#Shepperd Strudwick

[kwebtv]

From the Golden Age of Television

The Signing of the Declaration of Independence - CBS - February 6, 1955

A presentation of "You Are There" Season Season 3 Episode 24 (It was also presented in Season 1 Episode 13 on April 26, 1953 with the same cast)

Historical Reenactment

Running Time: 30 minutes

Directed by Jack Gage

Produced by Charles W Russell

Narrated by Walter Cronkite

News Reporters:

Harry Marble

Ned Calmer

Stars:

Shepperd Strudwick as Thomas Jefferson

Addison Richards as Benjamin Franklin

Philip Coolidge as John Adams

Fred Herrick as Merchant

Frank Aletter as Quaker

Bart Burns as Loafer

Bruce Williamson as Tom

Gene Peterson as Bill

Scott Tennyson as Frontiersman

Tom McDermott as Gentleman

John Shay as Captain Graydon

Rusty Lane as Samuel Adams

Philip Abbott as Edward Rutledge

Vinton Hayworth as John Dickinson

Francis Bethencourt as John Hancock

[erstwhile-punk-guerito]

[fourorfivemovements]

Films Watched in 2023:

12. The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe (1942) - Dir. Harry Lachman

[dorothydalmati1]

Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies 1940 Episode 18: Tom Thumb in Trouble

Written by Rich Hogan

Directed by Chuck Jones

Animated by Robert Cannon

Voice characterizations by Margaret Hill-Talbot, Shepperd Strudwick & Marion Darlington

[byneddiedingo]

Lorne Greene and Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves (Robert Aldrich, 1956) Cast: Joan Crawford, Cliff Robertson, Vera Miles, Lorne Greene, Ruth Donnelly, Shepperd Strudwick. Screenplay: Jean Rouverol*, Hugo Butler*, Lewis Meltzer, Robert Blees. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Music: Hans J. Salter. Costume design: Jean Louis. Six years before What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Robert Aldrich directed Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves. I mention this because the image many people now have of Aldrich comes from Alfred Molina's portrayal of him in the TV series Feud that concentrated on the shenanigans of Crawford and Bette Davis on the set of Baby Jane. Molina's Aldrich is a punching bag for Jessica Lange's Crawford and Susan Sarandon's Davis, and a studio hack under the thumb of Stanley Tucci's snaky Jack Warner. In fact, Aldrich was a gifted director with some strong credits, including the noir version of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and the action epic The Dirty Dozen (1967). Autumn Leaves shows off his strengths, especially in keeping a florid melodrama about Hollywood's idea of mental illness just this side of plausibility. He makes the most of the film's major set, Millicent Wetherby's (Crawford) bungalow, collaborating with cinematographer Charles Lang to keep an ordinary dwelling shadowy, confining, and off-kilter. Aldrich is particularly good at working with significant objects, and not only the typewriter that Burt Hanson (Cliff Robertson) so memorably hurls at Millicent. After a tense confrontation between Millicent and the increasingly unstable Burt, she goes from one room to another and there, front and center, Aldrich has placed precisely what we want to see: the telephone she should use to call for help. You sometimes sense that Aldrich is having a little fun with the film, too: He stages a beach makeout scene with Millicent and Burt kissing in the incoming tide that's an allusion to the celebrated scene with Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953). Aldrich is surely aware that Crawford was offered Kerr's role but turned it down. Crawford had just turned 50 and her face was beginning to harden into the familiar mask of her later years, but she's still plausibly a good five to 10 years younger as the tense, wary, but near-fatally susceptible Millicent. Robertson, especially in his early scenes, keeps us wondering whether Burt is more than just a creep who likes to hit on older women. Unfortunately, the portrayal of mental illness is the usual Hollywood hackwork: Millicent is in denial about Burt's psychosis because she is starved for love, having sacrificed herself in her youth so she could tend to her father, an invalid. Burt's compulsive lying is the result of a trauma suffered when he discovered that his wife was having an affair with his father. And of course, a montage of medication and shock therapy is all that's needed to persuade us that Burt has been rehabbed and is ready to resume something like a normal relationship with a wife old enough to be his mother. If I were Millicent, I'd keep the typewriter locked up when not in use. *Jean Rouverol and Hugo Butler were blacklisted. The screen credit went to their "front," Jack Jevne.

[letterboxd-loggd]

Rings on Her Fingers (1942) Rouben Mamoulian

August 3rd 2022

[gatutor]

Shepperd Strudwick-Preston Foster-Signe Hasso "Strange triangle" 1946, de Ray McCarey.

[clemsfilmdiary]

Autumn Leaves (1956, Robert Aldritch)

8/21/21

[vintagesoaparchives]

Afternoon TV Stars - November 1975 - One Life to Live

[twilightzonecloseup]

1.29 Nightmare as a Child

Director: Alvin Ganzer

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

“Month of November, hot chocolate, and a small cameo of a child's face, imperfect only in its solemnity. And these are the improbable ingredients to a human emotion, an emotion, say, like - fear.”

[lifejustgotawkward]

365 Day Movie Challenge (2019) - #59: Fast Company (1938) - dir. Edward Buzzell

I really don’t know why I keep wasting energy on mediocre Nick and Nora ripoffs, but the fact is that I have a multiple-DVD set featuring three films about another pair of married amateur sleuths, Joel and Garda Sloane, so I decided to bite the bullet and give the first entry in the short-lived series, Fast Company, a shot. Unfortunately, it’s a collective nadir for its otherwise talented cast and crew (Florence Rice being the primary exception; yikes, she’s awful), so I had to settle for my general enjoyment of Melvyn Douglas, Claire Dodd (in a juicier role than usual), Shepperd Strudwick, Louis Calhern, Nat Pendleton, Douglass Dumbrille, Minor Watson, Dwight Frye (one of my longtime favorites) and Thurston Hall, regardless of the lack of screen time and/or character development.

[erstwhile-punk-guerito]

[todaysdocument]

“We, the undersigned, as American Citizens who believe in constitutional democratic government, are disgusted and outraged by the continuing attempt of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to smear the Motion Picture Industry.” 10/21/1947

File Unit: Organization Files of the Files and Reference Section of the Internal Security Committee During the 79th through 94th Congresses, 1945 - 1976

Series: Committee Papers, 1945 - 1975

Record Group 233: Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1789 - 2015

Transcription:

The Committee for the First Amendment

     We, the undersigned, as American Citizens who believe in constitutional democratic government, are disgusted and outraged by the continuing attempt of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to smear the Motion Picture Industry.

     We hold that these hearings are morally wrong because:

      Any investigation into the political beliefs of the individual is contrary to the basic principles of our democracy;

      Any attempt to curb freedom of expression and to set arbitrary standards of Americanism is in itself disloyal to both the spirit and the letter of our Constitution.

Committee for the First Amendment

Richard Brooks     Paulette Goddard     Burgess Meredith

Eddie Cantor        Benny Goodman       Doris Nolan

Richard Conte      Van Heflin                  Gregory Peck

Norman Corwin     Paul Henreid             Vincent Price

Philip Dunne         Katharine Hepburn    Milton Sperling

Julius Epstein       John Houseman         Shepperd Strudwick

Philip Epstein       Marsha Hunt               Barry Sullivan

Henry Fonda        John Huston               Jerry Wald

Melvin Frank        Norma Krasna            Cornel Wilde

Ava Gardner        Anatole Ltivak            Billy Wilder

Sheridan Gibney  Myrna Loy                 William Wyler

                             Dorothy McGuire       Collier Young

The above statement has been given to the American press.  If it expresses your views and you wish to join with us in further action against this affront to our way of life, please wire:

"Bill  of Right:

care of Western Union

Beverly Hills

[classicfilmfreak]

New Post has been published on http://www.classicfilmfreak.com/2017/12/21/dr-renaults-secret-1942-with-j-carrol-naish-and-george-zucco/

Dr. Renault's Secret (1942) with J. Carrol Naish and George Zucco

The shocking story of a man-made monster…who dared to love!

20th Century Fox will never be known as the home of great horror films of the past, as that crown remains firmly with Universal Pictures. Even so, the former studio did contribute a few smaller, but still alluring, gems in the genre.

Among these is 1942’s Dr. Renault’s Secret, with J. Carrol Naish and Shepperd Strudwick. It’s not a classic horror picture in most senses of the word as there’s nobody slipping into a coffin by day or staggering around in linen wrappings. Rather, we have J. Carrol Naish as Noel, an ape who has been transformed by Dr. Renault (George Zucco) into a man. Sorry for the spoiler, but it’s something you figure out rather easily a few minutes into the roughly hour long picture.

Instead of Noel rampaging throughout the countryside killing and terrorizing the populace, Dr. Renault’s Secret is not only rather house bound like an Agatha Christie story, but is also extremely sympathetic to the ‘creature.’ In large part this is due to the wonderful performance by Naish as Noel. While clearly a B picture from a studio dabbling outside its forte, Naish doesn’t simply mail in his performance like many actors may have done. His movements, even the subtle ones betray his simian ancestry, though while at the same time not being cliched or hokey.

Naish makes the movie work. Early on his movements are subtle and only later does he resort to more stereotypical movements like arm swinging and such as his duct taped new personality breaks down and crashes. He’s also shot in many cases from below to highlight his exaggerated nostrils and swarthy complexion. We, the audience can almost feel his turmoil and his inner stress as he’s torn between his two selves and his infatuation with the doctor’s niece Madelon (Lynne Roberts).

Beyond Naish the only standout in the cast is George Zucco as the mad doctor himself. That said, he has only a handful of scenes. His most notable moment is (of course) playing against Noel in the basement where he conducts his experiments and has Noel live. Noel shares that he has memories of his past (as a gorilla) and doesn’t understand why he had to be changed to meet someone’s petty goals of self-promotion. Here Renault is much like Nazi architect Albert Speer, presenting outwardly as a sincere technocrat, while behind the scenes mercilessly running roughshod over any obstacle presented in his quest to get to the top of the mountain. Perfectly proper over tea but demonically sinister back at the office!

Shepperd Strucwick (as visiting Dr. Larry Forbes, fiance to Madelon) and Lynne Roberts (as Madelon Ranault herself) are both adequate but unengaging for the most part, both being a bit static and naive to make the picture go.

Dr. Renault’s Secret isn’t great art, but its sincere approach from the ‘monster’s’ side is a nice change of pace and makes this a gem worth seeking out if for no other reason than J. Carrol Naish’s great performance. Though not known for horror films, Twentieth Century Fox brings really good production values (much better than what Monogram or poverty row studios were bringing to the table) and a good technical ensemble led by Virgil Miller’s creative photography.  Music by Emil Newman and David Raksin is fair, but not on par with Salter’s work over at Universal.

[dorothydalmati1]

Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies 1940 Episode 4: Mighty Hunters

Written by Dave Monahan

Directed by Chuck Jones

Animated by Ken Harris

Voice characterizations by Shepperd Strudwick

DISCLAIMER: We’re not even on another Censored Eleven installment and already three cartoons with stereotypes in a row! This time, this short has Native American stereotypes! Great! Once again, it’s not done on malicious intent. The social views the cartoon depicts are considered okay for the time. It’s just that they became outdated overtime, and this cartoon, alongside the previous two, should be viewed in a historical context more so than a typical casual watch. Erasing this cartoon from existence would be like that it never existed, and watching cartoons in such historical can make viewers learn something from it. So, yeah. Not not much else to say here, it’s just another product of the time period.