I realize this is TV Time, but there's a big crossover between the worlds of classic television and movies, and in fact I often wish the intersection was even bigger. So all of you TV snobs who look down your noses at Hollywood films, be patient with me this time out because we’re gonna combine the two mediums. How many times have you watched a movie from the classic era of Hollywood--let's say the thirties and forties--and thought...
Read moreA previous column saluted the great male character actors – this month, a look at the actresses who specialized in supporting roles in vintage films: the mothers, grandmothers, and matrons; landladies, secretaries, maids, and nurses; spinsters, gossips, harridans, and eccentrics; bad girls, earth mothers, and iron-willed women. The films of the studio era are a museum of our images of women, both traditional and transitional. Lest this so...
Read moreI began writing this article on Joan Fontaine before her death in December 2013 at the age of 96. With her recent passing, I'm especially glad to have this opportunity to pay tribute to a remarkable actress. Joan Fontaine was born Joan de Havilland on October 22, 1917, in Tokyo, Japan. When Joan first entered the film business, the name de Havilland was already 'taken' by Joan's older sister, Olivia de Havilland. Particularly given ...
Read moreTelevision at its best is a collaborative medium, with producers teaming up to develop concepts, screenwriters working together to turn those concepts into stories, and craftsmen behind the camera joining forces to turn the written word into living color (or black and white before the mid-sixties). This month, I'm counting down the best teams who appear on camera in the vast annals of classic television--my all-time favorite small-screen dynamic duos.
Read moreRobert Montgomery was a multi-talented actor-director and two-time Oscar nominee, and yet for some years he was probably best remembered as the father of Elizabeth Montgomery, the delightful star of the classic TV series Bewitched. As Montgomery's films have become much more available in recent years, thanks to DVDs and Turner Classic Movies, he is today enjoying a resurgence of popularity with classic film fans. Montgomery was born on May 2...
Read moreSecond guessing the Oscars comes naturally to film buffs. It could hardly be otherwise. To expect that a short list of nominees could adequately represent the rich field of film production is impossible at the outset. This was more obvious at the peak of the studio era than it is today.
Read moreLast year the centennial of actress Loretta Young was celebrated with an exhibit at the Hollywood Museum, a ceremony at the Palm Springs Historical Society, and the rededication of Young's namesake memorial chapel at the Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, Young's longtime home. Young was also the Star of the Month on Turner Classic Movies. These were all most deserved honors for an Oscar-winning actress and television pioneer. Young...
Read moreBob Hope, when Bing Crosby makes his first appearance in The Road to Utopia (1945): “Hey! I thought this was an A picture!” One of the reasons I began writing about films nearly 20 years ago was to answer the questions I was asked whenever the subject of “old movies” came up (which happens a lot in my circle), or to clear up misconceptions. And over the years, the #1 question/misconception that I’ve encountered ...
Read more'There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!' Or so curator Henri Langlois said when asked why he had chosen to prominently display a huge portrait of Louise Brooks rather than Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich at the entrance of the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris on the occasion of its retrospective of the first sixty years of motion pictures. Langlois was overselling his case-after all, I wouldn't want to imagine a movie histor...
Read moreIn 1896 two stage actors, May Irwin and John C. Rice, sat for Thomas Edison's motion picture camera and enacted The Kiss. It was a 22-second film loop and it is said, perhaps apocryphally, to be the first film shown on a screen to a paying audience. It also offended some viewers, for, although it recreated an embrace from 'The Widow Jones', which Irwin and Rice had done onstage, the projected image made it uncomfortably intimate. To our eyes the only jarring aspect is that the actors, who wer...
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