Old Movies

I recently watched Singin' In the Rain again, one of my favorite old movies. I hadn't realized that Donald O'Connor was 27 when he did the famous "Make 'em Laugh" routine. My daughter, the only one of my kids who likes that movie too, is 27 right now. Crazy. Debbie Reynolds was 20. Gene Kelly, her love interest, was 40. Somehow that doesn't come across as too creepy. Gene Kelly was a pretty good looking 40, and Debbie Reynolds didn't necessarily look that young in this movie... although she did in The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, which came out a whole year later. I guess maybe pairing her opposite Bobby Van somehow made her look younger even though she's actually a year older. Those two movies are also curious in that both feature one of the same songs, although performed very differently, "All I Do is Dream of You." As much as I love the Singin' In the Rain version, the slower, more romantic Dobie Gillis version is my favorite. Including Bobby Van in duet form, and he's strummin' a ukulele. Like most songs in Singin' in the Rain, it actually comes from a much older movie, Sadie McKee, which came out 18 years earlier, and which is also slow and romantic in nature. 

Not that it's a Debbie Reynolds exclusive, of course (she would have been a toddler when Sadie McKee came out); Judy Garland also has a nice version of it from a Andy Hardy movie from 1940. I've even got a jaunty Dean Martin version of the song too. It's a great song. Seriously; I really, really like it.

I watched another video a while ago called something like "why do old movie stars look so old compared to modern stars at the same age?" The opening comparison is Carrol O'Connor (Archie Bunker from All in the Family, which everyone's thinking about now after Meathead's recent murder.) He was 46 in that show, whereas... Paul Rudd is 56 right now and looks at least 15 if not 20 years younger than Archie. I don't know that I look like I'm 53 right now, but I am, and I do at least have pretty graying hair. I'm the same age the actor who plays Mr. Roper was during the first season of Three's Company! The actor who played Grandpa Munster was obviously wearing a lot of makeup, but he was only 41!

Anyway, I don't know that it's that we've uncovered the secrets of anti-aging, although there is some truth to that. Cary Grant was 60 when he filmed Father Goose and he looks at least as good as I do now. If I dyed my hair to get the gray out, I'm sure I'd look way younger. Reportedly, Grant was a bit uncomfortable being cast as the romantic lead against Leslie Caron, who was only 33, and next time he made a movie, Walk, Don't Run, which was his final one, actually, he refused to play a romantic lead and instead set himself up as a businessman and amateur matchmaker. Although he doesn't come across as he's supposed to be 62 in that movie, and he doesn't look it either. 

Then again, Tom Cruise is 63 right now, and Brad Pitt is 61. If you've recently watched the latest Mission Impossible movie or F1, Pitt's recent racing movie, you wouldn't think that they were that old either. Bradley Cooper is 50; all three look about the same age to me. 

I don't know where I'm going with this. Age is hard to guess, I suppose. As I've gotten older, what I consider young and middle-aged has migrated over time, no doubt. In the 80s, I thought that the 40s or even the 50s was so long ago that it was basically a foreign country; we're now even further on the other side of the 80s than those decades were in front of them.