The marrying kind

Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon

Garson Kanin, who died this month at age 86, was, as a young man, an instantly successful New York actor, and the powerful right-hand assistant of Broadway impresario George Abbott. He adored the thespian life, so being offered a chance by Sam Goldwyn to go west and direct films wasn't a big deal. "The theater is my love and my life . . . and the movies are a mistress," Kanin declared as he jumped ship from Goldwyn to RKO. Between 1938 and '41, he fashioned there half-a-dozen enjoyable, glamorous screwball comedies, including The Great Man Votes, Bachelor Mother, and My Favorite Wife, all featuring such top-hat stars as Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, and Cary Grant.

But the really splendid stuff came after, when, reversing the usual order, Kanin suddenly stopped directing films and instead started writing them, in collaboration with his actress wife, Ruth Gordon. They worked exclusively for their director friend George Cukor, and we're talking about some of the most brilliant romantic comedies in the history of movies, and the most genuinely egalitarian. The battle of the sexes always ends in a buoyant draw, in a declaration of gender equality, in amazingly prescient consciousness-raising comedies like the Hepburn-Tracy classics, Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike, and (it's time to revive them) the Judy Holliday trilogy, The Marrying Kind, Born Yesterday, and It Should Happen to You.

"Life as a rule is created by a team in passionate action," Kanin wrote in the introduction to his book Together Again!" "Men and women reach the apex of existence when coupled." He and Gordon were married for 43 years, though only half a dozen of these saw them writing as a combo. The great collaboration shut down. They realized that they never quarreled in real life but bitterly when they shared a project. From the mid '50s onward, for 30 years (Gordon died in 1985), each wrote alone.

But the amour endured. I can testify to that, recalling a day in the early 1980s when I interviewed Kanin on WBUR radio. I witnessed an endearing site: Garson and Ruth, lovebirds, devotedly holding hands, as they walked toward the BU College of Communication.

It was Kanin's day to plug a book, and he and I talked a long time on the air, with the urbane writer holding forth on many show-business subjects. Meanwhile, Gordon, the diminutive cult star of Harold and Maude, sat hunched on a couch, a large pocketbook on her tiny lap, intently listening in. At the end of the interview, the moment the microphone shut down, Gordon looked up proudly at her husband, and her voice boomed: "MAHVELOUS!!!"

Indeed. Kanin's extra-simple secret of his success? "I just think I'm a cheerful, funny guy. I don't take life that seriously. I can see the funny side of almost anything, and I enjoy making other people laugh."

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Another recent death: actress Shirley Stoler, 70, whose frightening demeanor and heavyweight frame opened portals for her two famous castings, as the Nazi commandant who forces Giancarlo Giannini into her love nest in Seven Beauties (1975) and, even better, as the surly, homicidal, hammer-wielding nurse in the subterranean The Honeymoon Killers (1969). I once talked to Stoler at a New York Film Festival party, and my only memory is that though she stood several feet away, her bosom kept touching my chest. In life as on screen, Shirley Stoler was HUGE!

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I've heard rumors that founding editor Dave Yount might want to shut down his locally produced film magazine, Video Eyeball, unless it sells more and gets noticed. Hold your horses, Dave, fight the good fight, because the latest issue, Vol. 3, No. 3, about drive-in movies and the drive-in sensibility, is the best ever, featuring a sleek cover, drive-in testimonials from the likes of Michael Moore and Terry Gilliam, and some all-star content.

Tom Marcinko's article on "Video Rental by Mail" is an important consumer article comparing prices and services of half-a-dozen national outlets. Video Eyeball regular Paul Gaita is a school-of-Manny-Farber, un-PC master of describing lowbrow classics like The Sore Losers ("Writer/director/illustrator J. Michael McCarthy's long-awaited follow-up to his extraordinary Teenage Tupelo . . . [featuring)] . . . strippers, hippies, rockabillies and, oh yeah, the end of the world and girls with big tits . . . "). Finally, there's a respectful, encyclopedic essay by Michael Bowen on the live-action Disney films of the 1960s, from The Shaggy Dog (1959) to The Boatniks (1970), with homages along the way to Fred MacMurray and Hayley Mills and even time for a serious discussion of the underseen The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1970).

One-year (four issues) subscriptions to Video Eyeball are $12. Keep these movie-loving guys in business: send checks or money orders to 122 Montclair Avenue, Boston 02131-1344.

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Dick Lourue's Ghost Radio is in stores; this poetry volumes features his radiant "Forgiving Your Fathers," which was used transcendentally in the movie Smoke Signals. And check out Phoenix film writer Chris Fujiwara's extraordinary piece of surrealist movie appreciation, "Convent Erotica," about nunsploitation movies, in the latest issue of Hermenaut: The Digest of Heady Philosophy.