photo by Milton Greene Like so many summer days in Los Angeles, this one began as a balmy and sunlit morning. It would grow warmer and sunnier, but the languid summertime mood was shattered by news of a shocking event in one of the city’s most elite enclaves. It was Sunday, August 5, 1962, the day Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her West Los Angeles home, an empty pill bottle nearby. The story…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE One of the most beloved of Hollywood’s Golden Age stars, Ingrid Bergman lit up screens large and small in an acting career that spanned 50 years, included 54 onscreen performances and brought three Oscars and two Emmys among her many awards and accolades. On the American Film Institute’s most recent list of Great Screen Legends, Bergman ranks #4 among…
A fresh-faced 21-year-old Lee Remick made her motion picture debut as a seductive baton-twirling high school drum majorette in Elia Kazan’s 1957 classic, A Face in the Crowd . Remick’s rendering of a precocious but empty-headed teen who becomes the bride of a lecherous drifter turned media celebrity (Andy Griffith) would launch her on the path to movie stardom. A Face in the Crowd (1957) Because…
It was only with her passing last month that I found out Dame Angela Lansbury had made a couple of low budget films noir during her long, storied career. I was aware, of course, that she had played some memorably unpleasant female characters over the years. There was Nancy, Ingrid Bergman's devious maid in Gaslight (1944), Lansbury's first film performance, and one for which she was…
Romance, adventure and intrigue, plus dashing Cary Grant and delectable Grace Kelly. All of this along with a tour of the glittering French Riviera courtesy of Alfred Hitchcock. Who could resist such high style fun in the sun - and moonlight? What rapidly turns into an adventure begins with a mundane shot of a sedate travel agency where a colorful poster in its window proclaims, " If you love…
Today we celebrate our friend and fellow classic film (and more) blogger, Patricia Nolan-Hall aka/Paddy, Paddy Lee - and Caftan Woman, the name of her award-winning blog. When Paddy left us on March 7th, we lost one of classic film's most passionate champions and finest, most devoted bloggers. She was also conscientiously supportive of other bloggers and an avid participant in just about any/all…
In memory of our friend and world class classic film lover and blogger, Paddy, we gather to celebrate her with this, our Caftan Woman Blogathon: Honoring Patricia Nolan-Hall . Click here for links to all participating blogs. ~ I don't know exactly when Paddy and I first virtually met, but it must've been about ten years ago through the Classic Movie Blog Association. What I remember more clearly…
Patricia Nolan-Hall The Caftan Woman Blogathon – Honoring Patricia Nolan-Hall will be hosted here at Lady Eve’s Reel Life and at Jacqueline's Another Old Movie Blog on Friday, May 6 th . On March 7 th , the classic film blogger world lost one of its great writers and champions of classic film, Patricia Nolan-Hall, also known as Caftan Woman, the name of her delightful blog. You can visit her blog…
As time goes by I find myself in a reflective mood on Christmas Eve, often savoring memories of holidays gone by, some long, long ago, others from just a few years past. This year as I perused TCM's Christmas Eve schedule, I noticed that several longtime favorites were in the lineup and realized that I'd blogged about some of them early in the life of this blog (which is now 11 years old). Being…
Berlin-born Conrad Veidt packed nearly 120 film roles into his all too brief lifetime, but it was the last film released before his death that guaranteed him a special brand of eternal life, the “filmmortality,” or film immortality, actors acquire when they’ve played a key role in a film that becomes a timeless classic. For Veidt the film was Casablanca (1942) and the role was cold-as-marble Major…
On October 24, a rare and potent combination of “atmospheric river” and “bomb cyclone” generated a ferocious storm that pounded Northern California, dumping more than a foot of rain in some areas. As high winds blew and heavy rains fell, streets and roads flooded, power lines and trees came down and wildfire areas were slammed with mudslides. Many events and gatherings in the region were scrapped…
This Hollywood-savvy item appeared in the December 1932 issue of Vanity Fair , " …although a German director [he] is now claimed by America. His gay and cynic touch, his dramatic use of detail, have reconditioned many an otherwise anemic script and saved it from the shelf – until at one time the studio wise-crack of the hour was always, “For God’s sake, send for Lubitsch."" Hollywood first sent…
Eddie Muller's Original Noir Bible in a New Updated and Expanded Edition Eddie Muller Before he was film noir's czar and long before he was a TCM host, Eddie Muller made a decision to take a leap and, as mythologist Joseph Campbell might've put it, follow his bliss. Muller had been a writer with a 16-year run as a print journalist. Now he would become a "wordslinger," peppering the page with…
Clockwise from top: Bette Davis and John Garfield; Rita Hayworth; Hedy Lamarr and Bob Hope; GIs at the Canteen A Very Special "Old Hollywood Haunt" In her 1987 m emoir, This 'n That , Bette Davis rem emb er ed a day not long after World War II began when f ellow Warn er Bros. star John Garfield sat down n ext to h er in th e studio commissary. He told h er h e'd been thinking about all th e GIs…
Just in time for summer, TCM and Running Press offer John Malahy's delectably readable Summer Movies: 30 Sun-Drenched Classics. Featuring summertime-set films dating from the '20s ( Lonesome /1928) to the present day ( Call Me by Your Name /2017), it's a wide-ranging collection, detailed, photo-packed and filled with tantalizing backstory. In his quest to "reflect the full range of how summer has…
Rich, vivid Technicolor is one of the hallmarks of the most well-known and celebrated of the gorgeous, masterful films from the production team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Archers. From the mid-1940s into the early '50s, almost all of their films were shot in striking 3-strip Technicolor, often by cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Cardiff had been a camera operator for Denham Studios…
May 16 is here and it's National Classic Movie Day. Hooray! Happily, Rick over at the Classic Film & TV Cafe is once more hosting his annual blogathon in honor of this special day. The theme this year is "6 films - 6 decades," with each participant focusing on a favorite classic from each of six decades. Selecting just a few films from hundreds of favorites is never easy so I came up with a…
Charlie Farrell, top center; Ava Gardner, bottom left; on the right, Marilyn Monroe and Spencer Tracy Many years ago, Charlie Farrell was a movie star. He first gained fame as a leading man in the late 1920s when he was in his late 20s . He'd started out in Hollywood as an extra, appearing momentarily in films like the Lon Chaney classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and Ernst Lubitsch's…
I lived in Hollywood, once upon a time, on Poinsettia between Fountain and Santa Monica Blvd., not far from Melrose. It was the early '80s and I was working at a radio station on Sunset at North Genesee, across from the Screen Actors Guild. Ed Asner was the president of the guild then and I met him one afternoon, along with most of my co-workers, when SAG hosted an open house in the space it had…
It was August 1944 and World War II was advancing toward its cataclysmic end when 20 th Century Fox launched a heavily promoted biographical spectacular, Darryl F. Zanuck’s production of Wilson. A tribute to Woodrow Wilson, 28 th president of the United States, and his vision for world peace, Wilson was the most lavishly mounted film since David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind (1939) and would go…
50 YEARS OF CHARACTER ROLES IN AMERICAN AND FRENCH CLASSICS I was watching Josef von Sternberg’s flamboyantly decadent noir The Shanghai Gesture (1941) a while ago. Taking in the dense and elaborate décor, sinister atmosphere and louche characters the maestro whipped together for this wickedly twisted cinematic excursion, I marveled that the censors had left so much intact. The setting is a…
Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Gene Tierney's birth on November 19, 1920 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Link to Pt. 1 Gene Tierney would admit that before she married Paramount costume designer Oleg Cassini, “I dated dozens of young men, had fun with all, made commitments to none.” This crush of eligible fellows ran the gamut from Howard Hughes to Desi Arnaz, but when she met…
Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Gene Tierney's birth on November 19, 1920 ~ Marlene Dietrich once said, “The relationship between the make-up man and the film actor is that of accomplices in crime.” Amusing, and probably true of some whose faces have graced the silver – or Technicolor – screen, but not Gene Tierney. One of Hollywood's foremost leading ladies of the 1940s, she was a tall,…
PRESTON STURGES SERVES UP POLITICAL SATIRE IN HIS DIRECTORIAL DEBUT There is Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby who aspired to a romantic fantasy that was his vision of the American Dream. And there is Preston Sturges’s Dan McGinty whose aspirations didn’t, at first, extend beyond the opportunities of the moment, a warm bowl of soup, a couple of quick bucks. Different as they were, both of these fictional…
THE HITCHCOCK VILLAINS This is my contribution to Maddy's 4th Annual Alfred Hitchcock blogathon, click here to learn more... In 1962, French film director/critic Francois Truffaut spent a week sequestered at Universal Studios with Alfred Hitchcock, a filmmaker he admired extravagantly. There, the two explored each of Hitchcock’s films to date in detail. Discussing Stage Fright (1950), one of his…