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For some reason Tony Curtis is regarded today as something of a lesser light relative to his Hollywood post-World War II peers despite his nearly 60-year career covering nearly 130 movie and tv credits. He shouldn’t be. Born in the Bronx (ne Bernard Schwartz) of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, he had a horrendous childhood — spending time in […]
We pride ourselves on the quality of our readership — sassy, knowledgeable and invariably intelligent. Thus, the latest examples from our reader e-mail bag: Betty Corp takes us to task because we introduced our Jan. 20 blog (JOHN GILBERT — Shouldda Never Have Talked?) by stating that few would mourn the death of the silent […]
Famed director Stanley Kramer‘s first film, 1955’s Not as a Stranger, was an adaptation of a very successful potboiler of a novel of the same name by Morton Thomas. And it’s often cited as the worst film ever made with the best cast. It’s a romantic melodrama and, like the novel, it was tremendously popular. It […]
How much did you know about one of the screen’s toughest bad guys? Lawrence Tierney was one of film noir’s most volatile actors who excelled at the rough stuff onscreen and off. Throughout his checkered but lengthy career (comprising some 100 titles), he was often known more for the latter than the former. We remember him […]
(He) was a big lug, broad-shouldered and handsome. But his eyes narrowed into slits when he started thinking. And his thin-lipped grin was one of the most purely rapacious sights on film … He was the only actor in Hollywood who posed for more mug shots than publicity photos. — Eddie Muller, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. In short, […]
Did anyone in the mid-1940’s look better onscreen in a suit and fedora? Anyone more sartorially splendid? Was any actor more handsome? More terse? Alan Ladd once said of himself that he had the face of an aging choirboy. Whatever, by the early-to-mid 1940’s he was at the height of his reign as Paramount Pictures’ […]
MARLON BRANDO – THE HUNK Take a close look at the above Marlon Brando beefcake from Joe’s extensive photo collection. The picture was taken, we suspect, in the actor’s stage years in the late 1940’s, probably around the time that he starred in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. This was before he […]
John Gilbert died 80 years ago this month (Jan. 9, 1936, to be exact), and we suspect few are in mourning. Nothing against Gilbert, mind you, who was a hugely popular workhorse during the silent film era of the 1920s. As a recent article by critic David Mermelstein in The Wall Street Journal points out, […]
Cary Grant described her as the “sweetest-smelling actress” he’d ever worked with. Orson Welles was less kind (see below). But in either case our Monday Quiz subject — Irene Dunne — was a formidable figure for decades at the Hollywood box office. She was thought of as the essence of refined ladyhood, but she also […]
“She had gumption!” Or, at least all of the characters she portrayed in films in the 1930s and 40s did. Irene Dunne was a different kind of leading lady (and lady is the operative word here). She was a triple threat. She could do comedy, drama and she sang well too. She starred in weepies, […]