You are browsing archives for
We are not in the tour guide business although Frank thinks the much-traveled Joe would make an excellent one. But with summer approaching and visits to Paris in the offing (lucky stiffs!), we thought you might find it instructive to catalog exactly where French director Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal “nouvelle vague” (New Wave) gem Breathless was actually photographed 56 years […]
She was a looker, a Midwestern innocent from Marshalltown, Iowa who somehow, at age 17, managed to best some 18,000 hopefuls and snare the role of Joan of Arc in director Otto Preminger’s 1957 biopic, Saint Joan. But Jean Seberg is at her best in her fourth movie, as “Patricia Franchini,” the very pretty, not-so-innocent […]
He directed some of the great classic films of the Golden Era. How much do you know about ‘Wild Bill’ Wellman? Here he is captured above as a young man surrounded by two of his longtime passions, creatures of the wild and combat airplanes. Wellman smoothing integrated these passions in a lengthy film career ranking him […]
The man pictured above was one of the most famous, and most prolific directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age — William (Wild Bill) Wellman. If any classic Hollywood personality comes close to matching the macho image of he-man Ernest Hemingway, it is this guy. Last week, we ran a blog (‘A Walk In The Sun’ — […]
She is a survivor. She started as a teenage beauty queen in the early Fifties, and she’s still with us. She’s been in musicals (perhaps the best musical ever made), comedies, dramas, westerns, and embodies the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim’s song, “I’m still here.” She has survived at least one lousy husband, a famously rebellious daughter […]
A WALK IN THE SUN – IS IT THE BEST MOVIE TO COME OUT OF WW II? We wonder if it IS the best. What do you think? And by the way, which is your personal favorite WW II movie? First, a few words from Michael Caine (a dogface who fought in the Korean War): […]
Take a good long look at the photo today. You may not know it but you are peering at a pair of “million dollar legs.” They belonged to one Elizabeth Ruth Grable, born in St. Louis in 1916. No kidding. That’s what Betty Grable’s gams were said to be worth to her employer, Twentieth Century-Fox, […]
Just how much did you really know about the silent Marx brother? Our man Harpo was a first class clown-mimic who made the most out of being the unspeaking member of the Marx Brothers troupe. Younger brother Groucho is the most famous member, of course. But we believe Harpo may well have been the funniest. […]
Yes, he’s so famous he’s known by one name. Adolph Marx, the second oldest of the Marx family’s five surviving sons, was easily the zaniest and perhaps most creative of The Marx Brothers, and that’s saying quite a bit. An silent anarchist in spirit, he believed that mayhem when thing go wrong was wholly salutary […]
Regular reader and commentator Jeff Woodman sent in this anecdote about Christopher Plummer. During the Broadway run of “Barrymore,” as Plummer was exiting the theater accompanied by his friend, British comedian Peter Cook, he was accosted by an overly enthusiastic fan wielding a dozen Playbills from Plummer’s past shows. The fan asked Plummer to sign them […]