January 31

Happy Birthday to Jean Simmons and Suzanne Pleshette. TCM aired films for Jean Simmons. I have to admit I wasn't sure what exactly to make of Ms. Simmons. Her face doesn't really seem to move very much. Her face is very sculpted and her eyes seem very large. Her eyes show expression and she smiles, but she has a stillness to her overall facial movements. The films that I watched she played a young person but she seemed older. Maybe it is that stillness or the characters attitude. I will have to try some films from later in her career.

In Adam & Evelyne Ms. Simmons played Evelyne as a young girl in a childrens home. She was an older child in the home and she takes care of the younger children, chores and teaching. Her father dies and his friend comes to tell her, but she thinks he is her father. Her father signed his friends name and sent his picture. Adam becomes her guardian and takes her to his home. Evelyne does find out the truth. She goes away to boarding school. After she finishes school she comes back and discovers that Adam runs a gambling room out of his apartment. When the cops raid, she admits to the police that it is a gaming establishment because she loves Adam and it will stop him from gambling. I did not like this film. Ms. Simmons acted like a spoiled school girl that everything should go her way.

The next film I saw is So Long at the Fair. Ms. Simmons and her brother go to Paris in 1898 traveling from Italy on the way to England. Several days after they arrive is the start of the exposition. The night they arrive they go out to eat and to the Moulin Rouge. The brother is tired and they go back to the hotel to go to bed. Sometime in the night the bell rings for the bothers room. The next morning Ms. Simmons go to her brothers room, but the room is gone. She goes to the hotel staff and they state she checked in alone. She finds a man who talked with her brother the night before and they try to find out what happened. The story is imaginative and well planned. I won't give away the ending, but it seemed strange, maybe not complete or there should have been another scene to wrap up the story.

In She Couldn't Say No Ms. Simmons plays a young woman who received funds as a toddler to cover the cost of transportation and surgery goes back to the town to pay them back in any way she can. She plays 21 but seemed 30. I don't know how old she really was in the film, but maybe it is a sophisticated style of acting or the way she saw the character. Having faced so much so young, experience aged the girl. Robert Mitchum plays a doctor who is the son of the doctor that originally operated on her. This is a little more lighter role for him, but he plays the country doctor very well.