The Silent Film Society of Chicago launched their Summer Film Festival a couple of weeks ago, and this year’s line-up includes A Girl in Every Port featuring Louise Brooks, Why Change Your Wife? with Gloria Swanson, Heart o’ the Hills starring Mary Pickford, Sunrise with Janet Gaynor, The Cardboard Lover featuring Marion Davies and The Mysterious Lady with Greta Garbo. The festival opted for a running theme this year—essential films from the era’s legendary actresses. Though the films are 80 years old, the meaty performances by these talented stars are a collective breath of fresh air compared to the women’s roles in contemporary Hollywood films. I know that female viewers are woefully underserved by Hollywood these days, but I didn’t realize how much until I saw Mary Pickford in Heart o’ the Hills and watched the women in the audience respond to her.

I am a relatively recent fan of Pickford’s work. Apparently, her movies were not always widely available, which accounts in part for this gap in my silent-film education, but I also confess I was under a mistaken impression regarding the type of characters she played. For years, her name summoned up an image of an eternally optimistic goody two-shoes with a sweet nature and wholesome values—a kitschy incarnation of her nickname “America’s Sweetheart.”

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This coming Saturday — tomorrow, August 6th – marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of show business’ forever and always top funny lady Lucille Ball, and also a day of Lucille Ball on TCM’s Summer Under the Stars.  It would be more than appropriate for anyone to celebrate this significant milestone, but I especially love Lucy.  My mother used to say that when I was a kid everytime she would come into a room I’d be watching I Love Lucy on TV, and I used to talk about it all the time.  Still do even today — watch and talk about it! READ MORE

I’m not going to assume that you know French and Saunders, that is, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, but I bet that you might.  Even if you haven’t ever caught their eponymous comedy series and specials via some means (they’ve been doing them for British TV since the late 1980s), perhaps you know Dawn French in the title role of The Vicar of Dibley (frequently seen on PBS stations), and Jennifer Saunders as the creator and co-star (as Edina Monsoon) of Absolutely Fabulous.  Both French and Saunders are funny and fabulous, and one of the frequent features of their work together were parodies of popular movies, old and new, with both ladies playing all parts, often male and female, and having a riot doing it. 

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It’s summertime, and the perfect opportunity to pull out some photo albums — no groans, please — and take a look at Hollywood behind-the-scenes from my stash of old news photos.  It’s a nutty mixed bag, but that goes along with these lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, right?

Here’s Jimmy “Schnozzola” Durante and the highly respected actress Ethel Barrymore together, with Jimmy supplying the hilarious ham.  They had appeared together in radio and on TV, on Durante’s show, even recorded together, and this photo shows their unlikely but delightful collaboration.

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After Marilyn Monroe died during the wee hours of August 5, 2012, perceptions of her life and career began to change, and her blonde bombshell star image evolved into something more complex. Like others who have become pop culture icons—Elvis, James Dean, John Lennon, and second-tier figures like Hank Williams, Louis Brooks, Jean Harlow—death launched a second career for her. The entertainment industry, biographers, and filmmakers as well as fans were instrumental in charting this phase of her career. But, I can’t help but think that MM had no control over this “second” career, and it yielded no benefits for her. And, her struggle to control her work and image was important to her personally, and it is crucial in understanding her place in film history.

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I believe the best way to understand the appeal of Marilyn Monroe is to separate the flesh-and-blood actress from the two-dimensional icon by focusing on her work. In this second of my three-part series on Monroe, I offer a primer on her films. This is not a list of my favorite MM movies; nor are they all superior examples of classic filmmaking. Instead, these are the films that altered or affected the course of her career as she evolved from starlet to movie star to actress.

Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! June Haver stars in this 1948 comedy with the ridiculous title, which revolves around small-town life. The film would be entirely forgettable if not for MM’s bit part in her first film appearance. She speaks one line, “Hi Rad,” as she passes Haver on the church steps, but the line is a throwaway and inconsequential to the scene. She actually passes by the camera before uttering the line. For years, rumors persisted that her one line had been cut; Monroe herself believed this as evidenced by her remarks during a 1955 television interview. However, with the benefit of VHS, DVD, and Youtube, it is possible to slow down the scene to see Monroe walk by and hear her say the line as she strolls out of camera range. MM also appears in a later scene paddling in a canoe with another girl.

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Next year marks the 50^th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, but the pop culture machine is already ramping up to review her life and recast her career. Recently, the famous white dress from The Seven Year Itch—a signifier of her star image as Hollywood’s premiere sex symbol—sold for $5.6 million. Next month, a retrospective of her films is playing at BAM, the performing arts center in New York City. Two narrative films featuring Monroe as a character are scheduled for release: My Week with Marilyn (2011), starring Michelle Williams as MM, focuses on the tumultuous production of The Prince and the Showgirl in which an unsympathetic Laurence Olivier attempted to direct a neurotic Monroe; Blonde (in development for 2012), with Naomi Watts as MM, is another adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s imaginary Monroe memoir.

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In the twilight of her career, sassy, brassy Joan Blondell reflected on her star image by noting, “I was the fizz on the soda.” Considering her talent for snappy patter, her ability to get the most out of one-liners, and her full, robust figure, the description is apt. Like Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Ginger Rogers, Blondell enjoyed a long career stretching over several decades, and yet she lacks the critical and popular recognition of her peers. Perhaps this slight is the result of  playing the second female lead most often, alongside Rogers, Una Merkel, Barbara Stanwyck, or Ruby Keeler, who tended to get higher billing than she did. Only in hour-long programmers or B-films did Blondell get to play the lead. I have always enjoyed her wise-cracking characters, but it wasn’t until recently, while doing some research on Blondell, that I realized what a terrific movie star she really was.

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Please Note: In Tribute to Jackie Cooper, on Friday, May 13th TCM will broadcast nine of the actor’s films, which are listed here.

Jackie Cooper, who was an Oscar nominee for Best Actor in a Leading Role when he was only nine,  died on May 3rd at the age of 88. His shy smile, seemingly artless candor, and innate ability to suggest an overwhelmed child’s desire to make everything all right in the world continues to make those who stumble on his films smile in recognition.

If your most vivid mental image of Jackie Cooper is still as one of the ragamuffins in Hal Roach’s The Little Rascals, or the boy pleading with The Champ (1931-King Vidor) to rise again, or the privileged child befriending a kid from Shantytown in his Oscar-nominated performance in Skippy (1931-Norman Taurog), that’s understandable. Despite the fact that his early performances are eight decades in the past, his wonderfully natural portrayal of boys on film are still painfully fresh and have an evergreen realism at their core. In the darkest years of the Great Depression audiences felt a connection to that innocent, lion-hearted kid on screen whose life wasn’t going any more smoothly than their own. I like Shirley Temple, Jane Withers, and Freddie Bartholomew very much. I’ve been astounded by Mickey Rooney’s seemingly boundless talent. Yet to me, Jackie Cooper was one of most natural child actors, even though he had a different, understandably complex perspective on his own work. “I wasn’t great,” he claimed. “The directors were great. I was just a kid who did what he was told. And what I wasn’t told to do was done for me.”

His son, Russell Cooper, commented that his father “was a fascinating guy who really did everything, from all different aspects of the business. You can’t really say that about many people.” Looking back at Cooper‘s long life, when he acted in over a hundred movies, plays and television shows, and directed and produced over 250 TV projects, it seems that he may have done everything but sweep up the stage–and, as an apparently down-to-earth person–he probably did that at least a few times.

Much of Cooper‘s acting has a similar, recognizable quality, as he personified a kind of ragged moxie laced with a guileless intensity. Even when the stories were schmaltzy, he was not. As he grew up, and seemed likely to succumb to the neglect and adulation that early fame often breeds, he eventually approached his later problems with a similar ingenuousness as he struggled to become an adult in real ways. As he later pointed out about his childhood career, “I was trained to be a professional, not to be a person.”

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