Six Damn Fine Degrees

Six Damn Fine Degrees #252: Lombard & Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Carole Lombard’s unique status as the lady of screwball comedy, as well as her unexpectedly salty sense of humour and use of language, were at the centre of last week’s post. It reminded me, of course, that the final comedic performance released during her lifetime – before it was tragically cut short by the infamous Nevada plane crash in 1941 – was Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Alfred Hitchcock’s one and only pure foray into pure American screwball (and now annoyingly mixed up with the 2005 Brangelina flick of the same name). Even though Lombard’s penultimate performance is easily eclipsed by her last role in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, I thought that reevaluating her Hitchcock role was certainly worth my while, especially since it’s one of the most overlooked and most easily criticised Hitchcock entries.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #248: Terrible fathers, vengeful daughters

MelanieLeave a comment

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

The colour palette gives it away: This is Serious Drama

The Glory is a Chinese historical drama series from 2025 (not to be mistaken with the K-Drama school revenge story of the same name) whose descriptions are so innocuous they are completely misleading. For instance, MyDramaList explains: “Abandoned as a child, Zhuang Han Yan grows up in the southern countryside before returning to her family in the capital. She catches the eye of Fu Yun Xi, a deputy minister with a mysterious illness, who sees her as an ideal wife. As they navigate their relationship, they fall in love, and Han Yan reconnects with her mother while finding warmth and belonging with the Fu family.”

 I mean, OKAY. This is not technically wrong. But it completely misses the point in that The Glory is a revenge drama – specifically, the revenge of an adult daughter on her father. (And I am very sorry to pick this as my degree of connection with Alan’s musings who told such a great story of his own father taking him to see Gandhi!).

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #247: Gandhi (1982)

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a comment

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

In July 1981, my school went a bit mad. The heir to the British throne Prince Charles was getting married to Diana Spencer, someone the media genuinely referred to “a commoner”. Parts of the UK were getting insanely excited by the prospect, and this included my classroom. The Wedding, we were told, was a Big Event. For kids, this was an event that had everything. After all, there were Princes and Princesses, images of fancy soldiers and decorated palaces, alongside lots of maps smothered with pink. Union flags appeared in the school, and no trip to the shops was complete without seeing aisles of colourful tat with crowns on it.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #244: The Jack Lemmon-shaped hole in Billy Wilder’s “Kiss Me, Stupid”

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a comment

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

One of Jack Lemmon’s most impressive skills as an actor is his ability to take the role of a slightly schlubby loser, a character prone to selfish and petty acts, and still make him likeable. You can really see this in his films with Billy Wilder, roles such as Jerry in Some Like It Hot, C.C. Baxter in The Apartment, Nestor Patou in Irma La Douce and Wendell Armbruster Jr in Avanti! But I think its perhaps best highlighted in his absence from another Wilder film – Kiss Me, Stupid.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #242: So this is what ‘adult movies’ are?

MattLeave a comment

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

When I was a child, before the age of 7 or so, my parents took the family to the cinema once a year. Always on the second Sunday of Advent, we’d go and see whatever Disney movie was on – and it seems that there always was a Disney movie on at that time, sometimes a new one, sometimes a rerun. I don’t much remember the actual films: I have faint memories of seeing The Fox and the Hound, which would fit with the timeframe I’m talking about, and I think that Robin Hood and The Aristocats were also among the Disney films I saw when I was very young. I remember the tradition, though, which included us going to eat at an Italian restaurant after we left the cinema.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #241: Start-up drama in Tang Dynasty China

MelanieLeave a comment

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

From brotherhood to sisterhood: The Chinese costume drama Flourished Peony (2025) is at its heart a female empowerment story. It was one of the top dramas in China aired this year, featuring Yang Zi and Li Xian, the power couple who earned their first roaring success in 2019 with the crowd-pleaser Go, Go Squid.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #239: Three weeks of Vorkosigan space opera

MelanieLeave a comment

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Speaking of sci-fi novels: You guys, I did it! I binge read all the novels of Lois McMaster Bujold’s space opera, the Vorkosigan Saga, in about three weeks. All 17 of them.

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