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Hello everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, back again to report that Ms. Norman Maine is STILL Missing. Today, we pose a REAL challenge. If you can identify the two subjects above, you will be awarded our informal child-star-sleuth-of-the-year award. (That and a token will get you on a New York subway.) Because of their limited […]
Jean Seberg at her best. Hello, everybody, Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your Classic Movie guys, here again to continue our look at the life and career of the actress who still beguiles audiences as “Patricia Franchini,” the very pretty, not-so-innocent abroad who betrays her gangster-on-the-run boyfriend (Jean-Paul Belmondo, pictured above) in Jean-Luc Godard’s1960 French classic, “Breathless.” This “new wave” gem […]
Hi, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your Classic Movies guys, here again today to introduce our two-part look at the abbreviated, sad career of Jean Seberg — the actress director Robert Rossen once described as “the all-American cheerleader who cracked up.” We were enormously assisted in today’s report by Mark Rappaport’s crisp, informative video essay […]
Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, here again with more ruminations on the entertaining world of old-fashioned Hollywood movie publicity. Sometimes the publicity back then was more entertaining than the movie, but that’s a discussion for another day. Today, we’ve invited a special guest — our longtime friend, veteran Hollywood […]
Notice what’s special about the photo above? Sure, it’s a still of Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner — all in the cast of MGM’s version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” directed in 1941 by Victor Fleming (the director of credit for “Gone With The Wind.”) But it’s a posed shot with a […]
Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, back again to field a most welcome e-mail from another reader who demurs from our dismissal of Susan Hayward. In our blog of July 14 — “Susan Hayward — Forgotten Star?” — we wrote that although Hayward was popular in the late Forties and […]
Hello, everybody, Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your Classic Movie guys, here to wind up our Sonja Henie series with a look at her World War II bond-selling activities, which in retrospect contain rich historical irony. Almost all of the top film stars of the 1940s did their bit helping the war effort. World War […]
Only 10 months after she turned professional, the world’s most famous non-Hollywood movie star was on the precipice of becoming, well, a Hollywood movie star. Sonja Henie’s amateur figure skating career — boasting of an unheard of three consecutive Olympic gold medals plus 10 consecutive world championships — had electrified the sporting world. By the […]
Yes, Sonja Henie was one of the most successful actresses in Thirtes and Forties Hollywood. But she was also a supremely gifted athlete, a pioneering figure skater whose competitive record — three consecutive Olympic gold medals […]
What name springs to mind when one thinks of Ice Skating? Sonja Henie, you say? You are right! She is to ice skating what Babe Ruth is the baseball. Synonymous. While many today don’t know what she looked like or what she accompished, they know her name. Sonja Henie (there she is, above) was not only […]