Just when I start contemplating dropping the "expanded" cable (which comes with an "expanded" bill), one of the stations I'd lose charms and entices me into sticking with it.

TCM - Turner Classic Movies - has some wonderful things on it. Wonderful, unexpected things.

Tonight, it was the 1958 version of "The Matchmaker" - with Shirley Booth and Paul Ford as Dolly Gallagher Levi and Horace Vandergelder. (The play upon which Hello Dolly - which I frankly find the move of overblown - was based). This is a charming silly movie. I love charming silly movies, the kind that have mistaken identities and capers and that end with the characters talking directly to the audience. And that have "characters" that are more entertaining and benign and well-meaning than some of the "characters" I deal with in real life.

Oh, Anthony Perkins was in it, too, all twitchy as Vandergelder's assistant who winds up getting the girl.

Last night was a movie I had no idea even existed - an old (73 years old!) British comedy called First a Girl. It is apparently the inspiration for "Victor Victoria," a movie which I've never actually been able to sit all the way through. A girl (the on-screen guide said she was originally a delivery girl; I came into the movie a bit late) is got up to pretend to be young man who is a female impersonator. Because, of course, she is not actually impersonating, s/he's very good at it, and is a smashing success. But of course, the titular girl wants to spend time actually BEING a girl, rather than being what appears to be a 16 year old boy.

(There's a line in there, where Victor - her Svengali of sorts - tells her that soon she can go on vacation, and "knit to your heart's content" or something like that. Heh. As if not being able to knit would be the sole thing that would become tiresome about having to act "butch" all the time you're not on stage...)

And so, as they say, hilarity ensues. And yes, she is eventually found out, she gets the guy (who is not actually very interesting, IMHO, but then, what "Prince Charming" ever is?), and her manager winds up as the "new" "Victoria ???" as the playbills coyly describe the impersonator. (Though of course, because he's an actual man, he looks rather like Eric Idle got up in drag, but because the movie is a comedy, he makes a success of it because though the audience is not amazed at how well he plays a woman, they can laugh at his ungainliness.)

Part of the reason I kept watching with fairly rapt attention was the British setting - the different accents, the slightly different way of doing things. And also, the fact that the movie was made in the 30s made it inherently interesting to me - looking at the set-design, how the characters dressed, how restaurants and clubs and cars and everything were different.

Were it a movie made a couple years ago (and I shudder to think some of the jokes that would be put in by the Farrelly brothers or their counterpart were they making this movie), it would not have held my attention at all. But there's something different, that I can't quite put my finger on, about the older movies - part of it is the sheer archaeology of seeing how interiors and cars and things were different. But part of it is, also, I think that there's a sense of restraint. I don't know if this movie, being made in Britain in 1935 was subject to any kind of "morals code" like the Hayes code, but the more "racy" bits [which are not very racy] are played with more of a winking good humor than what seems to be present when people KNOW they can get away with "racy" bits. If you know what I mean.

I wonder, when people made movies 50 or 60 or 70 years ago, were they thinking, "There will be people - long after we're dead and gone - who will still be seeing these things?"

(Makes one wonder a bit about blogs, doesn't it? Things created for momentary entertainment that then tend to hang around.)