Recently on a road trip through Ohio, I came across the Hopalong Cassidy Museum in Cambridge, a small town located between Columbus and Wheeling, West Virginia. Less a museum and more like a collection, the Museum consists of several rooms in the 10th Avenue Antiques Mall in downtown Cambridge.  Located in the back of the mall, the rooms are packed with Hopalong Cassidy memorabilia, including clothes, toys, hats, and other products in the style of another era. Since seeing the Hopalong Cassidy Museum, I have been thinking a lot about stars and their fans, movie heroes past and present, and the pleasure of unexpected discoveries, especially while on the road.    READ MORE

Last night I revisited an old VCR tape that had on it a short compilation of 16mm educational films compiled by Alpha Blue Archives titled Pink Slip. These were films primarily targeted at young women during the 1960′s and ’70′s that required a signed “pink slip” from parents before they could be seen by the kids, due to their “sensitive” subject matter. Topics on this particular collection deal with menstruation, juvenile delinquency, adult predators, therapy, menstruation again (but this time aimed at children with Down syndrome), and teenage runaways. READ MORE

Among the many film adaptations of Sinclair Lewis novels over the years, ANN VICKERS (1933) is probably the least known of them all, and, it wasn’t among the most popular or critically acclaimed of Lewis’s novels either. Those would be Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927) and Dodsworth (1929). Yet, ANN VICKERS is probably Lewis’s most fully developed female protagonist and the film version starring Irene Dunne and Walter Huston is a flawed but fascinating movie that provides an apt example of how the work of a great American writer can be completely altered, distorted or softened by Hollywood and the Production Code officials.        READ MORE

When my husband was cleaning out his parents’ apartment in Santiago, Chile, after their deaths last year, one of the things he found was a well-worn leather satchel, crammed full of postcards and dinner menus from his mother’s 1938 ocean journey on the Hamburg-Amerika steamer Rhakotis when she and her family fled Germany for a new life in Chile.  She was a teenager then, and among the cards and mementos of the trip were a selection of movie star postcards which she had obviously collected, faces and autographs of personalities probably unfamiliar to most of us, but the stuff of a young fraulein’s dreams.  There were several photos of stars we would recognize — a couple of Shirley Temples, a Greer Garson, a Gary Cooper — but it was those other stars who caught my eye.  Who were these intriguing unknown celebrities?  John Boles I know, but who was, for instance, Lilian Harvey?

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FRANKENSTEIN 1970 (1958) wasn’t the first recursive horror film – that is to say, the first horror movie to employs in its plot an awareness of the genre’s standard tropes, gimmicks and guidelines within its plot to both inform and satirize the conventions of the genre (AIP’s HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER beat it to the streets by three weeks) but it certainly does deserve a modicum of credit for bringing onboard one of the greatest (and quite possibly the greatest) horror icons of all time… READ MORE

“Don’t look at me in that tone of voice” ~ Dorothy Parker

My attempts to look at women’s contributions to film this month have focused so far on a variety of females who found a way to make the patriarchal structures, frivolity, foolishness and opportunities in Hollywood’s studio era work for them. Today, I’ll be taking a look at Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), one woman whose contradictory film career, and, indeed, entire discontented life, seems to have been spent in opposition to the bright, guilty world that she thoroughly enjoyed, yet rejected.

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Claude Chabrol leans out a window to leer at his upstairs neighbor, who is shaving her legs in the nude. A few lecherous seconds later, with sweat beading on his forehead, he loses his grip and tumbles to an ignominious death. This is only one of  many brilliantly perverted sequences in Sam Fuller’s Thieves After Dark, his rarely seen 1984 curio, the first after his exile from Hollywood.

In 1982, with his late masterpiece White Dog nearing release, he sat down with Paramount studio heads Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who promptly told him they were shelving it. Rumors were swirling that the film was racist, based solely on the plot outline – about a dog who had been trained to kill black people. None of the critics had actually seen the film, which is as savage an attack on racist ideology that Hollywood has ever produced (Criterion released the film on DVD last year). In his inimitable autobiography, A Third Face, Fuller says:

It’s difficult to express the hurt of having a finished film locked away in a vault, never to be screened for an audience. It’s like someone putting your newborn baby in a goddamned maximum-security vault.

Disgusted with Paramount’s reaction, he quickly accepted an offer to make a film in Paris. It was the beginning of a thirteen year exile from the US. READ MORE

Over the past month, I have been strolling through the history of Hollywood to uncover the unsung women of the movie industry to pay homage to Women’s History Month. The exercise has provoked me in many ways. I was inspired by reading about adventurous movie pioneers such as Kathlyn Williams, Gene Gauntier, and Grace Cunard, who wrote and starred in their own adventure serials, often doing their own stunts. I was disconcerted that the names of these women seldom show up in standard histories of film. And, I was — and still am — disturbed to discover that more women worked in positions of power and creativity before 1920 than any other time in history, including now. This statistic comes from Ally Acker’s book Reel Women, an overview of pioneering women in the film business that I highly recommend. (There are some factual errors in the book, which is always a problem in film history, because it is very difficult to separate fact from legend, and you have to be a researcher par excellence to filter out the difference. But Acker was very successful in uncovering some key women who have never been sufficiently recognized.)

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John Cameron Mitchell co-wrote, directed, and starred in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). He came out to Boulder to speak about that film with a long Q&A to a full house of over 400 people. He has a warm but pixie-like demeanor that is both touching and mischievous. And he’s funny as hell, too. His comic timing as Hedwig is impeccable, and it was also in fine form last Monday night during the Q&A. Someone later told me that J.C.M had once been a comedian in the Borscht Belt. If so, it was easy to see how that might have influenced the settings for his celebrated film. READ MORE