I generally start a film late at night, and therefore I’ve unfortunately fallen asleep on more than a few occasions (some being my favorite films of all-time). However, I will always watch the film again the next day from start to finish — no matter what my initial reaction was the previous night.
The Last Laugh (1924, FW Murnau) (this is definitely one I’m not proud of)
Ivan the Terrible Part 1 (1944, Sergei M. Eisenstein) (though watched it the next day alongside Part 2)
The Hitch-Hiker (1953, Ida Lupino)
Playtime (1967, Jacques Tati)
Two for the Road (1967, Stanley Donen)
If the “mainstream” moviergoer is someone who views film as a weekend disposable entertainment, then I find applauding more commonplace with individuals that actually go to see vintage and indepedent cinema; films that wouldn’t attract the “mainstream” film audiences of today. Everytime I’ve been to the Silent Movie Theater, New Beverley, Castro, etc. there’s been a standing ovation at the end of a film; though I’ve never participated in the applauding, I understand it’s a display of showing one’s appreciation for something they’ve obviously just enjoyed.
The most disturbing film I’ve ever seen is Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts (1949): a beautifully poetic documentary that intertwines the quiet rural life in France with gruesome slaughterhouses. The first time you see that gorgeous horse get a bolt through his head — very disturbing.
The Byrds are the greatest American rock band of all-time. With their momentous, highly influential “jingle-jangle” interplay of six-and-twelve string guitars, and inspired west coast vocal harmonies, the Byrds would help pioneer folk-rock, psychedelic space rock, progressive rock, country rock, and even provided the genesis for alt-country – influencing everyone from Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, The Eagles, Grateful Dead, The Beatles, Tom Petty, The Flamin’ Groovies, Husker Du, R.E.M., The Stone Roses and countless others.
On her breakup with Valentino: “With butlers, maids and the rest, what work is there for a housewife? I won`t be a parasite. I won`t sit home and twiddle my fingers, waiting for a husband who goes on the lot at five a.m. and gets home at midnight and receives mail from girls in Oshkosh and Kalamazoo.”
Primarily famous as the wife of screen idol Rudolph Valentino, Natacha Rambova was also a talented dancer and an innovative set designer, bringing the Art Deco style to Hollywood for the first time. At the age of 17 she became a protégé and lover of Russian ballet Svengali Theodore Kosloff, a brilliant but manipulative dancer who shot her in the leg when she finally escaped from his dance company. She was engaged as an art director by Alla Nazimova, the exotic, histrionic bisexual actress. Rumours abounded that Rambova herself was sexually involved with Nazimova, but none have ever been proven, and Rambova professed to dislike the lesbian subculture.
Rambova’s set designs and costumes were enormously innovative, influenced by Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Legendary French artist Erté professed himself a fan of her work. Her dramatic set and costume designs for Nazimova’s Salome (1923/I) were based on Aubrey Beardsley’s famous illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s play.
She met Rudolph Valentino when he was working with Nazimova on Camille (1921). At the time he was relatively unknown, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) (made the same year) being the hit that propelled him into the stratosphere. Soon, the shy Valentino began wooing the exotic former ballerina, and they eloped in May 22nd 1922. This event was to produce a scandal, as it was revealed that Valentino was not legally divorced from his former wife Jean Acker. After being charged and fined for bigamy, the couple quietly re-married the following year.
Valentino’s association with Rambova was to prove both his greatest pleasure and his greatest pain. She immediately took over the management of his career, rejecting his usual stereotypical roles as a grunting Italian Stallion in favor of highbrow pictures such as the disastrous Monsieur Beaucaire (1924), a powdered-wig drama which did nothing to allay rumors that theirs was a ‘lavender marriage’ – a union of convenience between two homosexuals. Despite Natacha’s admirable aim to free her husband from the constraints of the studio and eventually begin a production company of their own, his career was in tatters. Anxious to get his career back on track, he signed contracts with producers, who expressly forbad Rambova to come to his film sets.
The painful end to their marriage in 1926 came though, because Valentino wanted to have children, while Rambova didn’t. His career was back on track, but little more than six months later, he was hospitalized. On his death bed, he asked for Rambova wanting her by his side, but she was in Europe. When she heard of his dire condition, she too reached out to him, and she and Valentino exchanged loving telegrams. She believed that a reconciliation had taken place. But his condition worsened and he soon died of a ruptured stomach ulcer. Rambova was reportedly devastated. Natacha left America for Spain after her marriage to Alvaro de Urzaiz in the 1930s. Reporters remarked that her second husband physically resembled Valentino, suggesting that Rambova never got over her first husband. She lived through the Spanish Civil War with him, but her second marriage ended in divorce, for the same reason that her first marriage ended, because her husbands wanted children, while she didn’t. Her interest in mysticism evolved into scholarly study of ancient cultures and Jungian psychology. Her collection of Far Eastern and Egyptian art was of museum quality.
She died at 56 of scleroderma, a painful stomach condition which, to the modern eye, was clearly brought on by the anorexia nervosa from which she suffered all her life. -IMDb
“The actor should not play a part. Like the Aeolian harps that used to be hung in the trees to be played only by the breeze, the actor should be an instrument played upon by the character he depicts.”
The grand, highly flamboyant Russian star Alla Nazimova of Hollywood silent films lived an equally grand, flamboyant life off-camera, though her legendary status has not held up as firmly as that of a Rudolph Valentino today.
Born in Yalta, Crimea, in 1879, Mariam Edez Adelaida Leventon was the third child in an abusive, contentious household. Most of her sad childhood was spent in foster homes or in the care of other relatives and she showed a strong penchant for outrageous behavior to cope. Nazimova also showed a great aptitude for music at a young age and began violin lessons at age seven. She changed her name to Alla Nazimova when she began appearing on stage at the insistence of her father to protect the family name, as “performing” was not considered respectable at the time.
She began acting lessons at age 17 and joined Konstatin Stanislavsky’s company of actors as a pupil of his “method style” at the Moscow Art Theatre. During that time she supported herself by being kept by rich, older men. A failed love affair led to her only marriage to an acting student named Sergei Golovin, but they separated quickly. She grew discontent with Stanislavsky and later performed in repertory. She met the legendary Pavel Orlenev, a close friend of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, and entered into both a personal and professional relationship with him. They toured internationally throughout Europe with great success and came to New York in 1905, where Nazimova was saluted on Broadway for her definitive interpretations of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” and “A Doll’s House.” Orlenev returned to Russia but Nazimova stayed.
She made her screen debut with War Brides (1916), which was initially a 35-minute play. By 1918 she was a box-office Metro star and completed 11 films for the studio over a three-year period. A torrid, stylish and rather outré tragedienne who played exotic, liberal women confronted by great personal anguish, she earned personal successes as a reformed prostitute in Revelation (1918), a suicide in Toys of Fate (1918) and dual roles as half-sisters during the Boxer Rebellion in The Red Lantern (1919), not to mention the title role of Camille (1921) with Valentino. At the same time she maintained a strong Broadway theatrical career.
In accordance with her rise in the film industry, she began producing her own efforts which were bold and experimental—and monumental failures, although they are hailed as great artistic efforts today. Her Salome (1923/I) was quite scandalous and deemed a failure at the time. The monetary losses she suffered as producer were astronomical. The Hays Code, which led to severe censorship in pictures, also led to her downfall, as well as her outmoded acting style. She was forced to abandon films for the theater, scoring exceptionally well in Chekhov’s “A Cherry Orchard.” She did return briefly in the 1940s in a variety of supporting roles, but she made these films solely for the money.
Nazimova’s private life has long been the subject of industry gossip. As a Hollywood cover to her well-known bisexual lifestyle, she coexisted in a “marriage” with gay actor Charles Bryant for well over a decade. Her “Garden of Allah” home was the centerpiece for many glamorous private parties. She died in 1945. -IMDb
“You read the script, and you find out what the author had in mind. That’s basically the essence of it. I don’t believe in actors and actresses having their own individual conception. In my opinion, the actor is a tool of the writer, and his sole ambitions should be to fulfill his conception of the work.”
Bio:
Frantisek Lederer was born on November 6th, 1899, in Czechoslovakia. His father was a leather merchant, and young Frantisek began his working life as a department store delivery boy in Prague. He fell in love with acting from a young age, and was soon on stage touring Moravia and then all over Central Europe with people like Peter Lorre.
Lederer was easily lured into film by German actress Henny Porten and her producer husband. And it wasn’t long before he was starring in the legendary German silent movie Pandora’s Box (1929).
Whilst Lederer, who was using the German name of Franz, shifted from silents to talkies easily and was fast becoming one of Germany’s top stars, he hadn’t yet learnt to speak any English.
By 1934, Lederer, (now using Francis), had begun working in America. And he was getting top billing too. Irving Thalberg had planned to make Lederer “the biggest star in Hollywood” but Thalberg’s untimely death put a stop to that. But Lederer continued successfully in film and TV for many years.
After two brief marriages his third lasted 59 years. He invested in property well and made a fortune in the Canoga Park, California area. He founded the National Academy of Performing Arts on which his close friend Joan Crawford was on the Advisory Board. He loved to teach.
Lederer was still teaching the week before he died in 2000, aged 100 years. —IMDb
“I am only a craftsman working in a very big industry that in a third of a century conquered the markets, caught up the oldest and most important human activities like metallurgy or motor-engineering and may be compared with press for its social influence and its power in spreading ideas”.
Bio:
French Filmmaker Jacques Feyder is one of the founders of poetic realism in French cinema. Feyder came from a bourgeois family with a strong military tradition, but after flunking the entrance exams to officers school, Feyder began working in a canon foundry. Upon learning that his son really aspired to becoming an actor, Feyder’s father forbade him to use the family name on stage. Feyder went to Paris in 1911 where he played many small roles on stage and in film before becoming interested in filmmaking. Just before World War I, he began assisting director Gaston Ravel. As most of the regular directors were called to serve in the war, Feyder was assigned to direct. He began with nondescript little comedies, but in 1917, soon after he married famed actress Francoise Rosay, he was inducted into the Belgian army where he worked as an actor in a military troupe. He did not return to filmmaking until 1919. Over the next two decades, Feyder’s reputation as a filmmaker extraordinaire grew. Feyder shot his films on location whenever possible — his first major film L’Atlantide(1921) was shot in the Sahara Desert. When his 1928 film, the stingingly satirical Les noveaux messieurs, was banned for poking fun at Parliamentary ministers, Feyder accepted an offer from MGM and moved to Hollywood where he directed Garbo’s last silent film. He made several more there, but he returned home three years later. His most famous film La kermess heroique (1935), a farcical look at contemporary politics, won many international awards, but when Nazis invaded France, Goebbels banned it and Feyder fled to Switzerland where he began writing scripts for himself and other filmmakers.—All Movie Guide
From Kiki’s Memoirs: “This is the only book I have ever written an introduction for and, God help me, the only one I ever will.”—Ernest Hemingway
Bio:
Alice Ernestine Prin (2 October 1901 – 29 April 1953), nicknamed Queen of Montparnasse, and often known as Kiki de Montparnasse, was a French artist model, nightclub singer, actress, memoirist, and painter. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated, early 1920s culture of Paris.
Alice Prin was born in Châtillon-sur-Seine, Côte d’Or. An illegitimate child, she was raised in abject poverty by her grandmother. At age twelve, she was sent to live with her mother in Paris in order to find work. She first worked in shops and bakeries, but by the age of fourteen, she was posing nude for sculptors, which created discord with her mother.
Adopting a single name, “Kiki”, she became a fixture in the Montparnasse social scene and a popular artist model, posing for dozens of artists, including Chaim Soutine, “Julian Mandel” (a pseudonym), Tsuguharu Foujita, Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteau, Arno Breker, Alexander Calder, Per Krohg, Hermine David, Pablo Gargallo, Mayo, and Tono Salazar. Moise Kisling painted a portrait of Kiki titled Nu assis, one of his best known.
Her companion for most of the 1920s was Man Ray, who made hundreds of portraits of her. She is the subject of some of his best-known images, including the notable surrealist image Le violon d’Ingres and Noire et blanche. She appeared in nine short and often experimental films, including Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique without any credit.
A painter in her own right, in 1927 Prin had a sold-out exhibition of her paintings at the Galerie au Sacre du Printemps in Paris. Signing her work with her chosen single name, Kiki, she usually noted the year. Her drawings and paintings comprise portraits, self-portraits, social activities, fanciful animals, and dreamy landscapes composed in a light, slightly uneven, expressionist style that is a reflection of her easy-going manner and boundless optimism.
Her autobiography was published in 1929 as Kiki’s Memoirs, with Ernest Hemingway and Tsuguharu Foujita providing introductions. In 1930 the book was translated by Samuel Putnam and published in Manhattan by Black Manikin Press, but it was immediately banned by the United States government. Kiki’s Memoirs remained banned in the United States through the late 1970s, when it still was held in the section for banned books in the New York Public Library. This autobiography finally saw republication in 1996.
Her music hall performances in black hose and garters included crowd-pleasing risqué songs, which were uninhibited, yet inoffensive. For a few years during the 1930s, she owned a Montparnasse cabaret, which she named Chez Kiki.
A symbol of bohemian and creative Paris, at age of twenty-eight she was declared the Queen of Montparnasse. Even during difficult times, she maintained her positive attitude, saying “all I need is an onion, a bit of bread, and a bottle of red [wine]; and I will always find somebody to offer me that.”
She left Paris to avoid the occupying German army during World War Two, which entered the city in June 1940. Nazi officials had a reputation for intolerance toward the art and artists associated with Montparnasse that extended to all embracing its liberal lifestyle. Although some of the Nazi leaders secretly collected the new art flourishing in Paris, it was suppressed where ever they exerted control. Hitler is said to have hoped that his military would burn Paris to the ground. She never returned as a resident.
Prin died in 1953 in Sanary-sur-Mer, France at the age of fifty-one, apparently of complications of alcoholism or drug dependence. A large crowd of artists and fans attended her Paris funeral and followed the procession to her interment in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. Her tomb identifies her as “Kiki, 1901–1953, singer, actress, painter, Queen of Montparnasse.” Tsuguharu Foujita has said that, with Kiki, the glorious days of Montparnasse were buried forever.
Long after her death, Prin remains the embodiment of the outspokenness, audacity, and creativity that marked that period of life in Montparnasse. In 1989, biographers Billy Klüver and Julie Martin called her “one of the century’s first truly independent women.” In her honor, a daylily has been named Kiki de Montparnasse.—Wikipedia
“It’s true that the French have a certain obsession with sex, but it’s a particularly adult obsession. France is the thriftiest of all nations; to a Frenchman, sex provides the most economical way to have fun. The French are a logical race.”
Bio:
American writer Anita Loos’ father was a California newspaper publisher who, after enduring a spell of unemployment, became a theatre manager. Anita’s first taste of show business was as a child actress (playing Little Lord Fauntleroy) in her father’s playhouse. She continued acting into her teens, then turned to writing, churning out hundreds of 3-page plot synopses and at least one vaudeville sketch. She made her first movie sale at the Lubin Company in 1912; the first Anita Loos script to be produced, however, was Biograph’s The New York Hat (1912), directed by D. W. Griffith. Because she looked about fifteen, and because for many years she misrepresented her date of birth, a myth grew up around Anita, alleging that she was writing Griffith scripts from the age of 12; vestiges of the Anita Loos legend were utilized for Peter Bogdanovich’s 1975 film Nickelodeon, in which Tatum O’Neal played a pre-teen silent movie scriptwriter. Anita remained with Griffith until 1916, when she wrote some of the subtitles for his epic Intolerance; then she moved to the Douglas Fairbanks unit at Triangle, where she and her future husband John Emerson collaborated on several witty Fairbanks scenarios. By 1925, Anita felt written out and planned to retire, but a chance meeting with “dumb like a fox” blonde actress Mae Clarke prompted Anita to write her best-remembered novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The book served as inspiration for a 1928 silent picture starring Ruth Taylor (the mother of Buck Henry), a 1949 Broadway musical starring Carol Channing, and a 1952 filmization of that musical starring Marilyn Monroe. Never a brilliant story constructionist, Anita was at her best contributing comic dialogue, which kept her busy at MGM throughout the ’30s. In 1946 she returned to the theatre, this time as a playwright. Her most successful theatrical projects were the English translations of the Collette plays Gigi (1950) and Cheri (1957) (Anita had spoken fluent French since childhood). Anita Loos devoted her final years to writing several volumes of hilarious but highly unreliable memoirs; her last published work was a biography, The Talmadge Girls.—All Movie Guide
“Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”
Bio:
William Falkner wrote works of psychological drama and emotional depth, typically with long serpentine prose and high, meticulously-chosen diction. Like most prolific authors, he suffered the envy and scorn of others, and was considered to be the stylistic rival to Ernest Hemingway (his long sentences contrasted to Hemingway’s short, ‘minimalist’ style). He is perhaps also considered to be the only true American Modernist prose fiction writer of the 1930s, following in experimental tradition European writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust, and known for using groundbreaking literary devices such as stream of consciousness, multiple narrations or points of view, and time-shifts within narrative.
Faulkner was born William Falkner (no “U”) in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in and heavily influenced by that state, as well as the general ambience of the South. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of Blacks and Whites, his keen characterization of usual Southern characters and his timeless themes, one of them being that fiercely intelligent people dwelled behind the facade of good old boys and simpletons. An early editor misspelled Falkner’s name as “Faulkner”, and the author decided to keep the spelling.
Faulkner’s most celebrated novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), The Unvanquished (1938), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), usually considered his masterpiece. Faulkner was a prolific writer of short stories: his first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most acclaimed (and most frequently anthologized) stories, including “A Rose for Emily,” “Red Leaves,” “That Evening Sun,” and “Dry September.” During the 1930s, in an effort to make money, Faulkner crafted a sensationalist “pulp” novel entitled Sanctuary (first published in 1931). Its themes of evil and corruption (bearing Southern Gothic tones), resonate to this day. A sequel to the book, Requiem for a Nun, is the only play that he has published. It involves an introduction that is actually one sentence that spans for a couple pages. He received a Pulitzer Prize for A Fable, and won a National Book Award (posthumously) for his Collected Stories.
Faulkner was also an acclaimed writer of mysteries, publishing a collection of crime fiction, Knight’s Gambit, that featured Gavin Stevens, an attorney, wise to the ways of folk living in Yoknapatawpha County. He set many of his short stories and novels in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on—and nearly identical to in terms of geography—Lafayette County, of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi is the county seat; Yoknapatawpha was his very own “postage stamp” and it is considered to be one of the most monumetal fictional creations in the history of literature.
In his later years Faulkner moved to Hollywood to be a screenwriter (producing scripts for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not—both directed by Howard Hawks). Faulkner started an affair with a secretary for Hawks, Meta Carpenter.
Faulkner was known rather infamously for his drinking problem as well, and throughout his life was known to be an alcoholic.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949. He drank shortly before he had to sail to Stockholm to receive the distinguished prize. Once there, he delivered one of the greatest speeches any literature recipient had ever given. In it, he remarked “I decline to accept the end of man…Man will not only endure, but prevail…” Both events were fully in character. Faulkner donated his Nobel winnings, “to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers”, eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Faulkner served as Writer-In-Residence at the University of Virginia from 1957 until his death in 1962.—biographybase
Marguerite De La Motte (June 22, 1902 – March 10, 1950) was an American film actress, most notably of the silent film era.
Born in Duluth, Minnesota, De La Motte began her entertainment career studying ballet under Anna Pavlova. In 1919 she became the dance star of Sid Grauman on the stage of his theater. In 1918, at the age of 16, she made her screen debut in the Douglas Fairbanks, Sr directed romantic comedy film Arizona. That same year she lost both of her parents in an automobile accident and film producer J.L. Frothingham assumed guardianship of her and her younger sister.
De La Motte spent the 1920s appearing in numerous films, often cast by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. to play opposite him in swashbuckling adventure films such as 1920’s The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers. She developed a close friendship with Fairbanks and his wife, actress Mary Pickford. De La Motte would also appear opposite such notable actors of the “Roaring Twenties” as Bela Lugosi, Milton Sills, Conrad Nagel, Owen Moore, Lon Chaney, John Gilbert and Noah Beery, Sr.
De La Motte’s career as an actress slowed dramatically at the end of the silent film era of the 1920s. She did continue acting in bit parts through the sound era and made her final appearance in the 1942 film Overland Mail opposite both Noah Beery, Sr. and Noah Beery, Jr., as well as Lon Chaney, Jr.
De La Motte was married twice. She first wed silent film actor John Bowers in 1924, who was then a matinee idol of silver screen. The couple were separated at the time when Bowers committed suicide in 1936. De La Motte later married attorney Sidney H. Rivkin whom she later divorced after four years of marriage. Margherite cousin was Clete Roberts, American War Correspondent and Journalist, who appeared in two episodes of M*A*S*H* in the 1970s.In the 1930s when Roberts moved to Los Angeles he was Marguerite’s houseguest and drove her Marmon convertible car.
After her film career ended, De La Motte worked as an inspector in a southern California war plant during World War II. Later she came to San Francisco, California, where she worked in the Red Cross office.
On March 10, 1950, De La Motte died of cerebral thrombosis in San Francisco in 1950, three months short of her 48th birthday. For her contribution as an actress to the motion picture industry, Marguerite De La Motte was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6902 Hollywood Blvd., in Hollywood, California.—Wikipedia
Even after 65 years, the phrase “Man of a Thousand Faces” brings to mind only one name: Lon Chaney Sr. The son of deaf-mute parents, he learned at an early age to rely on pantomime as a communication skill. The stagestruck Chaney worked in a variety of backstage positions at the opera house in his hometown of Colorado Springs; he was eventually allowed to appear on stage, and, before his 17th birthday, was on tour with a play he’d co-written with his brother. Sensitive about his youth and plain features, Chaney hid behind elaborate makeup when appearing on-stage. Forced into single parenthood after divorcing his first wife Cleva Creighton (the mother of his son Creighton, Lon Chaney Jr.), Chaney had to find a more steady source of income than the theater. He began picking up extra work at Universal Studios in 1912, making himself valuable — and ultimately indispensable — with his expertise with character makeup. He rose from featured player to star at Universal between 1913 and 1920, sometimes doubling as director and scriptwriter. Chaney’s breakthrough film was 1919’s The Miracle Man, in which he played a phony cripple. It was the first of many films in which he underwent severe physical discomfort to achieve a convincing screen effect; in The Penalty (1920), for example, he not only bound his legs to play a double amputee, but also contrived to jump from great heights and land on his knees. As Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Chaney wore a rubber hump weighing as much as 70 pounds, and the film made him a bona fide star.
After Universal’s Phantom of the Opera (1925), the actor moved to MGM, where he starred in several highly successful Grand Guignol horror films directed by Tod Browning. Some of Chaney’s best work during this period was actually done without makeup, in such bread-and-butter vehicles as Tell It to the Marines (1926) and The Big City (1928). Offscreen, he was a loner, preferring to live far from Hollywood with his son and second wife. When sound pictures took hold in 1929, Chaney initially refused to participate, concerned that he’d have to come up with a different voice for each performance; he finally acquiesced with 1930s The Unholy Three (a remake of his 1925 silent film success), in which he not only utilized four different vocal characterizations but also proved to be a superior performer in his natural voice.), but a growth in his throat developed into bronchial cancer. He died in 1930 at the age of 47; in his last days, his illness rendered him unable to speak, forcing him to rely on the pantomimic gestures of his youth in order to communicate with his friends and loved ones.—All Movie Guide
Applause (1929, Rouben Mamoulian)
City Girl (1930, F.W. Murnau)
Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer)
Heaven Can Wait (1943, Ernst Lubitsch)
The Last Flight (1931, William Dieterle)
The Love of Zero (1927, Robert Florey)
Portrait of Jenny (1948, William Dieterle)
Portrait of Jason (1966, Shirley Clarke)
Shadows (1959, John Cassavetes)
The Unknown (1927, Tod Browning)
Honorable mentions: Blast of Silence (1961, Allen Baron), Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960, Bert Stern), Manhatta (1921), Murder By Contract (1958, Irving Lerner), One Hour with You (1932, Ernst Lubitsch), etc.
This list was extremely difficult to construct, for that numerous of my favorites are still clearly absent.
“There was one thing I detested more than anything, and that was money; first of all, because I was bankrupt; then, because I had been seeing so many examples all around me where money had played a fatal role.”
Bio:
Marcel L’Herbier is unquestionably one of the most important figures in the history of French cinema. His contribution is not restricted to the films he directed, many of which are widely recognised as genuine masterpieces. He also worked actively to promote cinema as an art form in its own right, helping to ensure that France maintained its position of eminence in a medium which was becoming increasingly dominated by the Americans. Moreover, his films and his writings have inspired successive generations of filmmakers, many of whom went on to become just as influential in French cinema.
L’Herbier was born in Paris is 1888. Having studied law at the Sorbonne, he was drawn to literature (particularly the works of Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche) and he decided to pursue a career as a writer. He published his first novel, “In the Garden of Secret Games”, in 1914. He wrote a stage play “L’Enfantement du mort, miracle en pourpre, noir et or”, an anti-war piece which was not performed until 1919. He discovered cinema whilst serving in the army during the later years of the First World War, when he worked in the film department. He began making his first film, Phantasmes, in 1918, but it was never completed.
After the war, L’Herbier worked for a time with the recently formed Gaumont film company, before founding his own film production company, Cinégraphic, in 1922. Here, he began making his own films, whilst working alongside some other promising young directors, such as Jean Dréville, Claude Autant-Lara and Alberto Cavalcanti.
L’Herbier’s early film triumphs were the L’Homme du large (1920), El Dorado (1921), L’Inhumaine (1924), each a masterwork of visual poetry. His finest work was L’Argent (1929), a monumental work, based on Zola’s novel, which condemned the world of high finance. With L’Enfant de l’amour (1930), L’Herbier demonstrated his mastery of the innovation of sound cinema, despite the primitive technology. He continued making films into the 1950s, although his work would rarely ever achieve the popularity or quality of his early, silent films.
During his film-making career, L’Herbier actively promoted the rights of the filmmaker and sought to protect his country’s film legacy. In 1937, he co-founded the technician’s union, the CGT, and during the Occupation, he presided over the Cinémathèque française. In 1943, he created the first film school in France, the IDHEC, whose alumni include Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, Claude Sautet, and many other pivotal figures in French cinema. In the 1950s, as his filmmaking career declined, he influenced the direction of the comparatively new medium of television, ensuring that classic films were aired regularly. In 1978, Marcel L’Herbier published his memoirs, “La Tête qui tourne”, the final chapter in a life devoted to French cinema. In 1979, he died in Paris.—Films de France
Milena Dravić (Serbian Cyrillic: Милена Дравић) (born October 5, 1940) is a Serbian actress.
Born in Belgrade, Dravić was involved with the performing arts from the age of four: first with dance and later classical ballet. In 1959, while in high school, director František Čap saw her on the cover of a youth magazine in a ballet dancers group photo and decided on the spot to approach her about being in his film Vrata ostaju otvorena. After appearing in few more films she decided to pursue acting full-time and successfully enrolled in Belgrade’s Dramatic Arts Academy.
Her big break came in 1962 when she won the Golden Arena for Best Actress award (which was the Yugoslav equivalent of Academy Award) for her role in Branko Bauer’s film Prekobrojna. This was the moment that sent her on the way to becoming Yugoslavia’s first and arguably the biggest female movie star.
Milena Dravić continued with long and prolific career during which she showed great talent and versatility. She was equally memorable and believable as the tragic heroine in state-sponsored World War II epics, eccentric protagonist of experimental arthouse films like WR: Mysteries of the Organism and romantic comedies. She especially excelled in the latter during 1970s and 1980s. She won the Cannes Best Supporting Actress Award in 1980 for Special Treatment.
For her roles and contributions to domestic cinematography, she received the prestigious “Pavle Vujisić” award in August 1994.—Wikipedia
“Say anything you like, but don’t say that I ‘like’ to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.”
Bio:
Mabel Normand was the first great comedienne of American cinema and one the most important — and popular — American silent film actresses. By the time she first showed up at the Biograph studio in 1910, Normand was already a “Gibson Girl” (a model for illustrator Charles Dana Gibson) and a champion swimmer, and she was not yet 18. Biograph published a photo of Normand with the phony name “Muriel Fortescue,” leading some sources to believe this her real name, but nevertheless it was Mabel Normand. She was from a French Canadian family and born on Staten Island on November 9, 1892. Normand worked for Biograph only a few months, then joined Vitagraph for about a year while the Biograph Company wintered out West. After they returned, so did she, working under the direction of D.W. Griffith. Griffith cast Normand as the “second girl” in melodramas and in tomboy roles; Griffith’s protégé, Mack Sennett, primarily made comedies and would exploit Normand’s natural comic abilities and athleticism through casting her in the lead. A Dash Through the Clouds (1912) featured Normand escaping with her beau in a new gadget, a Wright Brothers-styled airplane. This, and other, short comedies made by Sennett helped establish Mabel Normand as a girl who could take care of herself — willful, powerful, and seemingly without fear.
Sennett broke with Biograph to found Keystone Comedies, and Normand joined him in California; she starred in the first Keystone, The Water Nymph, released in September 1912. Apparently, a personal relationship between Sennett and Normand blossomed about this time as well, and though it was once the source of a popular musical, Mack and Mabel, the true nature of their relationship remains unclear. Normand was the Sennett studio’s most significant female star, and as Sennett also discovered and introduced Gloria Swanson, Phyllis Haver, Betty Compson, and Carole Lombard, that’s saying a lot. Normand also began to direct in 1914, although more out of necessity than any artistic need. One reason Charlie Chaplin was allowed to direct so early in his Keystone career was that he objected to taking direction from Normand, complaining about it to Sennett.
Normand entered into an immensely popular series of films co-starring Roscoe \“Fatty\” Arbuckle as sidekick, with titles such as Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916) and Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition (1915) being among the best remembered. It is said that the relationship, such as it was, between Sennett and Normand foundered in the summer of 1915, nevertheless, Sennett decided to produce a feature starring Normand and built the Mabel Normand Studio next door to Keystone; it was a necessary move, as the Keystone studio didn’t have the right infrastructure to make such a film. Normand was 24 years old at the time; the studio with her name above the gate made only one film, Mickey (1918), a sentimental melodrama in the style of Griffith, spiced with comic touches. Mickey was tied up in post-production so long that by the time it was released, Normand had already left Sennett for the Goldwyn Studio and had been working there a year. Mickey, aided by a hit song and a successful merchandising campaign, proved Normand’s most successful film, but Sennett had lost legal control of it, and neither shared in its profits.
Normand’s sojourn to Goldwyn resulted in disappointing returns, and in 1920, Sam Goldwyn was happy to sell Sennett back her contract. During this time, Normand had become dependant on cocaine and began to suffer months-long periods of illness where she could not work. Once back at Sennett, she made Molly O’ (1921), a property more or less modeled right after Mickey; it was enormously successful. However, on February 1, 1922, director William Desmond Taylor was shot in the back and killed, and Normand was unfortunate enough to be the last person to see him alive. Although she had nothing to do with Taylor’s murder, her name was added early on to a long list of suspects in the still unsolved case. Although her reputation was sullied, Normand made one more feature with Sennett, The Extra Girl (1923), which remains the most frequently seen of her films, and one of her best. Although it opened to enthusiastic crowds and good reviews, at a New Year’s Eve party in 1923, Normand was witness to yet another shooting, this time of playboy Courtland S. Dines, by Normand’s chauffeur, with her gun. Dines survived, but Normand’s reputation was mortally wounded.
Although publicly Sennett declared that he planned to continue making films with Normand, in private they agreed to end their association. In 1926, Normand married actor Lew Cody and made five films with Hal Roach. These were her last, for in February 1927 Normand fell prey to her final bout with illness, which claimed her at the age of 37 after three years of slowly declining health. Though tuberculosis was given as cause, research in the late 20th century revealed that Normand may have died from a disease that was carried congenitally through her family line. Altogether Mabel Normand appeared in about 230 films and directed 16 of them; roughly 45 percent of her titles survive. It is not as generous a bequest as it sounds; a third of that total consists of 1914 films in which she co-starred with Chaplin, and the remainder includes only two of her Goldwyn features and one Vitagraph. At her peak, Normand was worshipped by scores of women who admired her for being wealthy, independent, fashionable, and flamboyant — not to mention well read and eloquent in interviews. She remains one of the most captivating and unique figures among American silent-screen stars.—All Movie Guide
[when asked how her last name is pronounced] My name is properly pronounced “vor’shack.” The D remains silent. I have had quite a time with the name, having been called practically everything from Balzac to Bickelsrock.
Bio:
Ann Dvorak made her first big entrance on August 2, 1911 in New York as Anna McKim. The only child of two vaudevillians, young Anna was raised in the business that would later make her a star (or at the least, a respected leading lady). Her father, Edwin McKim worked as a director for the Lubin Studios, and her mother, Anna Lehr, would find success as the star of many silent features. The couple split when Ann was four, and she and her mother moved to Hollywood. Ann would not see her father again until a national appeal to the press reunited the two in 1934.
Ann made her film debut as “Baby Anna Lehr” in the 1916 drama Ramona. Two more silents would follow, then Ann briefly retired from show business to concentrate on her studies at the Page School for Girls in Los Angeles. In 1929, the teenager was employed with MGM as a chorine. Appearing in over 20 features and shorts for the studio, she also served as “assistant choreographer” to Sammy Lee. As the 1930s began, Hollywood was pushing the limits of “public decency” with on-screen tales of urban decay, and Ann was about to play a part in the gritty world of “pre-code” cinema.
At various times Hollywood lore has credited Joan Crawford, George Raft and Karen Morley with encouraging Howard Hughes to consider the young actress for the pivotal role of Cesca in his gruesome 1932 masterpiece Scarface. The 19 year old, now going by the name Ann Dvorak, was signed to Hughes’ Caddo Company and cast opposite Paul Muni in the legendary gangster film, directed by Howard Hawks. After appearing with Spencer Tracy in Sky Devils, Hughes began loaning her out to Warner Bros. After a few short years in the movies, Ann looked like she was on the verge of becoming a star.
In 1932 Ann was appearing on film along side such greats as James Cagney and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and was given a meaty role in the pre-code classic, Three on a Match, with Bette Davis and Joan Blondell. Warner Bros seemed to be grooming the talented actress for stardom when they purchased her contact from Hughes and cast her in the title role in The Strange Love of Molly Louvain. It was on the set of this film that she met and fell in love with co-star Leslie Fenton. The two soon eloped and sailed to Europe for a year-long honeymoon in July of 1932. Ann’s relationship with Warner Bros. suffered and the remainder of her contract was spent either as leading ladies in mostly lackluster films, or in litigation, objecting to these types of roles. After many public battles with the studio, Ann left Warner’s in 1936 with her damaged reputation, and began to freelance for various studios.
In 1940, Ann temporarily put her career on hold to support her husband who was a British citizen and a member of the Royal Navy. Although she did make three films in England during this time, Ann devoted most of her energy to the war-effort as a member of the Women’s Land Army, an ambulance driver, a newspaper columnist and a BBC broadcaster. Returning to Hollywood in 1943, Ann soon filed for divorce from Fenton, referring to the broken marriage as a “war casualty.” She continued to make films throughout the 1940s and into the early 1950s and appeared on Broadway in The Respectful Prostitute in 1948. She also tried her hand at marriage for a second time. Ann ended this union with Russian dancer Igor Dega in 1951, the same year she retired from the screen.
Ann was married for a third time in 1951 to architect/television producer Nicholas Wade. The couple resided in both Honolulu, Hawaii and Malibu, California, traveled and amassed an impressive collection of rare books. Wade passed on in 1975, and Ann remained on the island until her own death on December 10, 1979. Her ashes were scattered off the coast of Waikiki Beach. Because she was living under her married name, Los Angeles newspapers did not report the death of the actress until Christmas Eve.
While Ann Dvorak has not survived the ages as a household name, she still managed to carve a small niche in the conscious of American pop culture. A discussion of “pre-code” films should always pay homage to Ann’s convincing death scenes, and her attempt to seduce George Raft in Scarface by suggestively slinking about in a revealing black gown has been shown to film students all over the country. While the films were not always good, her performances were always great. She could be tragic, (Three on A Match, G-Men) she could be loyal, (Bright Lights, Blind Alley, Thanks a Million) she could be funny (Merrily We Live, Out of the Blue) but above all she was always damn good (Scarface, A Life of Her Own, and many others)! Maybe some of the films are forgettable, but the personality she brought to all of her characters, as well as her own strong-willed personality, should never be forgotten.—anndvorak.com
Acting? The critics said I acted best with a gun in my hand.
Bio:
One is certainly hard-pressed to think of another true “bad girl” representative so closely identifiable with film noir than hard-looking blonde actress Audrey Totter. While she remained a “B”-tier actress for most her career, she was a “A” quality actress and one of filmdom’s most intriguing ladies. She always managed to set her self apart even in the most standard of programming.
Born to an Austrian father and Swedish mother on December 20, 1918, in Joliet, Illinois, she treaded lightly on stage (“The Copperhead,” “My Sister Eileen”) and initially earned notice on the Chicago and New York radio airwaves in the late 1930s before “going Hollywood.” MGM developed an interest in her and put her on its payroll in 1944. Still appearing on radio (including the sitcom “Meet Millie”), she made her film bow as, of course, a “bad girl” in Main Street After Dark (1945). That same year the studio usurped her vocal talents to torment poor Phyllis Thaxter in Bewitched (1945). Her voice was prominent again as an unseen phone operator in Ziegfeld Follies (1945). Audrey played one of her rare pure-heart roles in The Cockeyed Miracle (1946). At this point she began to establish herself in the exciting “film noir” market.
Among the certified classics she participated in were The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) in which she had a small role as John Garfield’s blonde floozie pick-up. Things brightened up considerably with Lady in the Lake (1947) co-starring Robert Montgomery as detective Philip Marlowe. The film was not well received and is now better remembered for its interesting subjective camera technique. Audrey’s first hit as a femme fatale co-star came on loanout to Warner Bros. In The Unsuspected (1947), she cemented her dubious reputation in “B” noir as a trampy, gold-digging niece married to alcoholic Hurd Hatfield. She then went on a truly enviable roll with High Wall (1947), as a psychiatrist to patient Robert Taylor, The Saxon Charm (1948) with Montgomery (again) and Susan Hayward, Alias Nick Beal (1949) as a loosely-moraled “Girl Friday” to Ray Milland, the boxing film The Set-Up (1949) as the beleaguered wife of washed-up boxer Robert Ryan, Any Number Can Play (1949) with Clark Gable and as a two-timing spouse in Tension (1949) with Richard Basehart.
Although the studio groomed Audrey to become a top star, it was not to be. Perhaps because she was too good at being bad. The 1950s film scene softened considerably and MGM began focusing on family-styled comedy and drama. Audrey’s tough-talking dames were no longer a commodity and MGM soon dropped her in 1951. She signed for a time with Columbia Pictures and 20th Century Fox as well but her era had come and gone. Film offers began to evaporate. At around this time she married Leo Fred, a doctor, and instead began focusing on marriage and family.
TV gave her career a slight boost in the 1960s and 1970s, including regular roles in “Cimarron City” (1958) and “Our Man Higgins” (1962) as a suburban mom opposite Stanley Holloway’s British butler. After a period of semi-retirement, she came back to TV to replace Jayne Meadows in the popular television series “Medical Center” (1969) starring Chad Everett and James Daly. She played Nurse Wilcox, a recurring role, for four seasons (1972-1976). The 70-year-old Totter retired after a 1987 guest role on “Murder, She Wrote.” Her husband died in 1996.—IMDb
I was the spark that lit up FLAMING YOUTH, Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble.—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bio:
Born Kathleen Morrison in Port Huron, MI, the daughter of an irrigation engineer, actress Colleen Moore was a favorite star of both silent and early sound films in Hollywood. Following her education in a convent, Moore studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory. It was her uncle, Walter Howey, who helped her break into films. It was he, an editor of the Chicago Examiner, who helped D.W. Griffith get his epic films, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, past the censors; to pay Howey back for his invaluable help, Griffith hired Moore as an actress in 1917 (Hollywood legend has it that she came in 1916, and actually appeared in Intolerance as an extra, but it’s not true). At first Moore played leads in second features and Westerns, frequently opposite cowboy star Tom Mix, but in the 1920s, she bobbed her hair and created the character of a vivacious flapper. The ploy made her an immediate success and Moore went on to play modern heroines in numerous films for First National. She became one of Hollywood’s top-grossing stars. Fortunately, in addition to being a popular actress, she was also an astute business woman who learned much from her second and third husbands, both stockbrokers, and invested her money wisely. Later she authored three disparate books: her autobiography, a book about her collection of miniatures, and a book on investments, How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market.—All Movie Guide
It has become rather commonplace for so-called literary critics to write off Sinclair Lewis as a novelist. Compared to…Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner…Lewis lacked style. Yet his impact on modern American life…was greater than all of the other four writers together.—William Shirer
Bio:
Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951), novelist, playwright
Born Harry Sinclair Lewis in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, he began reading books at a young age and kept a diary. A dreamer, at age 13 he unsuccessfully ran away from home, wanting to become a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War. At first, he produced romantic poetry, then romantic stories about knights and fair ladies. By 1921 he had six novels published .
In 1930, Sinclair Lewis became the first American author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award reflected his ground-breaking work in the 1920s on books such as Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. He was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize for ‘Arrowsmith’, but declined it because he believed that the Pulitzer was meant for books that celebrated American wholesomeness and his novels, which were quite critical, should not be awarded the prize.
Lewis was innovative for giving strong characterization to modern working women and his concern with race. Restless, he traveled a lot and in the 1920s he would spend time with other great artists in the Montparnasse Quarter in Paris, France where he would be photographed by Man Ray.
Alcohol would play a dominant role in his life and he died of the effects of advanced alcoholism in Rome, Italy.
In 2001, his 1920 book, Main Street would be named to the list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the editorial board of the American Modern Library. —biographybase
What did Hitchcock teach me? To be a puppet and not try to be creative.
Bio:
Sylvia Sidney was born in New York City, in the Bronx borough, on August 8, 1910 with the birth name of Sophia Kosow. Her father was Russian born and mother born in Rumania. They divorced not long after her birth. Her mother subsequently remarried and Sylvia was adopted by her stepfather, Sigmund Sidney. Sylvia was a shy child and her parents tried to encourage her to be more outgoing and gregarious. As an early teen, Sylvia had decided that she wanted a stage career. While most parents would have looked down on such an announcement, Sylvia’s encouraged her to pursue the dream she had made. She was enrolled in the Theater Guild’s School for Acting. Sylvia later admitted that when she decided to become a stage actress at 15, it wasn’t being starstruck that occurred to her, but the expression of beauty that encompassed acting. All she wanted was to be identified with good productions. One school production was held at a Broadway theater and in the audience was a critic for the New York Times who had nothing but rave reviews for the young Miss Sidney. On the strength of her performance in New York, Sylvia appeared in a play at the famed Poli Theater in Washington, D.C. More stage productions followed, each better than the last and it wasn’t long before the film moguls were at the doorstep. Sylvia was appearing in the stage production of “Crime” when she made her first appearance on the silver screen in 1927. The film in question was “Broadway Nights” which was dealt with stage personalities of which Sylvia was one. After the film she returned to the stage where she appeared in creations which were, for the most part, forgettable.
With the plays drying up, Sylvia moved to Colorado to tour with a stock company. She later returned to Broadway for a series of other plays. By 1929, Sylvia was on the big screen with “The Different Eyes” as Valerie Briand. There was another film, “Five Minutes From The Station” the following year. Sylvia was slowly leaving the stage for the production studios of Paramount. 1931 saw her appear in five films, of which, “City Streets” made her a star. She was very aware that she was replacing the great Clara Bow, who by now was suffering from severe depression. The contrast between the two actresses was very great indeed and the movie was a hit. The sad-eyed Sylvia made a tremendous impact and her screen career was off a running. Her next film was “Ladies of The Big House” later in ‘31. Sylvia played Kathleen Storm, part of a couple framed for a murder they didn’t commit. The film made huge profits at the box-office. Co-starring with Fredric March, she then made “Merrilly We Go To Hell” in 1932. The results of the film was, again, an unqualified success. Later she made “Madame Butterfly” as geisha girl, Cho-Cho San. Here she played in one of the worst productions to date. Most critics agreed that Miss Sidney’s performance saved the film from total disaster. In 1933, Sylvia starred in “Jeannie Gerhardt” in the role of the same name. Yet another doom and gloom picture, she played a girl beset with poverty and the death of her young husband before their child could be born. This turned out to be one fine performance and one fine motion picture. Sylvia received the star spotlight in 1934’s “Good Dame”. Despite her grand performance, the film failed miserably at the box-office, due in part to the miscast of co-star Fredric March. Sylvia scored big with the film critics with “Mary Burns”, “Fugitive” (1935). Here she played a law abiding restaurant owner who falls for a big time gangster. Her performance was overshadowed by the appearance of Alan Baxter who gave an outstanding portrayal as the gangster. That film was quickly followed by “Accent On Youth” where she played Linda Brown, a young lady who was fascinated by older men. In 1938, Sylvia played in “You and Me” opposite George Raft. The film critics gave it mixed reviews and because of that it didn’t do well at the box-office. Afterwards, the roles began to dissipate. Sylvia filmed “One Third of a Nation” and then wasn’t seen again until “The Wagons Roll at Night”(1941).
There was a four year hiatus before “Blood On The Sun”. In 1946, Sylvia starred in “The Searching Wind” where she played Cassie Bowman. The movie was based on a Broadway play but it just didn’t transfer well onto the big screen. The film was widely considered to be too serious and flopped with the movie fans. After 1947’s “Love From A Stranger” she didn’t appear again until “Les Miserables” in 1952. Only three more films followed that decade. There were no films throughout the 1960s. After appearing in a made for television movie, Sylvia returned to the big screen in “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams”. With a few movie appearances, here and there, she appeared in several made for TV flicks. In 1988, she appeared as Juno in the mega hit “Beetlejuice”. Her last film for the silver screen was “Mars Attacks”! in 1996. In 1998 she was Clia in the TV series “Fantasy Island”. Sylvia died on July 1, 1999, of throat cancer. To the end, she proved to be a very adept actress.—IMDb
The Band [Brown Album] – The Band
Then Play On – Fleetwood Mac
Black Monk Time – Monks
Forever Changes – Love
Here Are the Sonics!!! – The Sonics
The Notorious Byrd Brothers – The Byrds
Odessey & Oracle – The Zombies
Safe as Milk – Captain Beefheart
Silver Apples – Silver Apples
The United States of America – The United States of America
West Side Soul – Magic Sam
Some of my favorite ’60s Jazz records:
Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village – Albert Ayler
Black Fire – Andrew Hill
The Dealer – Chico Hamilton
Eastern Sounds – Yusef Lateef
The Jaki Byard Experience – Jaki Byard
Fuchsia Swing Song – Sam Rivers
Out to Lunch – Eric Dolphy
The Sidewinder – Lee Morgan
Lovely, auburn-haired Martha Vickers (nee Martha MacVicar) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on May 28, 1925, the daughter of James S. and Frances MacVicar. After attending schools in various states – Florida, Texas and California – she and her family settled on the West Coast. A raving beauty, she broke into the entertainment field as a model for still photographer William Mortenson. This attracted the interest of David O. Selznick and she signed a starlet contract with him, but nothing came of it. Universal took over her contract where she was groomed in inauspicious bit parts such as her corpse/victim in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), and in such low-level entries as Captive Wild Woman (1943) and The Mummy’s Ghost (1944). In between assignments, Martha earned WWII pin-up exposure in such magazines as “Yank: The Army Weekly.”
RKO gave her some higher-level billing chances with Marine Raiders (1944) and The Falcon in Mexico (1944), but it was Warner Bros. that put her officially on the map. The enticing Martha earned celebrity status and a new stage moniker when she generated some real heat as Lauren Bacall’s wild, thumb-sucking sister Carmen in the film noir classic The Big Sleep (1946), which also starred Humphrey Bogart, playing the teenage nymphet “bad girl” for all it was worth. This major success quickly led to other “B” roles and not necessarily all “bad girl” parts. Highly appealing as the second femme lead in the pleasant musical The Time, the Place and the Girl (1946), Martha looked radiant but was overlooked for bigger things. She continued on and disrupted the proceedings again in the atmospheric film noir The Man I Love (1947) with Ida Lupino and finally earned leading lady status in That Way with Women (1947) opposite Dane Clark.
Very much a part of the Hollywood dating scene, which included actor James Stewart and director Frederick De Cordova, Martha finally married producer A.C. Lyles in March of 1948, but the marriage was over within a couple of months. Post-war films included Love and Learn (1947), another film noir piece Ruthless (1948), and the melodrama Bad Boy (1949), which was Audie Murphy’s first starring role. She ended the decade top-lining the “Poverty-Row” drama Alimony (1949). Surprisingly, Martha’s high-profiled second marriage in 1949 to film star Mickey Rooney (she was his third wife) did not advance her career. In fact, Martha was not seen in films at all during this period. Despite the couple having a son, Teddy Rooney, the next year (1950), Rooney had already hit the nadir of his career and had turned excessively to the bottle. Her marriage to Rooney would be short-lived as well.
Martha married a third time in 1954 to Chilean polo player-turned-actor Manuel Rojas, best known for his co-starring role in The Magnificent Matador (1955), and she finally returned to the screen in The Big Bluff (1955) co-starring with John Bromfield. The momentum, however, was gone and the movie did nothing to generate new interest. She did move, however, into TV and performed effectively in a number of dramatic showcases. She and Rojas had two children, Tina and Tessa. In 1960, Martha did her last filming with the western Four Fast Guns (1960) and after guesting on a couple of episodes of the TV series “The Rebel,” ended her career. Not much was heard from this sultry beauty until her death from cancer in 1971 at age 46 in Hollywood, California.—IMDb
Hazel Brooks (September 8, 1924, Cape Town, South Africa – September 18, 2002, Bel Air, California) was an American actress.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, she grew up in the U.S. and by 1943, at age 18, had been signed by M.G.M. Billed under her real name, Hazel Brooks, she made a series of pictures at the studio during the 1940s, culminating with a lead role in 1947 Body and Soul with John Garfield.
She had captured almost as much attention three years earlier in 1944 when, at age 19, she married the long-time head of her studio’s fabled art department, Cedric Gibbons, then 51. Although the age difference inspired a certain amount of winking in the gossip columns at the time, the marriage proved a strong one and lasted until Gibbons’ death in 1960. Brooks subsequently married Dr. Rex Ross, a surgeon and founder of the Non-invasive Vascular Clinic at Hollywood Hospital. Dr. Ross predeceased her in 1999.
According to long-time friend Maria Cooper Janis, Gary Cooper’s daughter, Ross in the years after her retirement from films became a skilled still photographer. She also worked actively for a number of children’s charities.
Following early bit parts in a half-dozen MGM vehicles, Brooks played the cynical nightclub singer who distracts John Garfield from boxing and from Lilli Palmer in Body and Soul. She had subsequent roles in Arch of Triumph and Sleep, My Love in 1948, as well as The Basketball Fix (1951) and The I Don’t Care Girl (1953).
I consistently try to see 3-4 classics a week at either the LACMA or Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles. For the greater portion of the time, however, I am relegated to watching films on my television, which is of a befitting 42 inches, at home.
I loved being at the studio (20th Century-Fox). After all, I started at 15, and I grew up there. But there comes a time when an actress stays too long in the same place. People get used to having you around, and they can’t think of you in a different light.
Bio:
Jeanne Crain was born in Barstow, California, on May 25, 1925. The daughter of a high school English teacher and his wife, Jeanne was moved to Los Angeles not long after her birth after her father got another teaching position in that city. While in junior high school, Jeanne played the lead in a school production which set her on the path to acting. When she was in high school Jeanne was asked to take a screen test to appear in a film by Orson Welles. Unfortunately, she didn’t get the part, but it did set her sights on being a movie actress.
After her high school career, Jeanne enrolled at UCLA to study drama. At the age of 18, Jeanne won a bit part in Fox Studio’s film entitled The Gang’s All Here (1943) and a small contract. Her next film saw Jeanne elevated to a more substantial part in Home in Indiana (1944) the following year, which was filmed in neighboring Kentucky. The movie was an unquestionable hit. On the strength of that box-office success, Jeanne was given a raise and star billing, as Maggie Preston, in the next film of 1944, In the Meantime, Darling (1944). Unfortunately, the critics not only roasted the film, but singled out Jeanne’s performance in particular. She rebounded nicely in her last film of the year, Winged Victory (1944). The audiences loved it and the film was profitable.
In 1945, Jeanne was cast in State Fair (1945) as Margie Frake who travels to the fair and falls in love with a reporter played by Dana Andrews. Now, Jeanne got a bigger contract and more recognition. Later that year, Jeanne married Paul Brooks on New Year’s Eve. Although her mother wasn’t supportive of the marriage, the union has lasted to this day and produced seven children. Her 1947 was an off year for Jeanne as she took time off to bear the Brinkman’s first child.
In 1949, Jeanne appeared in three films, A Letter to Three Wives (1949), The Fan (1949), and Pinky (1949). It was this latter film which garnered her an Oscar nomination as Best Actress for her role as Pinky Johnson, a nurse who sets up a clinic in the Deep South. She lost to Olivia de Havilland for The Heiress (1949). Jeanne left Fox after filming Vicki (1953) in 1953, with Jean Peters. She had made 23 films for the studio that started her career, but she needed a well-deserved change. As with any good artist, Jeanne wanted to expand her range instead of playing the girl-next-door types.
She went briefly to Warner Brothers for the filming of Duel in the Jungle (1954) in 1954. The film was lukewarm at best. Jeanne, then, signed a contract, that same year, with Universal Studios with promises of better, high profile roles. She went into production in the film Man Without a Star (1955) which was a hit with audiences and critics. After The Joker Is Wild (1957) in 1957, Jeanne took time off for her family and to appear in a few television programs. She returned, briefly, to film in Guns of the Timberland (1960) in 1960. The films were sporadic after that. In 1967, she appeared in a low-budget suspense yarn called Hot Rods to Hell (1967) (TV). Her final film was as Clara Shaw in 1972’s Skyjacked (1972).
Jeanne died of a heart attack in Santa Barbara, California, on December 14, 2003. Her husband Paul Brooks had died two months earlier.—IMDb
Ok, admit you dozed off or slept while watching.... over 2 years ago
I generally start a film late at night, and therefore I’ve unfortunately fallen asleep on more than a few occasions (some being my favorite films of all-time). However, I will always watch the film again the next day from start to finish — no matter what my initial reaction was the previous night.
The Last Laugh (1924, FW Murnau) (this is definitely one I’m not proud of)
Ivan the Terrible Part 1 (1944, Sergei M. Eisenstein) (though watched it the next day alongside Part 2)
The Hitch-Hiker (1953, Ida Lupino)
Playtime (1967, Jacques Tati)
Two for the Road (1967, Stanley Donen)
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How Much Do People Hate Going to movies with Mainstream Audiences? over 2 years ago
If the “mainstream” moviergoer is someone who views film as a weekend disposable entertainment, then I find applauding more commonplace with individuals that actually go to see vintage and indepedent cinema; films that wouldn’t attract the “mainstream” film audiences of today. Everytime I’ve been to the Silent Movie Theater, New Beverley, Castro, etc. there’s been a standing ovation at the end of a film; though I’ve never participated in the applauding, I understand it’s a display of showing one’s appreciation for something they’ve obviously just enjoyed.
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most disturbing film ever seen over 2 years ago
The most disturbing film I’ve ever seen is Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts (1949): a beautifully poetic documentary that intertwines the quiet rural life in France with gruesome slaughterhouses. The first time you see that gorgeous horse get a bolt through his head — very disturbing.
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Greatest American rock band of all time? over 1 year ago
The Byrds are the greatest American rock band of all-time. With their momentous, highly influential “jingle-jangle” interplay of six-and-twelve string guitars, and inspired west coast vocal harmonies, the Byrds would help pioneer folk-rock, psychedelic space rock, progressive rock, country rock, and even provided the genesis for alt-country – influencing everyone from Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, The Eagles, Grateful Dead, The Beatles, Tom Petty, The Flamin’ Groovies, Husker Du, R.E.M., The Stone Roses and countless others.
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Photo, quote, and bio for Natacha Rambova
On her breakup with Valentino: “With butlers, maids and the rest, what work is there for a housewife? I won`t be a parasite. I won`t sit home and twiddle my fingers, waiting for a husband who goes on the lot at five a.m. and gets home at midnight and receives mail from girls in Oshkosh and Kalamazoo.”
Primarily famous as the wife of screen idol Rudolph Valentino, Natacha Rambova was also a talented dancer and an innovative set designer, bringing the Art Deco style to Hollywood for the first time. At the age of 17 she became a protégé and lover of Russian ballet Svengali Theodore Kosloff, a brilliant but manipulative dancer who shot her in the leg when she finally escaped from his dance company. She was engaged as an art director by Alla Nazimova, the exotic, histrionic bisexual actress. Rumours abounded that Rambova herself was sexually involved with Nazimova, but none have ever been proven, and Rambova professed to dislike the lesbian subculture.
Rambova’s set designs and costumes were enormously innovative, influenced by Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Legendary French artist Erté professed himself a fan of her work. Her dramatic set and costume designs for Nazimova’s Salome (1923/I) were based on Aubrey Beardsley’s famous illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s play.
She met Rudolph Valentino when he was working with Nazimova on Camille (1921). At the time he was relatively unknown, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) (made the same year) being the hit that propelled him into the stratosphere. Soon, the shy Valentino began wooing the exotic former ballerina, and they eloped in May 22nd 1922. This event was to produce a scandal, as it was revealed that Valentino was not legally divorced from his former wife Jean Acker. After being charged and fined for bigamy, the couple quietly re-married the following year.
Valentino’s association with Rambova was to prove both his greatest pleasure and his greatest pain. She immediately took over the management of his career, rejecting his usual stereotypical roles as a grunting Italian Stallion in favor of highbrow pictures such as the disastrous Monsieur Beaucaire (1924), a powdered-wig drama which did nothing to allay rumors that theirs was a ‘lavender marriage’ – a union of convenience between two homosexuals. Despite Natacha’s admirable aim to free her husband from the constraints of the studio and eventually begin a production company of their own, his career was in tatters. Anxious to get his career back on track, he signed contracts with producers, who expressly forbad Rambova to come to his film sets.
The painful end to their marriage in 1926 came though, because Valentino wanted to have children, while Rambova didn’t. His career was back on track, but little more than six months later, he was hospitalized. On his death bed, he asked for Rambova wanting her by his side, but she was in Europe. When she heard of his dire condition, she too reached out to him, and she and Valentino exchanged loving telegrams. She believed that a reconciliation had taken place. But his condition worsened and he soon died of a ruptured stomach ulcer. Rambova was reportedly devastated. Natacha left America for Spain after her marriage to Alvaro de Urzaiz in the 1930s. Reporters remarked that her second husband physically resembled Valentino, suggesting that Rambova never got over her first husband. She lived through the Spanish Civil War with him, but her second marriage ended in divorce, for the same reason that her first marriage ended, because her husbands wanted children, while she didn’t. Her interest in mysticism evolved into scholarly study of ancient cultures and Jungian psychology. Her collection of Far Eastern and Egyptian art was of museum quality.
She died at 56 of scleroderma, a painful stomach condition which, to the modern eye, was clearly brought on by the anorexia nervosa from which she suffered all her life. -IMDb
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Photo, quote, and bio for Alla Nazimova
“The actor should not play a part. Like the Aeolian harps that used to be hung in the trees to be played only by the breeze, the actor should be an instrument played upon by the character he depicts.”
The grand, highly flamboyant Russian star Alla Nazimova of Hollywood silent films lived an equally grand, flamboyant life off-camera, though her legendary status has not held up as firmly as that of a Rudolph Valentino today.
Born in Yalta, Crimea, in 1879, Mariam Edez Adelaida Leventon was the third child in an abusive, contentious household. Most of her sad childhood was spent in foster homes or in the care of other relatives and she showed a strong penchant for outrageous behavior to cope. Nazimova also showed a great aptitude for music at a young age and began violin lessons at age seven. She changed her name to Alla Nazimova when she began appearing on stage at the insistence of her father to protect the family name, as “performing” was not considered respectable at the time.
She began acting lessons at age 17 and joined Konstatin Stanislavsky’s company of actors as a pupil of his “method style” at the Moscow Art Theatre. During that time she supported herself by being kept by rich, older men. A failed love affair led to her only marriage to an acting student named Sergei Golovin, but they separated quickly. She grew discontent with Stanislavsky and later performed in repertory. She met the legendary Pavel Orlenev, a close friend of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, and entered into both a personal and professional relationship with him. They toured internationally throughout Europe with great success and came to New York in 1905, where Nazimova was saluted on Broadway for her definitive interpretations of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” and “A Doll’s House.” Orlenev returned to Russia but Nazimova stayed.
She made her screen debut with War Brides (1916), which was initially a 35-minute play. By 1918 she was a box-office Metro star and completed 11 films for the studio over a three-year period. A torrid, stylish and rather outré tragedienne who played exotic, liberal women confronted by great personal anguish, she earned personal successes as a reformed prostitute in Revelation (1918), a suicide in Toys of Fate (1918) and dual roles as half-sisters during the Boxer Rebellion in The Red Lantern (1919), not to mention the title role of Camille (1921) with Valentino. At the same time she maintained a strong Broadway theatrical career.
In accordance with her rise in the film industry, she began producing her own efforts which were bold and experimental—and monumental failures, although they are hailed as great artistic efforts today. Her Salome (1923/I) was quite scandalous and deemed a failure at the time. The monetary losses she suffered as producer were astronomical. The Hays Code, which led to severe censorship in pictures, also led to her downfall, as well as her outmoded acting style. She was forced to abandon films for the theater, scoring exceptionally well in Chekhov’s “A Cherry Orchard.” She did return briefly in the 1940s in a variety of supporting roles, but she made these films solely for the money.
Nazimova’s private life has long been the subject of industry gossip. As a Hollywood cover to her well-known bisexual lifestyle, she coexisted in a “marriage” with gay actor Charles Bryant for well over a decade. Her “Garden of Allah” home was the centerpiece for many glamorous private parties. She died in 1945. -IMDb
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Photo, quote, and bio for Francis Lederer
Quote:
“You read the script, and you find out what the author had in mind. That’s basically the essence of it. I don’t believe in actors and actresses having their own individual conception. In my opinion, the actor is a tool of the writer, and his sole ambitions should be to fulfill his conception of the work.”
Bio:
Frantisek Lederer was born on November 6th, 1899, in Czechoslovakia. His father was a leather merchant, and young Frantisek began his working life as a department store delivery boy in Prague. He fell in love with acting from a young age, and was soon on stage touring Moravia and then all over Central Europe with people like Peter Lorre.
Lederer was easily lured into film by German actress Henny Porten and her producer husband. And it wasn’t long before he was starring in the legendary German silent movie Pandora’s Box (1929).
Whilst Lederer, who was using the German name of Franz, shifted from silents to talkies easily and was fast becoming one of Germany’s top stars, he hadn’t yet learnt to speak any English.
By 1934, Lederer, (now using Francis), had begun working in America. And he was getting top billing too. Irving Thalberg had planned to make Lederer “the biggest star in Hollywood” but Thalberg’s untimely death put a stop to that. But Lederer continued successfully in film and TV for many years.
After two brief marriages his third lasted 59 years. He invested in property well and made a fortune in the Canoga Park, California area. He founded the National Academy of Performing Arts on which his close friend Joan Crawford was on the Advisory Board. He loved to teach.
Lederer was still teaching the week before he died in 2000, aged 100 years. —IMDb
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Photo, quote, and bio for Jacques Feyder
Quote:
“I am only a craftsman working in a very big industry that in a third of a century conquered the markets, caught up the oldest and most important human activities like metallurgy or motor-engineering and may be compared with press for its social influence and its power in spreading ideas”.
Bio:
French Filmmaker Jacques Feyder is one of the founders of poetic realism in French cinema. Feyder came from a bourgeois family with a strong military tradition, but after flunking the entrance exams to officers school, Feyder began working in a canon foundry. Upon learning that his son really aspired to becoming an actor, Feyder’s father forbade him to use the family name on stage. Feyder went to Paris in 1911 where he played many small roles on stage and in film before becoming interested in filmmaking. Just before World War I, he began assisting director Gaston Ravel. As most of the regular directors were called to serve in the war, Feyder was assigned to direct. He began with nondescript little comedies, but in 1917, soon after he married famed actress Francoise Rosay, he was inducted into the Belgian army where he worked as an actor in a military troupe. He did not return to filmmaking until 1919. Over the next two decades, Feyder’s reputation as a filmmaker extraordinaire grew. Feyder shot his films on location whenever possible — his first major film L’Atlantide(1921) was shot in the Sahara Desert. When his 1928 film, the stingingly satirical Les noveaux messieurs, was banned for poking fun at Parliamentary ministers, Feyder accepted an offer from MGM and moved to Hollywood where he directed Garbo’s last silent film. He made several more there, but he returned home three years later. His most famous film La kermess heroique (1935), a farcical look at contemporary politics, won many international awards, but when Nazis invaded France, Goebbels banned it and Feyder fled to Switzerland where he began writing scripts for himself and other filmmakers.—All Movie Guide
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Photo, quote, and bio for Kiki of Montparnasse
Quote:
From Kiki’s Memoirs: “This is the only book I have ever written an introduction for and, God help me, the only one I ever will.”—Ernest Hemingway
Bio:
Alice Ernestine Prin (2 October 1901 – 29 April 1953), nicknamed Queen of Montparnasse, and often known as Kiki de Montparnasse, was a French artist model, nightclub singer, actress, memoirist, and painter. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated, early 1920s culture of Paris.
Alice Prin was born in Châtillon-sur-Seine, Côte d’Or. An illegitimate child, she was raised in abject poverty by her grandmother. At age twelve, she was sent to live with her mother in Paris in order to find work. She first worked in shops and bakeries, but by the age of fourteen, she was posing nude for sculptors, which created discord with her mother.
Adopting a single name, “Kiki”, she became a fixture in the Montparnasse social scene and a popular artist model, posing for dozens of artists, including Chaim Soutine, “Julian Mandel” (a pseudonym), Tsuguharu Foujita, Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteau, Arno Breker, Alexander Calder, Per Krohg, Hermine David, Pablo Gargallo, Mayo, and Tono Salazar. Moise Kisling painted a portrait of Kiki titled Nu assis, one of his best known.
Her companion for most of the 1920s was Man Ray, who made hundreds of portraits of her. She is the subject of some of his best-known images, including the notable surrealist image Le violon d’Ingres and Noire et blanche. She appeared in nine short and often experimental films, including Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique without any credit.
A painter in her own right, in 1927 Prin had a sold-out exhibition of her paintings at the Galerie au Sacre du Printemps in Paris. Signing her work with her chosen single name, Kiki, she usually noted the year. Her drawings and paintings comprise portraits, self-portraits, social activities, fanciful animals, and dreamy landscapes composed in a light, slightly uneven, expressionist style that is a reflection of her easy-going manner and boundless optimism.
Her autobiography was published in 1929 as Kiki’s Memoirs, with Ernest Hemingway and Tsuguharu Foujita providing introductions. In 1930 the book was translated by Samuel Putnam and published in Manhattan by Black Manikin Press, but it was immediately banned by the United States government. Kiki’s Memoirs remained banned in the United States through the late 1970s, when it still was held in the section for banned books in the New York Public Library. This autobiography finally saw republication in 1996.
Her music hall performances in black hose and garters included crowd-pleasing risqué songs, which were uninhibited, yet inoffensive. For a few years during the 1930s, she owned a Montparnasse cabaret, which she named Chez Kiki.
A symbol of bohemian and creative Paris, at age of twenty-eight she was declared the Queen of Montparnasse. Even during difficult times, she maintained her positive attitude, saying “all I need is an onion, a bit of bread, and a bottle of red [wine]; and I will always find somebody to offer me that.”
She left Paris to avoid the occupying German army during World War Two, which entered the city in June 1940. Nazi officials had a reputation for intolerance toward the art and artists associated with Montparnasse that extended to all embracing its liberal lifestyle. Although some of the Nazi leaders secretly collected the new art flourishing in Paris, it was suppressed where ever they exerted control. Hitler is said to have hoped that his military would burn Paris to the ground. She never returned as a resident.
Prin died in 1953 in Sanary-sur-Mer, France at the age of fifty-one, apparently of complications of alcoholism or drug dependence. A large crowd of artists and fans attended her Paris funeral and followed the procession to her interment in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. Her tomb identifies her as “Kiki, 1901–1953, singer, actress, painter, Queen of Montparnasse.” Tsuguharu Foujita has said that, with Kiki, the glorious days of Montparnasse were buried forever.
Long after her death, Prin remains the embodiment of the outspokenness, audacity, and creativity that marked that period of life in Montparnasse. In 1989, biographers Billy Klüver and Julie Martin called her “one of the century’s first truly independent women.” In her honor, a daylily has been named Kiki de Montparnasse.—Wikipedia
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Photo, quote, and bio for Anita Loos
Quote:
“It’s true that the French have a certain obsession with sex, but it’s a particularly adult obsession. France is the thriftiest of all nations; to a Frenchman, sex provides the most economical way to have fun. The French are a logical race.”
Bio:
American writer Anita Loos’ father was a California newspaper publisher who, after enduring a spell of unemployment, became a theatre manager. Anita’s first taste of show business was as a child actress (playing Little Lord Fauntleroy) in her father’s playhouse. She continued acting into her teens, then turned to writing, churning out hundreds of 3-page plot synopses and at least one vaudeville sketch. She made her first movie sale at the Lubin Company in 1912; the first Anita Loos script to be produced, however, was Biograph’s The New York Hat (1912), directed by D. W. Griffith. Because she looked about fifteen, and because for many years she misrepresented her date of birth, a myth grew up around Anita, alleging that she was writing Griffith scripts from the age of 12; vestiges of the Anita Loos legend were utilized for Peter Bogdanovich’s 1975 film Nickelodeon, in which Tatum O’Neal played a pre-teen silent movie scriptwriter. Anita remained with Griffith until 1916, when she wrote some of the subtitles for his epic Intolerance; then she moved to the Douglas Fairbanks unit at Triangle, where she and her future husband John Emerson collaborated on several witty Fairbanks scenarios. By 1925, Anita felt written out and planned to retire, but a chance meeting with “dumb like a fox” blonde actress Mae Clarke prompted Anita to write her best-remembered novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The book served as inspiration for a 1928 silent picture starring Ruth Taylor (the mother of Buck Henry), a 1949 Broadway musical starring Carol Channing, and a 1952 filmization of that musical starring Marilyn Monroe. Never a brilliant story constructionist, Anita was at her best contributing comic dialogue, which kept her busy at MGM throughout the ’30s. In 1946 she returned to the theatre, this time as a playwright. Her most successful theatrical projects were the English translations of the Collette plays Gigi (1950) and Cheri (1957) (Anita had spoken fluent French since childhood). Anita Loos devoted her final years to writing several volumes of hilarious but highly unreliable memoirs; her last published work was a biography, The Talmadge Girls.—All Movie Guide
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Photo, quote, and bio for William Faulkner
Quote:
“Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”
Bio:
William Falkner wrote works of psychological drama and emotional depth, typically with long serpentine prose and high, meticulously-chosen diction. Like most prolific authors, he suffered the envy and scorn of others, and was considered to be the stylistic rival to Ernest Hemingway (his long sentences contrasted to Hemingway’s short, ‘minimalist’ style). He is perhaps also considered to be the only true American Modernist prose fiction writer of the 1930s, following in experimental tradition European writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust, and known for using groundbreaking literary devices such as stream of consciousness, multiple narrations or points of view, and time-shifts within narrative.
Faulkner was born William Falkner (no “U”) in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in and heavily influenced by that state, as well as the general ambience of the South. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of Blacks and Whites, his keen characterization of usual Southern characters and his timeless themes, one of them being that fiercely intelligent people dwelled behind the facade of good old boys and simpletons. An early editor misspelled Falkner’s name as “Faulkner”, and the author decided to keep the spelling.
Faulkner’s most celebrated novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), The Unvanquished (1938), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), usually considered his masterpiece. Faulkner was a prolific writer of short stories: his first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most acclaimed (and most frequently anthologized) stories, including “A Rose for Emily,” “Red Leaves,” “That Evening Sun,” and “Dry September.” During the 1930s, in an effort to make money, Faulkner crafted a sensationalist “pulp” novel entitled Sanctuary (first published in 1931). Its themes of evil and corruption (bearing Southern Gothic tones), resonate to this day. A sequel to the book, Requiem for a Nun, is the only play that he has published. It involves an introduction that is actually one sentence that spans for a couple pages. He received a Pulitzer Prize for A Fable, and won a National Book Award (posthumously) for his Collected Stories.
Faulkner was also an acclaimed writer of mysteries, publishing a collection of crime fiction, Knight’s Gambit, that featured Gavin Stevens, an attorney, wise to the ways of folk living in Yoknapatawpha County. He set many of his short stories and novels in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on—and nearly identical to in terms of geography—Lafayette County, of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi is the county seat; Yoknapatawpha was his very own “postage stamp” and it is considered to be one of the most monumetal fictional creations in the history of literature.
In his later years Faulkner moved to Hollywood to be a screenwriter (producing scripts for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not—both directed by Howard Hawks). Faulkner started an affair with a secretary for Hawks, Meta Carpenter.
Faulkner was known rather infamously for his drinking problem as well, and throughout his life was known to be an alcoholic.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949. He drank shortly before he had to sail to Stockholm to receive the distinguished prize. Once there, he delivered one of the greatest speeches any literature recipient had ever given. In it, he remarked “I decline to accept the end of man…Man will not only endure, but prevail…” Both events were fully in character. Faulkner donated his Nobel winnings, “to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers”, eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Faulkner served as Writer-In-Residence at the University of Virginia from 1957 until his death in 1962.—biographybase
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Photo and bio for Marguerite De La Motte
Bio:
Marguerite De La Motte (June 22, 1902 – March 10, 1950) was an American film actress, most notably of the silent film era.
Born in Duluth, Minnesota, De La Motte began her entertainment career studying ballet under Anna Pavlova. In 1919 she became the dance star of Sid Grauman on the stage of his theater. In 1918, at the age of 16, she made her screen debut in the Douglas Fairbanks, Sr directed romantic comedy film Arizona. That same year she lost both of her parents in an automobile accident and film producer J.L. Frothingham assumed guardianship of her and her younger sister.
De La Motte spent the 1920s appearing in numerous films, often cast by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. to play opposite him in swashbuckling adventure films such as 1920’s The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers. She developed a close friendship with Fairbanks and his wife, actress Mary Pickford. De La Motte would also appear opposite such notable actors of the “Roaring Twenties” as Bela Lugosi, Milton Sills, Conrad Nagel, Owen Moore, Lon Chaney, John Gilbert and Noah Beery, Sr.
De La Motte’s career as an actress slowed dramatically at the end of the silent film era of the 1920s. She did continue acting in bit parts through the sound era and made her final appearance in the 1942 film Overland Mail opposite both Noah Beery, Sr. and Noah Beery, Jr., as well as Lon Chaney, Jr.
De La Motte was married twice. She first wed silent film actor John Bowers in 1924, who was then a matinee idol of silver screen. The couple were separated at the time when Bowers committed suicide in 1936. De La Motte later married attorney Sidney H. Rivkin whom she later divorced after four years of marriage. Margherite cousin was Clete Roberts, American War Correspondent and Journalist, who appeared in two episodes of M*A*S*H* in the 1970s.In the 1930s when Roberts moved to Los Angeles he was Marguerite’s houseguest and drove her Marmon convertible car.
After her film career ended, De La Motte worked as an inspector in a southern California war plant during World War II. Later she came to San Francisco, California, where she worked in the Red Cross office.
On March 10, 1950, De La Motte died of cerebral thrombosis in San Francisco in 1950, three months short of her 48th birthday. For her contribution as an actress to the motion picture industry, Marguerite De La Motte was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6902 Hollywood Blvd., in Hollywood, California.—Wikipedia
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Photograph, quote, and bio for Lon Chaney
Quote:
“Between pictures, there is no Lon Chaney.”
Bio:
Even after 65 years, the phrase “Man of a Thousand Faces” brings to mind only one name: Lon Chaney Sr. The son of deaf-mute parents, he learned at an early age to rely on pantomime as a communication skill. The stagestruck Chaney worked in a variety of backstage positions at the opera house in his hometown of Colorado Springs; he was eventually allowed to appear on stage, and, before his 17th birthday, was on tour with a play he’d co-written with his brother. Sensitive about his youth and plain features, Chaney hid behind elaborate makeup when appearing on-stage. Forced into single parenthood after divorcing his first wife Cleva Creighton (the mother of his son Creighton, Lon Chaney Jr.), Chaney had to find a more steady source of income than the theater. He began picking up extra work at Universal Studios in 1912, making himself valuable — and ultimately indispensable — with his expertise with character makeup. He rose from featured player to star at Universal between 1913 and 1920, sometimes doubling as director and scriptwriter. Chaney’s breakthrough film was 1919’s The Miracle Man, in which he played a phony cripple. It was the first of many films in which he underwent severe physical discomfort to achieve a convincing screen effect; in The Penalty (1920), for example, he not only bound his legs to play a double amputee, but also contrived to jump from great heights and land on his knees. As Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Chaney wore a rubber hump weighing as much as 70 pounds, and the film made him a bona fide star.
After Universal’s Phantom of the Opera (1925), the actor moved to MGM, where he starred in several highly successful Grand Guignol horror films directed by Tod Browning. Some of Chaney’s best work during this period was actually done without makeup, in such bread-and-butter vehicles as Tell It to the Marines (1926) and The Big City (1928). Offscreen, he was a loner, preferring to live far from Hollywood with his son and second wife. When sound pictures took hold in 1929, Chaney initially refused to participate, concerned that he’d have to come up with a different voice for each performance; he finally acquiesced with 1930s The Unholy Three (a remake of his 1925 silent film success), in which he not only utilized four different vocal characterizations but also proved to be a superior performer in his natural voice.), but a growth in his throat developed into bronchial cancer. He died in 1930 at the age of 47; in his last days, his illness rendered him unable to speak, forcing him to rely on the pantomimic gestures of his youth in order to communicate with his friends and loved ones.—All Movie Guide
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top 10 favourite films from your home country over 1 year ago
US
Applause (1929, Rouben Mamoulian)
City Girl (1930, F.W. Murnau)
Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer)
Heaven Can Wait (1943, Ernst Lubitsch)
The Last Flight (1931, William Dieterle)
The Love of Zero (1927, Robert Florey)
Portrait of Jenny (1948, William Dieterle)
Portrait of Jason (1966, Shirley Clarke)
Shadows (1959, John Cassavetes)
The Unknown (1927, Tod Browning)
Honorable mentions: Blast of Silence (1961, Allen Baron), Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960, Bert Stern), Manhatta (1921), Murder By Contract (1958, Irving Lerner), One Hour with You (1932, Ernst Lubitsch), etc.
This list was extremely difficult to construct, for that numerous of my favorites are still clearly absent.
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Photograph, quote and bio for Marcel L’Herbier
Quote:
“There was one thing I detested more than anything, and that was money; first of all, because I was bankrupt; then, because I had been seeing so many examples all around me where money had played a fatal role.”
Bio:
Marcel L’Herbier is unquestionably one of the most important figures in the history of French cinema. His contribution is not restricted to the films he directed, many of which are widely recognised as genuine masterpieces. He also worked actively to promote cinema as an art form in its own right, helping to ensure that France maintained its position of eminence in a medium which was becoming increasingly dominated by the Americans. Moreover, his films and his writings have inspired successive generations of filmmakers, many of whom went on to become just as influential in French cinema.
L’Herbier was born in Paris is 1888. Having studied law at the Sorbonne, he was drawn to literature (particularly the works of Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche) and he decided to pursue a career as a writer. He published his first novel, “In the Garden of Secret Games”, in 1914. He wrote a stage play “L’Enfantement du mort, miracle en pourpre, noir et or”, an anti-war piece which was not performed until 1919. He discovered cinema whilst serving in the army during the later years of the First World War, when he worked in the film department. He began making his first film, Phantasmes, in 1918, but it was never completed.
After the war, L’Herbier worked for a time with the recently formed Gaumont film company, before founding his own film production company, Cinégraphic, in 1922. Here, he began making his own films, whilst working alongside some other promising young directors, such as Jean Dréville, Claude Autant-Lara and Alberto Cavalcanti.
L’Herbier’s early film triumphs were the L’Homme du large (1920), El Dorado (1921), L’Inhumaine (1924), each a masterwork of visual poetry. His finest work was L’Argent (1929), a monumental work, based on Zola’s novel, which condemned the world of high finance. With L’Enfant de l’amour (1930), L’Herbier demonstrated his mastery of the innovation of sound cinema, despite the primitive technology. He continued making films into the 1950s, although his work would rarely ever achieve the popularity or quality of his early, silent films.
During his film-making career, L’Herbier actively promoted the rights of the filmmaker and sought to protect his country’s film legacy. In 1937, he co-founded the technician’s union, the CGT, and during the Occupation, he presided over the Cinémathèque française. In 1943, he created the first film school in France, the IDHEC, whose alumni include Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, Claude Sautet, and many other pivotal figures in French cinema. In the 1950s, as his filmmaking career declined, he influenced the direction of the comparatively new medium of television, ensuring that classic films were aired regularly. In 1978, Marcel L’Herbier published his memoirs, “La Tête qui tourne”, the final chapter in a life devoted to French cinema. In 1979, he died in Paris.—Films de France
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Photograph and bio for Milena Dravić
Bio:
Milena Dravić (Serbian Cyrillic: Милена Дравић) (born October 5, 1940) is a Serbian actress.
Born in Belgrade, Dravić was involved with the performing arts from the age of four: first with dance and later classical ballet. In 1959, while in high school, director František Čap saw her on the cover of a youth magazine in a ballet dancers group photo and decided on the spot to approach her about being in his film Vrata ostaju otvorena. After appearing in few more films she decided to pursue acting full-time and successfully enrolled in Belgrade’s Dramatic Arts Academy.
Her big break came in 1962 when she won the Golden Arena for Best Actress award (which was the Yugoslav equivalent of Academy Award) for her role in Branko Bauer’s film Prekobrojna. This was the moment that sent her on the way to becoming Yugoslavia’s first and arguably the biggest female movie star.
Milena Dravić continued with long and prolific career during which she showed great talent and versatility. She was equally memorable and believable as the tragic heroine in state-sponsored World War II epics, eccentric protagonist of experimental arthouse films like WR: Mysteries of the Organism and romantic comedies. She especially excelled in the latter during 1970s and 1980s. She won the Cannes Best Supporting Actress Award in 1980 for Special Treatment.
For her roles and contributions to domestic cinematography, she received the prestigious “Pavle Vujisić” award in August 1994.—Wikipedia
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Photograph, quote and bio for Mabel Normand
Quote:
“Say anything you like, but don’t say that I ‘like’ to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.”
Bio:
Mabel Normand was the first great comedienne of American cinema and one the most important — and popular — American silent film actresses. By the time she first showed up at the Biograph studio in 1910, Normand was already a “Gibson Girl” (a model for illustrator Charles Dana Gibson) and a champion swimmer, and she was not yet 18. Biograph published a photo of Normand with the phony name “Muriel Fortescue,” leading some sources to believe this her real name, but nevertheless it was Mabel Normand. She was from a French Canadian family and born on Staten Island on November 9, 1892. Normand worked for Biograph only a few months, then joined Vitagraph for about a year while the Biograph Company wintered out West. After they returned, so did she, working under the direction of D.W. Griffith. Griffith cast Normand as the “second girl” in melodramas and in tomboy roles; Griffith’s protégé, Mack Sennett, primarily made comedies and would exploit Normand’s natural comic abilities and athleticism through casting her in the lead. A Dash Through the Clouds (1912) featured Normand escaping with her beau in a new gadget, a Wright Brothers-styled airplane. This, and other, short comedies made by Sennett helped establish Mabel Normand as a girl who could take care of herself — willful, powerful, and seemingly without fear.
Sennett broke with Biograph to found Keystone Comedies, and Normand joined him in California; she starred in the first Keystone, The Water Nymph, released in September 1912. Apparently, a personal relationship between Sennett and Normand blossomed about this time as well, and though it was once the source of a popular musical, Mack and Mabel, the true nature of their relationship remains unclear. Normand was the Sennett studio’s most significant female star, and as Sennett also discovered and introduced Gloria Swanson, Phyllis Haver, Betty Compson, and Carole Lombard, that’s saying a lot. Normand also began to direct in 1914, although more out of necessity than any artistic need. One reason Charlie Chaplin was allowed to direct so early in his Keystone career was that he objected to taking direction from Normand, complaining about it to Sennett.
Normand entered into an immensely popular series of films co-starring Roscoe \“Fatty\” Arbuckle as sidekick, with titles such as Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916) and Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition (1915) being among the best remembered. It is said that the relationship, such as it was, between Sennett and Normand foundered in the summer of 1915, nevertheless, Sennett decided to produce a feature starring Normand and built the Mabel Normand Studio next door to Keystone; it was a necessary move, as the Keystone studio didn’t have the right infrastructure to make such a film. Normand was 24 years old at the time; the studio with her name above the gate made only one film, Mickey (1918), a sentimental melodrama in the style of Griffith, spiced with comic touches. Mickey was tied up in post-production so long that by the time it was released, Normand had already left Sennett for the Goldwyn Studio and had been working there a year. Mickey, aided by a hit song and a successful merchandising campaign, proved Normand’s most successful film, but Sennett had lost legal control of it, and neither shared in its profits.
Normand’s sojourn to Goldwyn resulted in disappointing returns, and in 1920, Sam Goldwyn was happy to sell Sennett back her contract. During this time, Normand had become dependant on cocaine and began to suffer months-long periods of illness where she could not work. Once back at Sennett, she made Molly O’ (1921), a property more or less modeled right after Mickey; it was enormously successful. However, on February 1, 1922, director William Desmond Taylor was shot in the back and killed, and Normand was unfortunate enough to be the last person to see him alive. Although she had nothing to do with Taylor’s murder, her name was added early on to a long list of suspects in the still unsolved case. Although her reputation was sullied, Normand made one more feature with Sennett, The Extra Girl (1923), which remains the most frequently seen of her films, and one of her best. Although it opened to enthusiastic crowds and good reviews, at a New Year’s Eve party in 1923, Normand was witness to yet another shooting, this time of playboy Courtland S. Dines, by Normand’s chauffeur, with her gun. Dines survived, but Normand’s reputation was mortally wounded.
Although publicly Sennett declared that he planned to continue making films with Normand, in private they agreed to end their association. In 1926, Normand married actor Lew Cody and made five films with Hal Roach. These were her last, for in February 1927 Normand fell prey to her final bout with illness, which claimed her at the age of 37 after three years of slowly declining health. Though tuberculosis was given as cause, research in the late 20th century revealed that Normand may have died from a disease that was carried congenitally through her family line. Altogether Mabel Normand appeared in about 230 films and directed 16 of them; roughly 45 percent of her titles survive. It is not as generous a bequest as it sounds; a third of that total consists of 1914 films in which she co-starred with Chaplin, and the remainder includes only two of her Goldwyn features and one Vitagraph. At her peak, Normand was worshipped by scores of women who admired her for being wealthy, independent, fashionable, and flamboyant — not to mention well read and eloquent in interviews. She remains one of the most captivating and unique figures among American silent-screen stars.—All Movie Guide
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Photograph, quote and bio for Ann Dvorak
Quote:
[when asked how her last name is pronounced] My name is properly pronounced “vor’shack.” The D remains silent. I have had quite a time with the name, having been called practically everything from Balzac to Bickelsrock.
Bio:
Ann Dvorak made her first big entrance on August 2, 1911 in New York as Anna McKim. The only child of two vaudevillians, young Anna was raised in the business that would later make her a star (or at the least, a respected leading lady). Her father, Edwin McKim worked as a director for the Lubin Studios, and her mother, Anna Lehr, would find success as the star of many silent features. The couple split when Ann was four, and she and her mother moved to Hollywood. Ann would not see her father again until a national appeal to the press reunited the two in 1934.
Ann made her film debut as “Baby Anna Lehr” in the 1916 drama Ramona. Two more silents would follow, then Ann briefly retired from show business to concentrate on her studies at the Page School for Girls in Los Angeles. In 1929, the teenager was employed with MGM as a chorine. Appearing in over 20 features and shorts for the studio, she also served as “assistant choreographer” to Sammy Lee. As the 1930s began, Hollywood was pushing the limits of “public decency” with on-screen tales of urban decay, and Ann was about to play a part in the gritty world of “pre-code” cinema.
At various times Hollywood lore has credited Joan Crawford, George Raft and Karen Morley with encouraging Howard Hughes to consider the young actress for the pivotal role of Cesca in his gruesome 1932 masterpiece Scarface. The 19 year old, now going by the name Ann Dvorak, was signed to Hughes’ Caddo Company and cast opposite Paul Muni in the legendary gangster film, directed by Howard Hawks. After appearing with Spencer Tracy in Sky Devils, Hughes began loaning her out to Warner Bros. After a few short years in the movies, Ann looked like she was on the verge of becoming a star.
In 1932 Ann was appearing on film along side such greats as James Cagney and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and was given a meaty role in the pre-code classic, Three on a Match, with Bette Davis and Joan Blondell. Warner Bros seemed to be grooming the talented actress for stardom when they purchased her contact from Hughes and cast her in the title role in The Strange Love of Molly Louvain. It was on the set of this film that she met and fell in love with co-star Leslie Fenton. The two soon eloped and sailed to Europe for a year-long honeymoon in July of 1932. Ann’s relationship with Warner Bros. suffered and the remainder of her contract was spent either as leading ladies in mostly lackluster films, or in litigation, objecting to these types of roles. After many public battles with the studio, Ann left Warner’s in 1936 with her damaged reputation, and began to freelance for various studios.
In 1940, Ann temporarily put her career on hold to support her husband who was a British citizen and a member of the Royal Navy. Although she did make three films in England during this time, Ann devoted most of her energy to the war-effort as a member of the Women’s Land Army, an ambulance driver, a newspaper columnist and a BBC broadcaster. Returning to Hollywood in 1943, Ann soon filed for divorce from Fenton, referring to the broken marriage as a “war casualty.” She continued to make films throughout the 1940s and into the early 1950s and appeared on Broadway in The Respectful Prostitute in 1948. She also tried her hand at marriage for a second time. Ann ended this union with Russian dancer Igor Dega in 1951, the same year she retired from the screen.
Ann was married for a third time in 1951 to architect/television producer Nicholas Wade. The couple resided in both Honolulu, Hawaii and Malibu, California, traveled and amassed an impressive collection of rare books. Wade passed on in 1975, and Ann remained on the island until her own death on December 10, 1979. Her ashes were scattered off the coast of Waikiki Beach. Because she was living under her married name, Los Angeles newspapers did not report the death of the actress until Christmas Eve.
While Ann Dvorak has not survived the ages as a household name, she still managed to carve a small niche in the conscious of American pop culture. A discussion of “pre-code” films should always pay homage to Ann’s convincing death scenes, and her attempt to seduce George Raft in Scarface by suggestively slinking about in a revealing black gown has been shown to film students all over the country. While the films were not always good, her performances were always great. She could be tragic, (Three on A Match, G-Men) she could be loyal, (Bright Lights, Blind Alley, Thanks a Million) she could be funny (Merrily We Live, Out of the Blue) but above all she was always damn good (Scarface, A Life of Her Own, and many others)! Maybe some of the films are forgettable, but the personality she brought to all of her characters, as well as her own strong-willed personality, should never be forgotten.—anndvorak.com
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Cast addition for The Three Musketeers (1921)
Barbara La Marr
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Cast addition for The Big House (1930)
Leila Hyams
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Audrey TotterQuote:
Acting? The critics said I acted best with a gun in my hand.
Bio:
One is certainly hard-pressed to think of another true “bad girl” representative so closely identifiable with film noir than hard-looking blonde actress Audrey Totter. While she remained a “B”-tier actress for most her career, she was a “A” quality actress and one of filmdom’s most intriguing ladies. She always managed to set her self apart even in the most standard of programming.
Born to an Austrian father and Swedish mother on December 20, 1918, in Joliet, Illinois, she treaded lightly on stage (“The Copperhead,” “My Sister Eileen”) and initially earned notice on the Chicago and New York radio airwaves in the late 1930s before “going Hollywood.” MGM developed an interest in her and put her on its payroll in 1944. Still appearing on radio (including the sitcom “Meet Millie”), she made her film bow as, of course, a “bad girl” in Main Street After Dark (1945). That same year the studio usurped her vocal talents to torment poor Phyllis Thaxter in Bewitched (1945). Her voice was prominent again as an unseen phone operator in Ziegfeld Follies (1945). Audrey played one of her rare pure-heart roles in The Cockeyed Miracle (1946). At this point she began to establish herself in the exciting “film noir” market.
Among the certified classics she participated in were The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) in which she had a small role as John Garfield’s blonde floozie pick-up. Things brightened up considerably with Lady in the Lake (1947) co-starring Robert Montgomery as detective Philip Marlowe. The film was not well received and is now better remembered for its interesting subjective camera technique. Audrey’s first hit as a femme fatale co-star came on loanout to Warner Bros. In The Unsuspected (1947), she cemented her dubious reputation in “B” noir as a trampy, gold-digging niece married to alcoholic Hurd Hatfield. She then went on a truly enviable roll with High Wall (1947), as a psychiatrist to patient Robert Taylor, The Saxon Charm (1948) with Montgomery (again) and Susan Hayward, Alias Nick Beal (1949) as a loosely-moraled “Girl Friday” to Ray Milland, the boxing film The Set-Up (1949) as the beleaguered wife of washed-up boxer Robert Ryan, Any Number Can Play (1949) with Clark Gable and as a two-timing spouse in Tension (1949) with Richard Basehart.
Although the studio groomed Audrey to become a top star, it was not to be. Perhaps because she was too good at being bad. The 1950s film scene softened considerably and MGM began focusing on family-styled comedy and drama. Audrey’s tough-talking dames were no longer a commodity and MGM soon dropped her in 1951. She signed for a time with Columbia Pictures and 20th Century Fox as well but her era had come and gone. Film offers began to evaporate. At around this time she married Leo Fred, a doctor, and instead began focusing on marriage and family.
TV gave her career a slight boost in the 1960s and 1970s, including regular roles in “Cimarron City” (1958) and “Our Man Higgins” (1962) as a suburban mom opposite Stanley Holloway’s British butler. After a period of semi-retirement, she came back to TV to replace Jayne Meadows in the popular television series “Medical Center” (1969) starring Chad Everett and James Daly. She played Nurse Wilcox, a recurring role, for four seasons (1972-1976). The 70-year-old Totter retired after a 1987 guest role on “Murder, She Wrote.” Her husband died in 1996.—IMDb
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Colleen Moore
Quote:
I was the spark that lit up FLAMING YOUTH, Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble.—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bio:
Born Kathleen Morrison in Port Huron, MI, the daughter of an irrigation engineer, actress Colleen Moore was a favorite star of both silent and early sound films in Hollywood. Following her education in a convent, Moore studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory. It was her uncle, Walter Howey, who helped her break into films. It was he, an editor of the Chicago Examiner, who helped D.W. Griffith get his epic films, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, past the censors; to pay Howey back for his invaluable help, Griffith hired Moore as an actress in 1917 (Hollywood legend has it that she came in 1916, and actually appeared in Intolerance as an extra, but it’s not true). At first Moore played leads in second features and Westerns, frequently opposite cowboy star Tom Mix, but in the 1920s, she bobbed her hair and created the character of a vivacious flapper. The ploy made her an immediate success and Moore went on to play modern heroines in numerous films for First National. She became one of Hollywood’s top-grossing stars. Fortunately, in addition to being a popular actress, she was also an astute business woman who learned much from her second and third husbands, both stockbrokers, and invested her money wisely. Later she authored three disparate books: her autobiography, a book about her collection of miniatures, and a book on investments, How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market.—All Movie Guide
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Sinclair Lewis
Quote:
It has become rather commonplace for so-called literary critics to write off Sinclair Lewis as a novelist. Compared to…Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner…Lewis lacked style. Yet his impact on modern American life…was greater than all of the other four writers together.—William Shirer
Bio:
Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951), novelist, playwright
Born Harry Sinclair Lewis in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, he began reading books at a young age and kept a diary. A dreamer, at age 13 he unsuccessfully ran away from home, wanting to become a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War. At first, he produced romantic poetry, then romantic stories about knights and fair ladies. By 1921 he had six novels published .
In 1930, Sinclair Lewis became the first American author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award reflected his ground-breaking work in the 1920s on books such as Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. He was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize for ‘Arrowsmith’, but declined it because he believed that the Pulitzer was meant for books that celebrated American wholesomeness and his novels, which were quite critical, should not be awarded the prize.
Lewis was innovative for giving strong characterization to modern working women and his concern with race. Restless, he traveled a lot and in the 1920s he would spend time with other great artists in the Montparnasse Quarter in Paris, France where he would be photographed by Man Ray.
Alcohol would play a dominant role in his life and he died of the effects of advanced alcoholism in Rome, Italy.
In 2001, his 1920 book, Main Street would be named to the list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the editorial board of the American Modern Library. —biographybase
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Sylvia Sidney
Quote:
What did Hitchcock teach me? To be a puppet and not try to be creative.
Bio:
Sylvia Sidney was born in New York City, in the Bronx borough, on August 8, 1910 with the birth name of Sophia Kosow. Her father was Russian born and mother born in Rumania. They divorced not long after her birth. Her mother subsequently remarried and Sylvia was adopted by her stepfather, Sigmund Sidney. Sylvia was a shy child and her parents tried to encourage her to be more outgoing and gregarious. As an early teen, Sylvia had decided that she wanted a stage career. While most parents would have looked down on such an announcement, Sylvia’s encouraged her to pursue the dream she had made. She was enrolled in the Theater Guild’s School for Acting. Sylvia later admitted that when she decided to become a stage actress at 15, it wasn’t being starstruck that occurred to her, but the expression of beauty that encompassed acting. All she wanted was to be identified with good productions. One school production was held at a Broadway theater and in the audience was a critic for the New York Times who had nothing but rave reviews for the young Miss Sidney. On the strength of her performance in New York, Sylvia appeared in a play at the famed Poli Theater in Washington, D.C. More stage productions followed, each better than the last and it wasn’t long before the film moguls were at the doorstep. Sylvia was appearing in the stage production of “Crime” when she made her first appearance on the silver screen in 1927. The film in question was “Broadway Nights” which was dealt with stage personalities of which Sylvia was one. After the film she returned to the stage where she appeared in creations which were, for the most part, forgettable.
With the plays drying up, Sylvia moved to Colorado to tour with a stock company. She later returned to Broadway for a series of other plays. By 1929, Sylvia was on the big screen with “The Different Eyes” as Valerie Briand. There was another film, “Five Minutes From The Station” the following year. Sylvia was slowly leaving the stage for the production studios of Paramount. 1931 saw her appear in five films, of which, “City Streets” made her a star. She was very aware that she was replacing the great Clara Bow, who by now was suffering from severe depression. The contrast between the two actresses was very great indeed and the movie was a hit. The sad-eyed Sylvia made a tremendous impact and her screen career was off a running. Her next film was “Ladies of The Big House” later in ‘31. Sylvia played Kathleen Storm, part of a couple framed for a murder they didn’t commit. The film made huge profits at the box-office. Co-starring with Fredric March, she then made “Merrilly We Go To Hell” in 1932. The results of the film was, again, an unqualified success. Later she made “Madame Butterfly” as geisha girl, Cho-Cho San. Here she played in one of the worst productions to date. Most critics agreed that Miss Sidney’s performance saved the film from total disaster. In 1933, Sylvia starred in “Jeannie Gerhardt” in the role of the same name. Yet another doom and gloom picture, she played a girl beset with poverty and the death of her young husband before their child could be born. This turned out to be one fine performance and one fine motion picture. Sylvia received the star spotlight in 1934’s “Good Dame”. Despite her grand performance, the film failed miserably at the box-office, due in part to the miscast of co-star Fredric March. Sylvia scored big with the film critics with “Mary Burns”, “Fugitive” (1935). Here she played a law abiding restaurant owner who falls for a big time gangster. Her performance was overshadowed by the appearance of Alan Baxter who gave an outstanding portrayal as the gangster. That film was quickly followed by “Accent On Youth” where she played Linda Brown, a young lady who was fascinated by older men. In 1938, Sylvia played in “You and Me” opposite George Raft. The film critics gave it mixed reviews and because of that it didn’t do well at the box-office. Afterwards, the roles began to dissipate. Sylvia filmed “One Third of a Nation” and then wasn’t seen again until “The Wagons Roll at Night”(1941).
There was a four year hiatus before “Blood On The Sun”. In 1946, Sylvia starred in “The Searching Wind” where she played Cassie Bowman. The movie was based on a Broadway play but it just didn’t transfer well onto the big screen. The film was widely considered to be too serious and flopped with the movie fans. After 1947’s “Love From A Stranger” she didn’t appear again until “Les Miserables” in 1952. Only three more films followed that decade. There were no films throughout the 1960s. After appearing in a made for television movie, Sylvia returned to the big screen in “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams”. With a few movie appearances, here and there, she appeared in several made for TV flicks. In 1988, she appeared as Juno in the mega hit “Beetlejuice”. Her last film for the silver screen was “Mars Attacks”! in 1996. In 1998 she was Clia in the TV series “Fantasy Island”. Sylvia died on July 1, 1999, of throat cancer. To the end, she proved to be a very adept actress.—IMDb
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Best Albums of the '60s over 1 year ago
Some of my favorites:
The Band [Brown Album] – The Band
Then Play On – Fleetwood Mac
Black Monk Time – Monks
Forever Changes – Love
Here Are the Sonics!!! – The Sonics
The Notorious Byrd Brothers – The Byrds
Odessey & Oracle – The Zombies
Safe as Milk – Captain Beefheart
Silver Apples – Silver Apples
The United States of America – The United States of America
West Side Soul – Magic Sam
Some of my favorite ’60s Jazz records:
Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village – Albert Ayler
Black Fire – Andrew Hill
The Dealer – Chico Hamilton
Eastern Sounds – Yusef Lateef
The Jaki Byard Experience – Jaki Byard
Fuchsia Swing Song – Sam Rivers
Out to Lunch – Eric Dolphy
The Sidewinder – Lee Morgan
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Martha Vickers
Bio:
Lovely, auburn-haired Martha Vickers (nee Martha MacVicar) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on May 28, 1925, the daughter of James S. and Frances MacVicar. After attending schools in various states – Florida, Texas and California – she and her family settled on the West Coast. A raving beauty, she broke into the entertainment field as a model for still photographer William Mortenson. This attracted the interest of David O. Selznick and she signed a starlet contract with him, but nothing came of it. Universal took over her contract where she was groomed in inauspicious bit parts such as her corpse/victim in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), and in such low-level entries as Captive Wild Woman (1943) and The Mummy’s Ghost (1944). In between assignments, Martha earned WWII pin-up exposure in such magazines as “Yank: The Army Weekly.”
RKO gave her some higher-level billing chances with Marine Raiders (1944) and The Falcon in Mexico (1944), but it was Warner Bros. that put her officially on the map. The enticing Martha earned celebrity status and a new stage moniker when she generated some real heat as Lauren Bacall’s wild, thumb-sucking sister Carmen in the film noir classic The Big Sleep (1946), which also starred Humphrey Bogart, playing the teenage nymphet “bad girl” for all it was worth. This major success quickly led to other “B” roles and not necessarily all “bad girl” parts. Highly appealing as the second femme lead in the pleasant musical The Time, the Place and the Girl (1946), Martha looked radiant but was overlooked for bigger things. She continued on and disrupted the proceedings again in the atmospheric film noir The Man I Love (1947) with Ida Lupino and finally earned leading lady status in That Way with Women (1947) opposite Dane Clark.
Very much a part of the Hollywood dating scene, which included actor James Stewart and director Frederick De Cordova, Martha finally married producer A.C. Lyles in March of 1948, but the marriage was over within a couple of months. Post-war films included Love and Learn (1947), another film noir piece Ruthless (1948), and the melodrama Bad Boy (1949), which was Audie Murphy’s first starring role. She ended the decade top-lining the “Poverty-Row” drama Alimony (1949). Surprisingly, Martha’s high-profiled second marriage in 1949 to film star Mickey Rooney (she was his third wife) did not advance her career. In fact, Martha was not seen in films at all during this period. Despite the couple having a son, Teddy Rooney, the next year (1950), Rooney had already hit the nadir of his career and had turned excessively to the bottle. Her marriage to Rooney would be short-lived as well.
Martha married a third time in 1954 to Chilean polo player-turned-actor Manuel Rojas, best known for his co-starring role in The Magnificent Matador (1955), and she finally returned to the screen in The Big Bluff (1955) co-starring with John Bromfield. The momentum, however, was gone and the movie did nothing to generate new interest. She did move, however, into TV and performed effectively in a number of dramatic showcases. She and Rojas had two children, Tina and Tessa. In 1960, Martha did her last filming with the western Four Fast Guns (1960) and after guesting on a couple of episodes of the TV series “The Rebel,” ended her career. Not much was heard from this sultry beauty until her death from cancer in 1971 at age 46 in Hollywood, California.—IMDb
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Hazel Brooks
Bio:
Hazel Brooks (September 8, 1924, Cape Town, South Africa – September 18, 2002, Bel Air, California) was an American actress.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, she grew up in the U.S. and by 1943, at age 18, had been signed by M.G.M. Billed under her real name, Hazel Brooks, she made a series of pictures at the studio during the 1940s, culminating with a lead role in 1947 Body and Soul with John Garfield.
She had captured almost as much attention three years earlier in 1944 when, at age 19, she married the long-time head of her studio’s fabled art department, Cedric Gibbons, then 51. Although the age difference inspired a certain amount of winking in the gossip columns at the time, the marriage proved a strong one and lasted until Gibbons’ death in 1960. Brooks subsequently married Dr. Rex Ross, a surgeon and founder of the Non-invasive Vascular Clinic at Hollywood Hospital. Dr. Ross predeceased her in 1999.
According to long-time friend Maria Cooper Janis, Gary Cooper’s daughter, Ross in the years after her retirement from films became a skilled still photographer. She also worked actively for a number of children’s charities.
Following early bit parts in a half-dozen MGM vehicles, Brooks played the cynical nightclub singer who distracts John Garfield from boxing and from Lilli Palmer in Body and Soul. She had subsequent roles in Arch of Triumph and Sleep, My Love in 1948, as well as The Basketball Fix (1951) and The I Don’t Care Girl (1953).
She died in 2002, aged 78.—Wikipedia
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Post a song you are currently listening to over 1 year ago
Screamin’ Joe Neal:
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How/where do you watch most movies? over 1 year ago
I consistently try to see 3-4 classics a week at either the LACMA or Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles. For the greater portion of the time, however, I am relegated to watching films on my television, which is of a befitting 42 inches, at home.
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database over 1 year ago
Jeanne Crain
Quote:
I loved being at the studio (20th Century-Fox). After all, I started at 15, and I grew up there. But there comes a time when an actress stays too long in the same place. People get used to having you around, and they can’t think of you in a different light.
Bio:
Jeanne Crain was born in Barstow, California, on May 25, 1925. The daughter of a high school English teacher and his wife, Jeanne was moved to Los Angeles not long after her birth after her father got another teaching position in that city. While in junior high school, Jeanne played the lead in a school production which set her on the path to acting. When she was in high school Jeanne was asked to take a screen test to appear in a film by Orson Welles. Unfortunately, she didn’t get the part, but it did set her sights on being a movie actress.
After her high school career, Jeanne enrolled at UCLA to study drama. At the age of 18, Jeanne won a bit part in Fox Studio’s film entitled The Gang’s All Here (1943) and a small contract. Her next film saw Jeanne elevated to a more substantial part in Home in Indiana (1944) the following year, which was filmed in neighboring Kentucky. The movie was an unquestionable hit. On the strength of that box-office success, Jeanne was given a raise and star billing, as Maggie Preston, in the next film of 1944, In the Meantime, Darling (1944). Unfortunately, the critics not only roasted the film, but singled out Jeanne’s performance in particular. She rebounded nicely in her last film of the year, Winged Victory (1944). The audiences loved it and the film was profitable.
In 1945, Jeanne was cast in State Fair (1945) as Margie Frake who travels to the fair and falls in love with a reporter played by Dana Andrews. Now, Jeanne got a bigger contract and more recognition. Later that year, Jeanne married Paul Brooks on New Year’s Eve. Although her mother wasn’t supportive of the marriage, the union has lasted to this day and produced seven children. Her 1947 was an off year for Jeanne as she took time off to bear the Brinkman’s first child.
In 1949, Jeanne appeared in three films, A Letter to Three Wives (1949), The Fan (1949), and Pinky (1949). It was this latter film which garnered her an Oscar nomination as Best Actress for her role as Pinky Johnson, a nurse who sets up a clinic in the Deep South. She lost to Olivia de Havilland for The Heiress (1949). Jeanne left Fox after filming Vicki (1953) in 1953, with Jean Peters. She had made 23 films for the studio that started her career, but she needed a well-deserved change. As with any good artist, Jeanne wanted to expand her range instead of playing the girl-next-door types.
She went briefly to Warner Brothers for the filming of Duel in the Jungle (1954) in 1954. The film was lukewarm at best. Jeanne, then, signed a contract, that same year, with Universal Studios with promises of better, high profile roles. She went into production in the film Man Without a Star (1955) which was a hit with audiences and critics. After The Joker Is Wild (1957) in 1957, Jeanne took time off for her family and to appear in a few television programs. She returned, briefly, to film in Guns of the Timberland (1960) in 1960. The films were sporadic after that. In 1967, she appeared in a low-budget suspense yarn called Hot Rods to Hell (1967) (TV). Her final film was as Clara Shaw in 1972’s Skyjacked (1972).
Jeanne died of a heart attack in Santa Barbara, California, on December 14, 2003. Her husband Paul Brooks had died two months earlier.—IMDb
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