Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
It’s Always Fair Weather? I’m Afraid Not: Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse Say Good-bye to Broadway
What’s black and white and destroys Western Civilization?
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Activist & Political · African American · Societal Trends
A Star Is Shorn: Thanks to Woefully Underinformed Campus Activists, Acting Legend, Badger Alum, and Civil Rights Champion Fredric March Is Suddenly “Off Wisconsin”
Fredric March stands alongside four other mid-century drum majors for civil rights during the 1943 national radio broadcast of “Race-Relations Sunday.” Left to right: concert soprano Dorothy Maynor, actor Canada[…]
Cityscapes · Counterculture · Directors · Drama · Sex & Relationships
Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969): The “Baroque Geometry” of Los Angeles in the 1960s
“I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable and most uncivilized major city in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer. . . .”1 – Adam[…]
LGBT & Queer · Music & Musicals
Bonjour, Paris! Musical Conventions in Les Chansons d’amour (2007, Christophe Honoré)
Les Chansons d’amour is unusual because of the realism of its characters, setting and story; the film has little dance and no big production numbers, but it is a musical.[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Pre-Code
Happy Birthday, Lee Tracy (b. April 14, 1898): “A Manic, Scalding Passion for Success”
“With his impish grin, twinkling eyes, and boyish blond hair, he looks like Tom Sawyer crossed with a Tammany Hall fixer.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Who Becomes a Legend Most? And Why Wasn’t It Betty Garrett?
“The reason I sought out Betty Garrett’s book in the first place was because of something devastating that I read – and didn’t want to be true – in Farley[…]
Happy Birthday, Baby! Irving Berlin (b. May 11, 1888) on Film
This article first appeared in Bright Lights in October 2000. We reprint it as a tribute to the seminal composer on what would have been his 130th birthday. (And frankly, we’re surprised[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Music & Musicals
Los Angeles Cinema and the Utopia of La La Land
Few movies have represented LA with such fawning reverence and nostalgia as La La Land. The filmmakers depict a clean, spare, elegant city, sluiced in mid-century Technicolor, consisting almost exclusively[…]
What Makes Them So Successful? A Look into the Philosophy Behind the Coens’ Filmography
The truth is that they tend toward philosophical absurdism, rather than nihilism, and this perspective is what either makes or breaks their film in terms of commercial appeal. The draw,[…]
Happy Birthday to Cinema’s Great Bad Boy: Peter O’Toole (8/2/32-12/14-13)
“Arriving in Los Angeles for the film’s premiere there, he quickly blotted his copybook by hurling a drink at the producer Sam Spiegel, the most powerful man in Hollywood at the time. Spiegel had ‘massacred’ Lawrence, O’Toole remarked, by cutting twenty minutes of it in order ‘to sell more fucking ice cream to the punters.'”
Comedy · Directors · Historical & Epic · LGBT & Queer
Camping Out in Hollywood: The Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!
Hail, Caesar! is not one of the Coens’ better films, but, because of its grab-bag of Hollywood silliness, it is perhaps the best at illuminating one of the main reasons[…]
What a Way to Go! Shirley MacLaine, the 1960s, and How Hollywood Learned to Start Worrying and Fear the Bomb
Who’d have dreamed that the 1960s were as dumb as the 1990s? And that Shirley MacLaine was the transitional figure between the serious 1950s and the brainless decade that followed?[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Easter 2014, Part Deux: Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade, in which Fred and Judy celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ
In part “deux” of Bright Lights’ tribute to Easter, we present that devout duo, Fred and Judy, offering spiritual and musical solace on this day of reflection. Remember how it[…]
The Fall of the House of Warner: The Warner Brothers
“In the 1930s, Warners effectively became the studio to go to for social critique, a risky position to hold under the Hays Code when pictures could be censored not just[…]
Vincente Minnelli’s Descents Into Hell
Vincente Minnelli’s reputation is that of a stylist – someone who did not author his own screenplays, but who directed whatever the studio (usually MGM) assigned to him (usually musicals), and[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Nothin’ but Legs! Fred and Cyd Go out Kicking in Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings
Sorry, folks, but this is the last dance
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Funny Face! Audrey Hepburn’s Fabulous Fifties Fashion Frolic! Also Starring Fred Astaire
Paris! Gershwin! Been there! Heard that!
Actors & Personalities · Essays · War
Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair: Marlene Dietrich’s Star Persona and American Interventionist Strategies in Postwar Berlin
“I read so much about immigrants, how they must adjust to customs and the words of foreign lands. Maybe because I was never treated like an immigrant! Nobody made excuses for me. Not then – not now. Nobody cares about my roots.”1 – Marlene Dietrich, April 15, 1985
Images from The Three Musketeers (George Sidney, 1948)
Director George Sidney is known mainly for: (1) glamourizing women, and (2) showing the audience a good time. In The Three Musketeers (1948), he does both. The principal woman glamourized[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Yeah, I’m 56 and She’s 24. What’s Your Point? Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, frequently though not continuously irresistible in Daddy Long Legs
Come on, do the Sluefoot? That I can resist.
