Quote of the Day (Ginia Bellafante, on the Long-Term Decline of the Department Store)

“If you are in your 20s, department stores have been dying ostensibly for the whole of the time you have been conscious. ‘Lackluster upon lackluster,’ an analyst at Piper Jaffray described the sector in a New Yorker article in 2003 — seven years before Instagram ignited our scrolling addictions, 16 years before the closure of Henri Bendel, 17 before the end of Lord & Taylor and Barneys. The decline might be traced further back, sometime around 1989, when B. Altman shut down on Fifth Avenue. By then, Bloomingdale’s had been abandoned as an urbane meeting ground in romantic comedy (see ‘Manhattan’), replaced by The Sharper Image (see ‘When Harry Met Sally’).”— Fashion critic Ginia Bellafante, “Out of Step With Their Shoppers,” The New York Times, Feb. 8, 2026

The image accompanying this post, looking north across 60th Street at Barneys New York on a cloudy afternoon, was taken on Apr. 17, 2010, by Jim.henderson.

In the mid-1990s, as part of a larger retail tour of New York, I visited Barneys, along with other members of my company and industry marketing researchers. Somebody noticed that my jacket, bought at a more downscale department store, looked an awful lot like one on the racks. It turned out that the merchandise we saw cost seven times more than what I had paid.

In his 2025 memoir, They All Came to Barneys, Gene Pressman depicts the company he managed with his brother Bob as the height of Nineties glamour. Maybe so.

But from that day nearly three decades ago, I became convinced that the store’s merchandise was overpriced. It was a far cry from the discount men’s suit shop his grandfather had founded. When I read the reports of its demise, I figured that pride goeth before a fall.

I was glad that, unlike many casual observers (and even some retail analysts who should have known better), Ginia Bellafonte’s article didn’t attribute the decline of the entire department store sector solely to the Internet.

A single cause is a convenient explanation for everything, but the department store has withered for several reasons, much like the enclosed malls they anchored for decades. I look forward to an entire book that will trace this devolution with the care it deserves.

Quote of the Day (Christopher Morley, on the Explosive Power of Books)

"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”— American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet Christopher Morley (1890-1957), The Haunted Bookshop (1919)

This Day in Film History (Birth of Ronald Colman, Sterling Star of Silent and Sound Eras)

Feb. 9, 1891— Ronald Colman, an Oscar-winning actor who personified courtliness from Hollywood’s silent to sound eras, was born in Richmond, England.

Probably because I was annoyed by what seemed like an unduly stiff performance as an amnesiac war casualty in Random Harvest (1942), I was put off for years by Colman. I changed my opinion after watching his world-weary diplomat in Frank Capra’s adaptation of the James Hilton novel Lost Horizon (1937).

But it was his depiction of brilliant, alcoholic, self-sacrificing lawyer Sydney Carton in the 1935 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities that finally convinced me that Colman was a sterling talent, well-deserving of his reputation as one of Hollywood’s best leading men of the 1930s and 1940s.

Understandably, the actor saw this as one of the best roles of his career. Not only did he agree to shave off his trademark mustache to play the part, but, with great good humor, he recited his climactic speech from the film whenever Jack Benny visited him on the comedian’s radio and TV shows.

After a half-century, I think I really should re-watch Random Harvest, which enjoys a reputation as one of the finest romantic melodramas of Hollywood’s golden age. 

Colman himself had been badly wounded in the Great War while serving in the London Scottish Regiment (a legendary unit in which actors Basil Rathbone, Herbert Marshall, and Claude Rains had their own harrowing experiences, as related in this 2015 post on the “Sister Celluloid” blog).

The war was as psychologically as physically devastating, as Colman recalled later:

“I won’t go into the war and all that it did to all of us. We went out. Strangers came back. It was the war that made an actor out of me. When I came back that was all I was good for: acting. I wasn’t my own man anymore.”

Undoubtedly, it was Colman’s identification with the traumatized veteran in Random Harvest that helped him overcome an often far-fetched script—and win an Oscar nomination.

The war did not end Colman’s travails. Determined to appear on the New York stage, he initially encountered a long period of unemployment, to such an extent that he was reduced to scrounging for food. (“Figuring out the best way to spend five cents in an automat was an art at which I became adept. Doughnuts were the main standby.”) At last he broke through.

Colman found film to be the real where he would make his mark, however, when director Henry King cast him opposite Lillian Gish in the 1923 silent film The White Sister. The film was so successful that the trio reunited for Romola the following year.

Unlike many silent-film idols, Colman had no trouble adapting to sound. In fact, the new technology enhanced his career because he could take advantage of his distinctive voice: rich, cultured, mellifluous, enhancing his image as an English gentleman.

“Colman only really hit one note with it, a sort of wistful oboe note, but that note was enough if the writing of the picture suited his restrained lyricism,” wrote Dan Callahan in an October 2025 post on his “Stolen Holiday” blog.

No matter what genre he tried—western, melodrama, detective film, romantic comedy—Colman’s gentlemanly persona was tinged with melancholy, a trait of his off-screen temperament. That sense was reinforced early in his career because of a disastrous first marriage.

Colman wed Thelma Raye in haste in 1920, a union he came to rue as, stricken with jealousy at his increasing success, the actress took to stalking him. Increasingly withdrawn under this pressure, Colman was relieved when she sued him for divorce 14 years later. Fortunately his second marriage, to Benita Hume, was longer (20 years, until his death) and far happier.

To the greatest extent possible, Colman tried to live with discretion, so the public knew little of his private circumstances. What it saw onscreen, it loved. In addition to the films I mentioned previously, I also enjoyed him in The Talk of the Town (1942), a comedy in which his straitlaced lawyer risks his nomination to the Supreme Court by aiding an escaped convict whose innocence he comes to believe in.

With his fourth Oscar nomination in 1947 for A Double Life, Colman finally won formal recognition from his peers by winning the coveted statuette, as a Shakespearean actor whose latest role—the jealousy-maddened Othello—begins to mirror his own life.

(A recent biographer of Colman, the prolific Carl Rollyson, has a astute analysis of the actor’s “graceful, literate masculinity” in this Spring 2024 article for Humanities, a journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Lady Eve,’ As a Conversation Takes an Unusual Turn)

Charles [played by Henry Fonda] [speaking of card playing]: “Now you, on the other hand, with a little coaching you could be terrific."

Jean [played by Barbara Stanwyck]: “Do you really think so?”

Charles: “Yes, you have a definite nose.”

Jean: “Well, I'm glad you like it. Do you like any of the rest of me?”— The Lady Eve (1941), screenplay by Monckton Hoffe and Preston Sturges, directed by Preston Sturges

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Authenticity and Originality)

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”— English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), "Writing," in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (1963)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Archbishop Ronald Hicks, on Being a ‘Missionary Church’)

“We are called to be a missionary Church that takes care of the poor and the vulnerable, upholds life from conception to natural death, cares for creation, builds bridges, listens synodally, protects children, promotes healing for survivors and for all those wounded by the Church, and shows respect for all, building unity across cultures and generations.”—New York Roman Catholic Archbishop Ronald Hicks, Homily at Installation, Feb. 6, 2026

Quote of the Day (Lorraine Hansberry, on Stillness and Thinking)

“Don’t get up. Just sit a while and think. Never be afraid to sit a while and think.”— African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), A Raisin in the Sun (1959)

Excellent advice, to which I would add just one corollary: Never be afraid to sit a while, think—and write.