Posts tagged Bogart

« Older Entries

GABLE & Other One-Name Wonders.

Mar25
2013 1 Comment Written by classicmovieguys

He was one of the biggest stars. He was an Academy Award winner, and his days as a leading man spanned 35 years.  He died a leading man.

Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, here to discuss one of the easiest ways to determine whether an actor is or was a star.

Can he or she be identified by ONE name.

Gable, Harlow, Chaplin, Pickford, Bogart, Bardot.  Yes, of course, there might be a bit of confusion if the name is shared with another actor. Hepburn could, of course, be Audrey as well as Katherine.  And some names are just too common (think Russell, or Wayne)

But then there are other ways to mark a star with one name–think Roz or Duke.

Of course the ultimate is if BOTH first and last names can identify the star. If one says Marilyn you know they’re not referring to Miss Maxwell.  And if they say Monroe, you know they don’t mean Vaughn.

Use either Frank, Frankie or Sinatra. Say Elvis or Presley. Bing or Crosby. There’s only one Marlene and one Dietrich. One Greta and one Garbo.

What say, faithful readers, any more suggestions?

Did you like this? Share it:
Posted in Rare Photos - Tagged , , , , ,

WHO HOLDS THE TITLE?

Feb27
2013 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

 

So all the Oscar hullabaloo is over.  Have you ever wondered who has appeared in the most Oscar winning movies? Is it a mega star like Bette Davis or Humphrey Bogart?  Is it Gable or Garbo?

Hello Everybody?  Joe Morella and Frank Segers again to answer the burning question of the day.

The actor who has appeared in the most Academy Award Winning Best Pictures is none other than Franklyn Farnum.

WHO?

You probably think this man must be related to Dustin Farnum, the silent screen actor who was such a big star that people named their children after him. Think Dustin Hoffman.  But no. Franklyn Farnum was just the stage name of an actor born William Smith who segued from vaudeville to the stage to silent pictures, mostly westerns in the early days of Hollywood. He was quite successful and married to silent star Alma Rubens for a time.

Franklyn left films in 1925 to return to the stage, but then after talkies arrived he returned to movies.  Unfortunately for him his days of leading roles were over and he became a bit player. But a player who sometimes got billing, sometimes didn’t, but who worked constantly.

Since he appeared in over 430 films in his career some were bound to be big hits and indeed six of the films won best picture of the year.

Farnum is in The Life of Emile Zola, The Lost Weekend, Gentlemen’s Agreement, All About Eve, The Greatest Show on Earth, and Around the Word in Eighty Days. 

Whether by chance, because he was a favorite of top directors, or great choices on his part, his credits read like a list of classic must see films.

They include: Stagecoach, East of Eden, Sunset Boulevard, Strangers on a Train, Pillow Talk, The Bad and The Beautiful, and Garland’s A Star is Born.

But then as Bing Crosby said about having so many hits, if you record hundreds and hundreds of songs a couple of dozen are bound to click.

 

 

Did you like this? Share it:
Posted in Rare Photos - Tagged , , ,

All Four Categories Covered

Feb22
2013 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

This year for the first time in many years four actors from the same film have been nominated in all four of the acting categories for the Oscars.

From the film Silver Linings Playbook Bradley Cooper has been nominated for best actor,  Jennifer Lawrence for best actress, Robert DeNiro for best supporting actor and Jacki Weaver for best supporting actress.

Hello Everybody. MR. Joe Morella and MR. Frank Segers here again. MRS. Norman Maine is out getting her hair done for the Oscar telecast.

We’ve been talking of late of Oscar winners and losers.  Not since 1981 have all four categories of acting been represented from one movie.

This first happened in 1936 when William Powell and Carole Lombard were nominated for Oscars for My Man Godfrey and Misha Auer and Alice Brady garnered best supporting actor nominations for the same film. None of them won.

Through the years 12 more films captured nominations in all four categories. And in eleven of those years at least one of the four nominees won.

Sometimes two of the four won, as was the case with Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed, both supporting for From Here to Eternity, while Burt Lancaster, Monty Clift and Deborah Kerr were overlooked.

In two cases three of the four actually won.  That happened in 1951 when Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden and Kim Hunter won for Streetcar Named Desire. Marlon Brando lost that year to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. And again in 1976 when Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight won their Oscars for Network.  Ned Beatty lost best supporting Oscar to Jason Robards in All The President’s Men.

But NEVER, NEVER have all four actors from the same film captured all four Oscars in the acting categories.  Will this year make history? Doubtful.

Still the chances of at least one actor nominated from SilverLinings Playbook winning are quite high.  We’re not Nate Silver, but we’d guess the chance is 84%.

But we mustn’t forget that in 1936 NONE of those nominated won.  In fact My Man Godfrey was nominated in six categories and won zip.

And remember 1950 and the classic Sunset Boulevard. William Holden and Gloria Swanson were nominated for Best Actor Awards — Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olsen nominated for best supporting actor Awards.  All four lost.

 

 

 

Did you like this? Share it:
Posted in Rare Photos - Tagged , , , ,

Mary Astor — The Affairs of a Memorable Star

Oct09
2012 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

She was the bad girl for Bogie.  The villain to Bette Davis. The mother to Judy Garland. The lover to John Barrymore.  She was, in short, one of the most versatile stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Hello, everybody.  Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, here to add that in the long career of Mary Astor, the notion that infidelity has its rewards rushes to the surface.

Picture this. Astor’s second husband, one Dr. Franklin Thorpe, casually opens a dresser drawer one evening, discovers a leather-bound volume and begins to read.

“…remarkable staying power.  I don’t see how he does it….His powers of recuperation are amazing, and we made love all night long…It all worked perfectly, and we shared our fourth climax at dawn.”

Thorpe knew immediately that the “he” was not him. “It seems that George is just hard all the time…I don’t see how he does it, he is perfect.” The entry from Palm Springs went, “Ah, desert night — with George’s body plunging into mine, naked under the stars.”

The “George” here is playwright George S. Kaufman, and if you’ve ever seen a picture of him you would have to question Astor’s taste in men.  Well, she was 29 at the time, and Kaufman (then 36) was quite the man for her.

She not only refused to break off the affair (which prompted Thorpe to exit the union in 1935) but continued to write about it in intimate detail. The courtroom battles attending the final split transfixed Depression-era Hollywood.

By this time, the former Lucille Langhanke — born in 1906, the daughter of a German immigrants in Quincy, Illinois — had been making movies in Hollywood for 14 years.

She began appearing in silents, and moved on into “talkies” with 1930′s Ladies Love Brutes. It was during her silent movie period when she appeared in 1926′s Don Juan opposite John Barrymore, and decided to become the actor’s young mistress.

Also appearing in Don Juan was a young actress by the name of Hedda Hopper, who also fancied Barrymore. She, of course, much later became the powerful Hollywood columnist and adversary to sister columnist Louella Parsons.

The sensational breakup of Astor’s marriage and her affair with Kaufman actually resulted in a career boost. The actress’ best work from 1936 to the late Forties included her unforgettable turn as Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Also, she appeared in William Wyler’s Dodsworth  and played a deviously self-sacrificing mother in the Bette Davis starring vehicle, 1941′s The Great Lie, for which Astor won a best supporting actress Oscar.

As British author-critic David Thomson notes, Astor had her best chances playing polite bitches or demure snakes in the grass. Still she was superb in motherly roles in 1944′s Meet Me In St. Louis with Garland, and in 1949′s Little Women.

Astor’s fast-lane life (four husbands, various lovers, alcoholism, many visits to a psychiatrist) took its toll.  By the early Fifties, her star status had slipped to supporting part player. Her last movie was Robert Aldrich’s Hush, Hush…Sweet Charlotte in 1964 after which she exploited her talent as a fiction writer.

May Astor died 1987 at the age of 87. A memorable actress and, certainly, a most literate  mistress.

 

Did you like this? Share it:
Posted in Rare Photos - Tagged ,

The Fat Man… Sydney Greenstreet

Oct03
2012 1 Comment Written by classicmovieguys

He started his film career late in life.  He only worked in movies for a decade but his impact was enormous.

His most famous movie line:  Well, if you lose a son it is possible to get another. There is only one Maltese Falcon.

The actor who uttered them is Sydney Greenstreet, perhaps the greatest character actor in Hollywood history and perhaps one of the Hollywood’s greatest actors, period.

Born in England (Sandwich, Kent) in 1879, Greenstreet was one of eight children of a leather merchant.  At 18, he went abroad to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to try his hand at running a tea plantation. Returning to England, Greenstreet took to acting, and made his London stage debut in 1902, assaying the role of a villain in “Sherlock Homes.”

By the time he showed up on director John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon set at Warner Bros.  at the age of 61, he had logged 40 years as a stage actor on both sides of the pond. The 1941 classic was his first film. Wrote Huston, he was perfect from the word go, the Fat Man, inside out.  I had only to sit back and take delight in him and his performance.”

Greenstreet was nominated for an Academy Award in the best supporting actor category for his screen debut as “the fat man.” (Remember whom he lost to that year?)

To its credit, Warner’s knew what it had in the 300-pound-plus Greenstreet, and worked him hard over the next eight years — averaging more than two pictures per year.

The actor used size to great advantage, playing erudite spies, a sleazy tycoon, Nazi agents, a corrupt Southern sheriff, among other juicy roles. He always executed his parts with panache along with a delicious appreciation of evil that often outshone the histrionics of the top-billed star.

In “Casablanca,” Greenstreet made an indelible cameo appearance as Humphrey Bogart’s genial rival, a seen-it-all cabaret owner who languorously swats flies for amusement. In 1942’s “Across the Pacific,” also from Warners and also starring Bogart, Greenstreet found himself portraying a Japanese-speaking academic, a specialist in Philippine economics who holds “the chair of sociology at the university there.”

The general plot line of “Across the Pacific” had the Japanese secretly planning to pull off a Pearl Harbor-style attack on the Panama Canal. Greenstreet’s character was no academic, of course, but a master spy bent on violently undermining Bogey. The picture was directed for the most part by Huston, who bowed out before the film was completed in order to begin military service.  The studio commissioned Vincent Sherman to step in and shoot the ending.

As the cigar-puffing bon vivant, Greenstreet tosses off with great aplomb such politically incorrect lines as “Japanese make great servants… wonderful little people,” and “the Oriental life holds great appeal for me.”

In 1943’s “Backround to Danger,” director Raoul Walsh’s treatment of a spy thriller from the reliable Eric Ambler, the mustache-sporting Greenstreet has to cope with star George Raft and a daffy plot about Nazis supposedly enticing the then USSR to invade Turkey in order to destabilize the region. Greenstreet oozes evil in the role of “Colonel Robinson,” another Nazi mastermind in disguise. It’s all great fun abetted by the appearance of Peter Lorre.

Greenstreet and Lorre appeared together in at least four other films, the best of which probably is 1944’s The Mask of Dimitrios, directed by Jean Negulesco and also based on an Ambler novel.  The pair delivered entertaining performances in Negulesco’s 1946 mystery Three Strangers, also starring  Geraldine Fitzgerald. As in The Maltese Falcon, Greenstreet’s character finds himself within inches of realizing a fortune that slips from his reach.

As the corrupt sheriff and tyrannical town boss in his penultimate picture –1949’s Flamingo Road, the Joan Crawford melodrama directed by Michael Curtiz – Greenstreet consumes several servings of pie washed down with milk by the pitcher, gets slapped twice by Crawford and defuses adversaries with such lines as “you know how I’ve always been, just an easy-going, friendly fat old man.”

The fat man’s last screen performance as a character called simply “the Dutchman” was in MGM’s 1949 title “Malaya,” Richard Thorpe’s adventure outing about pirating rubber from the Japanese. Greenstreet was in good company. The stars were Spencer Tracy and James Stewart.

Greenstreet died in 1954, at the age of 74, felled by kidney disease and diabetes among other ailments.  His career was short and vastly fruitful. As long as there are those of use who prize classic movies, he will never be forgotten.

Did you like this? Share it:
Posted in Rare Photos - Tagged , , ,

AN UNCORKING GOOD TIME — Name Our Partying Mystery Subjects!

Sep24
2012 1 Comment Written by classicmovieguys

Hello, everybody.  Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, here to start the week with another mystery photo challenge.

Last week’s two couples were, no doubt, easily recognizable by most movie fans. And, we’re sure that two of the three teenagers pictured above will also be identified by MOST of our readers.

But the trick is to identify the one on the left. She’s almost forgotten today, but in the 1930s was as big a child star as the other two.

Ok, we are nice guys, so here are some clues:

– Our Chicago-born mystery lass came from a theatrical family, and started acting in movies at the age of nine.

– Her specialty for a while was playing obnoxious girls.  She was nominated for a best actress Oscar in 1937 for her role as a little nasty who says unpleasant things about her teachers.

– She appeared in some of Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy pictures at Metro, and gained notoriety for her portrayal of a detective/reporter named Nancy.

– She retired from acting in the early Fifties, and worked behind the cameras as the producer of a tv series about one of America’s most famous canines.

OK, take your best guess. Bonne chance. (Answers tomorrow.)

Now about the classic couples in last Monday’s photo.  They had it all:  Bogie and Bacall. Their romance first set off fireworks off and on the screen in 1944 when they costarred in director Howard Hawks’ To Have And To Have Not.

He was in his mid-Forties, she was a mere 20. As is obvious with even a casual viewing of the movie, they fell head over heels instantly.

Bacall’s cautious mother was hesitant because of Bogart’s age and the fact that he was already married — to third wife, Mayo Methot, an unusually self-centered actress known to throw plates in restaurants if the attention drifted from her direction.

I can only marvel at Bogie’s putting up with her for as long as he did, wrote the actor’s longtime pal, director John Huston. The marriage last seven years, until 1945.  Eleven days after the divorce, Humphrey and Lauren were married.  They stayed that way until his death in 1957.

The couple in the other photo are, of course, Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford, the costars most famously of the 1946 noir classic, Gilda.

Ford married four wives over the course of his life including his first, actress-dancer Eleanor Powell.  Rita married five husbands, one of which was Orson Welles. Although they never married, Rita and Glenn certainly look like they were having lots of off-camera fun with one another.

Did you like this? Share it:
Posted in Rare Photos - Tagged , ,

WHO WAS BOX OFFICE in 1945? — Arturo de Cordova? Really?

Nov02
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Joe Morella and Frank Segers

Hi, everybody.  Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, back again and STILL searching for Mrs. Norman Maine.  (You didn’t happen to run across her at the local supermarket, did you?)

Yesterday we wrote about the “stars” mentioned in the editorial pages of The New York Times one day in the mid Forties, specifically Aug. 7, 1945.  Now, we ask, what about the movies themselves? Wouldn’t the adverts for the films of that day give us a better understanding of star power?

Well, we thought so!

OK, on with our research: we asked, which ads featured the stars’ names above the title?

We found a  few surprises here.  But first the obvious.  Tracy and Hepburn. Gregory Peck and Greer Garson. Danny Kaye, Van Johnson, Barbara Stanwyck and Dennis Morgan,  John Wayne. Humphrey Bogart. Gary Cooper and Loretta Young.

But a closer reading of the ads showed that the most popular star of that summer day in 1945 was — drumroll, please — Fred MacMurray.

He had three films in release: Practically Yours, an inane Norman Krasna comedy for Paramount that costarred Claudette Colbert and included Robert Benchley in a supporting role.

Then there was Where Do We Go From Here?, a musical fantasy about a 4F Joe pining to serve in the military. It was made for Fox (and playing at the Roxy) by director Gregory Ratoff, with the alluring Joan Leslie in a supporting part. The picture is today regarded as a quiet gem buried within the Fox vault.

And movie No. 3, Captain Eddie, the biopic costarring Charles Bickford and Lynn Bari of war hero Eddie Rickenbauer. (MacMurray’s long and prolific career spanned nearly 100 films, tv movies and tube series, notably My Three Sons.)

Another “star” of the era, billed above the title in the day’s ads was Arturo deCordova.

You ask, Arturo who?

Born Arturo Garcia Rodriguez in Mexico City, he became a big action star in Mexico before getting the summons to Hollywood to play Latin Lover roles. If you think of him as a low-rent Fernando Lamas, you wouldn’t be far off.

Anyway, de Cardova costarred with Betty Hutton in Incendiary Blond, a musical biopic of entertainer Texas Guinan, with a solid supporting cast including Charles Ruggles and Barry Fitzgerald. And, opposite Joan Fontaine in Frenchman’s Creek, he played a lusty French pirate to her proper British lady letting loose.

Note how the above photo of Arturo embracing Fontaine nicely conveys the sexual innuendo of the film itself.  deCordova appears dowright lecherous in this shot, and while Joan’s face has an angelic expression, her shoulder sweat implies other things.

The important point here is that Arturo was featured above the title with his leading ladies in ads for those two films, a longtime definition of star power. (Almost forgotten today, de Cordova had quite a career in the mid-40s Hollywood, and after he returned to Mexico, became a big star in South America and Spain.)

Like today, actors weren’t the only “names” used to woo people into the theaters. Certain producers and directors were known to the public and highlighted in film advertising.  In the summer of 1945 moviegoers were invited to see Darryl F. Zanuck’s Wilson, Walt Disney’s animation classic Snow White, and Preston Sturges’ The Great Moment.

It’s fun and informative to read old newspapers. If one relies on books to learn history one has to trust the authors’ objectivity and integrity. If one reads accounts of the day for himself he sees what was happening at the time.

So just who were the biggest movie stars of 1945?

 

Did you like this? Share it:
Posted in Rare Photos - Tagged , , , , ,

Can We Stump You? Our Twitter Tweethearts.

Aug29
2011 2 Comments Written by classicmovieguys

Here’s another movie star from the 1940′s.  Who is she?

Well, perhaps she wasn’t a full fledged star, but she was in dozens of films, some very famous ones such as director Nicholas Ray’s 1950 movie,“In a Lonely Place,” which many consider one of Humphrey Bogart’s best late-career outings (he died seven years after the picture was made).

Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, back again with another photo taken from The Donald Gordon Collection.

Donald is the guy on the left, hands intertwined with our mystery star.  Seems he never let a chance slip by to become chummy with an an attractive actress.

Today we also want to salute and warmly welcome those of you who follow us on Twitter (and those we follow). You’ve got some great comments.

Bobby Rivers, for example, notes that although Rita Moreno has won all those acting awards she has never been interviewed on “Inside the Actor’s Studio” while Jennifer Aniston HAS. Is there no justice in the world?

Others have made suggestions about who of their favorite stars they’d like to see profiled on our blog.  We’ll do our our very best to accomodate all requests.

And, please remember — our twitter moniker is MOVIE CHAT GUYS.  Come on and chat with us.

But for now back to our mystery gal pictured above.

Although she worked at all the major studios, she was under contract at Columbia where she met and started a warm friendship with our man Donald.  He has many shots of her in his collection.

Can you identify her?

OK, since we’re such nice guys, we’ll provide a few hints:

– Although usually cast as the wholesome looking supporting actresses, our mystery gal had a complicated personal life.  (She married and divorced four husbands.)

– Although born as Jean Marie, our mystery gal was professionally billed with a male first name.

– Seven years after making “In A Lonely Place,” our mystery star had a small but meaty part in one of the most memorably hard boiled urban dramas ever filmed.

– On tv in the Sixties, she was mostly maternal to someone by the name of Gidget.

– Also on tv, she worked with an assortment of big names including Jimmy Stewart and Bob Newhart, and appeared in a mid-to-late Fifties series starring George Gobel, a comedian more or less forgotten today.

Now can you name our mystery gal?

 

Did you like this? Share it:
Posted in Never Before Seen Photos - Tagged , , , ,

Louella? Hedda? Who do you read?

May04
2011 1 Comment Written by classicmovieguys

 

Hello everybody.  Morella and Segers here again.  Remembering.

We old-timers remember the days when newspapers ran a half dozen entertainment  columns  about movies, theatre, and all other aspects of show business. If Louella– Parsons that is– or Hedda — Hopper, of course,   don’t ring a bell with you,  how about         Rona Barrett?    Or Rex Reed?    Or Liz Smith?   Or do you remember Ed Sullivan (yes, he was a columnist before he  was a TV host) or Walter Winchell? Dorothy Kilgallen ?

Show Business Columnists specialized in covering Hollywood, or Broadway, or sometimes a particular city (think Irv Kupcinet in Chicago, Herb Caen in San Francisco.)  The point is that you could pick up your morning paper and leisurely read about celebrities and show business doings while having your first cup of Joe. –By the way, the slang for coffee comes from one of the earliest popular brands,  Joseph Mortensen’s– which is the sort of tidbit you’d hear about in a “column.”

Somehow sports, advice and etiquette columns seemed to have survived, but  for the most part  entertainment”columns” are a thing of the past.  People get their news and gossip from TV.  Don’t know about you but we miss the old time columns.  And one of our goals with this blog is to try to give our readers a daily fix.  A little news, maybe a bit of gossip, some remeniscing, and a photo to remind you of the old days.

Thinking of those answers to the Bogart Quiz?

YESTERDAY’S PIC:  Alan Ladd and Brandon deWilde in “Shane.”  deWilde was one of the few child actors to make the transition to adult roles.  He’s excellent as Warren Beatty’s brother in “All Fall Down.” He died, tragically, too young.

Did you like this? Share it:
Posted in Rare Photos - Tagged , , , , , ,

BOGART and LOLLO and JENNIFER JONES

Apr08
2011 1 Comment Written by classicmovieguys


Hello Everybody.   Joe Morella and Frank Segers here once again

Let’s start with this question:

How can you resist a picture that (1) began production a week late, awaiting the arrival of the leading man’s false teeth; that (2) featured a principal character whose surname sounds suspiciously like “Dan Rather”; that (3) was directed by a distinguished veteran who literally fell off a cliff, martini in hand; and that (4) costarred Gina Lollobrigida speaking mangled English?

Before we reveal the title of this movie, it should be said Joe and Frank have differences about its merit.  Joe regards it more or less as an amusing trifle, once seen and that’s it.  Frank has enjoyed watching the movie again, and again and cannot get enough.  That pretty much defines the split reaction to “Beat the Devil” since it first came out in 1954.

If you haven’t seen it, please do yourself the favor. It’s on DVD, although the visual quality of the copy we have leaves a bit to be desired. Turner Classic Movies runs it occasionally although we suspect it is not one of host Robert Osborne’s favorites.  He describes as a mixture of film noir and comedy without making up its mind which genre it really occupies.

Fair enough.  But look what “Beat the Devil” has going for it.  A cast headed by Humphrey Bogart (who also coproduced the picture, meaning he put his own money into it).  There’s Ms. Lollo in full flower as Bogie’s wife. (She is the one who enunciates her husband’s surname, Dannreuther, as “Dan Rather.”)

There is also a terrific supporting cast including Robert Morley, Peter Lorre , Edward Underdown, Ivor Barnard and Bernard Lee.  It was directed by the John Huston, who, of course, cut his professional teeth along with Bogie and Lorre in the 1941 classic, “The Maltese Falcon.” The two stars appear older if not wiser in “Beat The Devil.” (And it was Huston who took a tumble with martini glass in tow down a steep 40-foot embankment; he swore he emerged unhurt.)

“Beat the Devil” was shot on location in Ravello, a steeply banked mountaintop village behind Sorrento on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. Much of the movie was shot in a grand villa that was once Greta Garbo’s romantic hideaway. An added advantage of the gorgeous Italy locale is the presence in the cast of several fine Italian actors including Marco Tulli, Mario Perrone and Saro Urzi, as a loud-mouthed, drunken ship’s captain.

But “Beat the Devil”s real surprise is the wondrous presence of Jennifer Jones as quirky, blunt-speaking British wife. The surprise, at least for some of us, is that  Jones was quite the sexpot, every bit the Lollobrigida’s physical rival. She comes across as a feisty sparkplug. No languorous romanticism here.

Jones was about 35 when she made “Beat the Devil,” and her lithe, athletic figure is fully on display in several scenes. Enough said that she looked great in a bathing suit.  Lollobrigida appears almost matronly by comparison.

At the time the movie was made, Jones was married to mogul David Selznick.  Although he had nothing whatsoever to do with the picture’s production, Selznick felt he had plenty to protect in how his much younger wife was handled.

As Huston recounts in his most entertaining 1980 memoir, “An Open Book,” Selznick would dispatch multi-page cables to the set providing his unsolicited opinions on how his wife should be directed and photographed.

“One day, after receiving a particularly long cable from David, “ recalled Huston, “I sent him a cable back. Page one answered various points he had made. I then omitted page two and jumped to page three. From then on I answered anything he asked me by replying: ‘Refer page two my cable X date.’ I understand this drove him right up the wall.  It was rough on the cable company, too, because David was out to find that missing page.  You might say that Page Two was Gone With The Wind.”

The script for “Beat the Devil” was a last-minute affair, literally composed on the set before and during shooting. The movie is based on a novel by one “James Helvick,” the nom de plume of a British newspaperman and Huston pal, Claude Cockburn.

Huston turned to a 29-year-old Truman Capote to help out after an earlier screen treatment was junked. One night, undoubtedly after the liquor flowed, Bogart and Capote got into an arm wrestling contest that turned into a genuine wrestling match. Tempers got the better of both men.

“Beat the Devil”s plot is difficult to summarize coherently but it has to do with the search for supposed uranium deposit in East Africa by a motley international crew stuck on a dilapidated Italian cargo ship.  In one scene, an Arab chieftain (holding stranded passengers captive) poses this question to the film’s world-weary narrator-protagonist, Bogie: “Now tell me, do you really know Rita Hayworth?”

Bogart and the rest handle such lines and situations with great aplomb.  The performances overall, as mentioned, are most enjoyable.  And, oh yes, by the time he made this picture, Bogie was sporting dentures.

Huston remembered that he and Bogie were provided by an Italian co-producer a Mercedes to make the trip from Rome to Naples on their way to the film location.  The problem was the chauffeur provided was less than reliable.

Somewhere around Monte Cassino, the Mercedes went flying into a stone wall and into a ditch.  No one was seriously hurt but Bogie’s false front teeth were knocked out. A new bridge was promptly ordered sent over from his dentist in California.  “Waiting for Bogie’s teeth delayed things for a week or so and gave Truman and me a chance to work on the script,” Huston wrote.

“Beat the Devil” was not well received when it first came out. It was, Huston felt, “ahead of its time. A few critics hailed it as a masterpiece… but they were all European.  There was not an American among them.”

Despite its early reception, the picture has developed an enthusiastic audience over time. “’Beat the Devil’ has done well over the years,” concluded Huston. “I only wish Bogie could have been around to see this happen.”

It was the last picture Huston and Bogart did together.  (Bogart died three years after “Beat the Devil” was released, of cancer; he was 58.)

Yesterday’s Pic:

That man in the center of yesterday’s photo is, of course, Humphrey Bogart, in a studio publicity shot with the Dead End Kids.

From 1937 to 1940, Bogie starred in nearly 25 films, one of which was the Broadway hit “Dead End” by Sidney Kingsley.  The film version was scripted by Lillian Hellman and directed by William Wyler. (Bogie was loaned out by Warner Bros. to the Goldwyn studio for the picture, a deal that netted Bogart no extra salary but made WB richer by nearly $7,000, a lot of money in those days.)

 

Did you like this? Share it:
Posted in Rare Photos - Tagged , , , ,
« Older Entries