giving notice

Brave the snow and come out to to The Million Poems Show; this will be my first appearance as regular house-band/banterer. Through no fault of Jordan's, I've forgotten who some of tonight's guests are, but Arlo Quint should be attraction enough; request "Jim Behrle Is My Boss." See "mere appearances" and links therein for time, directions. ~~ Yesterday at Film Forum, as part of a short series of newly unearthed RKO (mostly)-pre-Coders: Double Harness (1933, John Cromwell). Notable not so much for the marriage-as-a-business storyline (including a subplot involving a wife who's this close to "giving herself" to other men to keep herself in hats) as for a chance to see the utterly reliable William Powell ("an artist in dreadful films" - Manny F.) play against the patrician yet matter-of-fact Ann Harding, a mostly forgotten performer whose acting is fairly low-key for the period, and who has some nice throwaway moments here. ("Don't you love the smell of meat cooking?") Director Cromwell (father of actor James) mostly stays out of the way; no one wil ever claim his as an auteur, but he made a number of films that are better remembered (The Enchanted Cottage, Since You Went Away, Algiers, The Goddess) than his name. Rafter Romance (1933, William A. Sieter). He works nights, she works days, they're both broke, their landlord makes them share one apartment at different times of day; the meet-cute rom-com is not exactly a recent inventions. Pleasant, but probably not much here except for genre buffs: Lead Norman Foster did nothing for me, Ginger Rogers didn't really find her note as a non-musical actress until the '40s, and although the supporting cast (Robert Benchley, George Sidney, Laura Hope Crews, the great and omnipresent Guinn "Big Boy" Williams) are fun to watch, the story is needlessly (unhumorously) cruel to several characters, especially Crews' pathetic but blameless drunken socieity-lady. Might or might not make it to the remake Living On Love (1937, Lew Landers) in a few hours. ~~ Expect things to return to a more notes-and-jottings format here for the foreseeable future; otherwise, too little will appear here to be of use to anyone us.