Trevor Howard: “The World Doesn’t Make Any Heroes”
” In between the idealized lover and the cantankerous old goat lay a handful of roles in which Howard managed to simultaneously embody and undermine the archetypal Englishman.”
Author: Imogen Sara Smith
Imogen Sara Smith is the author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City (McFarland, 2011) and Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy (Gambit Publishing, 2008). She is a freelance film writer and librarian living in Brooklyn.
Dana Andrews: The Forties Hero and His Shadow
“It’s not difficult for me to hide emotion, since I’ve always hidden it in my personal life.”
More
Actors & Personalities · Asian
Japanese Cinema’s Uncommon Man: Tatsuya Nakadai’s Dissidents, Outcasts, and Shadow Warriors
“Like Hollywood’s new postwar men, he offered a multifaceted, ambivalent masculinity far from monolithic wartime ideals.”
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.”
Women in Love: Three Early ’30s Melodramas by John M. Stahl (Seed, Back Street, Only Yesterday)
The subtle beauty of John M. Stahl’s early ’30s work is revealed by the exquisite 35mm prints screening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the series Universal Pictures: Restorations and[…]
The Road to Hell: Three Early Films of Edward L. Cahn (Law and Order, Afraid to Talk, Laughter in Hell)
Among Cahn’s champions is Dave Kehr, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, who has programmed a four-week series (running through Wednesday, June 15) devoted to his tenure at[…]
Mary Astor (1906-1987) Birthday Tribute: A Lady’s a Lady
Mary Astor was born May 3, 1906 and died September 25, 1987. In honor of this superb star, we present Imogen Sara Smith’s profile, which originally appeared in Bright Lights in[…]
Allan Dwan: Between the Lines
“Dwan was never afraid of melodrama, so often disdained for its contrivance, implausibility and heightened emotion; nor of farce, with its tendency to reduce characters to spastic puppets or wind-up toys. Dwan’s skill at visually expressing relationships — the legacy of his nearly two decades making silent movies — cannot by itself salvage stories or characters that fail that test of engaging us; but when combined with his crisp narrative intelligence and detached yet compassionate eye for human behavior, it gives his best films an apparently effortless power to engross.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals
The Music of Words: Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films
“While Powell and Pressburger were masters of the classic show-don’t-tell method, they also daringly broke the rule by telling, not showing. Both techniques ultimately serve the same purpose. Despite the aesthetic of excess often attributed to the Archers’ films, they gain power by withholding certain elements, requiring the audience to supply what’s not there.”
Maximum Security: Film Noir, Domesticity, and the Female Captive
“While films about men with dangerous jobs showed them returning home to supportive, contented wives, films that focused on domestic settings showed women caught in oppressive relationships or warped by the narrowness of their emotional lives.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Forgotten Charleys I: Charley Bowers: Silent Comedy’s Wizard of the Bizarre
“He is Aladdin and the camera is his lamp.” — James R. Quirk
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Silents
Forgotten Charleys II: Charley Chase: Mr. Normal Unleashes His Comic Demon
“He could be suave or awkward, likable or pesky, average or eccentric, a winner or a loser, a fussy nerd or the life of the party, all the while remaining Charley Chase.”
Past Sunset: Noir in the West
“I don’t need other people. I don’t need help. I can take care of me.”
In Lonely Places: Film Noir Outside the City
“Noir films with non-urban settings exploded the idea that escape into a safer or healthier world was possible, showing how temptation and violence can attack anyone, anywhere.”
Sinners’ Holiday: An Ode to Pre-Code
“Code? What Code?”
Plumbing the Depths of Capitalism: On Force of Evil
“It was like going down to thebottom of the world”
Homeless on the Range: The Lusty Men and the “Great American Search”
“He’s always holding something back.”
Links + BSA
