GREAT MOVIE DIALOGUE PT9
BEAU GESTE (1939) Beau Geste (Gary Cooper), as Schwartz shouts at the legionnaires, exhorting them to mutiny against Sgt. Markoff: ‘Wait a minute. I don’t know much about mutinies, but I do know it isn’t good form to […]
ray milland
WORLD WAR TWO – The stars & their stories – PT45.
ROBERT PRESTON (1918-87) This charismatic Robert Preston was born in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts as Robert Preston Meservey towards the end of World War One. As Bob Mesevey he joined the US Army Air Corps, the predecessor of the US Army Air Force (USAAF) after Pearl Harbor and served for three […]
WORLD WAR TWO – The stars & their stories – PT34.
BUTTERFLY MCQUEEN (1911-95) Born Thelma McQueen in 1911 in Tampa Florida, she acquired the nickname ‘Butterfly’ – a tribute to her constantly moving hands – for her performance of the Butterfly Ballet in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She never much cared for her Christian […]
RANDOM QUOTES – PT12.
CLINT EASTWOOD: [On surviving a plane crash in the early fifties] ‘They had one plane, a Douglas AD, sort of a torpedo bomber of World War Two vintage, and I thought I’d hitch on that. Everything went wrong. Radios went out. Oxygen ran out. And finally […]
MOVIE TRIVIA – PT144.
Larry Storch as Corporal Randolph Agarn in F Troop (1965-7) A large number of us baby-boomers remain huge fans of the sixties comedy series F Troop (1965-7), mostly because of the hilarious antics of Larry Storch as Corporal Randolph Agarn and, to a slightly lesser extent, Frank de Kova’s deadpan humour as […]
THE BEST OSCAR YEARS – 1939 & 1950.
Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in GWTW (1939) The Academy Awards is a competition, but it is one that has seldom been conducted on a level playing field. A winner one year may very well not even have been nominated in a stronger year. Historically, the two […]
MOVIE TRIVIA – PT109.
A scene from the 1952 feature Scaramouche Stewart Granger and Mel Ferrer fought a duel early in Scaramouche (1952), and part of the sequence required Granger to lie on the wooden floorboards as an iron chandelier dropped towards him. It was rigged to stop just inches from his face. The […]
MEMORABLE PERFORMANCES – PT2
Michael Caine as Peachy Carnehan in The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Sean Connery as Daniel Dravot Michael Caine and Sean Connery were the fifth intended pairing for Rudyard Kipling’s terrific The Man Who Would be King to be transferred to the screen. In the fifties it was to […]
The Romances of Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco.
The stunning American actress Grace Kelly only made eleven movies in her brief but spectacular career. By most accounts she made hay with most of her leading men while the sun shone. But not all of them. Her supporters argue that she was basically seeking a father substitute […]
The exquisite Grace Kelly.
Fans of Grace Kelly (and I am one of them, believe it or not) are probably going to jump up and down if they read this, and accuse me of ‘muck-raking’ or, at best, sensationalising her track record (or should I say ‘sack’ record) with members of the opposite […]