Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Changeling: The Comic Art of Woody Allen
“‘You can’t control life,’ he tells us in that film. ‘”It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only art you can control. Art and masturbation.'”
Category: Actors & Personalities
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[…]
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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[…]
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 · Interviews
The Ballad of Stella Stevens: An Interview
In which Stella tells all or at least most
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Feminism · Indies · Interviews · SF & Fantasy
The Secret of Her Success: An Interview with Helen Slater
For me, on Supergirl, I was 100% in. It was the biggest opportunity that ever happened to me, and the process of making the film was very nourishing. I think[…]
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 · Artists
Extinguishing Features: The Last Years of Richard Pryor
Editor’s Note: Richard Pryor died on this date, December 10, 2005, ten days after his sixty-fifth birthday. We salute this comic genius and cultural game-changer by reposting Julian Upton’s powerful[…]
Actors & Personalities · Hollywood · Politics
Desperate Journey: How a B-Movie Bonzo Climbed into Politics
If only Ronald Reagan had been a better actor, our world might be a brighter place today. * * * Although it’s been thirty-three years and six presidents since Ronald[…]
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 · Interviews
“The Best Jewish Cowboy”: An Interview with James Caan
“Hard times will make a monkey eatred peppers.”
Happy Happy Birthday Baby! Steve McQueen (b. 3/24/30): Fifty Years of the King of Cool
“Steve understood real people, particularly misfits, like nobody else.It was just the Hollywood brass he loathed.”
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[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Drama · Silents · Women in Film
An Innocent Lulu: How Pabst Rewrote Wedekind in Pandora’s Box
If she is seen simply as a free spirit, a woman who lives for sexual pleasure, and as exemplary on that account, a model liberated woman (as Louise Brooks herself[…]
Tall Cool One: The Artful Life of Anthony James
As some of those character names echo, James portrayed a lot of villainy and savage desperation over the course of his career, inaugurated by his performance as burning racist Ralph[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian · Directors · Theory
Inhabiting the Frame: Building as Body in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs
When Lee’s daughter asks her new caretaker why the apartment is such a mess, she answers, “A house is like a person. It gets sick, grows old. The cracks in[…]
Actors & Personalities · Colonialism · Drama · Essays · Historical & Epic · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
A Passage to India with James Fox: Understanding a Curious Country through an English Film
Near the close of our Skype meeting, my conversation with James Fox turned inside out. He enquired if he could ask me a question. He then tried to assemble the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama
The Erotic Persona of Jimmy Stewart: From Visionary to Voyeur
You would never guess either from looking at him or from the “aw shucks” way in which he’s remembered that Stewart is responsible for some of the most erotic romantic[…]
Actors & Personalities · Women in Film
Vivien Leigh: Becoming Scarlett
“[Vivien Leigh] is, I should say, the most important recruit British films have ever had . . . She is still not at all keen on going to Hollywood. She could go any day if she said the word. It’s up to the English studios to develop her over here.” — Picturegoer, April 3, 1937
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?”
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