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An unusual Monday Quiz today. Instead of answering specific questions about each of these three chaps, we want to know: (a) just who are these people; (b) who is their (in two cases) more famous sibling; …and (c) the title of least one of the films most often associated with the more celebrated frere. As […]
What an actor. He could read the phone book on screen and enchant an audience. He also is a stand-up guy. Consider the following: We are probably all too familiar with that annoying personality trait that compels some insecure types to flatter the powerful — those above them in status — while at the same […]
People often forget that actors who achieved fame on early television were once movie stars. Think Lucille Ball. Yes, Barbara Hale was an above the title star who worked opposite people like James Stewart, Frank Sinatra, Robert Young and Charlton Heston. Yet most people only remember her portraying legal secretary Della Street opposite Raymond Burr in […]
Who could forget her? She was one of classic Hollywood’s best comedienne/actresses, loud, disruptive, wise-cracking and thoroughly ingratiating. And typical for talented supporting player of the period, she had a very long career covering nearly 150 movie and tv credits over a 63-year span. Born Mary Isabella Wickenhauser in St, Louis in 1910, she was […]
There’s our man, Kent Smith, introducing himself to French actress Simone Simon at the beginning of the superbly made, Cat People, a 1942 horror feature from RKO producer Val Lewton, who churned out a series of low-budget features — in effect, making a cinematic silk purse out of sow’s ear in each case. (That’s Lewton […]
He is undoubtedly one of the most anonymously competent leading men of Hollywood’s classic period. His career lasted for more than 40 years, and covered well over a hundred movie and tv credits. Yet even classic film fans today have difficulty tying the name to the blandly handsome face (see above in a 1943 studio […]
Yes, he was a crooner, Yes, he was a radio star, a BIG radio star. Yes, he sold millions of records. And, yes, he made movies in the early sound era. But as a character actor in the 1940s Hubert Prior “Rudy” Vallee really hit his stride in pictures. Comedy such as 1942’s like The […]
Why watch The Longest Day or Saving Private Ryan? Watch this great comedy/drama from 1964 instead. Paddy Chayefsky wrote the screenplay. It’s based on a novel of the same title but Chayefsky rewrote the entire thing. What does D-Day have to do with it all? Well, we won’t spoil it for you. See the film. […]
Often thought of as just the wife (and sometime co-star) of Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester had quite a career of her own. After all, the former Elsa Sullivan Lanchester — born in London in 1902 to devout Socialist parents who did not believe in the institution of marriage — rolled up nearly 100 movie and […]
Here’s our man in the mid-1940’s squiring the actress who would become in the summer of 1946 his one — and only — wife. (Dig that fur coat she’s sporting.) Yup, that’s Anne Baxter, Hodiak’s costar in Sunday Dinner For A Soldier made in 1944, a big year for the actor. His legacy film, Lifeboat, came […]