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Not a film but a wildly (especially in Baltimore, where it was shot) popular television show, Homicide: Life on the Streets featured Robin Williams in an episode directed by my beloved Stephen Gyllenhaal, who cast his young son in a guest role. This is the scene where Jake is told that his mother is dead. Be prepared to have your heart torn out.
The beginning of films, a "new freedom" for women, Hollywood was begining to become "on the rage", and everyone wanted a "piece" of that fame. Celebraties started to become popular, and magazines like PicturePlay, PhotoPlay among others, took noticed. Famous celebraties of that era where Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson and Marie Prevost, just to name a few, but none of those actresses top my list of the glamorous and famous, except Alla Nazimova.
Born Mariam Edez Adelaida Leventon in 1879 to a dysfunctional-jewish family, this actress/producer/writer and feminist, is a fascination to study and learned her life. Madame Nazimova (everyone call her Madame...), suffer alot during her childhood, teenage years, and adulthood, but she knew how to control her troubled mind, her discomforted soul, and she knew how to balanced them. I became interested in this silent actress, when I bought the book The Sewing Circle: Sappho's leading ladies by Axel Madsen.
Since she always used untrue facts about her past life (childhood and teenage years), the most that one reads about her is her sexuality. She was known in the silent era, for her lesbian-bisexual life style, which it was the best unkept secret in Hollywood. Even when I have two books and alot of information about her, I can't stop learning about this amazing woman...
"...well darling, keep busy, and take an advice from an old woman,
find happiness inside of you, don't
relay on others..., is hard but I find it
to be rather true."
~this is my favorite quote from Nazimova,
from a letter to Mercedes de Acosta"~
Here's a Charles Trenet standard that's been heard in at least three films. Name one.
Name the only film in the list below in which Garbo dies:
1. The Temptress
2. Flesh and the Devil
3. The Mysterious Lady
And then there's Love Me Tonight (1932), a pre-Code classic from Mamoulian and one of the best musicals ever. Jeanette MacDonald, Maurice Chevalier, Myrna Loy, C. Aubrey Smith, Charles Ruggles, even Gabby Hayes(!) when he was still just plain ol' George. Highlights: the incredible opening scene where Paris awakens, MacDonald in a nightgown so deliciously transparent it belongs in a stag movie, and the "traveling" melodies "Isn't It Romantic?" and "Mimi", both courtesy of Rodgers and Hart. In time, Rodgers came to detest Hart, MacDonald came to loathe Chevalier and I wasn't too crazy about Mamoulian after working eight months deciphering his rambling tales of Hollywood yore. But - art lives on long after old grudges die, and this film is proof of that.
Personal connections with this film:
- I was Mamoulian's amaneunsis in the late 1970s.
- Queen Christina is a heavily-romanticized biopic of Christina of Sweden who, in real life, ennobled a certain landowner named Nils Gunnesson Haal, who then changed his surname to Gyllenhaal.
- Stephen Gyllenhaal is ninth in direct line from the original Nils Gyllenhaal.
- Stephen is my...well, you know.
Here's an offering from 1987's winner for
Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting
Actress. Name the movie, the singer, and the singer's best-known
Manhattan venue.
So a couple of blogs and dozens of twitty commenters all over the internets are ejaculating all types of swoony praise over a Vanity Fair spread of current day mediocre actors posing as if they were in Alfred Hitchcock stills. If "Captivity" and "Meet The Spartans" hasn't totally killed off whatever legitimacy modern movies had, then spread did:
This is how pathetic cinema has become these days -- this is also why TV is so much better. Its not that we don't have the same caliber of stars as Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart. We have Javier Bardem, Ryan Gosling, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and they are all indelible.
The Problem is two fold: First, the studios can't do anything fucking original! Rock n' roll bands got nowhere by just doing Rolling Stone covers. So why do the studios insist on churning out one uninspired remake after another? Why one gross out comedy after the next? Film is one of the most dynamic mediums that exists and the studios have squandered it. In 1944, James Agee, one of the best critics evar, Age insisted that movies as an art were "sick unto death" and only the men with the most "murderous and creative passion could hope to save it". And he's right. This shit is going backwards and clinging to the vision of a old glamorous Hollywood does nothing to push the medium forward. Yeah bro, Orson Welles amazing, Godard = excellent, now move the fuck on! Write some new shit down and film it!
Second problem is the idea that there can even be Hollywood glamour. There was a time when studios had a KGB like grip on their hunks and starlets. David O. Selznick had Judy Garland on a diet of diet pills and chicken broth so she could stay slim. You would have never seen some like Tom Cruise (our modern Clark Gablet, btw) bouncing on a couch. Mel Gibson's debacle would have squashed were he under contacted at MGM. People, we've seen Britney Spear's menstrual soaked panties. There's no going back from that.
And its a good thing. The actors that came of the second golden era: late 1970's: Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, Dustin Hoffman weren't glamorous actors, they were gritty, real, and raw actors. The studio system lost its grip and Hollywood produced some of the greatest movies of all time.
Don't get me wrong, I love glamour. That's why I love the movies. But I hate nostalgia. But glamour ain't about being antique.
you can see the rest of the pics here.
