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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Joan Collins in The Opposite Sex (1956) The Opposite Sex (1956) was a musical re-make of the 1939 film The Women. It was also one of the early vehicles for the new British bombshell Joan Collins. New to the movies and to MGM, she recalled walking past the studio […]
The fall of the studio system in Hollywood did not happen overnight. It took from the late forties until the late sixties, but although it happened over a couple of decades, it was always going to happen sooner or later. Indeed, if World War Two had not interceded it […]
The victim – 1959 – Beverly Hills, California George Reeves (45) The corpse of George Reeves, television’s Superman, was found naked in his bedroom at 1.59am by his party guests who then waited 45 minutes before calling police. Why the delay? And why would George get completely […]
As far as film noirs go, The Blue Gardenia rests somewhere near the middle of the genre. It has its moments, but the hurried ending detracts from its overall effectiveness. Indeed, if we didn’t know better, we could be forgiven for thinking that the production suddenly ran out of […]
Over the past century or more that Hollywood has existed there has been no shortage of abortions performed on many of its aspiring young actresses. Unwanted offspring are not unique to the movie business, but they do tend to interfere with ambitions, not to mention reputations, more often in […]
PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL, THE (1957) This was the first film produced by Marilyn Monroe’s own company. It made a slight profit, but God only knows how because it is as dull […]
One wonders how many young movie fans of today have any idea why the intersection of Orange Drive and Hollywood Boulevard, just across from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, is now named ‘Carmen Miranda Square’. How many have even heard of her? Back in 1945 on ‘V-J Day’, at that very […]
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