You are browsing archives for
Every once in a while we like to revisit some notable classic movie titles. Today’s choice is 1954’s The Barefoot Contessa, written and director by Joseph Mankiewicz and costarring Ava Garner and Humphrey Bogart. The movie is really a down-home show biz story wrapped up in Hollywood’s then fascination with Europe. Bogie — just three […]
She has been viewed as “the fallen Queen” of film noir, whose screwball — she was once up for Judy Holliday’s role in 1950’s Born Yesterday — seductive screen presence belied her British and Scottish royal family heritage. MGM’s Louis B. Mayer changed her name from Gloria Hallward, and once saw in her the aristocratic […]
We’ve published blogs and have run a number of Monday Quizzes devoted to what we see as the Queens of Film Noir, notably including Marie Windsor, Audrey Totter, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Greer, Gene Tierney, Coleen Gray, Veronica Lake and Jean Gillie. But for some dumb reason we have not focused on perhaps the Queen of […]
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, […]