George Montgomery is perhaps best remembered today as a '50s Western star, but he could truly do it all. His career progressed from stuntman and bit player to actor and then on to a new creative field, becoming a highly respected artist and craftsman. Montgomery was born August 27, 1916, in Brady, Montana. One of a large family, he grew up as a rancher's son, gaining the riding skills which would help him get a toehold in Hollywood as a stuntman and later stand him in good stead ...
Read moreThe economic boom of the Roaring Twenties came to a screeching halt with the stock market crash of October, 1929, throwing the world into economic depression. It's impossible to overstate the hardship and uncertainty people endured during The Great Depression, when nearly every industry was struggling after the crash. This seemed not to be the case in Hollywood, however, as studios reassured the public that their industry was stable, even booming. Insiders confided to the trades ...
Read moreHere is a second selection of casting tales from Hollywood history. As before, the caveat holds that much of what passes as Hollywood history is gossip, and when it comes to casting deals, the story may be clouded by hearsay, whimsy, and star egos. Film buffs love these stories; we play the altered movies in our heads. Who has not loved Olivia De Havilland as Melanie, the decent, nurturing...
Read moreMore than a decade before Snow White first flitted across the screen in Walt Disney’s seminal feature-length animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), a young woman in Germany produced her own animated feature. Rather than hand-drawn animated cels, however, this woman’s film was made with silhouettes, using a technique that she herself had devised that allowed for seamless movement onscreen. The film, featuring hand-tinted frames in glorious, full-blown color, took the...
Read moreKnown as 'America's Sweetheart,' Mary Pickford was actually Canadian, born Gladys Marie Smith in Toronto in 1892. Shortly after the death of her alcoholic father, the seven year old Gladys hit the stage, and along with her brother and sister, began to tour Canada and the United States regularly as part of a series of low-rent theater troupes. Hoping to become a Broadway actress, Smith moved to New York in 1906 and cha...
Read moreDifficult for us to appreciate these days, but once upon a time, there was a movie theatre in most every neighborhood and the films changed three times a week; you could go to the same theatre on Monday, Thursday and Saturday and see a completely different show, with a feature, newsreel, cartoon and various entertaining or educational short subjects. As a way of keeping audiences coming back (“I loved tonight’s Louise Fazenda movie but that Lupino Lane picture th...
Read moreJeanne Crain was the quintessential girl next door, a teenager who became a star overnight and went on to a long and successful career while also parenting a large family off the screen. Crain was born in the California desert town of Barstow on May 25, 1925. Her family later moved to Los Angeles, where legend has it she was spotted by Orson Welles while she was on an RKO studio tour. He had her tested for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)...
Read moreIf Guy Madison (1922-1996) had done nothing but star in the hugely successful syndicated TV series The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1951-58), he’d have made his mark on 50s popular culture. But Western fans know Madison rode tall in theaters, too. He made some excellent medium-budget Westerns, which are under-represented on DVD. Born Robert Mo...
Read moreFact or fiction: Groucho Marx was seriously considered for the part of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. Try googling that. You will receive an education in the collision of fact, distortion, half-truth, and mythologizing that makes Hollywood history. You’ll find websites clamoring to give you the Groucho/Rhett connection. Skim a little for the first limitation on the claim: apparent...
Read moreI 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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