Stars! They're just like us!

They swim! Nice legs, Bogie!

They use water guns!

They play with their pipes!

They go fishing!

They hit the beach! Love that hat, Backus!

They feed one another!

They play darts! Nice bullseye, Freddie!

TCM kicks off a Memorial weekend with their war movie marathon starting tonight!

3 days, 34 movies.

Get your war on!

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Stella Dallas (1937)

Sick of her working-class lifestyle Stella Martin (Barbara Stanwyck) is determined to better her situation by snagging a husband like Stephen Dallas (John Boles) the mill executive at her father and brother’s factory. Stephen has a past he wishes to get away from as well. Disappearing from high society after his father’s suicide over losing the family fortune, a penniless and heartsick Stephen intended to marry his fiancée Helen (Barbara O'Neil) once he was financially able to support her. By the time he reaches that goal however, he learns that Helen has married someone else. he reads in the newspaper the announcement of her wedding. So when Stella came along, she was just the distraction he needed.

Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water…Stella is stubborn in her tactics to move up the social ladder. Mistaking loud, flashy gamblers and wastrels like as a step up, she falls into the wrong crowd and refuses to heed Stephen’s gentle but earnest advise. She also has deplorable fashion sense. When their daughter Laurel (Anne Shirley) is born Stella discovers she has a strong maternal instinct. Stephen, hoping that a child will calm Stella down is disappointed to realize she still wants to move up socially and continue her friendship with the vulgar Ed Munn (Alan Hale). He ends up estranged from Stella and eventually runs into Helen, now widowed with three sons.

They renew their acquaintance and Laurel who has always gone back and forth between her parents, is invited to stay at Helen's with her father. Realizing that Laurel fits in perfectly with Helen and her family, he decides to ask Stella for a divorce. However, Stella's social ambitions have been redirected towards Laurel and she turns Stephen down, thinking it would not be beneficial for her daughter. She also realizes that Stephen may have been correct all those years ago and she tentatively tries to capture his attention again. However, Stephen loves Helen and is disappointed at Stella’s refusal of divorce.

It’s not until Stella takes Laurel to a fancy resort that she realizes that her taste in clothes and her lack of social refinement will damage her daughter’s social standing. When Stella makes her first appearance at the resort, she becomes the target of Laurel’s friends who, unaware that Stella is her mother, viciously gossip about how tacky and vulgar Stella is. Embarrassed for her mother, Laurel insists they leave at once without telling her why. On the train back, Stella overhears the truth.

Realizing she must do what’s best for Laurel, Stella turns to Helen and makes a deal. She will allow the divorce if Helen and Stephen let Laurel live with them. Helen realizes the sacrifice Stella is making and assures her that her wishes will be carried out. When Laurel learns of the arrangement, she insists on going home to her mother. However, when Stella is notified by a telegram that Laurel is returning, she pretends she sent laurel away so she can marry Ed Munns, whom Laurel does not like. Laurel returns to her father and never sees her mother again. She doesn’t even know that Stella stands outside in the rain on her wedding day just to catch her daughter exchange vows through a window that Helen has strategically left open for view.

Hands down, this is the best role I have seen Stanwyck in yet! Her sacrifice is so moving, so heartfelt. Between cringing at her machinations, her vulgarity, and her downright generosity despite her social ambitions, Stanwyck seriously humanizes Stella so that we empathize with her. This movie is totally owned by Stanwyck. Though Shirley and Hale give great performances, Stanwyck outshines them all. Best yet, there is a minimum on the classic Stanwyck tantrums you see in so many of her films- something I’ve come to find irritating. Too, it’s interesting the juxtaposition of Stanwyck’s role here as opposed to her role as Lily in Babyface. As Lily, we don’t feel the empathy we should for the character, rather we’re glad she’s made the sacrifice she must at the end because it’s her just desserts. Stella Dallas is a must see, especially if you’re a Stanwyck fan!

Tonight on TCM! I am so excited to see this! Writer Larry Marcus and actress Rosalind Russell came up with the story and wrote the screenplay as a vehicle for Russell who became too busy with Broadway commitments to act in the film which eventually went to Esther Williams.
The Unguarded Moment (1956) When a high-school teacher is attacked, evidence implicates a troubled student.  Dir: Harry Keller Cast: Esther Williams, George Nader, Edward Andrews.

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Hooray! Hurrell!

Hurell collaborated with Joan on more than fifty photo sessions over the course of a decade.

She was very pliable and gave so much to the stills camera. She really worked at it. She would spend a whole day, changing into perhaps twenty different gowns, different hairdos, changing makeup... In a sense she used (these changes) to present a new image that might possibly work for her whole screen personality. Every time, there was a different kind of lighting or different backgrounds or poses. Crawford had the closest face to Garbo's- perfect proportions. Crawford had strong jawbones, her cheekbones were good, and her forehead and her eyes were good... She had a classic beauty and a kind of spirituality- practically everything she did was a picture. 

                            - George Hurrell excerpt from Donald Spoto's Possessed, a biography of Joan Crawford

Tonight on TCM! Not really all that great but if you like Edward G. Robinson...

The Man With Two Faces (1934) An actor uses his skills to protect his sister from her sinister husband.

Dir: Archie Mayo Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Mary Astor, Ricardo Cortez.

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Tuesdays with The Screen Guild Magazine

UNIQUE AND EXTRAORDINARY

By Ann Harding
[Reprinted from The Screen Guilds’ Magazine 1934]


There is a clause in actors’ contracts that always makes me want to hang my head, chew on a finger, dig my bare to in the soft loam and say, “Aw, shucks!” A clause which claims that the actor is “unique and extraordinary.” That is not inserted purely as a compliment, however. The actor is requested to endorse the claim, and is then requires by law and various acts of producer-gods to live up to it.
Now, how can he—after the fan magazines have run him through their mill and turned out just another “new” movie star, complete, C.O.D. for ten to twenty cents, with a full set of hobbies, favorite colors, breakfast foods and purple underwear? A few months later, the usual routine calls for a lead: “Is he slipping?” and after another period, he is neatly buried in a two-page spread: “Can he come back?”

The answer is: “Why should he?”—if you are one of the thousands who have followed his idiotic path through the fan magazine pages, believing, as you read, that “where there is some there is fire.”
How short-sighted of the mags to go so far afield from their grand old Pappy, the honored Fourth Estate. The garbled and twisted versions of what actors actually said in interviews—let alone the out-and-out inventions placed within quotes—have driven all of us into our armor plate at the sight of one of their approaching representatives. At that, the misquotation itself is often less painful than the libelous grammar in which it is couched.

What started this de-bunking mania, anyway? All right—H. L. Mencken—you win. But why bring it into a field of illusion to the millions who find life itself sufficiently debunked to begin with, and seek adventure and romance and beauty vicariously, through the lives of others? We—who according to contract are unique and extraordinary—have at least the touchstone of direct living. And that gift is not lost to us—though fan magazines pour the hottest lead and their most poisonous gas upon us in telling the wistful the “real truth.” Which isn’t the real truth—what is?—and if it were, the greater cruelty is not against us—it is the veil of deeper discouragement in the wistful eyes that read it.

The fan identifies himself with the hero in an hour of high adventure and emotional release. He doesn’t enjoy coming out into a sweltering or freezing or otherwise uncomfortable world, to find on the nearest magazine stand, that the person whose talent and personality have the blessed power to lead him into a land of dreams, is a driveling fool, a fake, or a monster. He feels somehow that he himself has been insulted too. Our fan mail is full of such indignant reactions to the phoney filth, the bald “insinuations” and sewer rakings. The don’t want it, they don’t like it when they get it, and it seems worth a wonder whether indeed this destructive approach is not, to a considerable extent, responsible for the drop in circulation among the more blatant of the scandal mongers.

It is a little fantastic that the boys and girls become enraged at those of us who decline to contribute toward our destruction by giving interviews and making possible those direct misquotes that too frequently follow our conversations with such pencil- pushers. They then set out to “get” us—using the power of print to avenge what they consider a personal grievance. Sporting, I call it. Naturally we withhold donations from the pages trying so cheaply but so doggedly to wring out personal and professional necks.

Fan magazines and actors draw their incomes from the same source. Both would profit by cooperating on a constructive policy for the benefit of the industry as a whole, instead of chasing each other around in this vicious circle. Mutual antagonism is burning brightly—the mags bristling with pins to stick into us—the actors locking themselves behind gates of reticence for sheer self-preservation. How silly, when we could really be of help to each other.

We turn to the Fourth Estate as our only true channel of communication with the world beyond Hollywood—and there IS a world beyond Hollywood, my little kiddies—a world that the fan magazines would have something to sell to, if they could win back our confidence by remembering the days when they were honest-to-God reporters—with a nose for news instead of a taste for unsavory hash. Some of them don’t even blush when an actor says, “But that isn’t news—can’t we think of something that hasn’t been covered so many times?”

Their way of earning a living is to shovel out so many words a month about us. If we don’t give them material, they must invent it to survive. And we can’t give it to them—as things are now and have been for some years—because of that embarrassing clause in our contracts. It has become a violation of our legal obligation to go into their ears as individuals and come out of their presses as rubber stamps of what they think all movie stars ought to sound like.

Obviously they agree that we are “unique and extraordinary”—and delight in printing in just what way they think so. Same to them! All right—let’s cry quits and play something else. Aren’t we all tired of this game? Let’s pretend that each side is “unique and extraordinary” in a decent way, for a change.
The mags can always stop first—we are the only ones who have to keep it up.


Debuting on the Broadway stage in 1921, Ann Harding was eventually brought to Hollywood like many stage actors and actresses due to her lovely speaking voice. Extremely beautiful with waiste-length blonde hair, Harding was promoted as RKO's answer to MGM's Norma Shearer. debuting onscreen in 1931 with Fredric March in Paris Bound, Harding found herself playing mostly in films for the "women's pictures" genre. Realizing she was being type-casted as the innocent, self-sacrificing character in film after film, she returned to the stage for the next five years. Eventually, she got in front of the cameras again and even tried her hand at several television shows.

I really enjoyed Harding's entry in the The Screen Guild. It's quite fascinating that as early as the thirties there were people who spoke out about the fantastic stories and libelous claims such fan magazines produced and unfortunately, are still producing. If only more people had taken action, we might be living in an era where nude photos and sex tapes aren't a means to revitalize or jump start one's career. It was especially brave of Harding to speak out as she was an actress under contract with the type of factory that encouraged such magazines to be produced.



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Girl with Green Eyes (1964)

Longtime friends Kate (Rita Tushingham) and Baba (Lynn Redgrave) move to Dublin together to escape their small town blues. Extreme opposites, Baba is an extrovert whose chatty vivaciousness allows the more reserved Kate to experience a little social life. Their youthful experiments at drinking and dating are countered by their religion that encourages them to attend mass every Sunday despite living away from their family.



One day, the girls take a ride into the country with a male friend who is intent on selling a dog to Eugene Gaillard (Peter Finch), a writer. Kate meets him first and is instantly taken with him. By chance, the girls bump into him later that week and Baba invites him out to tea. As Baba chatters on, Kate feeds her curiosity by staring at Gaillard intently. Unable to get him off her mind, she first waits around the bookstore and teashop hoping to bump into him again. When that doesn’t work, she boldly writes to invite him out to tea. The director uses an interesting little technique of showing the note on screen side by side with Kate at her desk writing it. Though out of sequence with the rest of the film’s darker theme- it adds a quirky touch.


Gaillard accepts her invitation and as Kate asks several questions there’s another interesting technique of them speaking in the same conversation but in different times and places- a relationship developing. However, Gaillard doesn’t want to get involved- the red light for most girls to give the typical answer which Kate does- neither does she, she just wants to be friends. Will we ever learn?

Kate starts spending nights at Eugene’s house and after a few visits, ventures out of the guestroom and into his bed where she is unable to consummate the relationship due to the strangeness most likely brought on by her religious background. She does this despite knowing Gaillard is married but slightly estranged from his wife. When her family back on the farm learns of her relationship, they drag her back home where a priest tries to talk some “sense” to her. Running away again, she hides at Gaillard’s house and wonders how he can remain so calm. When her father and a few of his friends arrive, Gaillard realizes things are no longer a joke. Thankfully his housekeeper knew how to wield a gun. After Kate’s father departs, Kate and Gaillard finally consummate their relationship. He gives her a wedding ring, takes her shopping, and moves her into his house. But it’s all ceremony, something to appease Kate.



However, real life begins to invade. Realizing that she is not mature enough to understand that he must work, he must maintain a relationship with his estranged wife because of their daughter, and he, at times, must put up with friends that will talk about his wife in front of her, Gaillard finds he does not know how to control the situation. Surprise, surprise. Another large factor is that he’s not at all religious. When he asks Kate why she bothers with Mass, she answers simply that she likes to go, it helps her when she feels all the goodness has gone out of her. Wonderful line.

 
One day Kate opens a letter from Gaillard’s wife that contains a plane ticket to New York and a note chastising him for messing with such a young woman. An argument ensues where it’s plain that Gaillard knows he’s gotten himself into something he meant to avoid in the first place. Afterwards, Kate asks if she may go into town with him. She runs off while he isn’t looking, hoping and expecting him to come after her. She is too naïve to realize she too has given him a ticket—to the way out. Though devastated, the film ends with Kate heading off to London and new adventures. There is a very touching scene on the boat as it leaves the port and Kate realizes that Gaillard didn’t come to see her off. She stars at the disappearing land and then smiles and turns to Baba and asks if she looks like a woman with a past? Baba responds with something jokingly and Kate runs to join in the fun on the boat. Ah youth!


The film ends with Kate, now firmly transplanted in London with Baba. Gaillard has written to her about their time together and she realizes that he did help her to get over a hump of sorts. She’s a wiser woman her May-December romance has given her the courage to be more outgoing, more confident.
 

Girl with Green Eyes is another wonderful example of the immergence of realistic filmmaking in the British counterculture of the sixties. With unusual shots and at times dizzying views, the audience is treated to the drab surroundings of post war Europe that either depends upon the characters to brighten the place up or uses the background to enhance the feelings and actions of the character. I honestly could watch Redgrave and Tushingham in a whole slew of these types of films. I think it wouldn’t hurt to check out more Peter finch movies either. He was fantastic in The Network.


Tonight on TCM! I watched this the other night- simply a MUST SEE!
Splendor In The Grass (1961) Sexual repression drives a small-town Kansas girl mad during the roaring twenties. Dir: Elia Kazan Cast: Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Pat Hingle.

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Through the looking glass...

Brave, brave Beatrice Lillie

Charles Boyer

Deanna Durbin

Robert Taylor and Greta Garbo in Camille

Edward Arnold in a movie I have seen but cannot recall. Anyone? 

Henry Fonda in Grapes of Wrath

Ina Claire in The Quaker Girl

Tonight on TCM!
Spend an evening with Esther Williams. Things are sure to go swimmingly!

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S & G: Irony

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Tuesdays with The Screen Guild Magazine

AN ACTRESS’ WORKING DAY


By Genevieve Tobin
[Reprinted from The Screen Guilds’ Magazine 1934]


Promptly at 10:30, one of the maids quietly opens the door to remind me that it is time to go to work. Usually I do not feel like working in the morning, so I yawn sleepily, draw the silk coverlet over my eyes and go back to sleep.
The maid is well trained and knows without being told that she is expected to phone my director to lay the company off for the day or until I feel like coming to the studio.
At 1 or 1:30 in the afternoon, I have my perfumed bath and a Continental breakfast, after which one of my secretaries comes in with the mail.
Sometimes I go to the club for a few holes of golf, or more often, I must confess, drop into one of the Golden Salons that line Hollywood streets and risk a few thousand on roulette.
This usually tires me—so I return home for a milk bath, after which I take a nap until 7 or 8.
Then—my day really begins!
It often takes an hour to select my costume for dinner.
When my escort calls, we have a few champagne cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. Sometimes sixty or seventy people drop in for dinner, or more often I go out to dine, as my place only has thirty rooms and is really too small for entertaining.
After dinner, I make the round of dancing places and unless things are particularly interesting, arrive home at about 3 o’clock, as I think an actress should not keep too late hours when she is working hard.
This, dear reader, is the accepted notion of a movie star’s routine, but is far from the cold and desolate truth.
The facts of the matter—which differ materially from the glorified popular notion—are as follows:
The conventional 9 o’clock “call: means that I must be in the hair-dressing department at 7, which in turn means that I must get up at 6, bathe hurriedly, snatch a glass of orange juice and drive ten miles to the studio. This part of my routine is the same, whether I am sleepy, tired, moody, or what-not.
From 7 to 7:45 I sit sleepy-eyed in the hair-dresser’s chair, and then go to the make-up room. This means another hour.
By 8:45 o’clock, I am in my dressing room. It takes only about fifteen minutes to get into whatever costumes needed for the first scene.
By 9 o’clock I am on the set. Incidentally, it is a matter of price with players nowadays to be prompt. It is no longer the movie fashion to keep companies waiting. The business office gets reports on those who do. Here, temperament is figured along with all other unnecessary expenses. Nowadays, Geniu$ is spelt with a “$”.
From 9 o’clock until 12:30 we work and then I return to my dressing room, where my hour of rest and refreshment consists mostly of fitting costumes, seeing interviewers or doing a little last minute brushing up on my lines for the afternoon.
Often the afternoon’s work is not over until nearly 7 o’clock, when I return to my dressing room and realize that I have eaten practically nothing.
In my weariness, I drop my clothes—rather than take them off. By 7:30 I get my make-up off and start for home.
At about 8, I open the door and from the atmosphere, to which I am keenly sensitive, I know the cook is out of patience. He cannot see why these actresses he reads about should be detained by so prosaic a thing as work.
I manage to enjoy my one and only meal of the day and gather some measure of strength from my dinner.
I leave the dining room, with the thought of how wonderful it would be to fall into bed. But I cannot.
There is still a lot of studying to do on tomorrow’s lines. Sometimes I allow myself the luxury of listening for a half hour to a radio program, to take my mind off my work.
At about 10:30, I drag myself wearily from the tub and toward the bed.
It has no golden canopy; no liveried servant wafts incense toward it with a peacock plume; no diamond-brocaded coverlet gleams in the soft light of an amethyst lamp.
It is just a plain bed—not a movie bed.

And I fall into it. I am an awfully tire girl!



Vivacious, highly stylish and a great commedienne, Genvieve Tobin was always a wonderful addition to any movie. I especially loved her in Kiss and Make-Up with Cary Grant and her last film No Time for Comedy with Rosalind Russell and James Stewart. Both movies were quite quirky and deliciously humorous. Genevieve and her sister Vivian (so ironic for me as I love both these names and if I ever have two little girls, this will be what I name them) were daughters of a stage entertainer. Along with their brother George, they all three became stage and screen performers from a young age. Considered more stylish and attractive than talented, Genevieve didn't let this deter her from taking on challenging roles such as King Lear. But much like Constance Bennett, Genevieve gave up on her career for high society and never looked back.

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Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)

American single mother Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) has come to England with plans to settle in London with her journalist brother Steven (Keir Dullea) and her four-year-old daughter Felicia, whom she calls Bunny.. Late on Bunny’s first day of school and needing to get ome to meet the movers, Ann leaves Bunny in the “first day” room while she tries to find a teacher. She comes across the very busy cook (Lucie Mannheim) who says she will look after her. However, when Ann comes to fetch Bunny later that day she is not there and nobody can remember having seen her. The cook quit earlier that day.

Police Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) has a small list of suspects to check out in Bunny's disappearance: the cook whom quit the school earlier that day, Ann's landlord, aging writer and broadcaster Horatio Wilson (Noel Coward), and retired teacher Ada Ford (Martita Hunt) wholives on the school's top floor and collects recordings of children's nightmares.
The investigation becomes more suspicious when all of Bunny’s possessions have disappeared, including her passport and the school has no record of her registration despite Steven’s check registrar showing he wrote a check to the school two weeks prior. Further, Ada tells Newhouse that Steven confided in her that Ann used to have an imaginary friend she called Bunny and that he was worried about her. Ann is having a hard time proving that Bunny even exists and Steven is threatening to go public with the help of his resources as a reporter unless the police find Bunny quickly.

Already handing over a gift she bought Bunny earlier that day as proof she isn’t lying about her daughter’s existence, Ann suddenly recalls that her doll had been taken in for repair. She sets off to the shop and finds the doll but  when Steven arrives he sets it on fire while Ann is upstairs paying the repair man. When Ann returns she is shocked and Steven then strikes her, knocking her out. He checks her into a hospital, claiming she hit her head and that she may be mentally unstable, but Ann manages to escape and tracks him down to the friend’s house they were staying at prior to their move to the flat.

Steven retrieves Bunny from the trunk of his car, where she was drugged and kept all day. Preparing to murder Bunny and bury her with all her posessions, Ann sees that he’s clearly insane. Stating he’s tired of Bunny always coming between them and that she loves her more than he, Steven confides how easy it was to trick her and the police. Ann spends the next hour trying to distract and reassure Steven by playing frantic children games out in the yard until Newhouse and his men arrive.

This was a wonderful film that kept me guessing throughout as to whether or not Ann or Steven was crazy. Their relationship with one another was certainly questionable as you're lead to believe they are husband and wife in the beginning of the film. Indeed, if you hadn't been told they were siblings, you'd still think by their behavior that something more than platonic was between them. The best part of the film however, was Noel Coward's bit part as the perverse landlord with a penchant for sadomasochism. I could honestly listen to him talk like Horatio Wilson all day.
 I am currently reading Donald Spoto's Laurence Olivier: A Biography which is part of the reason I wanted to see this film- that and I was interested in seeing Raymond Massey's daughter in action. Laurence participated in this film, like in most of his films as a source to replenish his bank account. He also relished the opportunity to work with his long-time friend Noel Coward. However, he found the director Otto Preminger quite a bully and egotist. Both he and Coward did not like him much.

Tonight on TCM:
Ocean's Eleven (1960) A group of friends plot to rob a Las Vegas casino. Dir: Lewis Milestone Cast: Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra.

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