MOVIE TRIVIA – PT22.
Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan (M.A.S.H.) Loretta and her husband Dennis Holahan Loretta Swit portrayed Nurse Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan in the enormously successful TV series M.A.S.H. from 1972 until 1983. In […]
deborah kerr
MOVIE TRIVIA – PT 11.
Warren Beatty & Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde (1967) Before he agreed to play the role of Clyde Barrow in the 1967 hit Bonnie and Clyde, Warren Beatty was chasing the director’s job and had already chosen the two actors he wanted to play the title roles – his sister Shirley […]
MOVIE TRIVIA – PT9.
Ali MacGraw & Robert Evans Steve McQueen’s performance in Papillon (1973) was overlooked when Oscar nominations were announced in 1974. The general feeling was that his stealing Ali MacGraw from Robert Evans, a very powerful studio executive, may well […]
FIFTIES MOVIE TRIVIA – PT6.
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 […]
FIFTIES MOVIE TRIVIA – PT3.
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 […]
FIFTIES MOVIE TRIVIA – PT1.
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, […]
FIFTIES MOVIE TRIVIA – PT5
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 […]
A couple of English roses – Simmons & Bloom.
JEAN SIMMONS (1929 – 2010) Jean Simmons was her real name and she hailed from Crouch Hill, London. She was barely sixteen when she landed a miniscule part in the British film Caesar and Cleopatra in 1945. The production proved to be an opportunity (however small) for several […]
DEBORAH KERR – Class and beauty personified.
I have written nine books on Hollywood, mostly on the stars of the so-called ‘Golden Era’, and have reached the slightly disillusioning understanding that most of my readers, (not all I hasten to add), are far more interested in the scandal and gossip than about any of the genuinely […]
‘South Pacific’ (1958) – an almost perfect musical.
The Broadway production of South Pacific ran for 1,925 performances in New York City, and in London it ran for four and a half years. In my opinion it contains the best soundtrack of all of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals and it was the first to be recorded and […]