Paramount did not think much of the source material for this picture. But Alfred Hitchcock did. Recognizing its potential, he anonymously purchased the screen rights to Robert Bloch’s novel for a paltry $9,000, then went around buying up as many copies as he could find, just to keep the […]
I was ten years old when my grandparents took me to see Elvis Presley’s first picture, Love Me Tender. I think they were curious to see what all the fuss was about. I had been reading history books for a few years by then, mostly books about wars and […]
Roman Polanski and writer Kenneth Tynan shared similar views on what this production of Shakespeare’s play should look like. They intended to have Lady Macbeth do the sleepwalk scene stark naked; they wanted to depict death more realistically and they wished to inject a lot more violence than was […]
James Caan was offered $4 million to play the title role in Superman but he refused it. Marlon Brando rang him and asked, ‘What’s the matter? Isn’t the money enough?’ Caan replied: ‘The money’s incredible…but you don’t have to wear the suit.’ Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood were also […]
When Marlon Brando turned down the Oscar for his performance in The Godfather (1972), it was to protest the depiction and treatment of Native Americans in Hollywood westerns. He even sent a friend of his, Sacheen Littlefeather, […]
Stars Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961) were supposed to be playing teenagers, but were in fact 22 and 23 years old respectively at the time of filming. Kazan simply surrounded them with more actors in their twenties, rather than players in […]
Doctor Zhivago was released in the same year as The Sound of Music and was almost as successful, finishing second behind that picture in the race for box-office champion of 1965. Furthermore, of all the movies produced by MGM in its entire history, only Gone with the Wind (1939) made […]
Lately, I have been making a point of catching up on famous movies that, for various reasons, I never got around to seeing when they were released. I mainly watch them to see what all the fuss was about. Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember is one of those fifties […]
Easy Rider (1969) was intended to star Peter Fonda, Rip Torn and Dennis Hopper, but Fonda encountered impenetrable opposition when he went in search of financial backing, because nobody wanted to get involved with a project that included the notoriously difficult Dennis Hopper. His professional reputation was in the […]
Although I am Australian through and through, born and bred in Fremantle, Western Australia where I have lived almost my entire life, I have never been a fan of Australian-made movies. In my opinion, most of the early screen efforts painted Australian men as stereotypes; loud, foul-mouthed, country bumpkins, forever […]
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