Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Historical & Epic · Politics
Charlie Chaplin was born on April 16, 1889. To honor the old boy, we herewith present Alan Vanneman’s witty discussion of one of Charlie’s masterpieces, originally published in Bright Lights[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Drama · Women in Film
“[H]er favorite expression of strained intensity would be less quickly relieved by a merciful death than by Ex-Lax.”
” 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.”
“It’s not difficult for me to hide emotion, since I’ve always hidden it in my personal life.”
Actors & Personalities · Asian
The next step for a Hollywood that is coming to see the true potential of Dev Patel’s abilities is to let him shine in his own right, and in his[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian
“Like Hollywood’s new postwar men, he offered a multifaceted, ambivalent masculinity far from monolithic wartime ideals.”
Actors & Personalities · Books · Characters · Hollywood
David Lazar, Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, October 2020) * * * I’d have to say that the best definition[…]
Actors & Personalities · Interviews
Mason was “equally at home playing small, brooding anti-heroes, camping it up in a toga, or doing a nice line in late career self-parody.”
Actors & Personalities · Books
Big picture book is a fun peruse for cineastes * * * Stephen Tapert’s Best Actress: The History of Oscar-Winning Women (2020, Rutgers University Press, 504 pages) is a coffee[…]
We’ve reposted this piece before because, really, can there ever be enough Doris? Her talent, humor, and joie de vivre are a tonic in a world increasingly locked down and[…]
“Steve understood real people, particularly misfits, like nobody else.It was just the Hollywood brass he loathed.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama · Essays · Romance
QT’s films are commonly hurtling toward darkness, yet Once Upon feels like a repudiation, as much as a culmination, of his oeuvre. There’s a point in the experience where the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Hollywood
INTRODUCTION Jean Harlow (1911-1937), born Harlean Carpenter, rose to screen fame in the early 1930s playing characters with an unaffected, uninhibited, spontaneous sexuality. [See Figure 1.] Dubbed the “Platinum Blonde”[…]
Actors & Personalities · Commentary · Silents
Those who affect a superior attitude toward a great artist such as Lillian Gish are not only ignorant of our cultural heritage but stubbornly unaware that art usually comes from[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Pre-Code
“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
“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[…]
Actors & Personalities · Documentaries
As Robert Clift states in the film: “The people in my life who loved Monty lost him twice: in his death, and then again when they couldn’t find him in[…]
Considering Mitchum’s background, it’s forgivable to conflate his cinematic existentialist tough guys with his mythic, often dubious, real-life history. Some things are certain, though: Mitchum lost his father early, crushed[…]
Actors & Personalities · Artists
Editor’s Note: Richard Pryor died on this date, December 10, 2005, nine days shy of his sixty-fifth birthday. We salute this comic genius and cultural game-changer by reposting Julian Upton’s[…]
