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Time
is short, so make your reservations soon. This year’s Donna Reed Festival is scheduled
for June 12-19 in Denison, Iowa. Be there.
Donna grew up on a farm just
outside of Denison. According to a festival press kit, she milked cows, drove
the tractor, sewed her own 4-H uniform, and won a blue ribbon at the Iowa State
Fair for a pan of biscuits. Back then, her name was Donnabelle Mullenger.
After high school, she went to California to study drama and business (she needed
something to fall back on if the acting didn’t work out) at Los Angeles City College.
She entered some beauty contests, too, and when she was named Campus Queen and
got her picture in the newspapers, her telephone started ringing. Donnabelle Mullenger
signed a contract with MGM and became Donna Reed.
Though she appeared in
42 movies and won an Academy Award for her performance in From
Here to Eternity, she may be best remembered as Jimmy Stewart’s loving
wife in the classic It’s
a Wonderful Life. The model-wife-and-mother role suited her so well that
she later played it for eight years on television’s The Donna Reed Show.
I once found a TV channel that was broadcasting a Seven-Day Donnathon – a full
week of nonstop Donna Reed Show reruns. It made for soothing viewing. In a relentlessly
wholesome, black-and-white world where nothing really bad ever happened, Donna
was a cheerful helpmate to her husband, a wise counselor to her children, a consummate
homemaker who twirled into her spotless kitchen and emerged moments later, every
hair in place, bearing pot roasts and layer cakes. She was perfect. No wonder
they’re proud of her in Denison.
In addition to several educational workshops
and an appearance by Shelley Fabares, who was Donna’s TV daughter and is currently
playing a live-in girlfriend on the sitcom Coach ( a role of which I’m not sure
Donna would approve, but never mind), the festival offers a preservation angle,
too: Sponsors are raising funds to restore Denison’s Ritz Theater. I’m really
glad to hear that. They’re not just saving a building. They’re preserving a means
of escape.
When
I was growing up, I spent a lot of time at two theaters in Plainview,
Texas: the State and the Granada. The State was a small, plain theater where
we yelled and threw popcorn and scuffled in the aisles during the westerns and
comedies that filled the double-feature bill. A Saturday afternoon at the State
was an experience in moviegoing as contact sport.
The Granada was different.
Nowadays I’d call it a movie palace; back then, I just knew it was a vast and
wonderful place where yelling was unthinkable. A ceiling studded with dim stars
was suspended over walls that simulated a castle, with Spanish shawls draped over
fake balconies and dripping fountains set into niches. (We learned to avoid those
fountains. If we sat too near them, the sound of the water sent us on frequent
trips to the restroom.) At the center of it all was a screen of truly monumental
dimensions, thundering with the exploits of pirates, knights, Walt Disney characters,
and atomic-mutant monsters on a rampage.
I distinctly remember more than
one afternoon when I thought, sitting there in the plushly upholstered splendor
of the Granada, “I wish the whole world was like this.” A decade later, Donna
Reed brought that sentiment into our living rooms. She created, inhabited and
exemplified a world in which parents were strong and loving and relatively affluent,
adolescents were polite and well-adjusted, problems were relatively minor and
endings were always happy. Watching, we knew it was ludicrously unreal, but we
couldn’t help wishing the whole world could be like that.
That’s why I’m
glad they’re memorializing Donna Reed by restoring an old movie house. Escape
is essential now and then, but it’s hard to find it in a shoebox-sized theater
with a name like Asphalt Gardens Shopping Plaza Multiplex Cinema 17. We need to
save lots of Palaces and Rialtos and Majestics – and Granadas.
In fact,
when the folks in Denison finish restoring their Ritz, I wish they’d take on the
Granada. I hear it’s been subdivided into two smaller theaters. I’ll bet the fountains
are dry, and I’m worried that they’ve turned off the stars, too. Donna wouldn’t
like that.
-- Historic Preservation News, June 1993 |
| DVDs |
| From
Here to Eternity (1953) |
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| It's
a Wonderful Life (1947) |
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UPDATE:
Having suffered a number of indignities in recent years, the Granada closed its
doors in 1997. The building still stands, a vacant but imposing landmark on Plainview’s
Broadway. Just down the street, the smaller and less opulent Fair Theatre has
been restored; it reopened in 1999 as a venue for live performances and meetings.
The kid-battered State, on the other hand, long ago followed ten-cent popcorn
and Saturday afternoon double-feature westerns into oblivion. I’m not sure what
sort of building now occupies the site, though it occurs to me that the presence
of a foot-thick layer of discarded Milk Duds and bubble gum might have rendered
any redevelopment infeasible.
Meanwhile, the Donna Reed Festival is still
doing boffo business in Denison. The renovated Ritz reopened in 1995 and is now
known as the Donna Reed Center for the Performing Arts. Information on the theater
and festival can be found at www.donnareed.org.
Speaking of Donna, a reader
wrote to remind me that not all of her screen roles were of the apple-pie-and-gingham-apron
variety. In fact, she won her Oscar for playing a prostitute in From Here to Eternity.
Snuggling up against her in one scene, boyfriend Montgomery Clift says, “Gee,
this is just like being married, isn’t it?”
Shooting him a Meaningful
Look, Donna replies, “It’s better.”
Further evidence – if any were needed
– that when it came to creating a perfect world, nobody out-did Donna.
Published
with Permission, Courtesy Dwight Young
They
Shoe Horses, Don't They? February 1 , 2005 Guest Column |
| Road
Trips Through History |
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