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You might not remember him, or the few films he made in the 1940s, but William Marshall had some life! He first married Michele Morgan. His second wife was another French beauty, Michelline Presle. His last was the distinctly American Ginger Rogers. MAKING GOOD ON FRED CLARK — We belatedly realized that we did not […]
Vera Hruba Ralston. An unlikely star. Yes, that’s she pictured above with the Duke, not one of her biggest fans. Ralston was a Czech-born figure skater who’d made her way to Hollywood and after a film or two became the girl friend of Herbert J. Yates, the chief honcho of Republic Pictures. (See our Quiz blogs for […]
How much did you know about Republic and Herbert Yates? That stern looking gent pictured above is Yates himself, who glued together Republic Pictures in 1935. He was a tough, visionary businessman but a hopeless romantic personally. Yates is now perhaps best known for being the longtime paramour of Vera Ralston, a Czech-born actress import […]
Of all the second string studios, it was the most interesting. That’s largely because it was an amalgam of six independent, poverty row production companies, one of which had John Wayne under contract. Wayne made eight films under the Republic banner, and he learned at the studio how to make movies firsthand. He remains its […]
Yes, a few. No doubt she is best remembered today for being the older sister of Audrey, who famously played Jackie Gleason’s brassy, no-nonsense wife, Alice Kramden, in the 1950’s tv sitcom The Honeymooners. Or perhaps by her later career as a tv personality and her 46-year marriage to her second husband, tv talk show […]
In 1944 when a film co-starred Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly, one would think the moviegoer had a right to expect light musical fare — especially with Christmas in the title. But this film with a script by Herman J. Mankiewicz based on a novel by Somerset Maugham, is a film noir directed by Robert Siodmak. When Joe first saw the film he […]
Today a director might be able to get away with real bumps and grinds while filming a movie about burlesque queens, but in Hollywood’s hay day (with censorship) a director had to be damned clever. Just who are these two women pictured above, anyway? (Read on!) One of Joe’s favorite films is the 1943 feature, […]
How much did you know about the screen’s perfect fall guy? Writes Eddie Muller in Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (1998, St. Martin’s Press), Elisha Cook Jr. was noir’s favorite fall guy…savagely slapped, brutally beaten and mercilessly murdered dozens more times in a career that seemed like one long death scene. Betrayed […]
The fulsomely paternal Sydney Greenstreet handed him over to the cops on a silver platter. A “luminously wicked” Marie Windsor (above) two-timed and belittled him in what has been perversely referred to as film noir’s “most perfectly married couple.” A crazed Peter Lorre was thrilled when he was framed for a brutal murder that you-know-who committed. Born […]
You can’t forget that face. You might not put the face and the name together, but you’ve seen him in dozens of films and tv shows– he appeared in more than 105 to be exact over a quarter century. Sometimes gruff… sometimes menacing…. sometimes very funny. Always a pleasure. It didn’t quite start that way. […]