façade: praising pam

My wife and I wandered back to ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" this year, after having consciously avoided it for a couple of years, and we rediscovered why we liked the show in the first place. Much like the annual Golden Globes telecast, DWTS is a party. You sit back, sip a highball - or two - and enjoy the fizzy fun without having to dress up or leave the house.

Every year that we watched, there was a revelation and, this year, the pleasant surprise was Pamela Anderson, a personality who, frankly, had only existed on the periphery of my life. I never paid much attention to her. But, on this show, dancing with Aussie pro Damian Whitewood, she's been indeed a revelation. Hands-down. Anderson doesn't just dance - which she does extremely well, by the way - but rather inhabits each routine with a specific movie-driven character. Marilyn one week, Loren the next.

She was especially a knock-out Dolly Parton in the hugely clever "9 to 5" bit that Whitewood choreographed for her. One week, judge Carrie Ann Inaba declared, "I'd love to see you on Broadway!" Hey, me, too.

Bruno Tonioli, meanwhile, has enthusiastically noted and admired Anderson's deep, concentrated focus with each little character piece she danced. And she received well-deserved high praise from dance critic Gia Kourlas in her most astute New York Times assessment of DWTS:

"As a dancer, Ms. Anderson isn’t like other people, either: apart from being an actual celebrity, which is increasingly rare on “Dancing With the Stars,” she’s the only imaginative dancer in the bunch.

"Buxom, blond and full of saucy insouciance, Ms. Anderson has said that she had never had a dance lesson in her life. Even so, she is a natural performer, with rhythm, an understanding of when to be subtle or fierce and a sense of how movements connect to create a story. And that’s all accomplished with a tongue-in-cheek self-awareness.

"She’s flexible, has great legs and even in high heels could probably run the length of a football field. For a ballroom dancer, that’s key; just as a point shoe creates an extension of the foot, Ms. Anderson’s stilettos achieve the same sensation on the dance floor.

"In her mesmerizing rumba last week she floated along so smoothly, lingering in each pose a millisecond too long — this was genius — that her partner, Damian Whitewood, eyes flashing like a desperate Broadway dancer, was the one trying too hard to please. Ms. Anderson may be sexual, but that doesn’t mean that she is cheap. She doesn’t flaunt her sexuality; it’s simply a part of her. Bob Fosse would have loved that."

Where have you been all these years, Pamela Anderson?

Or perhaps I should ask, where have I been? More to the point, where is the management to push you in the right direction? You are so much more than an animated pin-up. You're a real movie star. Or could be.

Get this woman a good real! And quick.

cinema obscura: "Two Loves" (and other lost Shirley MacLaine titles)

MGM's "Two Loves," directed by Charles Walters in 1961, is a lost Shirley MacLaine film co-starring Laurence Harvey and Jack Hawkins. Filmed on location in New Zealand and based on a Sylvia Ashton-Warner novel titled "The Spinster" (also the film's working title), the film casts MacLaine against type as a repressed teacher of native children whose methodical, cloistered world is upset when she is sexually challenged by randy drifter Harvey and an intimidating Hawkins, who plays the headmaster of her school.

Other lost MacLaine titles from the same era include Daniel Mann's "Hot Spell" (1958), starring Anthony Quinn and Shirley Booth - it was prominently (and surprisingly) featured in MacLaine's most recent film, Garry Marshall's "Valentine's Day" - and Joseph Anthony's "Career" (1959), co-starring Dean Martin, Anthony Franciosa and Carolyn Jones. Jack Cardiff's "My Geisha" (1962), long unavailable, was finally made availalble on DVD a couple of years ago. All three titles are Paramount films.

breeding contempt

Oh, no! Are we experiencing Jane Lynch overkill?

"Familiarity breeds contempt, while rarity wins admiration."
-Apuleius,
Roman philosopher, rhetorician, & satirist (124 AD-170 AD)

If there was ever any doubt about the validity of Apuleius' observation, one has only to look in the direction of modern television programming.

A show that one loves this year is likely to be dreaded a few years into the future. "Seinfeld" and "Roseanne" are two expert sitcoms that didn't know when to quit, losing their momentum and wearing out their welcome. Both were literally unwatchable their last two seasons.

"Ugly Betty," on the other hand, was a dramedy whose initial promise had dwindled in record time - by Season Two. It became both cloying and annoying when it became disturbingly clear that Betty was GOING TO BE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING. Consequently, it got to a point where I couldn't tolerate even looking at star America Ferrera anymore.

Right now, my concern revolves around "Glee," a first-rate weekly musical comedy whose modest merits have been a tad overrated by both wroking critics and its supporters (which, in some cases, are one and the same). The show reached its nadir somewhat early - with its "Madonna episode" on 20 April, a show which I found, well, cringe-worthy.

It's one thing for the producers to have the show's talented cast perform the Madonna song catalogue exclusively - and quite another to fawn over the self-promoting singer to the point of making the viewer sick to his/her stomach. I mean, the show behaved as if Madonna was still relevant.

But my greatest fear is the potential for Jane Lynch Overkill. I like Lynch way too much for me to get sick of her so soon - and I have the uneasy feeling that that's exactly what's happening. She has seemingly taken over the show as its resident villain but I, for one, wish the powers there would use her more sporadically - and more selectively.

Also, the jokes about Matthew Morrison's marcelled-looking hair have become tiresome in record time, no matter how well Lynch reads them.

As the most astute David Hiltbrand desperately pleaded in his Philadelphia Inquirer column on 24 April, "Can I please have my show back?"

façade: Nancy Kwan

Kwan in her most iconic moment - the "I Enjoy Being a Girl" number from Henry Koster's film of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Flower Drum Song" (1961)

In anticipation of Brian Jamieson's new documentary, "To Whom It May Concern: Ka Shen's Journey," which played San Jose's Cinequest 20 Film Festival in February, today's space is devoted to words about and images of the sublime Nancy Kwan, an enchanting film presence who flirted fleetingly with movie fame in the 1960s in a string of titles that never quite matched her talent and magnetism but which challenged the notion of who could be a star when moviegoers still weren't colorblind.

Kwan dancing with Lionel Blair in her first film, Richard Quine's "The World of Suzie Wong" (1960), and with her leading man, William Holden

Born Ka Shin Kwan in Hong Kong in 1939, Kwan was 20 and studying at England's Royal Ballet School, when she was snagged by producer Ray Stark and director Richard Quine as a last-minute replacement for France Nuyen, the play's original star, in Quine's 1960 film version of playwright Paul Osborn's "The World of Suzie Wong," with William Holden as her leading man. Nuyen had been a sensation opposite William Shatner on Broadway - Josh Logan directed - but untimely weight gain reportedly is what ruled her out for the film.

Nancy Kwan/then

I was always charmed by Kwan's ever-so-slight speech impediment, a quality which added immense vulnerability to her affecting portrayal of Mee Ling Wong, aka Suzie Wong.

The following year, she appeared in Henry Koster's faithful 1961 film adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Flower Drum Song," a film which made use of Kwan's dance training and which has become legendary for Koster and producer Ross Hunter's decision to go with an all Asian cast. (It's a recent addition to the National Film Registry.) The film's only Caucasian (not counting extras, including an uncredited Virginia Grey) is Herman Rudin, as the vagrant who holds up Benson Fong.

Nancy Kwan/now

Miyoshi Umeki, James Shigeta and Jack Soo joined Kwan in what should have been starmaking roles for all of them, but "Flower Drum Song," for some bizarre reason, effectively ended their film careers. Umeki and Soo segued into TV work ("The Courtship of Eddie's Father" and "Barney Miller," respectively), although Soo was recruited again by Hunter for a shocking racist role in George Roy Hill's awful "Thoroughly Modern Millie"; Shigeta went on to play supporting parts in forgettable films, and Kwan, the most productive of them all, appeared in a string of pleasing, if uneventful films ("Honeymoon Hotel," "Fate Is the Hunter," "The Main Attraction," "The Wrecking Crew," "Arrivederci, Baby!," "Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N." and an amusing conceit titled "Tamahine," Philip Leacock's clever take on Debbie Reynolds' "Tammy") before abruptly disappearing.

At one time, Stark was preparing to team her again with Holden in a film version of Richard Rodger's interracial musical, "No Strings," which starred Diahanne Carroll and Richard Kiley on Broadway, but the project was aborted when Carroll reportedly complained about changing the female lead's ethnicity - and with good reason. The character of international model Barbara Woodruff is shaped by America's civil rights and racial issues that, while not spelled out in the play, are crucial to the role. At one point, Kwan was poised to appear in Wayne Wang's film of Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club," but that obviously never happened. She still acts occasionally, most recently in 2006's "Ray of Sunshine," which was made her her third husband, actor-director Norbert Meisel.

In 1996, Kwan buried her only child, actor Bernie Pock, who died at age 33. Jamieson's documentary no doubt covers much of this, tracing how Ka Shen became Nancy. Among those interviewed in the film are Joan Chen, Vivian Wu, Sandra Allen and, yes, France Nuyen, the actress who, inadvertently, presented Nancy Kwan with her big break.

I read somewhere that Kwan once starred as Martha in a stage production of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Viginia Woolf?," an intriguing bit of casting that I would have loved to see. She is missed.