Actors & Personalities · Interviews
Happy Birthday, James Mason (b. 5/15/1909): Odd Man Out
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.”
Category: Actors & Personalities
Actors & Personalities · Books
Books: Best Actress: The History of Oscar-Winning Women by Stephen Tapert
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[…]
Not the Girl Next Door: Doris Day Reconsidered (Happy 98th Birthday)
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[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama · Essays · Romance
Adios, Compañeros: Living the Dream of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
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
“Newest Ideas about Brain Power”: Hair Color and Jean Harlow, Hollywood’s Platinum Blonde
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
Political Correctness Run Amok: Life and Lillian Gish at Bowling Green State University, Ohio
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
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.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Who Becomes a Legend Most? And Why Wasn’t It Betty Garrett?
“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
Making Montgomery Clift: An Intimate Exploration of a Hollywood Enigma
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[…]
Looking for Quiet: The Other Side of Robert Mitchum
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
Extinguishing Features: The Last Years of Richard Pryor
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[…]
A Mannequin’s Face: Joan Crawford
Joan Crawford was born on this day in 1905. Our buddy Howard Mandelbaum wrote this incisive tribute to her in the 1970s. We reprint it here for your reading pleasure.[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
No One Gets In Alive! Kicking Down Doors with the Marx Brothers
The Brothers don’t enter into sanctimonious class systems, organizational institutions, or drawing rooms to assimilate and enjoy the fruits of its privileges either; they gain access, enact a savage modus[…]
Actors & Personalities · Franchises & Series · Interviews
A Man for All Seasons: An Interview with Dean Cain
I feel like I get to go and play at it now. I mean, I take it very seriously and I do the work. But it feels more like play[…]
Actors & Personalities · Festivals & Awards · Historical & Epic
Keeping It Royal: Oscar Loves British Monarchs Much More Than American Presidents
The moral of this particular dose of Oscar reality: You don’t have to be a royal to grab the Academy’s attention, but it sure helps if you’re pretending to be[…]
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 · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Boxcars, Beery, and a Dutch Bob: William Wellman’s Beggars of Life (1928) on Blu-ray
What we see in Brooks and Beery on the screen is a mixup of the actors’ hardwired personalities and those contrived for their roles, but this is the sort of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Film Technology & History · Silents
Florence Lawrence and the Truth Behind “We Nail a Lie” (Famous Ads, 1910)
Ever since the ad appeared, there have been unanswered questions: who or what was behind the rumors of Florence Lawrence’s death? Did these rumors start because the fans of her[…]
