Gregory Peck & Ava Gardner in On the Beach (1959) I was about 16 when I first saw On the Beach (1959) at a theatre in Perth, Western Australia. I hated it. Too depressing. I got the impression that my grandparents dragged me along to see the thing, because they […]
THE TRAIN (1964) – World War Two Paul Scofield & Burt Lancaster in The Train (1964) Like many WW2 movies, The Train is loosely based on an actual event. A few weeks before the liberation of Paris in 1944, the Germans decided to freight five boxcars of art treasures stolen from […]
Gia Scala, James Darren, David Niven & Gregory Peck in The Guns of Navarone (1961) GUNS OF NAVARONE, THE (1961) World War Two – A mission to destroy a naval gun battery. There are a lot of things wrong with this movie but it is still entertaining enough. Gregory […]
L to R – James Darren, Greg Peck, David Niven & Anthony Quinn in The Guns of Navarone (1961) The problem with the WW2 action flick The Guns of Navarone (1961) should be immediately apparent to just about everyone. Of the six commandos sent to disable the mighty guns of the […]
Gregory Peck & Ava Gardner in On the Beach (1959) When Ava Gardner came to Australia to make On the Beach (1959), she did not exactly endear herself to the nation when she remarked that Melbourne was the most appropriate place on Earth to make a picture about the end of […]
Clara Bow Silent star Clara Bow’s 1926 contract with Paramount guaranteed her a bonus of $500,000, a staggering amount of money at the time, if she could manage to stay ‘scandal-free’ for its tenure. She never even came close to collecting. Oddly enough, given her tawdry reputation, Clara had […]
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 […]
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 […]
MARGARET DUMONT (1882 – 1965) Margaret Dumont’s great claim to movie fame was her regular role as the ‘straight woman’ to the Marx Brothers in their movies. She was totally bald beneath her wigs and, consequently, wore them all the time. Groucho was convinced that she rarely understood the group’s […]
PETER O’TOOLE (1932 – 2013) Peter O’Toole hailed from Leeds in Yorkshire. He always maintained he was born in Ireland, but there are simply no records indicating that. As a teenager he started out as a newspaper copy boy, showed promise as a reporter, but was drawn to the […]
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