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Who? Ella Raines… You know, the bright Hollywood actress who graced the cover of the Feb. 28, 1944 issue of Life magazine — the first of two times she made the cover of the that top-of-the-publicity mountain at the time. Ok, ok, you don’t remember her. Can’t blame you. Her career was short — less […]
Louella was short, dumpy and unattractive, a three-times married Catholic who delivered innumerable Hollywood “excloooseeves” (as she pronounced it) for the Hearst publishing empire and its Los Angeles Examiner flagship. Orson Welles was her bete noir. Hedda, an ex chorus girl and character actress, was better looking — tall and thin, and elegant of appearance who barked out questions like […]
That’s right. They made B musicals as well as B westerns, crime stories and melodrama. And, in the 1940’s many westerns and light musicals featured the woman pictured above — Jane Frazee, the toast of Ramsey, Minnesota who early on carved out a nice niche with older sister Ruth on radio variety shows and in […]
Above are two looks at Kevin McCarthy in perhaps his most enduring role — that of a benign physician battling an invasion of demonic pods which reduce human beings into emotionless and distinctly malevolent imposters. The picture, of course, is Don Siegel’s 1956 sci-fi thriller, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Critics have read all […]
We are talking of Kevin McCarthy here. No, not the California politician! The McCarthy of our Quiz is pictured above in the early phase of an amazingly long career comprising more than 200 movie and tv credits over a nearly 70-year period, from 1944 to 2012. Handsome, chisel-jawed, well spoken, McCarthy, who died in 2010 […]
One of the quintessential film noirs. And, as is often the case with classic studio films, it was the product of intense internecine conflict. 20th Century Fox head Darryl Zanuck harbored an intense dislike for director Otto Preminger (fancy that!), who was under contract to the studio. To fulfill contractual obligations and then show Preminger […]
Were there any other Asian leading ladies before 1960? Just asking. We are familiar with Asian players of both sexes in Hollywood from the Twenties onward: Sessue Hayakawa and his hedonistic actress/wife Tsuru Aoki. Less notable is Keye Luke, who played Charlie Chan’s No. 1 son (Chan himself was played by a bevy of non-Asians notably Warner […]
The great body of work left by Paul Newman will cement his place in Hollywood history of the second half of the 20th century. He made so many terrific features and worked with so many of Hollywood’s finest directors that it’s hard — nay, impossible? — to definitively say which one is his best. But […]
There they are. Is further identification necessary? The movie is 1957’s Hellcats of the Navy, a World War II submarine drama from Columbia Pictures, and is the only movie that Nancy Davis ever made costarring her more famous husband. The marriage, by the way, was five years old at the filming. Our Nancy Davis Quiz […]
Last week we wrote about Helen Hayes, who for much of her working life was known as the First Lady of the American Theater. On Jan. 20, 1981, nearly 30 years after she married Ronald Reagan, the former Nancy Davis became — literally — America’s First Lady. Lost in the mists of time is the […]