#menjou icons

[mariacallous]

Before Billy Wilder became the screenwriter and director of iconic films like Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, he worked as a freelance reporter, first in Vienna and then in Weimar Berlin. Billy Wilder on Assignment brings together more than fifty articles, translated into English for the first time, that Wilder (then known as “Billie”) published in magazines and newspapers between September 1925 and November 1930. From a humorous account of Wilder’s stint as a hired dancing companion in a posh Berlin hotel and his dispatches from the international film scene, to his astute profiles of writers, performers, and political figures, the collection offers fresh insights into the creative mind of one of Hollywood’s most revered writer-directors.

Wilder’s early writings—a heady mix of cultural essays, interviews, and reviews—contain the same sparkling wit and intelligence as his later Hollywood screenplays, while also casting light into the dark corners of Vienna and Berlin between the wars. Wilder covered everything: big-city sensations, jazz performances, film and theater openings, dance, photography, and all manner of mass entertainment. And he wrote about the most colorful figures of the day, including Charlie Chaplin, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Prince of Wales, actor Adolphe Menjou, director Erich von Stroheim, and the Tiller Girls dance troupe. Film historian Noah Isenberg’s introduction and commentary place Wilder’s pieces—brilliantly translated by Shelley Frisch—in historical and biographical context, and rare photos capture Wilder and his circle during these formative years.

Filled with rich reportage and personal musings, Billy Wilder on Assignment showcases the burgeoning voice of a young journalist who would go on to become a great auteur.

[annicon]

.｡.:*･ hare icons ･*:.｡. 

like/reblog if you save

© on twitter @mewseok

[filmpenance]

Day 4, 2020 - Morocco

Morocco – 1930 – Josef von Sternberg

(Pre Hays Babes)

“Every time a man has helped me, there has been a price. What's yours?” – Amy Jolly

I’ve been dying to see Morocco for a long time. It has lived in my imagination as that iconic queer image of Marlene Dietrich in a tuxedo and top hat kissing a woman in the audience of a nightclub scene. It is a moment from the past that speaks to the existence of queer desire just as talking pictures were starting to take hold.

But that had been all it was to me: a moment separate from the context of the film itself – and that may be its best legacy because it’s not an earth shattering film in other respects. It’s a fairly standard plot based on a popular work Amy Jolly by author Benno Vigny. This film was American audiences’ English language introduction to Marlene Dietrich[i].

Dietrich plays Amy Jolly, an edgy cabaret performer who has come to Morocco to make some money at the nightclub owned by Lo Tinto.

It just so happens that two other men have arrived in town.

Tom Brown (Gary Cooper) is an American in the French Foreign Legion, who has arrived in Morocco with his unit for a respite before they receive their next set of orders. Tom’s a trouble-maker and a bit of a cad, known for his exploits with the ladies and his laissez-faire attitude toward orders and well, everything else.

On the same evening, Monsieur La Bessiere (Adolphe Menjou) has come to Morocco – he’s a well-connected, wealthy French gentleman for whom this place is a second home.

Both men take a shine to Amy after seeing her confident and gender-bending performance at Lo Tinto’s club. At first it seems that Tom will win her heart, but with Tom getting caught in an affair with his superior’s wife send Amy into the arms of La Bessiere?

I mean, if we know one thing she will pick one of them, right[ii]? Real love means a woman putting a halt to everything you want to pursue and following a man[iii]. For a film with that sparkling queer moment, it’s an ultimately conservative message.

And – content warning – there are most assuredly racist and sexist moments that seemingly pop out of nowhere in this film[iv].

The film is well shot, and in particular you have a sense of how vast some of the locations are: The nightclub is deep and wide, the Moroccan streets seem to be maze-like. There is a real sense of place and scope.

Glad I saw it and satisfied my curiosity – you don’t really need to though. The photos of Marlene in a top hat are all we need to take from Morocco.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/AgGFytQHYso

Review (NYT): https://www.nytimes.com/1930/11/17/archives/the-screen-david-and-goliath-a-new-german-actress-king-george-in.html

NOTES:

[i] And most critics at the time thought she was a sub-standard Garbo rip-off.

[ii] This is when I yearn for Marlene to go off by herself; she was fab at the start!

[iii] LITERALLY in the case of this film.

[iv] Including some dolls that Amy keeps in her dressing room, murdering a local man, and the depiction of sex workers.

[byneddiedingo]

Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) Cast: Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Adolphe Menjou, Ullrich Haupt, Eve Southern, Francis McDonald, Paul Porcasi. Screenplay: Jules Furthman, based on a play by Benno Vigny. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Film editing: Sam Winston. Costume design: Travis Banton. Music: Karl Hajos. At one point in Josef von Sternberg's Morocco, Tom Brown (Gary Cooper) literally sweeps Amy Jolly (Marlene Dietrich) off her feet and then tries to guess her weight. She scoffs at his estimate of 120 pounds and says his low estimate must be because he's so strong. In fact, Dietrich had slimmed down noticeably since she made The Blue Angel for Sternberg only a few months earlier in Germany, though she's still not quite as svelte as she would become after his transformation of her into a Hollywood icon was complete. The pounds are gone in her first American film, as are the realistically tawdry cabaret costumes Lola Lola wears in the German film, replaced by a wardrobe designed by Travis Banton. She is also filmed lovingly by Lee Garmes, who helped her locate the key light whenever the camera is on, a lesson she never forgot long after Sternberg's star-making was over. Morocco was a sensation, earning Dietrich her only Oscar nomination, though it's hardly her best performance or even a very good film. Sternberg still maintains the slightly halting pace of a director making a transition from silent films to talkies, chopping up Jules Furthman's dialogue by pausing too long between lines, losing the snap that would be present when Sternberg and Furthman worked together two years later on Shanghai Express. What action there is in the story, such as the attack by thugs outside Amy's apartment or the taking out of the machine gun nest, is tossed off casually, all in service of romance. And even the celebrated ending, with Amy kicking off her shoes to join the camp-followers into the desert, is more likely to elicit laughs today. As handsome as Gary Cooper's legionnaire is, it doesn't seem likely that a tough cookie like Amy, once capable of tearing up La Bessiere's (Adolphe Menjou) card into small pieces while he's watching, would be such a careless lovesick sap. Still, Morocco is worth sitting through for its legendary moments, including the celebrated appearance of Amy in men's evening wear, taking a flower from a woman whom she kisses on the mouth and then tossing it to the wryly amused Tom, who tucks it behind his ear. It's an entertaining flirtation with what the Production Code would, in just a few years, and for several dreary decades, egregiously label "sex perversion."

[chiseler]

RAYMOND GRIFFITH

How did Raymond Griffith get to be so forgotten? I first read about him in Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clowns, and though he sounded fascinating in Kerr’s lambent prose, I found it hard to imagine a really great silent comic having slipped into the land of amnesia so thoroughly. Yet, if you seek out the performer’s work on YouTube (few legitimate avenues offer his movies), you’ll see an extraordinary comedy player.

Griffith is unlike Chaplin, Keaton and Llloyd in that he doesn’t offer an iconic silhouette: his “costume” was a top hat and tux, and his dapper appearance calls to mind France’s great Max Linder. But though Griffith could and did play it straight (notably in Todd Browning’s 1923 White Tiger), he wasn’t seen as a straight actor with a gift for elegant comedy, like Adolphe Menjou. Griffith played a supporting role in the Menjou vehicle Open All Night (1924), and it’s clear he’s a comedy turn, brought in to spice things up with a broader kind of farce. Griffith had, after all, gotten his start at Keystone—where his promotion from gag man to star was swiftly followed by demotion back to the story department, so ill-fitted was his style to the Keystone school of mayhem. Today, Griffith’s few surviving shorts look much more watchable than the hectic knockabout of the typical Sennett programmer. True, they have no structure, but Griffith provides moments of reflection and comic calm amid the maelstrom of brickbats and slaps.

Griffith was a uniquely reactive comedian. He could throw himself about with some courage, but never aspired to the knockabout wonder of a Keaton: his original background was the legitimate stage, not vaudeville. Instead, he uses his reactions to the events around him to provoke laughter. His standard attitude is sang-froid, but rather than showing the elegant man who hilariously loses his dignity, Griffith makes the dignity hilarious, an absurd spectacle of conceit, yet so human as to be oddly appealing. When the façade is cracked, a whole array of little details emerge, lightning-fast changes of face and posture, each amusing in itself but truly hysterical in combination. Langdon could make shyness funny, Keaton was a master of astonishment, Chaplin could evoke desperation, but Griffith might combine all three in a few seconds.

Keystone—supporting work—stardom. A clue to Griffith’s modern obscurity can be found in the fact that so many of his films are lost. Despite becoming a founding member of Twentieth Century Fox, Griffith apparently didn’t ensure his films were well preserved, as Chaplin and Lloyd did: important movies from all three stages of his career are lost. Paths to Paradise (1925), perhaps his most impressive extant film, is minus its climax, and Trent’s Last Case (1929), his last silent, directed by Howard Hawks, is also frustratingly incomplete.

I choose Paths to Paradise because what’s left of it is nearly perfect and shows Griffith’s most distinctive qualities at their purest, stripping away the slapstick of The Night Club, and the cartoony effects of Hands Up! (1926), fun though those are. Here, Griffith stands revealed, the comic as cypher. His character, a con-man and safe-cracker, has no name of his own, presenting a different identity to everyone he meets, and remarking via intertitle: “I always answer pages. One never knows what will happen.” But this roguish adventurer’s suavity is constantly punctured: Griffith will become bashful, flustered, panic-stricken, fatuously triumphant at the drop of a silk hat (“fatuous” is an emotion he really claims for himself: his picture accompanied the word in the 1928 edition of Funk & Wagnall’s Illustrated Dictionary. That is a true fact and not in any way a lie I just made up). Really, he has no persona, no equivalent of Chaplin’s little fellow or Lloyd’s boy next door. To watch him is to watch a succession of masks dropping, each a perfectly captured emotion, but each discarded as soon as it’s served its purpose.

Griffith’s stardom didn’t last into talkies, and for a poetically perfect reason: he had no voice to speak of, or with. His vocal cords had suffered a trauma onstage during adolescence, and he couldn’t utter more than a whisper. In one final short, The Sleeping Porch (1929), he played a man who’s lost his voice and must resort to pantomime, and in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) he’s a dying soldier, his voice a hoarse rattle. The rest is silence.

 by David Cairns

[etc-eterablog]

Photo Gallery: Katharine Hepburn

Only Hepburn’s third film, Morning Glory garnered her the first of her record four Academy Awards for Best Actress. Though the script had originally been intended for fellow RKO actress Constance Bennett, who was the studio’s most popular star at the time, Hepburn convinced producer Pandro S. Berman that she was the only one who could play the role. Hepburn is seen here with co-star Adolphe Menjou.

"It's life isn't it? You plow ahead and make a hit. And you plow on and someone passes you. Then someone passes them. Time levels.”

View the gallery for more images: http://bit.ly/2mC5Kjy

[lightscamerabitchsmileee]

#classicmovienight watching the 1943 musical “Du Barry Was A Lady” starring Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball & Red Skelton 😊

This is Lucy’s most memorable role as an actress before she became the famous TV icon & pioneer that we all know and love 😊 & a lot of people don’t really know that she was a Hollywood actress during the golden age and is so highly underrated too she started out at the time joining RKO in the mid 30’s with bit parts and small roles in movies like the Fred & Ginger classics “Roberta” & “Follow The Fleet” but she got her breakthrough role in 1937 as Judy Canfield in the hit movie “Stage Door” with Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers (who was one of Lucy’s closest friends) and Adolphe Menjou although her time with RKO never really garnered big success after that as she was known as “Queen of the B’s” for being in many B movies with her only other notable roles at the time being 1938’s “Having Wonderful Time” again with Ginger & Douglas Fairbanks Jr., 1939’s “Room Service” with The Marx Brothers and 1942’s “The Big Street” with Henry Fonda which was also her favorite role 😊

Looking for better parts she moved to MGM in 1943 and this movie was her first big role and most memorable but even at MGM they never really knew what to do with her because of the fact that she was a female comedian and not a glamour girl like Lana Turner for instance she did have some good roles like 1945’s “Without Love” again with Katharine & Spencer Tracy, 1946’s “Easy To Wed” with Van Johnson & Esther Williams & 1949’s “Sorrowful Jones” her first of 4 movies with fellow comedian Bob Hope as you can tell she moved to TV in the 50’s with the first ever successful sitcom in history the iconic “I Love Lucy” with her husband at the time Desi Arnaz and the rest they say is history 😊😊

This is also a highly underrated role for Gene Kelly who was fresh off his breakthrough success at the time in “For Me & My Gal” with Judy Garland from the year before. The tap dance legend went on to star in many iconic successful films in the 40s and 50s most notably 1944’s “Cover Girl”, 1951’s “An American in Paris” & of course 1952’s “Singin in the Rain” 😊

[healthycoffeeguy]

"A Star Is Born" New. Never Opened. Still in original shrink wrap. "The original" Starring: Janet Gaynor, Fredric March, Adolphe Menjou, May Robson, Andy Devine "This is Mrs. Norman Maine," proclaims Janet Gaynor, fighting back the tears as she addresses her fans while still rocked by personal tragedy. It's the kind of grandiose gesture we love in a movie star, and the original A Star Is Born is gloriously grand with a cynical undercurrent. William Wellman, working from a sharp screenplay cowritten by the acerbic Dorothy Parker, strikes a balance between romantic glamour and tragic melodrama, all accomplished with a barely concealed caustic wit. It's a Cinderella story of a fresh-faced farm girl, the improbably named Esther Blodgett (they have a lot of fun with that one) who transforms into screen icon Vicki Lester when she comes to the attentions of matinee idol Norman Maine (Fredric March). But when the deliriously happy couple marries, Vicki's rise to the top is counterbalanced by Norman's fall from grace, a precipitous plummet from stardom to alcoholism and bitterness. Gaynor's milk-fed wholesomeness is a tad corny next to March's worldly cynicism, but she's a movie star through and through. Adolphe Menjou costars as a mercenary agent with a sing-song patter. One of the quintessential Hollywood Self-portraits, A Star Is Born was remade twice and was itself inspired by George Cukor's wonderful What Price Hollywood? and the real-life story of Colleen Moore and John McCormick. March based his character on John Gilbert and John Barrymore. https://item.mercari.com/gl/m19838062817/ #wellnessjames #Entrepreneurs #Jamesthehealthycoffeeguy my Passions CBDa from CTFO wellnessjames.myctfo.com and Ganoderma Enriched products from Gano Excel us.ganoexcel.com/lockettshp http://jameslockettrepairs.blogspot.com (at Mesa, Arizona) https://www.instagram.com/p/CP09lwcj8T_/?utm_medium=tumblr

[dweemeister]

NOTE: Pollyanna was the 2,000th feature-length or short-length film I rated on imdb as part of the, “My Movie Odyssey” tag on this blog. Movie #1,000 was Shane (1953) – a Western from a young boy’s point of view. Now, here is an iconic classic film from a young girl’s point of view.

Pollyanna (1960)

Following an animators’ strike and Bambi (1942) losing money at the box office due to the Second World War, Walt Disney would never be as involved in his studio’s animated features again. He had been harangued past his breaking point, and needed to shift his attention elsewhere. So after the innovative first five animated features, Disney concentrated on his studio’s nature documentaries, the construction of Disneyland, his anthology television show, and live-action films. Pollyanna, directed by Philip Kaufman and with an adapted screenplay by David Swift (based on Eleanor Porter’s novel of the same name), would become one of the most famous in that live-action Disney canon, even introducing the central character’s name into the English language – a “Pollyanna” is an excessively optimistic person. Family-friendly, yet divisive for its sugary optimism, it would be one of Walt Disney’s personal favorites among the live-action films he produced. Today, Pollyanna’s reputation – in part because the name is now a derisive shorthand – overshadows the fact that the film is moving in its goodness, in its belief that bitterness prevents one from a meaningful pursuit of happiness.

Twelve-year-old Pollyanna (Hayley Mills) is the daughter of deceased missionaries, who has come to live with her aunt Polly (Jane Wyman) in a small New England town. The affluent, austere, uncharitable Aunt Polly is an influential citizen – even going so far as to opposing the destruction and rebuilding of the local orphanage. Several citizens want Reverend Ford (Karl Malden) to use his Sunday sermons – usually blustering ordeals reminding of catastrophe and death – to support their orphanage plans. The reverend will initially refuse, fearful of Aunt Polly. As Pollyanna makes herself familiar with the maids at Aunt Polly’s home and befriends orphan Jimmy Bean (Kevin Corcoran), cantankerous hypochondriac Mrs. Snow (Agnes Moorehead), and town recluse Mr. Pendergast (Adolphe Menjou), she – through her actions – helps her new hometown to realize the walls of suspicion they have constructed against their friends and family and neighbors. 

The world outside their well-kempt homes, their scenic wooden porches, and enormous frontyards might not be as threatening or suspicious as it might seem. Pollyanna’s optimism – embodied in the so-called “Glad Game” (stop rolling your eyes and keep reading), a psychological exercise to help Pollyanna remain cognizant of life’s beauty and others’ goodness when terrible things might occur – is contagious. How little Pollyanna knows what she means to so many townspeople in the film’s final minutes. By entrusting a town of misanthropes with her company, she has earned their respect, admiration, and affection. It takes a village to raise a child, so the proverb goes. In Pollyanna, the child has brought to the village companionship, solace.

English actress Hayley Mills, sixteen years of age during the film’s release, starred in her first of six Disney live-action movies with Pollyanna – a year removed from Mills’ double role in the original Parent Trap – and only her second film ever. The daughter of actor Sir John Mills (the father in 1960′s Swiss Family Robinson, another Disney live-action film), Hayley avoids the horrible trap of precociousness or self-consciousness that plagues the performances of child actors, no matter the decade, throughout Pollyanna. She even has the nerve to appear nervous on-screen. From her first scene stepping off the train to a place where she will not be a stranger for long, her character’s anxiety is never hidden. Those accusing Mills, who won the final Academy Juvenile Award ever presented for her work in Pollyanna, of simplistic, brainless cheerfulness are either being too harsh on child actors or are omitting certain scenes in their arguments. For blind optimism is not apparent in David Swift’s screenplay, nor in Mills’ acting. When Pollyanna is meeting Adolphe Menjou’s Mr. Pendergast for the first time, look at Hayley Mills’ face and how she seems a little smaller in this moment, Before the resolving scenes in the final minutes, notice how Mills interacts with Jane Wyman’s Aunt Polly – there is always an awkwardness there, an inability to be as warm with her as Pollyanna has with other townspeople. It is an accomplished feat of acting by the young Mills, as a performance any less genuine would derail the film.

That village I mentioned earlier? Well, an excellent ensemble performance from a packed cast does nothing but to make Pollyanna that more appealing. Jane Wyman must play against Hayley Mills’ optimism, yet keep the audience believing that Aunt Polly – delighting in keeping her neighbors in their place and enjoying Sunday reminders of God’s wrathful side – does care for Pollyanna as if she was her own daughter despite her best intentions an outward coldness. Yet Aunt Polly’s level of control of the town’s affairs is the source of so much of Pollyanna’s discomfort and inability to truly feel at home. For Karl Malden, Pollyanna utilizes some of Malden’s underrated comedic chops as he sermonizes with the fire and brimstone relished by Aunt Polly, dreaded by all other worshippers. In Malden’s scene with Mills as he is practicing for his upcoming Sunday’s sermon, there is a loving, an understanding between Pollyanna and Reverend Ford of a God that is not furious, but merciful. “Nobody owns a church,” Reverend Ford eventually realizes. Agnes Moorehead and Adolphe Menjou – the latter appears in his final theatrical film, and is provided scenes encouraging Pollyanna’s curiosity while doubling as a poignant send-off - are wonderful in their bit supporting parts.

Any attempt to understand and trust what might not be tangible or approachable – when it is almost always easier to be fearful and to anticipate rejection and resentment – underlies every minute of Pollyanna. How interesting that the film’s detractors ignore the fact Pollyanna, who has lost both her parents, is recovering from tragedy herself. Before coming into Aunt Polly’s life, Pollyanna has been provided the tools to help herself and others – these two qualities are interconnected; by helping others she helps herself, and vice versa. It is a way to process her loss, her unspoken pain. When Pollyanna, in the film’s darker final passages, is unable to say hello and keep her many friends company, her many friends arrive at Aunt Polly’s house to express their concern and love for one of their newest, beloved neighbors. Think of it like an It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) suitable for younger children. Walt Disney Studios, renowned among its fans for inspiring tears in moments of sadness, has infrequently moved audiences in scenes of goodness. Pollyanna is that rare Disney film that does so.

Surrounding the cast are beautiful, period-specific turn-of-the-twentieth-century details enabled by saturated colors and its art and production designers Carroll Clark, Robert Clatworthy, Emile Kuri, and Fred M. MacLean. Costume designer Walter Plunkett (1939′s Gone with the Wind, 1952′s Singin’ in the Rain) also contributes to that period detail, and veteran Disney matte artist extraordinaire Peter Ellenshaw has some of his most convincing work in Pollyanna (note the scenes where Pollyanna is looking outside her fourth-floor bedroom window and certain moments where the enormous tree outside Aunt Polly’s outside that leads into Pollyanna’s bedroom is featured). This more than compensates for some of the by-the-numbers camerawork and editing that too many live-action Disney movies from this time employed.

Dividing critics and barely making a profit at the box office, Walt Disney conceded that his studio failed to separate this film adaptation with the saccharine reputation assigned to Porter’s book. Disney – whose live-action films were, long before 1960, associated with family-friendly entertainment that few took seriously – had made a weepie, audiences and critics noted. But Disney, in this financial failure, had just released one of the best live-action films he would ever produce. Biographer Neal Gabler notes that Disney, watching the final cut for the first time, teared up, and rejected screenwriter David Swift’s suggestion to cut the film by twenty minutes (Pollyanna is overlong, but won’t feel that way to those who become invested in it). The studio and Disney himself might not have received the instant gratification of ticket sales and critical praise, but subsequent television airings and robust home video releases has allowed for reevaluation.

Pollyanna made an instant star out of Hayley Mills and is now proudly part of Walt Disney Studios’ live-action filmography. The film, like too many other live-action films produced as Disney was still alive, has been collecting dust within the Disney Vault. The recent high-definition remastering for a Blu-ray era appears to have been rushed, as the colors in this HD remaster appear to have been drained, and lighter colors appear whiter than they should. Perhaps this is indicative of a throwaway mentality that has seeped into Walt Disney Studios – often cited as an exemplar for film preservation (at least, for its animated works). Too few younger movie watchers are aware of Walt Disney’s history of live-action excellence in the 1950s and 60s. That history continued with Pollyanna – a film assuming the best of others, familiar and otherwise.

My rating: 7.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

[chiseler]

DESERT MORPHEUS

Morocco is the first Hollywood Dietrich-Sternberg film and the one I find hardest to watch. Indeed, while I've pressed PLAY on this one several times, I can't swear to having seen it. A proper film screening might prove to be the answer, but I'd have to be fully caffeinated.

Sternberg had already made two talkies at Paramount, the bizarre gangster flick Thunderbolt and An American Tragedy, which are slow-moving but beautiful and at least somewhat compelling. And The Blue Angel at UFA is an electrifying work. Returning to the US with Marlene in tow, her massive aluminum make-up trunk by her side, Sternberg was determined to present his "discovery" to American audiences in a vehicle showing her to best advantage. "I am Miss Dietrich; Miss Dietrich is me."

Marlene again plays a cabaret singer, but her Amy Jolly differs from her Lola Lola quite markedly. Though she hasn't quite slimmed down to her later angular proportions, she's had her back teeth out to increase the jut of those cheekbones, and she's generally plucked, groomed, polished and powdered into the impossible glamor icon we know today. Amy performs in seedy dives, but she saunters through them in a tuxedo, high-hatting the men and kissing the girls, serenely above it all. Nothing tacky about her.

Everything is arranged around Dietrich, including the men, Gary Cooper and Adolph Menjou. How Cooper attained a reputation for undeplaying is a mystery as unsolvable as Woman. Here he pouts and simpers abominably: true, his drawling voice is somewhat flat, but he makes up for it in the gangling coquetry of his physical performance. Still, he's somehow appealing, and can sell a classic dirty joke from screenwriter Jules Furthman with a kind of hangdog innocence, like he doesn't quite know what he's saying. When his superior officer (he's in the Foreign Legion, a bit half-heartedly) catches him hand-signaling an assignation with a local houri and demands, "What are you doing with those fingers?" Coop replies "Nothing -- YET."

Menjou plays the rich man who pursues Amy, offering comfort where Cooper can only offer... whatever it is he's offering. Menjou could have played the character as a snake, but he seems decent enough most of the time. he's just not the Montana Mule. While he dangles diamonds, Dietrich sulks in the souk. The lattice of sticks roofing the mean alleys breaks up the light into noirish slashes. A big part of the Sternberg style is obstruction: foreground objects slash the image into slices, light is cut up into slats. If one image isn't cluttered enough, a lingering lap dissolve will double-expose two at once, as in a march through the desert that melts into a long expanse of papier-mâché boulders sliding past the lens like an alien planetscape from Eraserhead.

Every time one snaps awake and interrogates the characters' behavior, it seems to make sense. Motivations have been supplied via overheard conversations, last-minute recriminations or remissions. But the heat-drenched pace, the almost incident-free plot (though, again, things always seem to be happening) and the director's lack of interest in anything that prevents him gazing at his luminescent object of desire, creates an inescapable, numbing sensation of soporific delirium. It's far from unpleasant. But it's a bit like the sensation of reading a book while tired, and suddenly realizing that the last three paragraphs pored over have made no mental impression whatsoever except as a monochrome landscape slowly unscrolling through your blurry vision, a desert dotted with tiny dark figures moving according to inscrutable impulses.

by David Cairns

[lightscamerabitchsmileee]

Movie no. 32: the last film I watched for my #365classicmoviechallenge last night was 1933’s “Morning Glory” starring Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. & Adolphe Menjou 😊 By this time Hepburn’s career was on the rise with the successes of her debut role in “A Bill of Divorcement” with John Barrymore & Billie Burke the year prior & her 2nd film “Christopher Strong” with again Billie Burke & Colin Clive earlier in 1933. The role of Eva Lovelace was supposed to go to Constance Bennett then RKO’s biggest star on the lot but when Kate read the script she convinced producer Pandro S. Berman that she was born to play this role and he eventually decided to give it to Kate 😊 she was given a big salary of $2500 per week for the film 😊 The role fits her perfectly as her character almost resembles her in real life as an aspiring actress determined to succeed. Kate said that she used famous broadway actress Ruth Gordon as an inspiration for the role. 😊 Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is the son of Douglas Fairbanks one of cinema’s first major icons in the business when film became the popular medium in the 1910’s and 20’s alongside other icons like Charlie Chaplin, The Barrymores & his wife Mary Pickford and had big films such as The Mark of Zorro, The Three Musketeers & Robin Hood 😊 Like father like son the younger Fairbanks’ career started in 1923 when he signed to Paramount at the age of 14 with his first big film “Stephen Steps Out” he mainly played supporting roles during the silent era in films like Stella Dallas & Women Love Diamonds though by the end of the era he started getting bigger roles like in A Woman of Affairs with Garbo & John Gilbert & Our Modern Maidens with Joan Crawford (which she eventually became his first wife) & he transitioned well into the talkies with films like Little Caesar & Parachute Jumper. This film furthered his success as an actor 😊 When RKO bought the rights to the play it wasn’t even on the stage yet and as a result the director Lowell Sherman got the cast to do a week of rehearsal before shooting began and was given 18 days to shoot the film and unlike most films the film was shot in the same way as the script.

[lightscamerabitchsmileee]

Classic Movie Night 😊😊 tonight I’m watching the 1942 classic “You Were Never Lovelier” starring Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth & Adolphe Menjou 😊😊

This is one of the first successful films that Fred Astaire did without Ginger Rogers (of which they did 9 movies together during the 30’s) and it’s 2nd film that he & Rita ever did together with the first being “You’ll Never Get Rich” in 1941 😊

Before these movies came about Rita Hayworth was already becoming a star in her own right with films like her small breakthrough role in the 1939 film “Only Angels Have Wings” starring Cary Grant & Jean Arthur & 1941’s “Strawberry Blonde” opposite James Cagney and after these movies she would go on to appear in some of the biggest movies of her career including 1944’s “Cover Girl” opposite Gene Kelly & of course the 1946 iconic film “Gilda” opposite Glenn Ford 😊

Even though Fred Astaire was very well known for dancing with Ginger Rogers and were always very close friends he did say in an interview that Rita was his favorite dancing partner 😊😊

#classicmovienight #classichollywood #oldhollywood #fredastaire #ritahayworth #youwereneverlovelier #gingerrogers #adolphemenjou #musical