Below is part 4 of 4 of an essay I wrote on director George Stevens in 2011. Click here for part one, here for part two and here for part three. Last week was Stevens 119th birthday. I had a plan: to work our way through “Shane”, my favorite Stevens
The below is part two of a four part essay I wrote on director George Stevens (‘A Place In The Sun’, ‘Shane’, ‘Giant’) in April, 2011. Yesterday would have been Stevens 119th birthday. I’ll be posting the rest of the essay throughout this week. Click here to read part one
Tough guy actor George Raft began his career in the cabarets of Times Square in the 1920s as a ‘hoofer’, period slang for a male dancer who didn’t specialize in formal dance. Hoofers were a breed unto themselves, generally self-taught street-wise kids whose athleticism and panache could land them in
Apropos of the doc about the making of Billy Wilder and I.A.L Diamond’s ‘Fedora’ (1978) which I posted last Friday, here’s another doc about the making of Wilder’s much more robust and well-known film ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959) titled “Nobody’s Perfect’. Scholars of Wilder and Marilyn Monroe will hear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUqnSedqssI Much is being jabbered about A.I. and its likely calamitous effect on the creative/filmmaking/writing and even acting process. There’s little reason to worry in my opinion; A.I. is hear to stay and will soon supplant the methods by which movies have been made for one-hundred plus years. And in
Continuing our story of ‘Annie Hall’ and its Oscars moment, above is a short section from a doc about Woody (don’t know which one) which tells the oft-repeated tale of how he blew off the ceremony and didn’t even know the movie had won the major Oscars of that year
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBLUKjrdH3M The director William Friedkin, who died in August of this year, was not one to mince words. He was volatile, sometimes crude, always controversial and extremely refreshing in a bracing sort of way. For time and space reasons I won’t go into his many quotable comments but I urge
Enjoy a condensed day/evening in the Berlin of 1927, featuring some awfully well-dressed Menschen, lovely streets and shops, a fine looking Neutrum for luncheon and an evening at a Nachtclub that may well have featured Anita Berber (our subject of Monday’s post which has kicked off this weeks interest in
CLICK HERE TO WATCH the three-and-a-half minute screen test that Marlene Dietrich made for ‘The Blue Angel’ in 1929. This is presumably the first time a camera fully captured the multi-faceted genius of this ground-breaking performer. The film’s director, Josef Von Sternberg, also directed the test and used two angles;
Behold Anita Berber, a dancer/actress/performer/scandalous provocateuer of the late teens/1920s German cultural landscape. Berber was daring, mad, wildly admired and reviled and died young in 1929 of multiple drug addictions and a general exhaustion of excessive existence. Little of her film work is extant but the above video features two