Honoring Honor


Heard they did some Oscar preening the other night, so I thought it would be a good time to talk about movie iconography that’s actually interesting. It’s hard to get much more iconic than Honor Blackman, whose place in cinematic history transcends the phony glamour of the Academy Awards. I knew I had to do this small homage as soon as I read the opening paragraph of her IMDB entry, which immediately captures the difference between a Hollywood Star and a cultural touchstone. The rest of the brief bio explains the timeless allure:

Comparing this sultry-eyed blonde to Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich may seem a bit overzealous, but Honor Blackman's stylish allure over the years cannot be denied.

One of four children, Blackman was born in London's East End to a statistician father employed with the civil service and a homemaker mother. She received diction lessons as a teenager and later attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She temporarily followed in her father's footsteps with a job in the civil service, and then was, of all things, a dispatch rider during World War II. This is where she developed some of her trademark athleticism.

TV series work then also came her way, notably with the highly popular The Avengers (1961), costarring Patrick Macnee as John Steed. As the leather-clad "Mrs. Cathy Gale", Blackman showcased her incredible beauty, self-confidence, and athletic derring-do. Her admirable qualities made her not only a catch for the men, but also an inspirational figure for the 1960s feminist movement. Blackman left the show at its peak, however, and was replaced by the equally assertive and popular Diana Rigg as "Mrs. Emma Peel".

Not out of work long, Blackman took on the role of Greek goddess "Hera" in popular movie adventure Jason and the Argonauts (1963) (1963) with marvelous Ray Harryhausen and melodrama Life at the Top (1965) (1965) with Laurence Harvey. She then filmed the most popular role of her career: "Pussy Galore". In the classic James Bond movie Goldfinger (1964), Blackman went toe to toe with Sean Connery's womanizing "007" and created major sparks on screen, managing to outclass the (wink-wink) double meaning of her character's name.>>



For many of her fans, her story sort of ends there, adrift forever in that life raft with Sean Connery in the greatest of all Bond movies — best title song, best Bond Car (Aston Martin DB4), and best Bond Girl. The first Bond Girl was Ursula Andress, memorable for her smoking hot Botticelli Venus entrance, but it was really Blackman who forever altered the stereotype by being an archetype Of looks, sass, class, and kickass action.

She didn’t go on to make a lot of movies, yet she has always been a presence in one of the most successful series of blockbuster box office hits about one character ever made.

And whatever ‘It’ was that made her so magnetic on screen has not vanished either. We’ll close with two 21st Century video clips of the Honor Blackman who is still alive and bewitching in her, um, nineties now.



And another charming glimpse here...





Long Live La Galore!

Comments

Post a Comment

Readers also liked…

A Near-Perfect Microcosm of “The Swamp”

Image
Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. There’s an intensely contemporary reason for taking a close look at Scientology. The Swamp is so huge it seems like the Borg. But what are the stripped down essentials of the Borg? Here’s a look at a laboratory example, a microcosm if you will. In the interests of full disclosure, I did encounter Scientology back in the weird year of 1968. I was in Boston, got scooped in to a “Dianetics” exercise, and got speedily thrown out for having too much “charge” to participate. The one in charge was blond, bland to the point of creepy, and I almost (but not quite) succeeded in making him lose his temper. In further interests of disclosure, I spent years on Facebook, debating Trump-haters. They did lose their tempers. But they also exhibited the exact same repetition of Talking Points the lefties (and Scientologists) employ. Exact. Same. Words. How I made the cult connection. Overview Like it says. Troublemaker. Destroy Utterly  Horror Show Squared More ... More
Read more

The Best Book on the Trump Phenomenon

Image
Everybody rushed in after the fact to be first with the goods on how Trump pulled off the biggest electoral upset in modern presidential history. I was already ahead of them though. I had been covering the political briar patch with a steady diary approach for four presidential election cycles, both terms of W, the meteoric rise and weird re-election of Barack Obama, and of course the first flutterings of the Republican country club riot over replacing him. I had three blogs to draw from over that time, and a couple+ books out of it, including one demonstrating that I had Obama  figured out long before even his fiercest beltway critics caught on. Here’s another relevant book . I recognized the unique potential of Trump to win the whole thing early, in June of 2014. I could prove it. Why has it taken me this long to do my own book about the most spectacular politician of all our lifetimes? Two reasons. I didn’t realize I had produced so much material about Trump, the blog in whic
Read more

A Reclamation Project Begun

Image
As you work your way through the links here, don’t be shy. Get ‘Click Happy.’ Even on pics. FIGHTING BACK ONE FILE AT A TIME … How bad has it gotten? I uploaded this video from the old Instapunk at YouTube an hour ago. It has already been removed for violating YT Community Standards.  There’s a pdf version, just published, of the post from Instapunk.com the video above was created for. Nobody censored it 15 years ago. Back then, it was unquestioningly covered as freedom of expression. Here’s my pdf file of ‘ The Goosestep Enigma ’.  This was by no means the most controversial post or graphic included in Instapunk’s 2,000+++ posts over the years. Now I’m going back in time to make pdf versions of the key parts of that website, meaning the most comical, controversial, reflective, insightful, and graphically provocative. But why reinvent the wheel. It’s all still there, isn’t it? The sad fact is that the truly huge resource called Instapunk.com is facing a ticking clock. The original site
Read more

Manuscript Submission, The Boomer Bible

Image
  Cover of U.K. Edition, 1991 Manuscript Submission, The Boomer Bible   It is time to republish The Boomer Bible. The book is more relevant to the body politic now than it was even when it was first published. Your instructions call for complete manuscript submission. Here that is, in three forms, plus a depth backgrounder: The Boomer Bible  (Full screen view available, May load slowly) http://TheBoomerBible.com   (Three testaments including LIVE Intercolumn Reference) The Boomer Bible  (physical hard copy; Amazon sells them as they periodically acquire them) The Boomer Bible Website  (The original archived background site, not originated by the author but by students of the book) The Boomer Bible is officially out of print, no longer offered for sale by the original publisher, who offered the book for nearly 30 years, selling out the the original 88,000-copy print run before withdrawing the title. The rights have therefore reverted to me, the author. The important point is that The Bo
Read more

The CHYOS Superscript

Image
 There’s a Mighty Old Name on the Scene For the past half century or so, the University of Pennsylvania has not been treated as an equal in the Ivy League, let alone the CHYOS Club. Here’s a telling true story. At a recent Penn-Princeton basketball game, the Quakers had an insurmountable lead in the closing seconds, and the girlie-boys of Princeton started chanting, “Safety School…! Safety School…!” For many years, the preppy feeder schools for the Ivies with the toughest admissions standards had reliably used three schools as fallbacks (i.e., Safety Schools): the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Penn. A similar discrimination situation obtained with law schools. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and later Stanford got first pick, and Penn somehow occupied a lower rung. Here’s a direct quote from the website ‘wordhistories’ about the mutating epithet “Philadelphia Lawyer”: The proof of this evolving lack of respect can be found in the history of the Supr
Read more

The impenetrable NYC Bubble

Image
  Funny as hell and deadly serious Let me begin on a note we can all agree on. There is a time in our teen lives when we imprint on popular music. What we were listening to during the dramatic changes in our bodies, social lives, and aspirational identities stays with us, regardless of what we come to value and treasure later in life. Everyone has those certain songs that are foundational chords in their lives, and they respond physically to even a few notes of the recordings that gave rise to their libidos and, well, self . Two not unrelated things. This is a constant and nothing new. There are Sinatra imprints, Elvis, Beach Boys, Dylan, Motown, Beatles, Stones, Who, Doors, Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Pink Floyd, James Taylor, Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, James Brown, Rick James, Springsteen, Metallica, and on and on and on imprints. (Apologies to the imprinters in Country, Disco, Jazz, and Blondie/Madonna Pop, have my own chords there too.) I never judge those. We just all
Read more