As 2013 departs, 2014 arrives with flair - courtesy of elegant and stylish Mr. Fred Astaire...
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Friday, December 27, 2013
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| Marlene Dietrich, photograph by Edward Steichen |
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| As a child, Dietrich contracted her first name, added her nickname (pronounced Layna) and became "Marlene" |
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| The Devil is a Woman (1935) |
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| Dietrich in Travis Banton, from her personal wardrobe |
- Marlene Dietrich
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| Marlene Dietrich by David Downton |
Sunday, December 22, 2013
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| Marc Platt (shown here, in the purple shirt, in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) turned 100 on December 2 |
He left the troupe in 1942 and, as Marc Platt, alternated between the New York stage and the Hollywood soundstage for many years. On Broadway, he was part of the original 1943 cast of the Rogers & Hammerstein classic, Oklahoma!, creating the role of "Dream Curly."
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| Marc Platt and Katharine Sergava in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma! |
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| Tonight and Every Night (1945), starring Rita Hayworth |
Here's Marc, in the purple shirt again, and "his brothers" in the legendary "barn raising" dance number (Note: the occasional hiss heard at the clip's beginning doesn't last)...
A year later, in 1955, he would appear in a speaking and dancing role in Fred Zinnemann's film adaptation of Oklahoma! starring Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae.
Marc Platt would enjoy a multifaceted career. He acted on series TV from the 1950s into the early 1990s, served as dance director for Radio City Music Hall and went on to open his own dance studio in Florida, with his wife, dancer Jane Goodall.
As of this writing, Mr. Platt will have at least one more credit coming his way. He is set to appear in a documentary now in post-production, Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age, a sequel to Broadway: The Golden Age (2003).
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| Marc Platt at the party celebrating his 100th birthday in Mill Valley, California, on December 8 (photo by Sarah Rice) |
Monday, December 16, 2013
BOOKS AND DVDS IN YOUR STOCKING THIS YEAR?
One of the things I love most about the holidays is giving gifts. This year I happen to have presents for a few classic film buffs and I'll be giving them this week.
Literally the biggest gift to be given - at 1,000+ pages - is Victoria Wilson's long-awaited, long in-process biography, A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907 - 1940. Detailed, thorough and fascinating, Wilson traces Stanwyck's family history back to long before the future star came into the world as Ruby Stevens. The hefty tome also covers Stanwyck's show business beginnings, at a very tender age, as a dancer, her rapid rise to Broadway and Hollywood stardom, two marriages and 88 films. As well-written as it is meticulously researched, Steel-True is impossible to put down once picked up. Fifteen years in the writing, this reader only hopes Wilson's volume covering the rest of Stanwyck's life and career, from 1941 to 1990, won't take quite so long to make its way to print.
Here, Victoria Wilson talks about Stanwyck's appeal for her and the writing of Steel-True:
Here, Victoria Wilson talks about Stanwyck's appeal for her and the writing of Steel-True:
The by-invitation-only funeral of Orson Welles, who died in October 1985, took place in a downtown Los Angeles slum. His eldest daughter, Chris, who flew in from New York to attend, thought the rundown building seemed more like a "hot-sheets motel" than a funeral parlor. She was told by her stepmother, Welles's last wife from whom he had been long separated, that there was "no money" for anything more.
The Jaglom/Welles-"unplugged" chats are intriguing and quite often dishy. And then there's the "dancing bear show," the larger-than-life persona Welles donned as occasion required. Jaglom must've felt, at times, like he was front row/center for the greatest show on earth...
Two of the most celebrated leading ladies/movie stars of the 1950s were Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly. Very different types - one dark, voluptuous and mercurial, the other a cool and stunning blonde - they are nonetheless considered two of the most beautiful and talented actresses of their era.
My final gift is a celebration, in two parts, of these mid-century icons. First, TCM's Greatest Classic Legends: Elizabeth Taylor DVD collection. The set features Vincente Minnelli's sparkling romantic comedy, Father of the Bride (1950), with Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett; the Richard Brooks production of the Tennessee Williams classic, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), co-starring Paul Newman; Butterfield 8 (1960), the drama that brought Taylor her first Oscar, directed by Daniel Mann and co-starring Laurence Harvey; and Vincente Minnelli's 1965 melodrama set in Big Sur, The Sandpiper, co-starring Richard Burton and Eva Marie Saint. Paired with the Taylor DVD collection is Gina McKinnon's recently published What Would Grace Do?, a style guide/mini-biography of Grace Kelly (aka/Princess Grace). Lots of pointers here - useful in a world some would find lacking in classic taste and timeless style.
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A random drawing will be held Saturday, December 21, at 5:00pm PST. I will select three winners from the names entered and the first chosen will have first pick, the second name drawn will choose next and the third winner will receive the remaining gift. All winners will be notified immediately.
UPDATE: The random drawing was held, winners were selected and congratulations to Bob in Illinois (Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True), Christina in Ontario, Canada (My Lunches with Orson) and Lindsey in Michigan (TCM's Classic Legends: Elizabeth Taylor DVD collection and What Would Grace Do?). Thanks to all who entered and HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
(Congratulations to Marsha in New York, winner of the recent random drawing for TCM's Greatest Classic Films: Astaire & Rogers, Vol. 1, DVD collection - she tells me the set has already arrived)
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
The latest edition of the Film Noir Foundation's Noir City e-magazine is out and, along with major features on Dan Duryea and Peter Lorre, it brings news of Noir City XII, the FNFs annual film noir festival in San Francisco.
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| Olga Zubarry |
The full schedule for Noir City XII will be released as part of the FNF's 4th annual Noir City Xmas, a double feature event set for next Wednesday night, December 18, at the Castro Theatre; Blast of Silence (1961) and Christmas Eve (1947) will be screened.
The San Francisco festival kicks off the Noir City season, with "satellite" festivals to follow later in the year in Seattle, Austin, L.A., Chicago, Portland (OR) and Washington, D.C.
For information on Noir City and Noir City Xmas, click here.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Watching a console TV for long stretches from the living room floor and a distance of not more than a few feet was a good part of a typical day for most tots of my era. Much of what we watched was “old movies,” because, for many years, the films of what we now call "The Golden Age" aired morning, noon and night on local stations in need of hours of not-too-expensive programming. On top of this, I grew up in a movie-loving home. Mother, a child of the ‘30s and young woman of the ‘40s, had been one of the countless kids who was terrorized by King Kong when it was a first-run release and she was among the many teenagers who lined up to see Gone with the Wind when it was breaking box office records. Later, after she came to live in Southern California during World War II, she had chance encounters with one or two movie stars that she never forgot. Dad wasn't a movie fan in the same way, but he did love Cagney. And he favored Westerns. One night, when my brother and I were in his charge, he took us to see Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It was the only night out at the movies we ever had with just dad.
Since movies were a part of my life from the beginning, is it any mystery that I knew who Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo and Tyrone Power were before I knew the names of some of my relatives? I recall noting in my diary when I was about nine that I had watched The Great Lie, “starring Bette Davis.” I remember first being enchanted by Tyrone Power when he smiled at Dorothy Lamour just after they met on a staircase in Johnny Apollo. And there was the time I watched Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder every night, five nights in a row, on a channel that ran the same feature film every week, all through the week.
But as I got older my interests multipied to include music and boys and so many other things. And time continued to pass...
Since movies were a part of my life from the beginning, is it any mystery that I knew who Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo and Tyrone Power were before I knew the names of some of my relatives? I recall noting in my diary when I was about nine that I had watched The Great Lie, “starring Bette Davis.” I remember first being enchanted by Tyrone Power when he smiled at Dorothy Lamour just after they met on a staircase in Johnny Apollo. And there was the time I watched Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder every night, five nights in a row, on a channel that ran the same feature film every week, all through the week.
But as I got older my interests multipied to include music and boys and so many other things. And time continued to pass...
It was summertime and I was living in a beach town where I’d taken a part-time job at a veterinary clinic until the fall term began. I usually listened to records or sometimes watched TV when I got home from work an hour two before dinner. Channel surfing one day, I tuned in to an L.A. TV station that aired "old movies" in the afternoon. I hadn’t seen any of the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at that point and was curious, so I sat down to watch when it turned out the movie of the day would be The Gay Divorcee(1934).
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| Resort set |
The Gay Divorcee was the first in a string of musicals Astaire and Rogers headlined together and it set the mold for the greatest of their classics. In this one, he's Guy Holden, a cocky Broadway hoofer on holiday in Europe, traveling with his dim and dizzy sidekick, Egbert (Edward Everett Horton), a British attorney of sorts. Astaire is up and dancing within the film's first minutes: pressed into service to pay for dinner at a Paris nightclub, Guy puts on a floor show of his own, improvising a slapdash dance routine on the spot. The prototypical Astaire/Rogers meet-cute takes place dockside in London. He is instantly smitten, she is promptly put off. When he later begins to pine for her (though he protests, "girls pine...men just suffer"), he warbles a lovesick tune, "Needle in a Haystack," and breaks into a nifty dance around his hotel room as he gets dressed. Irving Berlin was on the money when he said, "As a dancer he stands alone, and no singer knows his way around a song like Fred Astaire."  |
| "It's just like looking for a needle in a haystack...still I've got to find you..." |
Also on hand lending comic support are Eric Blore as an unctuous waiter with an eye and ear for detail and Erik Rhodes as an enthusiastic, if hare-brained, professional "co-respondent" ("Your wife is safe with Tonetti, he prefers spaghetti"). Briefly featured is 18-year-old Betty Grable as a bit of platinum strudel intent on k-knocking k-knees with Egbert.
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| Betty Grable to Edward Everett Horton: "Let's K-knock K-knees" |
Most of The Gay Divorcee is set at a lavish resort on the faux English seaside - the Bella Vista, a glittering monument to Art Deco. When Guy spies Mimi at the hotel, he pursues and coaxes her into dancing with him in an empty ballroom overlooking a moonlit sea. He sings Cole Porter's glorious "Night and Day," they dance, and as the heat between them builds, her resistance begins to melt. It's a palpably seductive moment and he literally dances his way into her heart. The expression on Mimi's face when the music ends says it all...
Naturally, there's a cleverly contrived identity mix-up that derails the romance for a while. It centers on time and place and the phrase, "chance is the fool's name for fate" (repeated variously as "chance is the foolish name for fate," "fate is a foolish thing to take chances with," "chances are that fate is foolish," etc.). But Guy and Mimi unravel the misunderstanding and it isn't long before they're dancing again, this time in the musical centerpiece of The Gay Divorcee, "The Continental," a many-phased, grand-scale, 22-minute production number. Here are excerpts from the finale:
It was then that my dormant affection for "old movies" reawakened and became a full-blown passion. Soon it was more than classics on TV and keeping up with the latest new movies (many of them now legends of the New Hollywood) for me. I began to haunt "revival houses," where retrospectives of Hollywood classics were shown, and "art houses" that screened foreign films old and new. And that was just the beginning.
Thinking back on it, the experience of reconnecting with classic movies and recognizing, consciously, what they meant to me wasn't too unlike what had happened when I returned to my hometown for the first time after many months away. It was springtime and as the car descended into the valley where I'd grown up, the scent of orange blossoms drifted up, growing stronger and stronger. Tears suddenly sprang into my eyes. The smell was so powerful and exotic...and yet so intimately familiar. That beautiful scent had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember but I'm not sure I fully appreciated it until that instant.
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The Gay Divorcee was a box office smash and established the Astaire/Rogers formula for the best of their films at RKO. The picture was nominated for five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Art Direction (Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark) Best Music/Score (Max Steiner), Best Sound Recording (Carl Dreher) and the first Best Music/Original Song award, which it won, for "The Continental" by Con Conrad and Herb Magidson.
The film was based on a 1932 Broadway hit, Gay Divorce, in which Astaire had starred with Claire Luce. Only "Night and Day," of the thirteen songs Cole Porter had written for the original stage production, was kept in the film version, but the plot remained intact and both Eric Blore and Erik Rhodes reprised their Broadway roles onscreen. The original title of the musical was changed at the insistence of the Hays Office in the belief that suggesting a divorcee could be happy was safer than implying divorce might be a cause for frivolity.
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| Erik Rhodes and Fred Astaire, "Chance is the fool's name for fate..." |
Turner Classic Movies is honoring Fred Astaire as Star of the Month in December. For more about him and the line-up of his films this month, Click here.
~This is my contribution to the Classic Movie Blog Association's Film Passion 101 Blogathon. Click here for links to participating blogs!
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
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| Clockwise from top left: Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson and Louise Brooks |
Fashion in Film
Film and costume design history expert Kimberly Truhler, one of the presenting hosts at TCM’s 2013 Classic Film Festival, launched her new webinar series The History of Fashion in Filmwith The 1920s - The Jazz Age on November 17 - and I was there!
Kimberly certainly knows her stuff - she’s an adjunct professor at L.A.’s Woodbury University where she teaches a course on the history of fashion in film, she serves as a film and costume design historian for Christies of London, curates a private vintage fashion collection, manages her own website, GlamAmor (dedicated to preserving and sharing the history and legacy of fashion in film), and much more. Her impressive experience and knowledge were clearly evident throughout the nearly two-hour inaugural webinar session. And what an education I got…
Kimberly touched on the history of American film itself, from its invention to the advent of the studio system, from its beginnings on the East Coast to its move to the West Coast, from the age of the nickelodeon to the production of full-length feature films, from the silent era to the dawn of sound and from a time when costumes were often homemade to the use of European couture to the emergence of American couture.
Kimberly certainly knows her stuff - she’s an adjunct professor at L.A.’s Woodbury University where she teaches a course on the history of fashion in film, she serves as a film and costume design historian for Christies of London, curates a private vintage fashion collection, manages her own website, GlamAmor (dedicated to preserving and sharing the history and legacy of fashion in film), and much more. Her impressive experience and knowledge were clearly evident throughout the nearly two-hour inaugural webinar session. And what an education I got…
Kimberly touched on the history of American film itself, from its invention to the advent of the studio system, from its beginnings on the East Coast to its move to the West Coast, from the age of the nickelodeon to the production of full-length feature films, from the silent era to the dawn of sound and from a time when costumes were often homemade to the use of European couture to the emergence of American couture.
Kimberly narrowed her focus to four films of the ‘20s that she considers essential to film fashion history because of their immediate as well as long-lasting impact on style on and offscreen. Here is a snapshot of just some of what we learned:
Cecil B. DeMille’s Why Change Your Wife? (1920), starring Gloria Swanson with costumes by Clare West
Clare West, as was the practice of the time, did not actually design costumes but traveled to Europe where she spent lavishly on clothing from couture houses. Swanson’s opulent wardrobe and signature style was created out of West’s selections – and DeMille spared no expense to dress his great star.
It (1927), from Paramount, starring Clara Bow with costumes by Travis Banton
Banton made a daring decision when he chose to showcase the “little black dress” look on Clara Bow in It only a few months after Coco Chanel unveiled her “Ford dress,” the first lbddesigned for conventional wear. Until then, women wore black only at funerals - but the look was popularized with It.
MGM’s Our Dancing Daughters (1928), starring Joan Crawford with costumes credited to David Cox (though Kimberly suggests that Adrian may well have been involved)
This film made a star of Joan Crawford and popularized the Art Deco look. The movie also promoted “women wearing pants” (a huge taboo at the time) with an equestrian look that was famously mirrored decades later in Diane Keaton’s legendary Annie Hall style.
G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), a German silent film starring American actress Louise Brooks with costumes by French designer Jean Patou
Would anyone remember Louise Brooks if not for this film? Her pared-down, low-cut, back-revealing wardrobe by French fashion icon Jean Patou signaled the direction style would take in the 1930s. And Brooks’ iconic “bob” became a haircut du jour that never went out of style.
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| Clockwise from top left: Clare West, Jean Patou, Adrian and Travis Banton |
I have barely scratched the surface of Kimberly‘s fascinating webinar but a recording of the session is now available online. Click here for information on access to the recording and for more on the remaining History of Fashion in Film webinars:
Sun., December 15: The 1930s – Art Deco Elegance
Sun., Janaury 19: The 1940s – Film Noir Style
Sun., February 16: The 1950s – Opposites Attract
Sun., March 16: The 1960s – Revolution
Sun., April 20: The 1970s – Everybody’s All American
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| Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932), costume design by Travis Banton |
The Hollywood Costume
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| Deborah Nadoolman-Landis |
Meanwhile, beginning on the 6th of December, Turner Classic Movies will shine its Friday Night Spotlight on The Hollywood Costume all through the month. Costume designer (Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and author Deborah Nadoolman Landis will host, and every Friday evening viewers will be treated to three double features, each showcasing the work of a different top Hollywood costume designer. Here’s what we can look forward to:
December 6
Designer: Travis Banton
Films: Blonde Venus (1932), starring Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant, and Cleopatra (1934), starring Claudette Colbert
Designer: Orry-Kelly
Films: Casablanca(1942), starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, and Auntie Mame (1958), starring Rosalind Russell
Designer: Adrian
Films: The Women (1939), starring Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford, and Anna Karenina (1935), starring Greta Garbo
December 13
Designer: Irene Sharaff
Films: Funny Girl (1968), starring Barbra Streisand, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton
Designer: Anthea Sylbert
Films: Chinatown (1974), starring Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson, and Carnal Knowledge (1971), starring Jack Nicholson and Ann-Margret
Designer: Walter Plunkett
Films: Adam’s Rib (1949), starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and Forbidden Planet (1956), starring Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis
December 20
Designer: Jean Louis
Films: Send Me No Flowers (1964), starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson, and The Big Heat (1953), starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame
Designer: Anna Hill Johnstone
Films: Dog Day Afternoon (1975), starring Al Pacino, and The Stepford Wives (1975), starring Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss and Tina Louise
Designer: Edith Head
Films: Sullivan’s Travels (1941), starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake, and The Seven Little Foys (1955), starring Bob Hope
December 27
Designer: Edward Stevenson
Films: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), starring Joseph Cotten and Tim Holt, and Out of the Past (1947), starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer
Designer: Ann Roth
Films: Silkwood (1983), starring Meryl Streep, and Klute (1971), starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland
Designer: Helen Rose
Films: The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), starring Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas, and Annie Get Your Gun (1950), starring Betty Hutton.
(check your local TV listings for times)
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| Faye Dunaway in Chinatown (1974), costume design by Anthea Sylbert |
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