Shirley MacLaine

I watched the film The Apartment on Sunday night. It was the first time I had ever seen it. I am a big Shirley MacLaine fan, and have been ever since I developed a girl crush on her in middle school. I know (and adore) Shirley as the incarnation-believing wacktress that she has been for the last thirty years or so, so it's nice to see her as the wide-eyed ingenue. Her performance in this film was spectacular and really displays the range of her talents all together. Of course, she's also a decent singer/dancer, but as far as her acting talents go, nothing shows her range quite like this movie. It was also really interesting to see Fred MacMurray as sort of the bad guy. The utter sexuality of the movie was the most shocking thing - men in the corporate world openly portrayed as having sexual affairs. Obviously this thing had been alluded to before, but we may as well have been viewing blatant sex scenes it was all so obvious. I loved the dialogue, and the relationships between the characters really developed throughout the course of the movie without it seeming contrived or rushed. Despite his sunny disposition, it's clear from the beginning that Jack Lemmon's character is truly sad within. You want him to succeed and be happy, but yet you feel as embarrassed as he does for the way that this success unfolds. We know he's better than that and he knows he's better than that, but it seems he just doesn't know how to stand out any other way.

Okay, I'm sort of babbling about the movie at this point, but I did really love it and encourage any one to see it, if you can stand watching black and white film. (This movie wouldn't have been right in color; it would have been too distracting.) All this post has really done has kept me from being completely bored for the last ten minutes or so, and it reminded me how fascinating I find Shirley MacLaine and how I need to watch another one of her movies very soon. I may do a Terms of Endearment/The Evening Star marathon if my tear ducts can handle it.

Which reminds me, Shirley MacLaine is the first woman over the age of 60 that I recognized as sexy. Many of my other "loves" have caught up to her now, age-wise, but I loved her as an older woman before I ever saw her work in her younger days.

I like men, I swear I do.