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Showing posts with label names. Show all posts
Showing posts with label names. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Coming Attractions: My Night at Maud's
Wednesday, 24 August at 7:00 & 9:10 P.M.
Giveaways: Anatomy of a Murder DVD courtesy of Scarecrow Video and a gift certificate for Cinema Books, respectively.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Links: Gilda
New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was utterly perplexed by Gilda on its premiere in March of 1946, not an unusual state for him.
"It is quite all right to make a character elusive and enigmatic in a film—that can be highly provocative—providing some terminal light is shed. But when one is conceived so vaguely and with such perplexing lack of motive point as is the dame played by Rita Hayworth in Gilda, the Music Hall's new film, one may be reasonably forgiven for wondering just what she's meant to prove, for questioning, indeed, the whole drama in which she is set. And that is what we frankly do.
Despite close and earnest attention to this nigh-onto-two-hour film, this reviewer was utterly baffled by what happened on the screen. To our average register of reasoning, it simply did not make sense. "
He was particularly dissatisfied with Rita Hayworth, whose charms somehow failed to interest him:
"Miss Hayworth, who plays in this picture her first straight dramatic role, gives little evidence of a talent that should be commended or encouraged. She wears many gowns of shimmering luster and tosses her tawny hair in glamourous style, but her manner of playing a worldly woman is distinctly five-and-dime. A couple of times she sings song numbers, with little distinction, be is said, and wiggles through a few dances that are nothing short of crude."
Writing a couple of weeks ago in The Observer, though, Phillip French sees what Crowther could not, the fantastical sexual subtexts that make Gilda so much fun:
"The movie revolves around the exotic Rita Hayworth and was produced by Virginia Van Upp, the most powerful woman at Columbia, who was charged by tough studio boss Harry Cohn with supervising the star's career. Hayworth is stranded in Buenos Aires at the end of the second world war, trapped between her sadistic, middle-aged husband, the Nazi-sympathiser Ballin Mundson (George Macready), and her ex-lover, the cruel, amoral American adventurer, Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford). The men have a homoerotic love-hate relationship. After Johnny sees Ballin's phallic sword-cane the first time they meet, he says admiringly: 'You must lead a gay life.'"
The excellent film noir podcast series "Out of the Past", hosted by academics Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards, devoted its 40th episode to Gilda, focusing in particular on the visual style of the film and the work of celebrated cinematographer Rudolph Maté.
"From the flip of her fiery hair to the reprise of her incendiary song, she sizzles the celluloid and burns herself indelibly into our collective consciousness. In fact, her presence so scorches that we are apt to miss the technical artistry of this film. Rudolph Maté's superlative cinematography uses banal objects pedagogically, to teach us to read the images: the blinds in Mundson's office make us aware of the fact we're looking, then show us how and where to look; the elaborate staging and framing of staircases make us wonder whether each character's fate is ascending or descending. While the Triad of superb players (Hayworth, Ford, and Macready) fleshes out the elaborate story, it is Maté's camera that builds the suspense. In then end, the cinematography combines with lines of dialogue pronounced by philosopher Uncle Pio to give us the world through noir-colored glasses—a "worm's eye view" that lends Hollywood's biggest stars a distinct earthiness."
Finally, Rita Hayworth is pretty. The Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess site has the hundreds of pictures to prove it.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Top 5 Top 5 Lists Related To, But Not Including, Gilda
Top 5 Rita Hayworth Films:
1. Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)
2. The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947)
3. The Strawberry Blonde (Raoul Walsh, 1941)
4. You Were Never Lovelier (William A. Seiter, 1942)
5. Pal Joey (George Sidney, 1957)
Top 5 Glenn Ford Films:
1. The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)
2. Superman (Richard Donner, 1978)
3. The Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955)
4. The Courtship of Eddie's Father (Vincente Minnelli, 1963)
5. Plunder of the Sun (John Farrow, 1953)
Top 5 Charles Vidor Films I Haven't Seen Yet:
1. Cover Girl (1944)
2. Rhapsody (1954)
3. The Bridge (1929)
4. A Song to Remember (1945)
5. The Swan (1956)
Top 5 Non-South American Films Set in South America:
1. Only Angels Have Wings (Howard hawks, 1939)
2. Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 2005)
3. Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)
4. Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997)
5. Starship Troopers (Paul Veerhoeven, 1997)
Top 5 Films of 1946:
1. The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks)
2. It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra)
3. A Matter of Life and Death (Powell & Pressburger)
4. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock)
5. My Darling Clementine (John Ford)
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
Links: Laura
Opening in New York at the Roxy in October, 1944, Thomas Pryor gave it a generally positive review in the Times. The film's only real flaw, he found, was in the performance of Gene Tierney:
"Yes, you get the idea that this Laura must have been something truly wonderful. Now, at the risk of being unchivalrous, we venture to say that when the lady herself appears upon the scene via a flashback of events leading up to the tragedy, she is a disappointment. For Gene Tierney simply doesn't measure up to the word-portrait of her character. Pretty, indeed, but hardly the type of girl we had expected to meet. For Miss Tierney plays at being a brilliant and sophisticated advertising executive with the wild-eyed innocence of a college junior."
Sacrilege, I say! Everyone knows that Gene Tierney is flawless.
Dave Kehr didn't take a position on Ms. Tierney in the Chicago Reader, instead content once again to brilliantly capsulize a classic film:
"It reveals a coldly objective temperament and a masterful narrative sense, which combine to turn this standard 40s melodrama into something as haunting as its famous theme. Less a crime film than a study in levels of obsession, Laura is one of those classic works that leave their subject matter behind and live on the strength of their seductive style."
One of the many websites dedicated to the glory that is Gene Tierney, themave.com has, along with a bio and the requisite photos, a link to an article hyping Tierney in Motion Picture magazine. Headlined:
"SIDNEY SKOLSKY COMES UP WITH A PICTURE OF GENE TIERNEY AS SHE IS TODAY, NOT THE DEMURE, PETITE BRUNETTE MOST PEOPLE THINK HER, BUT A GAY, SPUR-OF-THE-MOMENT KIND OF GIRL, REFRESHING AS A COLD SHOWER, AND SHE'S SEXY, T00!"
Skolsky (bylined as "Famous movie reporter") then writes:
"Gene Tierney. She's sex in any language. On the screen, she's been Chinese, Polynesian, Eurasian, Arabian, Sicilian and just plain American. But regardless of the role she plays, she's always sexy. This international type actually was born in Brooklyn. The date is November 20, 1920. To further complicate her cosmopolitan attainments, she is married to a Russian, was partly educated in Switzerland and she speaks perfect French.
"Her full name is Gene Eliza Tierney and the initials spell "get." She has a driving ambition and generally gets what she wants."
I'm convinced.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
Top 5 Top 5 Lists Related To, But Not Including, Laura
Top 5 Gene Tierney Movies:
1. The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941)
2. Leave Her to Heaven (John Stahl, 1945)
3. The Ghost & Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947)
4. Advise & Consent (Otto Preminger, 1962)
5. Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, 1943)
Top 5 Dana Andrews Movies:
1. The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
2. The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman, 1943)
3. Where the Sidewalk Ends (Otto Preminger, 1950)
4. Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941)
5. A Walk in the Sun (Lewis Milestone, 1945)
Top 5 Vincent Price Movies:
1. The Masque of the Red Death (Roger Corman, 1964)
2. Leave Her to Heaven (John Stahl, 1945)
3. His Kind of Woman (John Farrow, 1951)
4. The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956)
5. Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990)
Top 5 Otto Preminger Movies:
1. Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
2. Advise & Consent (1962)
3. Bonjour tristesse (1958)
4. Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)
5. Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)
Top 5 Films of 1944:
1. A Canterbury Tale (Powell & Pressburger)
2. Ivan the Terrible Part 1 (Sergei Eisenstein)
3. To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks)
4. Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder)
5. Going My Way (Leo McCarey)
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