Photographer Ruth Harriet Louise in her studio with actress Joan Crawford

You might not be familiar with her name but you’re probably familiar with her work. Ruth Harriet Louise’s glamorous photos of classic movie stars have graced countless magazines and book covers. Her photos helped launch the careers of many beloved actors and they offered fans an intimate look at some of Hollywood’s most celebrated icons. Her impressive portfolio is still in circulation today and if you take a quick look around the TCM website you’re bound to come across one or two of Louise’s famous portraits starring back at you.

READ MORE

Despondent cineaste Jack Andrus should buck up. First, he’s seated in an eye-blazingly Technicolor red chair, which one assumes is also of sensuously high-grain leather. Second, he’s being played by Kirk Douglas at his most flamboyantly masculine, a dream come true for characters of dissolutely manic personalities like Jack. Third, the Warner Archive has released a fine remastered DVD of the film that houses him, Vincente Minnelli’s convulsively beautiful Two Weeks in Another Town. For the rest of us, they also recently put out a remastered version of Minnelli’s The Cobweb (1955) and an un-restored but handsome-looking edition of Blake Edwards’ Wild Rovers (1971). We’ll start with the last first just to get Jack’s goat, but also because the Minnelli greats have already been covered by more seasoned minds, although I’ll still get my thoughts in.

READ MORE

“If you find this book hard to read, please consider, it also was hard to write it.”

So notes Gene Fowler(left)  near the end of Good Night, Sweet Prince, his biography of his good friend John Barrymore. The second half of the biography, which begins when Barrymore quits the theater to pursue a movie career, is certainly more difficult to read than the first half, which I discussed in last week’s post. The great actor experienced only about five or six good years in Hollywood before his health deteriorated, affecting his personal relationships and his skills as an actor. Reading about the rapid and sharp decline of this vibrant, virile artist, who had enjoyed such an extraordinary youth, was truly disheartening. I can only imagine how grueling it was for Fowler to research and chronicle the tragic decline of his close friend.

READ MORE

Retitled and released as Outback in the U.S. and Great Britain in 1971, Ted Kotcheff’s WAKE IN FRIGHT was barely noticed by American critics and moviegoers and quickly vanished from screens. What attention it did receive in England at the time was mostly critical of the film’s negative depiction of the Australian Outback region and its inhabitants. And despite the fact that it was a huge critical success at Cannes and was nominated for the Golden Palm, the film went missing soon after and until recently was considered a lost film.      READ MORE

Last week I posted an essay about 1930′s comedy star William Haines, and ignited some impassioned responses in the comments area from some Haines supporters who took umbrage at what I wrote.  I like to provoke intense feelings—I can’t see much point to wasting my life writing about movies if I don’t generate some kind of response.  I could be spending my time playing with my kids, or drinking. . . or drinking with my kids.  So, I think angry comments are better than no comments at all—but this particular firestorm has encouraged me to write a sequel.

This week isn’t about Haines, though, but is about the issue that informed last week’s controversy: how changing cultural attitudes influences how we react to comedy.  And the touchstone I’ll be using for this week’s discussion is blackface comedy of the 20s and 30s—I use the term “blackface” broadly, to cover not just white actors playing blacks but black actors playing crude black stereotypes.  If you click on the “read more” button, you will be greeted with some images and film clips I fully expect to be offensive.  Proceed advisedly.

READ MORE

Everybody loves a good trapped in the sanitarium movie, don’t they?  You know the drill – some smart so-and-so either gets themselves committed to an asylum to sniff out corruption or  some bright-eyed do-g0oder tries to change the system from within and winds up an inmate… er, I mean “guest.”  We call them guests here. READ MORE

Are human beings inherently cruel or do we learn cruelty by example? Does our genetic makeup dictate our personalities at birth or are we shaped by numerous circumstances including our environments and upbringing? To borrow the title of a current popular song, are we “born this way” or are we more complex creatures than our personal DNA map might suggest? The nature vs. nurture debate has been going on for centuries and many films have attempted to tackle it head on. One of the best examples of this is Peter Brooks’ extraordinary film adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1963), which argues that people are savages at heart and in the right circumstances we’re all likely to turn on one another. Another film, which I recently had the opportunity to watch, champions the other side of the argument. John Mackenzie’s haunting film adaptation of Giles Cooper’s radio play UNMAN, WITTERING AND ZIGO (1971) questions the example set by Lord of the Flies and suggests that we’re taught savage behaviors, which could manifest in acts of violence.

READ MORE

The next few months promise an embarrassment of film criticism riches. On March 15th, J. Hoberman’s An Army of Phantoms drops, the second entry in his breathless and exhaustive cultural history of Cold War cinema. In April, the long-overdue first collection of Dave Kehr’s writing, When Movies Mattered, will grace bookshelves. I’ll have cowed reviews of both near their release, but for now I’ll stick to a title Hoberman singles out in Phantoms, and which he programmed for his series at BAM: Gordon Douglas’ despairing cavalry Western, Only the Valiant (1951, also available on a DVD from Lionsgate).

READ MORE