Peter Lawford Peter Lawford was born in 1923, the son of Sir Sydney Lawford and his lover, a married woman named May Aylen. May’s cuckolded husband generously stayed with her until the baby was born, just so Peter would be born legitimate. All things considered, it was a most […]
Marjorie Main Marjorie Main was an MGM character actress loaned out to Universal for the ten ‘Ma & Pa Kettle’ films that proved so successful. Her real life husband of 14 years, Stanley Krebs, passed away in 1935 when she was in her forty-fifth year, but she continued to […]
ALFRED HITCHCOCK: ‘There is a dreadful story that I hate actors. Imagine anyone hating Jimmy Stewart…Jack L. Warner? I can’t imagine how such a rumour began. Of course, it may possibly be because I was once quoted as saying that actors are cattle. My actor friends know I would […]
Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955) is an unusual film – a sex comedy that contains no sex! Thanks to the iconic image of its star Marilyn Monroe standing atop a subway grating with her dress being blown upwards, revealing her legs and whatever else imaginative cinema-goers think they […]
The name Norma Desmond, Gloria Swanson’s character in Sunset Boulevard (1950), was chosen from a combination of silent-film star Norma Talmadge and silent movie director William Desmond Taylor. The latter’s still-unsolved murder is one of the great scandals of Hollywood history and contributed to the eventual introduction of the Hays […]
In my movie collection is the 1992 Sean Connery-Lorraine Bracco film Medicine Man, one of those pictures that critics in their unchallenged wisdom chose to lambast from the moment it was released. As director John McTiernan said, ‘If the press hadn’t defined it as an action movie, it probably wouldn’t […]
Peter Lawford Frank Sinatra wrongfully blamed his actor buddy Peter Lawford for President Kennedy cancelling plans to stay at the crooner’s Palm Springs retreat in 1962. In reality it was Bobby Kennedy who insisted his brother cut his ties with Sinatra […]
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 […]
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, […]
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) I suppose most fans of old movies have their personal favourite film noir. Mine is without doubt Double Indemnity (1944), which surprises even me because I have never been overly keen on any of the three stars – Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson. […]
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