| Interesting you should mention Reynolds, whom I've always enjoyed except in "Molly Brown"--last night TCM showed one of my guilty pleasures (one of the first "grown-up movies" I went to with my family), the unfortunately-titled "How the West Was Won" (Spencer Tracy's narration--which presumably was written by James Webb, who won an Oscar for his screenplay--is politely racist, but racist nonetheless). That aside, I was struck by how good Reynolds was in aging from a rather hard-to-believe 20 year old at the beginning (not her fault) through the middle-aged scenes, where she does some song and dance numbers that made me think she would have been a credible Dolly by 1969. Even if a little young (maybe more the age of Irene, when played as a widow), she would have been more believable than Streisand, even if not as much a rare avis as Babs. |
