MissGreerGarson.com by Ed S.

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Mrs. Parkington (1944)

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Some of Ed's favourite moments

• Greer has black hair. Eeeooo! But she really is gorgeous here.
• Walter uses the term "spooning". It's not clear to me what he means by it in 1944, though.
• "I'm practically naked!" Aspasia (a beautiful Agnes Moorehead) says that in France they say "decolleté". That is the very term used by Mary Boland in "Pride and Prejudice" when she's admonishing Kitty at the Meryton Assembly.
• Greer: "That's house-breaking. It's against the law." Walter: "Who cares about the law? It's a free country, isn't it?"
• Then Walter shows her the house that supposedly belongs to a friend. This is a delightful sequence.
• Greer does a one-hand turnover with playing cards. I'll bet she would've been impressed if I showed her my one-hand riffle shuffle.
• Cecil Kellaway has a couple of great scenes. You will have seen him on TV a million times in the 1960s.
• I'll bet Walter Pidgeon loved making this movie. Major Parkington is like a filthy rich Sam Gladney, full of vigour and optimism and mad about Greer.
• Greer spends much of this movie being eighty-four years old. I must say that in real life she looked better at eighty than she did in this movie.
• Greer rubs her butt again as an 84-year-old when she warms herself by the fire. Later she and Aspasia both warm their butts when they're in England.
• Greer tries to sound more "American" by enunciating her R's the way we do west of the Atlantic. Thus, she says "mothER" and "summER" rather than her usual "mutha" and "summa".
• If you grew up in the 1960s, you'll enjoy seeing Anges Moorehead in this movie, who had four Oscar® nominations, one of them for this very movie.
• Simon Callow's book on Orson Welles claims that Mr. Welles was offered the role of the Prince of Wales in this movie, the role eventually played by Cecil Kellaway.
  (Simon Callow is also an actor. He's the funeral in "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and Reverend Beebe in "A Room With a View.")