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Has there ever been a sexier Hollywood star than today’s subject, Brooklyn born Mary Jane West? Sure Mae West, as she became to be known, had been around the block a few times by 1932 when she arrived in Hollywood. Fortyish, full figured and a fully-formed show biz veteran, she never quite fit the Hollywood prototype […]
We’ll start off today by noting that the 1941 classic pictured above had nothing to do with today’s subject, novelist/screenwriter Raymond Chandler. The Maltese Falcon was based upon a novel by Chandler’s compatriot in crime fiction, Dashiell Hammett. The central character, Sam Spade, a hardnosed, San Francisco-based gumshoe, is played Humphrey Bogart. Bogart also introduces […]
Who exactly was the third man? Not Joseph Cotten, he was looking for the third man. You may not know this but British director Carol Reed’s 1949 classic The Third Man was meant to end happily. At least that’s what the producers wanted. Reed had another idea, and thus a bit of film history was made. […]
There’s our couple in happier days. John Ireland married his second wife, actress Joanne Dru, in the summer of 1949, and they became one of Hollywood’s more interesting onscreen couples. They had appeared together in several big pictures — 1948’s Red River, and 1949’s She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and All The King’s Men –– […]
He played mostly heavies. But he also had great range. Over a long career — beginning in the mid-Forties and covering more than 200 bigscreen and tv credits over a nearly 50-year span (he died in 1992) — John Ireland played everything from a ruminative World War II G.I. to a costumed army captain witnessing the immolation […]
They are left to right: Leo Gorcey as Spit, Gabe Dell as T.B., Bobby Jordan as Angel, Bernard Punsly (he’s the least known) as Milty, Billy Halop as Tommy, and Huntz Hall as Dippy. In later incarnations, and with different character names they were The Little Tough Guys, the East Side Kids, and The Bowery […]
Actors, that is. Last week’s discussion about Rock Hudson got us to thinking about the three great films he made with Doris Day and how all of them were peppered with great character actresses and actors. Pillow Talk featured such pros as Lee Patrick, Marcel Dalio, Mary McCarty, Don Beddoe, Hayden Rorke, and, of course, […]
Classic movies were hard to view in the age before videos and DVDs. Where the hell were you going to see a classic film unless some studio re-released it? The answer was to find someone who had a 16mm print of a movie classic, even though back then to possess an “unauthorized” print of a […]
She had a knack for marrying famous husbands. There’s her second (above, John Ireland) with whom our winsome Quiz subject (pictured in full makeup) costarred in Howard Hawks’ super 1948 western, Red River. Our Quiz subject, of course, is Joanne Dru, whose first marriage spanning most of the Forties was to someone even more […]
The former Joanne LaCock, the belle of Logan, West Virginia, started out as a model in New York in 1940, appeared as a showgirl in an Al Jolson Broadway show, married in 1941 (when she was all of 19) one of her two famous husbands and then migrated with him to Hollywood. It took a bit […]