Astonishing Feat of Memory and Facial Recognition

Along with everyone of my generation, I've been worrying about my deteriorating memory. There are these horrible moments. I stand in front of the open refrigerator, wondering what I'm doing there and for what I'm searching. Or I go the market and then forget to bring the groceries in from the car -- that sort of thing. Is it normal deterioration or is it pathological?

 

So I'm happy to bring some good news -- no, remarkable news from the memory front.

 

A couple of nights ago, Miss Reynolds and I watched the worst movie we've seen in many a year. It's called Johnny Guitar, a it's a "western" perpetrated in 1954. It's an unholy mess of pretentious but incoherent plot, absurd characters, goofy dialogue and atrocious acting. We watched it right to the end because it was so bad bad bad that it became amusing. The film is so beyond crappy that it has been praised as authentically American by both Godard and Truffaut.

 

About three-quarters of the way through, I said to Miss Reynolds that the actor who played the villainous "Dancin' Kid" -- his name, no joke, and he actually performs a few steps with Mercedes McCambridge, who if overacting were a crime, would have served a life sentence in a supermax facility -- that the actor, billed as "Scott Brady" looked a lot like Lawrence Tierney, a no-longer-remembered "heavy" who had starred in "Born to Kill" (1947), which we had watched a couple of months ago.

 

Let me burnish this feat. I proposed that so-called "Scott Brady" resembled Lawrence Tierney. What a remarkable and daring assertion! 

 

So after Johnny Guitar came to its ludicrous conclusion, bullets flying everywhere, I looked up so-called "Scott Brady," the "Dancin' Kid," on Wikipedia  and discovered that his birth name was Gerard Tierney and that he was indeed the younger brother of Lawrence Tierney. 

 

I got to say I spent a few minutes crowing. I mean, really, noticing the resemblance and recalling the name of an obscure actor whom we had hardly noticed months ago -- what a coup! What a feat! I could hear the hallelujahs ring throughout our valley.

 

I didn't think that Miss Reynolds was sufficiently effusive in praise of my achievement -- although she did her best -- so I went to the window, opened it and shouted into the street, very loud, these words: "In Johnny Guitar, Scott Brady is Lawrence Tierney's younger brother Gerard." No doubt putting the Governor's security detail on Code Red alert.

 

After a few minutes, I wanted to do it again, but Miss R. talked me down.

 

The next day, I bragged to my children and their spouses about my achievement. One of my daughters-in-law, CKNC, wrote back that on reading my news, she went to her front door, opened it, and shouted, "My father-in-law knew that in Johnny Guitar, the actor Scott Brady is Lawrence Tierney's younger brother Gerard."  An entirely appropriate and measured response on her part, in my opinion.

 

My point is that a guy who can identify Lawrence Tierney's brother shouldn't worry about brain decay for at least a month or two. 

 

I don't know in what part of the brain information about Lawrence Tierney is stored. Certainly not the part that doesn't let you know why you're peering into the open refrigerator.  

 

I should also point out that I've recently received confirmation of the excellence of my amygdalae:   https://www.drmetablog.com/2020/11/spider.html

 

So there's hope.

 

[December 18:  Last night we watched, on TCM of course, a movie called Passion Flower (1930), an interesting tale of love and marriage and adultery and reconciliation and compromise. Definitely pre-Code. At one point, there's a party scene.  A very young man says his good-byes.  Both Ms. R and I immediately said, "that's a familiar face. Who is he?" And I said, "his voice sounds a lot like Ray Milland's." Later that evening we look it up on Wiki. Here's the news: "first screen appearance of Ray Milland, uncredited." 

 

Another astonishing feat -- this time of voice recognition. The old guy still has it, some of the time.]

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

Scott Brady was pretty good in $, a flick starring Goldie Hawn and Warren Beatty. In one scene, he zips up his leather jacket on the first try and says, "Let's go to a party." That could not have been easy. Try zipping up a coat these days with a zipper made in China.