MOVIE TRIVIA – PT120.
Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express (1974) […]
MOVIE TRIVIA – PT119.
Wendy Barrie as Jane Seymour in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) Whenever I see the Alexander Korda feature The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), the one in which Charles Laughton so memorably plays the title role, I find myself drawn to the actress playing Jane […]
THE BEST OSCAR YEARS – 1939 & 1950.
Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in GWTW (1939) The Academy Awards is a competition, but it is one that has seldom been conducted on a level playing field. A winner one year may very well not even have been nominated in a stronger year. Historically, the two […]
MOVIE TRIVIA – PT118.
Olivia with her Oscar for To Each His Own (1947) In August 1943, Olivia de Havilland filed a law suit against Warner Bros and was immediately suspended. When she won her suit in December 1944, via a unanimous decision, the studio promptly fired her. Because of the law suit and her […]
MOVIE TRIVIA – PT117.
(L to R) Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate & Patty Duke Jacqueline Susann based the book on which the 1967 film of the same title, Valley of the Dolls, on a number of people […]
WAR PICTURES WORTH WATCHING – PT9.
36 HOURS (1964) – World War Two This is an intriguing black and white feature, a slice of Hollywood hokum, cleverly done and well-acted. The story, however, is as far-fetched as it can get. It stars three of my favourite actors – James Garner, Rod Taylor and Eva Marie […]
THE POVERTY ROW STUDIOS – their rise and fall.
The ‘Big Five’ major studios Up until the time the first crack in the system appeared in 1948, the movie business was controlled by the ‘Big Five’ major studios – MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros, RKO and Fox – and to a far lesser extent by the ‘Little Three’ majors – […]
MEETING SARA SHANE/ELAINE HOLLINGSWORTH.
Sara Shane & Gordon Scott in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959) A year or so ago I had the great pleasure and honour to spend five days chatting with a lady named Elaine Hollingsworth, a former Universal actress who performed under the name of Sara Shane in the 1950s on […]
THE MAKING OF ‘SPARTACUS’ (1960).
There were three Servile Wars in B.C. Italy; the one involving escaped slave/gladiator Spartacus being the last of them. It ended with a final battle in 71 BC. Stanley Kubrick replaced Anthony Mann as director of Spartacus (1960), after Mann and the star, Kirk Douglas, repeatedly clashed. Douglas and […]
MOVIE TRIVIA – PT116.
The stunning Linda Darnell Nineteen year-old Linda Darnell was supposed to play the role of Vivian Potter in 1943’s The Gang’s All Here, but then she up and married 41 year-old cinematographer J. Peverell Marley and her boss, the predatory Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox, was anything but […]