Evanston: Rita Hayworth dreams
Evanston: Rita Hayworth dreams
I took a journey to the past last evening. To 1957, to be exact.
I was fifteen years old most of that year. I lived with my mother and stepfather, and my mother’s mother and stepfather, in a small brick house in Kirkwood, Missouri, on the edge of Saint Louis suburbs. I did not want to be there and dreamed of the sea.
On weekends I often went to movies, usually by myself.
One weekend I saw FIRE DOWN BELOW, a film about a woman who has made her way from post WWII Europe to the Caribbean by trading her beauty to a series of men and now, without proper papers, needs to be taken from one island to another. Two men with an old powerboat, smugglers of cigarettes and whiskey, agree to do so for a suitable fee. Rita Hayworth plays the woman. Robert Mitchum and Jack Lemon the men.
A few days ago I noticed that the movie was being shown on Turner Classic Movies. I recorded it and watched it last night.
In retrospect the movie should be better than it is. The screen play was written by the novelist, Irwin Shaw, and the supporting cast includes Anthony Newley, Herbert Lom, who went on to star as Peter Seller’s boss in the Pink Panther films, and Bernard Lee, who was the first ‘M’ in the James Bond series.
But it isn’t.
Still one scene has stuck in my mind all these years.
The boat is anchored off a pristine islet. Rita Hayworth, wearing what today would be an absurdly modest one piece bathing suit, steps to the bow, dives into the water and swims to a palm lined beach. Jack Lemon follows her.
In that darkened theater, with little experience of the world and none of the sea, I told myself: I’m going to sail to an island like that with a woman like that and we will dive from the boat and swim to a beach like that. And in the past fifty years I have. Many times.
But before I did I sailed alone around Cape Horn.
Now in old age, the tropics have little appeal to me, other than the joy of snorkeling in warm clear water. I have sailed to French Polynesia seven times. Bali three. Fiji and Tonga and Mauritius and Samoa and Cocos and many others, often more than once. I have come to prefer more temperate climes, such as New Zealand, and my thoughts tend toward the cold Southern Ocean.
Rita Hayworth’s dive from that scruffy power boat was a boy’s dream that I fulfilled and outgrew. But it was a good dream and I’m glad I dreamed it.
Thursday, April 21, 2011