| re: Ages and these characters | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 01:10 pm EST 12/29/21 | |
| In reply to: Ages and these characters - AC126748 04:00 pm EST 12/28/21 | |
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| I think we discussed this stuff here years ago, and I may have written some of this then. I know that I have posted the general stuff I am posting below in other places in the past. The published script gives Mrs. Paroo's age as 40. As noted in a post below, Pert Kelton was 50 when the original production opened. The script says that Winthrop is 10. Eddie Hodges was 10 when the original production opened. Ron Howard was 7 when the movie was being made, and with Kelton a few years older by that time, it does seem unlikely in the movie that she could be his mother, especially since Kelton reads to us now as being at least her age. But we were supposed to not think about that or suspend disbelief if we did think about it. In the footbridge scene, Harold guesses that Marian is 26. If Marian is 26 or so, and Mrs. Paroo is 40, then it may be that Mrs. Paroo was married at 14. Legal in many states at that time, although if she was pregnant when she got married, perhaps a bit of a scandal to those who knew. But this is thinking more than I think the creators intended us to think. Anyway, they cast a 50-year-old Mrs. Paroo, not too old to have a 10-year-old son and not too young to have been a perfectly respectable age when she had a daughter who is now 26. The theory that Marian is Winthrop's mother, which people have been talking about since at least as long ago as the 1970s and probably back in 1958, seems to me easily dismissed (although someone who sometimes posts here argued with me once about this, insisting that Marian was Winthrop's mother). If this were the case, lots of people in town would know it. You can't hide something like that. You can try, but this is a small town in which everybody knows everyone else's business. If the family takes a trip for six months or nine months or a year, and when they come back, there is Winthrop, and they tell the townspeople he is Mrs. Paroo's son, who would believe it? No one. Can we believe that when Mrs. Shinn and the other ladies try to turn Harold against Marian, telling him she used her womanly wiles with old miser Madison, they would not tell him or at least strongly imply that Winthrop was Marian's out-of-wedlock son? I can't believe that. Again, this is overthinking in ways that the creators probably never expected anyone to do, but that theory is out there and has been for decades. If the roles are cast with performers who look appropriate ages, there should be no problem. If the creators had especially cared or expected us to think about these kinds of questions, they would not have cast 79-year-old Helen Raymond as Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn. The script says Eulalie is 50. Given that she has both a 16-year-old daughter and a younger one, 50 is certainly plausible. 79 is not. Hermione Gingold was 62 or so when the movie was being made. 62 is not very plausible since the yonger daughter, Gracie, is probably 12--14. Yet I never hear anyone wonder if the Shinns employed a surrogate. :) Oh, yes. Jane Houdyshell is 68. And Marie Mullen, as noted by a poster below, is also 68. Not a problem if onstage they look 50ish, even 55, but do they? But it is theatre, and this show is not exactly realism. Still, I bet people are going to wonder if Marian is Winthrop's mother much more than they did in 1957, and not just because we perhaps think that way more now. |
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