#anne revere

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The Devil Commands (1941)

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Elia Kazan’s GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT, starring Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, John Garfield, Celeste Holm, Anne Revere and Dean Stockwell, premiered in New York City #OnThisDay in 1947.

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Hot Vintage Stage Actress Round 1

Anne Revere: Martha Dobie in The Children's Hour (1934 Broadway); Anna Berniers in Toys in the Attic (1960 Broadway)

Libby Holman: Mari in The Sapphire Ring (1925 Broadway); The Little Show (1929 Broadway); Mme Baltin in You Never Know (1938 Broadway)

Propaganda under the cut

Anne Revere:

this is the loving communists website so i better see people voting for an active member of the american communist party

Libby Holman:

Openly bisexual Jewish woman who loved making a scene. A man allegedly killed himself because she broke his heart. Had affairs with Josephine Baker and Tallulah Bankhead.

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National Velvet (1944) Clarence Brown

March 18th 2024

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The Song of Bernadette (1943)

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Gentleman's Agreement (1947) dir. Elia Kazan.

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“You talk different, but you drive just like the rest of em!”

Fallen Angel (1945) dir. Otto Preminger

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Dragonwyck

Alfred Newman’s blissfully thundering score, replacing the usual 20th Century-Fox fanfare, promises a much better film than Joseph L. Mankiewicz delivers with his first directing effort, DRAGONWYCK (1946, TCM, YouTube). It’s not that the film is bad. It has some strong moments and performances, and you can see hints of the wit and grace that would inform some of his later films. It just doesn’t live up to the promise of its first hour.

It opens in 1844 with Gene Tierney running into a farmhouse, and, to her and Mankiewicz’ s credit, she maintains that level of youthful exuberance through much of the film. She’s being raised by Walter Huston and Anne Revere (who are simply marvelous) in a strict religious farm family in Connecticut. When a wealthy distant relation (Vincent Price) requests they send one of their daughters as a companion for his, she convinces Huston to send her off. She’s soon swept up in the glamour of life on a wealthy landowner’s estate in the Hudson River Valley. She’s also charmed by Price’s urbanity and seeming generosity, particularly in a beautifully staged grand ball scene. When his wife dies suddenly, Price proposes, and then the film goes downhill.

Some of the problem is that Mankiewicz, who also wrote the screenplay, has condensed a 400+ page novel into a 103-minute movie. Characters keep telling us about things we should have seen, and the housekeeper, a wonderfully eccentric and surprisingly malicious Spring Byington, vanishes halfway through. A farmer (Henry Morgan) wrongly arrested for murder is suddenly free with no explanation. Along with those narrative lapses, 1940s values also start getting in the way. The scene in which the recently married Tierney finds out that Price is (<gasp><clutch pearls>) an atheist is almost ludicrous. DRAGONWYCK looks and sounds great, and most of the acting is at a high level. Tierney did very good work for Mankiewicz, and the scene in which she discovers what the film can only hint at, that her husband’s become an opium addict, proves that she really could move her face. Price’s performance feels like a successful tryout for his later Gothic hero-villains in the Roger Corman Poe films. And Jessica Tandy has a nice turn as a maid who can’t cook, iron or sew but is fiercely loyal to her mistress. With what Tierney goes through in the name of gothic suspense, she needs it.

[weirdlookindog]

Boris Karloff, Anne Revere, Ralph Penney, and a ghost in The Devil Commands (1941).

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Remembering Anne Revere on her birthday #botd

[peggy-elise]

Vincent Price as Nicholas Van Ryn in Dragonwyck 1946 🌓

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Dragonwyck (1946) Joseph L. Mankiewicz

March 16th 2024

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Yet, even Chapuys, who gives us this information, says earlier in the same letter that ‘there had been… talk of a new marriage for this king… which rumour agrees well with my own news from the court of France, where, according to letters [I have] received, courtiers maintain that this king has actually applied for the hand of Francis’ daughter’. Chapuys himself therefore does not connect up the rumours of a ‘new marriage’ with Jane Seymour. In early April, Jane was still little more than a lady whom the king was pursuing. At best, in accordance with the conventions of courtly love, she was the lady whom ‘he serves’ – a telling phrase. At worst, she was a passing fancy, whom Henry may have hoped to make his mistress. Chapuys certainly didn’t think much of Henry’s choice. He described Jane the day before Anne’s execution as ‘no great beauty’ and ‘not a woman of great wit’; he implied that she was unlikely to be a virgin, and reported that people said she was inclined ‘to be proud and haughty’. Yet, by this point, the world had changed, and with it, Henry’s intentions towards Jane. It is highly improbable that before Anne was considered guilty of adultery, Henry had seriously begun to plan to make Jane his wife.

1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII, Suzannah Lipscomb

"I hear that, even before the arrest of the Concubine, the King, speaking with Mistress Jane Semel of their future marriage [...]"