“Take me to your island.  I want to do all those things you talked about. . . .  I love you.  Nothing else matters.” The forerunner, the grandparent of screwball comedies It Happened One Night opened at New York's Radio City Music Hall on this day February 22, 1934! The charming pre-code film, directed by Frank Capra, with a screenplay by Robert Riskin, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, soared on to become 1934's most notable success. Based on a story by Samuel Hopkins Adams, a headstrong heiress (Ellie) finds herself on a road trip of discovery with an unemployed cynical newspaper reporter (Peter). A runaway bride, he offers to help her reunite with her soon-to-be husband in exchange for an exclusive story, leading to an unexpected romance.  Due to the 1930 Hays Code being in force while the film was shot, its implied sexual content was primarily expressed with witty banter and innuendo. The film focuses on traditional gender roles and the Great Depressio...

    "Life is a long rehearsal for a film that is never made" - Marlene Dietrich 

  Bette Davis had recently resigned as President of the Academy. In 1941, the 33-year-old assumed Hollywood's top job, proposed doing away with dinner and dancing at the Oscars and revoking the right of extras to vote — ideas that were later implemented — and was met with such great resistance that she stepped down after less than two months. Davis hadn’t made it in Hollywood on her looks. She was smart, talented and suffered no fools, earning her the reputation of being “difficult” — and numerous contract suspensions — at Warner's, and it wasn’t long before the Academy’s board discovered her no-nonsense side. “At the first meeting I presided at as president. I arrived with full knowledge of my rights of office. I had studied the by-laws. It became clear to me that this was a surprise. I was not supposed to preside intelligently.” She had two big initiatives she immediately pushed to enact. First, she wanted to reformat the annual Academy Awards banquet. Since her...

Acting isn't a game of "pretend." It's an exercise in being real."  Remembering Sir Sidney Poitier, born on today's date in 1927.  

Jeff Bridges made his film debut in The Company She Keeps (1951) with Jane Greer. He's the infant Greer is holding in the scene below. They would work again 31 years later in Against All Odds (1984), a loose imagining of Out of the Past (1941) in which Greer also starred. Neither knew they once appeared together until filming began on Against All Odds.  

"My god, I had black hair — it was photographed blue-black it was so dark — and thick bushy eyebrows. And my mother and father had to stop them from dying my hair and plucking out my eyebrows. The studio even wanted to change my name to Virginia. They tried to get me to create a Joan Crawford mouth when I first began using lipstick at fifteen. They wanted, you know, Joan Crawford, the ‘40s and everything. Every movie star, Lana Turner, all of them, painted over their lips: and I’m sure that some of them had perfectly fine, full lips — but thin eyebrows were the fad…and God forbid you do anything individual or go against the fad. But I did. I figured this looks absurd. And I agreed with my dad: God must have had some reason for giving me bushy eyebrows and black hair. I guess I must have been pretty sure of my sense of identity. It was me. I accepted it all my life and I can’t explain it. Because I’ve always been very aware of the inner me that has nothing to do with t...

There have been motion pictures made about the collapse of marriages. Scenes froth with denial, anger, depression, to bitter custody battles and destructive emotions of jealousy and abuse.  Some that comes to mind like Scenes from a Marriage (1974), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), An Unmarried Woman (1979), and more recently A Marriage Story (2019). But none of them in my opinion quite captured the confusion, heartbreak, and turmoil like  Shoot the Moon (1982). The phrase "shoot the moon," comes from the card game hearts. It refers to taking a risk when playing your hand to achieve a higher score.     Directed by Alan Parker (Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express, Fame) and written by Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Melvin, and Howard). The film depicts an intense look at marital disintegration from the perspective of both parents and their children. Parker and Goldman called upon their marriages to create the screenplay. The late Albert Finney and Diane Keaton are T...

    "If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable" - Jack Lemmon

Some day I will show all the motherf**kers who say I was a success just because of my pretty face. Sometimes I wish I had a really bad car accident so my face would get smashed up and I’d look like Eddie Constantine. It’s so tiring being everybody’s darling boy at my age … I know I’ve been lucky, that things have gone almost too smoothly career-wise. What I resent about it is that it is all built on a pretty face. Hollywood was such a crazy place, made you feel terrific at times. You felt you could achieve anything because you were treated like a god. But it sure was a bum place too. When you saw the new faces queuing up, like bloody comets, who would strike the screen and leave an old worshiped star obsolete in no time. Nobody will ever understand what this did to people, how it destroyed them, made them hollow … J***s C***t, I don’t want to become an ageless matinée idol, having to keep up my looks, lift my chin like Marlene and never dare smile in case my face cracks....

“I can still say that Buster Keaton was the kindest, gentlest man I have ever known. Everybody who knew him loved him, and I suppose that somewhere along the line I just joined the rest of the group. I think that these qualities come through in his films, and I trust that these pictures will remind everyone of what a wonderful soul he was.” —Keaton’s wife Eleanor Norris  

  "It only took a day to happen but I'm in love with you for always" A sweet, funny, romantic screwball gem of a film, starring two of my favorites, a real-life couple at the time, Ginger Rogers and James Stewart. Directed by George Stevens who previously dated and directed Rogers in Swingtime (1936). Stewart plays a sweet and shy botany professor and Rogers is a spunky and charming nightclub singer who fall in love after a one-night courtship. But can they survive his conservative domineering parents, misunderstandings, secrets, jealous ex-fiance, and The Big Apple? Onscreen the two exude genuine chemistry. The cozy couple is constantly touching and cuddling. It's so infectious to watch as are Rogers' comedic skills and Stewart's emergence as a leading man.    Also starred Beulah Bondi (one of five times that Bondi plays Stewart's mother), Charles Coburn, Franklin Pangborn, Frances Mercer, Grady Sutton, Jack Carson, and Hattie McDaniel. Stewart w...