The Martyrdom of Lulu: Louise Brooks at 117
Louise Brooks was born November 14, 1906, which means she would be 117 today. We honor the legend by reposting Dan Callahan’s scintillating profile, first published on Brooks’s centenary on[…]
Author: Dan Callahan
Dan Callahan is the author of Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman (2012), Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave (2014), The Art of American Screen Acting (2 volumes, 2018-19), The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock (2020), and the novel That Was Something (2018). He has written for Film Comment, Sight & Sound, New York Magazine, The Criterion Collection, and many other publications.
Mary Astor: 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[…]
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Actors & Personalities · French Cinema
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.”
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.”
Actors & Personalities · Dance · Dancers · Hollywood · Music & Musicals
Fred Astaire: Footsteps on the Sands of Time
He is transfixing just walking across the screen in his first movie, Dancing Lady (1933), where he partners Joan Crawford and looks as if he could fly if he wanted[…]
Actors & Personalities · Pre-Code · Sex & Relationships · Women in Film
Mae West: Pleasure Woman
West is a born outlaw, a queen of the underworld who knows that two and two are four but five will get you 10 if you know how to work[…]
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?”
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?”
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)
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[…]
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