The Thin Man’s Nora Charles Witty Lines
If all the films that Claudette made in which she dealt with children - bathing them, tucking them into bed, reading to them, consoling them - were arranged in order of age, from infants to toddlers, pre-adolescents, teenagers, and adults, the image of a perfect mother would emerge. Perhaps Claudette was just a screen mother, but one would like to think that her films revealed the kind of mother Claudette might have been if she had children of her own. Even when she bathed her young son in Family Honeymoon, she did it with such naturalness that it seemed not only unrehearsed but also unfeigned. It was the same in The Egg and I, when she cupped the chicks in her hands as tenderly as she would hold an infant in her arms. Somehow one feels that changing diapers would have come as easily to Claudette as breezing down a staircase in a Travis Banton gown.
- Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty
Mrs. Robinson, if you don’t mind my saying so, this conversation is getting a little strange.
Cary Grant in North by Northwest, 1959.
