Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacle-style cinema with its clear-cut morality does not seem to mesh with Gloria Grahame’s image as the sympathetic tart who tends to bring out the violence in men. She was best suited to the smoky atmosphere and hazy morality of film noir where her characters took their hits and rolled with the punches. Yet, Grahame acquitted herself nicely in DeMille’s circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth, playing the trampy-around-the-edges elephant girl called Angel. Greatest Show was released in 1952, which marked the beginning of Grahame’s most successful period as an actress, but this sentimental circus tale is often overlooked in favor of Macao (1952), The Bad and Beautiful (1952), and The Big Heat (1953) when scholars write of this period.

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When we Morlocks were given our marching orders and asked to give Gloria Grahame the spotlight, I put dibs down on A Woman’s Secret (1949). Mainly it was because I’ve been brushing up on my Nicholas Ray films recently. Within this last year I saw film prints of On Dangerous Ground (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954), and Bigger Than Life (1956) – all of which, incidentally, screened at the Film Forum in New York as part of their July 24 – August 6th Nick Ray retrospective (on July 28th they screened A Woman’s Secret, which is also coming up on TCM). One claim to fame for A Woman’s Secret is that it’s where Ray would meet his second-wife: Gloria Grahame. READ MORE

Most Hollywood stars have a distinct screen persona and Gloria Grahame, whether by intention or design, established herself as the iconic bad girl of film noir starting with CROSSFIRE in 1947 and continuing all the way up to ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW in 1959. At least, that’s how the majority of moviegoers probably remember her – as the vengeful gangster moll, disfigured by hot coffee, in THE BIG HEAT (1953) or the murderous schemers of SUDDEN FEAR (1952) and HUMAN DESIRE (1954) or the unfaithful wives from THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1952) and MAN ON A TIGHTROPE (1953) or terrified by the likes of Humphrey Bogart (IN A LONELY PLACE, 1950) or Broderick Crawford (HUMAN DESIRE, 1954). A comedienne is not the image that usually comes to mind when one thinks of Gloria Grahame yet that’s how the actress began her career –  in light comedy roles, often playing flirtatious, fickle women who are completely aware of their sex appeal and its effect on men. READ MORE

Gloria Grahme was born and bred in the glow from the halo of Tinseltown but she’d have to go to New York to be offered a Hollywood contract.  The stage was her first love, perhaps her abiding love, and the young Gloria Hallward parlayed a handful of appearances in Los Angeles plays (one of them a hillbilly farce costarring a young Robert Mitchum) into a shot at Broadway.  And she got there, too, albeit as an understudy to Miriam Hopkins (a replacement for Tallullah Bankhead) in Thornton Wilder’s THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH.  It was Gloria’s rough luck that Ms. Hopkins never missed a performance but there were other plays and other roles and MGM boss Louis B. Mayer saw her in one of these and offered her a seven year contract.  Although she wasn’t thrilled about the idea of giving up on live theatre, Gloria followed the money back to California.  She made her film debut as Gloria Grahame in 1944 but spent most of her time on the Metro lot posing for cheesecake photos with such pretty young hopefuls as Cyd Charisse, Linda Christian and Ava Gardner.  It was on loan-out to RKO that she made her first real dent in the immortality game, as good-time girl Violet Bick in Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946).  RKO would eventually take Gloria on full-time but not before she played a supporting role, another fallen woman, in Edward Dmytryk’s CROSSFIRE (1947), for which she received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress.  Although she had played it bright and bubbly at MGM, RKO stamped Gloria Grahame as damaged goods… and by then the actress really was feeling the part. READ MORE

Today would have been the 98th birthday of beloved actress and comedienne Lucille Ball, who died a little over twenty years ago.  Of course it’s almost impossible to believe that we no longer have Lucy with us, because she’s around us every day, as solid a piece of pop culture as there is anywhere.  Even if you haven’t watched an episode of I Love Lucy in years, when you do go back it’s like visiting with an old friend.  I recently watched a few on TV and honestly was completely charmed again — they retain every bit of their comedy bite and brilliance.  Though perhaps her television credits somewhat eclipsed her movie work in the minds of the public at large, Lucille Ball started in motion pictures as a chorus girl beauty in the early 1930s, and made 80 or so films before revolutionizing television comedy twenty years later.  In honor of the great Lucy, let’s look at some clips to remember and celebrate the redhead who was as funny as she was beautiful, and a hell of an all-around actress. 

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“I’ve never played anyone but myself on screen.”
~ Glenn Ford (1916-2006)

He never won an Academy Award, nor was he recognized by the American Film Institute with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Yet, in over 200 movies, the seamless, artless quality in actor Glenn Ford‘s work enabled him to fly under the radar of the ballyhoo that surrounds much of Hollywood. His very squareness illuminated something of value for audiences: the effort to survive, the desire to preserve some integrity, some shared insight into the nature of good and evil, and the things of value that we might try to pass on. Whether behind a badge, roaming on horseback, wearing a business suit, a uniform or a pair of well-worn jeans, his characters could be good and bad. He didn’t really care if he played “the villain or the hero,” the actor once pointed out. “Sometimes the villain is the most colorful. But I prefer a part where you don’t know what he is until the end.” Commentators have pointed out that much of the career of Glenn Ford was based on “niceness”, with decency and morality running consistently through his characters. I find the struggle and inability of Ford‘s characters to remain “nice” in an increasingly complex, unfair world to be one of the factors that makes him an interesting actor. His occasional slow burns on screen in roles such as The Violent Men, Trial, Ransom, The Big Heat and Human Desire, and his overwhelmed comic characters, such as the widower in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, brought out something unexpectedly mercurial in his screen persona. You cannot always predict where he is going to go with a characterization.

When TCM trots out a plethora of Glenn Ford movies this Friday, August 7th, as part of the Summer Under the Stars celebration, I’ll probably be watching–warily. Until the last few years, you see, I didn’t think I liked Glenn Ford. But that was my mistake. Now I know better and can appreciate some of his work. Besides, I need to hang out till the ends of his movies to find out if his character was good or bad.
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The fabulously popular streaming video site Hulu is useful for keeping abreast of contemporary pop-culture effluvia, sure, but if one peeks into their dusty old movies section, there’s an eclectic collection of auteur rarities, 50′s horror, Poverty Row Westerns, and public domain slapstick comedies to be unearthed. With only 3.77% of the titles listed on TCMDB available on home video, dutiful cinephiles need to devour repertory screenings, lobby intractable studios, and pluck the desirable titles out of what is available, and so Hulu is another prime portal to chip away at our film-historical ignorance. I had used it primarily to catch up with TV series I had fallen behind on (like the ubiquitous 30 Rock), but in researching my piece on Bruce Surtees last week, I discovered that Don Siegel’s The Beguiled was streaming for free on the site. Delving into their archives produced a fascinating hodgepodge of titles, some of which are quite hard to see otherwise. Below the fold is a list of titles ready to view on Hulu that I’m eager get to know, and others with which I’m already in committed relationships (with selected commentary, and each title links to its page on Hulu).

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Whenever I watch a silent film at the Portage Theater, an old movie palace on Chicago’s north side, it’s like stepping back in time and escaping the pressures of the day. On Friday evening, I saw Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld as part of this summer’s series from the Silent Film Society of Chicago. Underworld is a well-crafted and well-acted film that stands the test of time, so I don’t want to imply that the movie was in any way “old-fashioned.” What I am referring to is the way the Silent Film Society takes great care to recreate the movie-going experience of the silent era, and this stands in stark contrast to today’s tacky, uncomfortable cineplexes with their self-absorbed, cell-phone-addicted audience members.

The Portage, which originally opened in 1920, now seats a little more than 1300; on Friday, the theater was well over half full with an attentive audience of all ages and types. Before the program started, people milled about the lobby looking over the t-shirts and books for sale, or they sat in their seats actually talking to each other instead of yapping on cell phones. I liked that the audience consisted of people from different generations who had all come to see this famous 1927 gangster saga, though probably for different reasons.

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