Vital Viewing (Preach Therapy Edition)

 

 

Not to be confused with a one-time cast member on Law and Order, screenwriter and director Richard Brooks was born on this date in 1912 (he died in 1992.) Among several well-known movies that Brooks wrote and directed were Blackboard Jungle (1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), In Cold Blood (1967) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), all worthwhile films, but the one I want you to recommend to you today is this 1960 adaptation of a best-selling novel of the Wild (Mid)West: 

Academy Award voters of the day seem to second my recommendation. But first a word from Bob:

I like Kitty's gown, but that's neither here nor there. What IS here or there is the trailer for the movie, a movie that also won Oscars for leading man Burt and the future Mrs. Partridge:

Elmer didn't get to become Pope either.

C'mon Get Happy

 

Before she was the matriarch of a family of pop singers including a son who once successfully negotiated a record contract in a treehouse in The Partridge Family; before she was a River City librarian wooed by a con man attempting to unload a bunch of children's band uniforms by warning the small town citizenry about trouble that starts with a T and rhymes with P and that spells pool in The Music Man; before she was an Academy Award-winning prostitute who uses a bunch of incriminating photos to exact revenge on a religious huckster who once jilted her in Elmer Gantry; before she was a farm girl who falls for a juvenile delinquent played by Pat Boone (WTF?) in April Love; before she was a mill worker widowed by a carnival barker who sings "You'll Never Walk Alone" while home on a 24-hour leave from Heaven in Carousel; and before becoming the center of a frontier love triangle that leaves one man dead but has everyone else singing about what a beautiful morning it is in Oklahoma, Shirley Jones was Miss Pittsburgh of 1952.

Well, you didn't think she got her start playing for the Steelers, did you?