FIFTIES MOVIE TRIVIA – PT6.

March 31, 2018 Alan Royle 1

The two leads in Carnival Story (1954), Steve Cochran and Anne Baxter, did not enjoy each other’s company during the shoot. ‘One minute I was Mother Cabrini, helping him with his complicated love life’, Anne said later, ‘the next kicking him out of my tiny penthouse for attempted rape. He […]

FOUR BRITISH WARTIME CLASSICS

March 29, 2018 Alan Royle 0

  The British have always been exceptionally good at making movies about World War Two. They seem to possess a knack for underplaying heroism which, unfortunately, tends to make warfare even more heroic than any amount of gaudy flag-waving might otherwise imply. Americans would probably be the first to admit […]

What Happened to the ‘Wagon Train’ (1957-65) Stars?

March 25, 2018 Alan Royle 67

From 1957 until 1965 the prairie schooners of TV’s Wagon Train series rolled over 284 episodes. Throughout those eight seasons only eight actors (no actresses) appeared in fifty or more episodes. A minor actress named Kay Stewart popped up in eleven episodes from 1958 to 1964, playing eleven different women. […]

No Image

THE 10 WORST ‘BEST PICTURE’ OSCAR-WINNERS.

March 23, 2018 Alan Royle 0

Selecting the ten worst winners of the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar is a whole lot tougher than choosing the ten best. Why? Because I have not always bothered to see a lot of the rubbishy ones. Only recently I sat through several of those I had avoided like the plague for […]

No Image

BEST PICTURE OSCAR WINNERS – THE BEST AND THE WORST.

March 21, 2018 Alan Royle 7

There have been some quite wonderful ‘Best Picture’ Oscar winners since 1927/8 and there have been some shockers, too. Just for the heck of it, I went through the list and jotted down my top ten and my bottom ten. If anyone agrees with either list I shall be flabbergasted, […]

FIFTIES MOVIE TRIVIA – PT4.

March 19, 2018 Alan Royle 8

Director Charles Laughton thought Robert Mitchum was one of the finest actors in the world and he also respected him as a person. He wrote in Esquire about the American who starred in his masterpiece The Night of the Hunter in 1955: ‘All this tough talk is a blind, you […]

FIFTIES MOVIE TRIVIA – PT3.

March 17, 2018 Alan Royle 3

In the 1955 Hitchcock picture To Catch a Thief, there is a scene in which John Robie (Cary Grant) is discussing the cook’s ‘sensitive hands’ with an insurance agent and casually mentions that those hands once strangled a German general without a sound. For German audiences, however, the words were […]

FIFTIES MOVIE TRIVIA – PT2.

March 15, 2018 Alan Royle 3

  Tea and Sympathy (1956) could have been a fine movie, but the Production Code Administration (PCA) and the Catholic Legion of Decency (CLOD) did all in their considerable powers to emasculate it. And they succeeded. No matter how many times the screenplay was rewritten, they continued to find it […]

FIFTIES MOVIE TRIVIA – PT1.

March 13, 2018 Alan Royle 2

The Moon is Blue (1953) is a pretty tame picture, yet it was the first post-Hayes mainstream Hollywood movie to use the words ‘virgin’, ‘seduce’ and ‘mistress’ (in the sexual partner sense). The mere utterance of these three words was enough to get the picture banned from theatres in Boston, […]

FORTIES MOVIE TRIVIA – PT 6.

March 11, 2018 Alan Royle 10

                     George Raft George Raft turned down the leads in High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon (both in 1941), thereby giving Humphrey Bogart’s career a huge kick-start. Contrary to public opinion though, he never turned down Casablanca (1942). Why? Because he […]