Cinema Betty

Wish With the Candles had some terrific bits where our heroine plays a few awfully good games of billiards. My favorite movie about billiards is:

The Music Man (1962)

I played second trumpet in the pit orchestra of my high school production and could probably understudy to this day (if I could sing or dance worth a lick...).

The incomparable Robert Preston has to sell a small Iowa town on the idea of buying a buying everything necessary for a boy's band. But why do they need a band? To keep them away from the pool tables, that's why. Billiards is a nice genteel game, says our slick salesman, but Pool?--'Any boob can take and shove a ball in a pocket.' I call that sloth.

The Venerable Neels mightn't have liked it as it is rather littered about with Americans...

An Apple From Eve needed something Eve-ish and as I've already used All About Eve, it had to be:

The Lady Eve (1941)

To me, Barbara Stanwyck is the ultimate Araminta--plain at first glance but she pays for dressing.

Jean Harrington is a beautiful con artist. Along with her equally larcenous father, "Colonel" Harrington and his partner Gerald, she is out to fleece rich, naive Charles Pike, the heir to the Pike Ale fortune ("The Ale That Won for Yale"). Pike is a woman-shy snake expert just returning from a year-long expedition up the Amazon.

But even the best laid plans can go astray. First, Jean falls hard for Pike and shields him from her card sharp father. Then, when Pike's suspicious minder/valet Muggsy discovers the truth about her and her father, Pike dumps her. Furious at being scorned, she re-enters his life masquerading as the posh "Lady Eve Sidwich", niece of Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith, another con man who's been swindling the rich folk of Connecticut. Jean is determined to torment Pike mercilessly – as she explains, "I've got some unfinished business with him — I need him like the axe needs the turkey" – and it doesn't hurt that Pike's wealthy businessman father is impressed by English nobility and eager to promote a marriage between his son and her ladyship. Soon her hapless victim is so confused and bothered he doesn't know which way is up, but, in the end, after all the twists and turns, deceptions and lies, true love wins out.

My favorite scene ever is of Stanwyck (playing the posh Lady Eve on her wedding night with Pike) tells him the long, long, long story of her sordid past...