John Barrymore: Sweet Prince of Irony
“Isn’t it extraordinary that the most popular character ever written should apparently be defeated by life instead of transcending it?”
Author: Dan Callahan
Dan Callahan is a film writer based in New York. He's the former Arts Editor of Show Business Weekly and Book Editor at Culturedose.net. He has written for Slant Magazine, Time Out New York, and Senses of Cinema.
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Drama · Women in Film
Ida Lupino: Demon Mother Night
“[H]er favorite expression of strained intensity would be less quickly relieved by a merciful death than by Ex-Lax.”
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Margaret Sullavan and the Art of Dying
Note: One of our favorite actresses, Margaret Sullavan, was born on May 16, 1909, which means she’d be 111 if she’d lived. Not that she’d necessarily have wanted to, as[…]
Fatal Instincts: The Dangerous Pout of Gloria Grahame
“I’m a girl who loves to be manhandled! After all, what are a few contusions or abrasions if you get the man you love?”
Mary Astor (b. 5/3/1906) Birthday Tribute: Prisoner of Kicks
Mary Astor was born May 3, 1906 and died September 25, 1987. In honor of this superb star, who was also a gifted novelist and memoirist and a sexually adventurous free-thinker[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Nuts and Nice Messes: On Laurel and Hardy
“Life isn’t short enough . . .” Laurel in Sons of the Desert (1934)
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Rudolph Valentino: Dream Lover
“Valentino said there’s nothing like tile for a tango!” — Norma Desmond to Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Delphine Seyrig: The Eternal Return
“Seyrig is capable of stopping an entire film with one decisive physical gesture, one smile, one glare, one sound from her smoky, murmuring voice.”
Robert Ryan: A Moon for the Misbegotten
“I have been in films pretty well everything I am dedicated to fighting against.”
Norma Shearer: The Primrose Path to MGM Stock
“She hovered somewhere between the realest of realities and the most blatant of impersonations.”
George Sanders: A Mitigated Cad
“Where on the screen I aminvariably a sonofabitch, in life I am a dear, dear boy.”
Nuts to the Squirrels and Roués Redeemed: The Discreet Charm of Charles Boyer
“In Boyer, self-belief and theatrical technique are seamlessly fused together.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Ode to Lili: And Leslie Caron
“This MGM movie is studio-system filmmaking at its most protective, and it’s designed entirely to showcase Leslie Caron …”
Actors & Personalities · Artists
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: The Elusive Pleasures of Irene Dunne
“You’d never get tired of having her around, because she’d always be someone else for you.” The reasons for Irene Dunne’s continuing, undeserved obscurity are fairly well known. Nearly all[…]
Herzog’s Tricky Rescue Dawn
Most critics have approached Werner Herzog’s latest film Rescue Dawn with qualifying kid gloves, as if it would be impolite to question a late work from such a grand old[…]
Uneasy Living: The Insecure Charm of Jean Arthur
“Funny, tender, a little neurotic, a little erotic, and always spontaneous …” A Foreign Affair (1948) is a blunt Billy Wilder comedy set amid the ruins of Berlin, and it’s[…]
Farley Granger: Senso and Sensibility
In four films, two for Alfred Hitchcock (Rope {1948} and Strangers on a Train {1951}), one for Nicholas Ray (They Live by Night {1948}) and one for Luchino Visconti (Senso[…]
Through the Looking Glass: Thoughts on The Window
Ted Tetzlaff brings Bobby Driscoll to the voyeur’s front window The Window (1949) is the kind of movie probably best experienced as a child of 11 or 12, plagued by[…]
A Woman in Trouble is Rescued and Loved
David Lynch’s Inland Empire, which runs 172 minutes, keeps collapsing in on itself. This is sure to frustrate most people, even Lynch fans. (I was not a big Lynch fan[…]
