Programming Note: Apologies that we're off schedule on episodes of Pfandom and Three Fittings. Performance anxiety (aka writer's block) at Film Experience HQ. While Nathaniel course corrects...
On this day in showbiz history...
Here are a few cinematic things to think about today March 19th. Which will you feel most festive about?
1859 Charles Gounod's Opera Faust premieres in Paris. There are multiple Faust operas just as there are multiple film versions of the
1897 Betty Compson (The Barker, 1928), the only Best Actress nominee born in Beaver, Utah (I mean, she'd have to be, right?) enters the world.
1915 Happy 102nd birthday today to 40s star Patricia Morrison (Dressed to Kill, Song of the Thin Man). Yes, she's still alive!
1947 Glenn Close is born in Connecticutt. 70 years later she still hasn't won her Oscar! She's back on Broadway in Sunset Blvd at the moment...
On this day in showbiz history...
Here are a few cinematic things to think about today March 19th. Which will you feel most festive about?
1859 Charles Gounod's Opera Faust premieres in Paris. There are multiple Faust operas just as there are multiple film versions of the
1897 Betty Compson (The Barker, 1928), the only Best Actress nominee born in Beaver, Utah (I mean, she'd have to be, right?) enters the world.
1915 Happy 102nd birthday today to 40s star Patricia Morrison (Dressed to Kill, Song of the Thin Man). Yes, she's still alive!
1947 Glenn Close is born in Connecticutt. 70 years later she still hasn't won her Oscar! She's back on Broadway in Sunset Blvd at the moment...
- 3/19/2017
- by NATHANIEL R
- FilmExperience
Joan Crawford Movie Star Joan Crawford movies on TCM: Underrated actress, top star in several of her greatest roles If there was ever a professional who was utterly, completely, wholeheartedly dedicated to her work, Joan Crawford was it. Ambitious, driven, talented, smart, obsessive, calculating, she had whatever it took – and more – to reach the top and stay there. Nearly four decades after her death, Crawford, the star to end all stars, remains one of the iconic performers of the 20th century. Deservedly so, once you choose to bypass the Mommie Dearest inanity and focus on her film work. From the get-go, she was a capable actress; look for the hard-to-find silents The Understanding Heart (1927) and The Taxi Dancer (1927), and check her out in the more easily accessible The Unknown (1927) and Our Dancing Daughters (1928). By the early '30s, Joan Crawford had become a first-rate film actress, far more naturalistic than...
- 8/10/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...
- 2/6/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Betty Compson, Clive Brook, Woman to Woman Despite some confusion in various reports, the 1923 melodrama The White Shadow, half of which was recently found at the New Zealand Film Archive, is not Alfred Hitchcock's directorial debut. It isn't Hitchcock's first ever credited effort, either. That honor apparently belongs to Woman to Woman, which came out earlier that same year. The White Shadow, in fact, was a Woman to Woman afterthought. Both movies were directed by Graham Cutts, both were produced by future British film industry stalwarts Victor Saville and Michael Balcon, both were based on works by Michael Morton (the earlier film was taken from a Morton play; the later one from a Morton novel), and both starred Clive Brook and Hollywood import Betty Compson. (Compson plays two parts in both films as well; but whereas in The White Shadow she plays two actual characters, in Woman to Woman...
- 8/3/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
The Barker (1928) Direction: George Fitzmaurice Cast: Milton Sills, Dorothy Mackaill, Betty Compson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Sylvia Ashton, George Cooper Screenplay: Benjamin Glazer; dialogue by Joseph Jackson; titles by Herman J. Mankiewicz, from Kenyon Nicholson's 1927 play Oscar Movies, Pre-Code Movies Dorothy Mackaill, Milton Sills, The Barker Directed by George Fitzmaurice, by then already a film veteran, The Barker is one of those strange hybrids made at the dawn of the sound era: some sequences feature dialogue, others have intertitles and musical accompaniment. The Barker, in fact, is perhaps stranger than most for the dialogue isn't restricted to one specific reel or two. Characters start talking unexpectedly, only to go silent again a few scenes later. Besides its historical importance as one of those transitional curiosities, this B-movie melodrama produced with a mostly A-class talent has enough intriguing elements to keep viewers at least moderately entertained. The basic plot, from Kenyon Nicholson...
- 3/9/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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