Okay, I am up and watching Rita movies. I am going to try and thread all my tweets so they aren’t too annoying? but Affectionately Yours starts at 9:15!

I’m watching them mostly in order, but I might skip some I have already seen this year to go back and watch the two I missed this morning.

Affectionately Yours is from 1941, which is one of my favorite years of Rita’s career. She was in four movies that year: The Strawberry Blonde (on later today), this, Blood and Sand, and You’ll Never Get Rich.

Blood and Sand is the last time she plays the second female and You’ll Never Get Rich is her first starring role at Columbia.

So 1941 is the year that we watch Rita Hayworth because the Rita Hayworth we’re going to have between 1942-1957.

Rita’s suit looks a lot like Rosalind Russell’s in His Girl Friday. lady journalist coded! and we’ll get Ralph Bellamy too soon.

“Who is this fried egg?” is a great way to describe Ralph Bellamy.

One of the most underrated aspects of Rita’s career is her speaking voice. The way she modulates and affects it in this dinner scene!

I immediately messed up and doubled my threads, but The Happy Thieves is next, which I have never seen!

https://twitter.com/emmkick/status/1290303029678407680?s=21 https://twitter.com/emmkick/status/1290303029678407680

This doesn't have a great reputation, but I am embarrassingly both an art history major and a Rex Harrison apologist (talent wise) and I'm already having fun?

I don't hate this movie! but Rita playing an alcoholic with a temperamental love interest for comedic effect is very sad considering this was produced by James Hill. They would be divorced by the time it came out, but he was very cruel

including writing a memoir of their "love story" while she was alive, but suffering from the effects of Alzheimer's.

ooooo they have a little maquette of the Prado in anticipation of the heist. like a two and a half star version of How to Steal a Million? I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't love Rita or museums, but I love both of those things?

there is something at play in this movie that happens a lot across Rita’s career and it’s proximity to Spanishness. she famously was remade into an “all-American” girl, with electrolysis and hair dye and a name change, but it isn’t as simple as it seems.

in many movies post Cansino to Hayworth transformation, she plays women who are either coded as Spanish/South American, explicitly are, or like here in The Happy Thieves, the plot takes her to Spain and she exists adjacent to the othered setting.

I'm definitely not an expert on how Rita's ethnicity and race intersect with the construction of her career, but the story is more complicated than Harry Cohn transforming her into an certain type of whiteness in 1937 and that being the end of it.