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It’s always fun when one discovers an old movie and it turns out to be really GOOD. That was Joe’s experience with the 1946 thriller Shock, which stars Vincent Price and Lynn Bari. The film also stars Anabel Shaw (pictured above with Price) and Frank Latimore. Shaw only made a handful of films but she’s […]
John Ford officially triumphed in several screen genres but not for his many westerns. He won an Academy Award four times but never for a western. His ageless classic Stagecoach was nominated in the 1940 sweepstakes but something titled Gone With The Wind got in the way. So much for such now lionized Ford oaters — […]
That man above, pictured departing a Brown Derby restaurant, is Sydney Greenstreet, perhaps the greatest character actor in Hollywood history and, Frank argues in this blog, one of the Hollywood’s greatest actors, period. (How many of you out there agree?) Greenstreet was born in England (Sandwich, Kent) in 1879, one of eight children of a […]
From the 30s to the 50s she lit up the screen. But how much did you really know about her? Not covered in yesterday’s Monday Quiz is this telling factoid — Claudette Colbert felt her left side photographed best, and only reluctantly permitted full face or right-profile shots. Whatever this says about her (she claimed […]
She was one of the biggest stars of the Golden Era. From DeMille classics to screwball comedy…. She starred in pre code films as well…. And, take a look at them eyes! Has such a saucy, playful expression ever been better projected by any other major screen star of the Thirties and Forties? We are […]
If ever there was a major star of the 40s and 50s who has almost totally faded from memory it is the beautiful actress, Coleen Gray. She started off as the girl next door type, but Gray soon joined the ranks of the strong and spicy women who peopled the dark circles of Film Noir. She […]
Another A Star is Born ?? Apparently Hollywood can’t get enough of this subject matter. One star going up, one star declining. This time around the stars are Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. Cooper also directs. The first version was 1937 starring Fredric March and Janet Gaynor. Supposedly, that was a rewrite of What Price Hollywood, […]
Perhaps they just don’t make — or won’t allow — actresses like Iris Adrian anymore. One of the marvels of Hollywood’s classic movie period is its plentiful supply of supporting actors and actresses, who collectively propped up stars on bad movie days and inspired them on the good. One of these was certainly Adrian. Ok, the […]
How much did you know about early Charles Bronson? Let’s find out by getting to our Bronson Quiz answers. Here we go: 1) Question: It seemed that Bronson’s specialty early in his career was playing young, aspiring gangsters. He succeeds nicely in this 1953 film noir directed by Andre DeToth and starring Sterling Hayden as a […]
He started out a character actor and became a star, one of the biggest international topliners of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. Bronson, born Charles Buchinsky, the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner in 1921, was a well-chiselled, taciturn tough guy who began his 50-year-plus — yes, more than a half century — career during Hollywood’s late […]