD 📀! #tv #television #comedy #sitcom #thebradybunch #click #RobertReed #riprobertreed #FlorenceHenderson #RIPFlorenceHenderson #AnnBDavis #ripannbdavis #maureenmccormick #eveplumb #SusanOlsen #BarryWilliams #ChristopherKnight #mikelookinland #70s #dvd #durandurantulsa #durandurantulsastelevisionshowcase

[mariocki]

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

"Jane, did you ever stop to think that... if anything happened to me, I mean anything bad, there wouldn't be any money for you? I wouldn't be here to sign the checks. You wouldn't even have pocket money. Did you ever think of that?"

"Yeah, I've thought about that."

[cemfilmes]

#19 - Creed 3