🫶Love Nostalgia- Humphrey Bogart’s loveletter to Lauren Bacall

Slim darling, you came along and into my arms and into my heart and all the real true love I have is yours – and now I’m afraid you won’t understand and that you’ll become impatient and that I’ll lose you – but even if that happened, I wouldn’t stop loving you for you are my last love and all the rest of my life I shall love you and watch you and be ready to help you should you ever need help. All the nice things......

 

 I do each day would be so much sweeter and so much gayer if you were with me. I find myself saying a hundred times a day, ‘If Slim could only see that’ or ‘I wish Slim could hear this.’ I want to make a new life with you – I want all the friends I’ve lost to meet you and know you and love you as I do – and live again with you, for the past years have been terribly tough, damn near drove me crazy. You’ll soon be here, Baby, and when you come you’ll bring everything that’s important to me in this world with you. ——Humphrey Bogart’s letter to Lauren Bacall

❤️ Happy Valentine's Day

"The real lover is the man who can thrill you just by touching your head or smiling into your eyes — or just by staring into space." Marilyn Monroe
 

🌠 Happy 90th Birthday Kim Novak

“I loved acting, which was never about money, the fame. It was about a search for meaning. It was painful” 

 

Happy 90th Birthday to Kim Novak! A film and television actress, painter and visual artist. Born on this day in Chicago, Illnois in 1933. 

 

 

 

Watch the fantastic Kim Novak Interview for the 2013 TCM Festival here: https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZRmldkZO2wJkm77zj41v8MFGRe3lV9l6E07

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

🌠 Star Profile: Joan Blondell

(August 30, 1906 - December 25, 1979)

 

"In the 20s, you were a face. And that was enough. In the 30s, you also had to be a voice. And your voice had to match your face if you can imagine that"--Joan Blondell.  

 

I absolutely love Joan! Whenever she's on screen, my eyes are immediately drawn to her. She has such a vibrant, sexy, sassy, and funny personality that also knows how to pull at your heartstrings. I used to help run the Joan Blondell Appreciation Group and I still find ways to honor and share her with others - like making her the Ambassador of my Facebook group.

 

“I was the fizz on the soda”

 

 

* Rose Joan Blondell was born on August 30, 1906, in New York City, who was born into show business. Her parents were vaudevillian actors, and her first stage appearance was when she was 3 months old.

* When she arrived in Hollywood in 1930, Jack Warner wanted her to change her name to Inez Holmes but she refused. 

 

* She referred to herself as "Warner's (Brothers) workhorse" for the huge amount of films she'd make. Her firecracker personality garnered huge profits for the studio during the 1930s. In 1931, Blondell made 10 films, 9 films in 1932, (which landed her in the hospital due to exhaustion and an easing up her film schedule), eight in 1933, five in 1934, six in 1936, and five in 1939. 

 

Recalling those crazy years of shooting: "We never had time off-never. We were either on the set or in the portrait gallery. Or having a layout buy the beach or mountains-always working, They got their money's worth. I was doing them fast and furious. In fact, there were many I didn't see ever. I never saw the rushes. And a few times, I saw them for the first time on the Late Show. Several times I thought, "I don't ever remember doing that."

 

Joan Blondell in “Gold Diggers of 1933” singing “Remember My Forgotten Man"

 

 

* James Cagney said that the only woman he loved other than his wife was Joan. She made six films with James Cagney while under contract at Warner Brothers.

"The minute they saw us work, the second day of shooting, they signed us right there and then to as a 5-year contract. They saw us work on stage and that we knew what we were doing."

 

 

 

 * Starred in 10 musical pictures with her second husband Dick Powell.

 

 

It takes all the talent you’ve got in your guts to play unimportant roles. It’s not degrading, just tough to do. I just sailed through things, took the scripts I was given, did what I was told. I couldn’t afford to go on suspension. I wasn't that ambitious I enjoyed a home life more than a theatrical career. I just took what they gave me because I wanted to get home quickly"

 
 

* Earned her first and only Academy Award nomination for supporting actress in The Blue Veil (1951) in 1952. 

 

 “I’ve given back more men to leading ladies than anybody else in the world. The toughest was handing Clark Gable back to Greer Garson.”

 

 

⭐Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Barbara Stanwyck

Stanwyck at Home

"Put me in the last fifteen minutes of a picture and I don't care what happened before. I don't even care if I was IN the rest of the damned thing - I'll take it in those fifteen minutes."
—Barbara Stanwyck

Stanwyck at Home

 

Don’t Bother to Knock (1952)

 

An American psychological film noir thriller starring Richard Widmark, Marilyn Monroe, Anne Bancroft & Elisha Cook Jr. and directed by Roy Ward Baker. When troubled Nell (giving an underrated performance by Monroe) is hired to babysit for the Joneses at a New York hotel, suppressed emotions and danger come to head when she meets catches the eye of fellow hotel guest Jed (Widmark) whose trying to win back his love (Bancroft in her first film role).

Marilyn Monroe & Richard Widmark

 

 

“I liked Marilyn, but she was God-awful to work with. Impossible, really. She would hide in her dressing room and refuse to come out. Then, when she finally would show up, she was a nervous wreck. It was all a result of fear. She was insecure about so many things and was obviously self-destructive. She was a wounded bird from the beginning. She had trouble remembering lines. But none of it mattered. With a very few special people, something happens between the lens & the film that is pure magic. And she really had it."- Co-Star Richard Widmark. 

 

Anne Bancroft

 

 

I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)

 “I reached the point of thinking there were no more masterpieces to discover, until I saw I Know Where I’m Going! It was funny, it was exciting, it was truly mystical and it was deeply stirring”- Martin Scorsese

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's stunningly photographed comedy, romance flourishes in an unlikely place—the bleak and moody Scottish Hebrides. Wendy Hiller stars as a headstrong young woman who travels to these remote isles to marry a rich lord. Stranded by stormy weather, she meets a handsome naval officer (Roger Livesey) who threatens to thwart her carefully laid-out life plans. Its the story of a young woman's transformation as she learns there can be much more to life than its glossy surfaces.

 

Pressburger wrote the screenplay in four days. "It just burst out, you couldn't hold back," he said. Pressburger said that, when he visited Paramount Pictures in 1947, the head of the script department told him they considered the film's screenplay perfect and frequently watched it for inspiration. Shooting took place on the Isle of Mull and at Denham Studios.

The movie was originally meant to star Deborah Kerr and James Mason but Kerr could not get out of her contract with MGM, so they cast Wendy Hiller. Six weeks before filming, Mason pulled out of the movie, saying he did not want to go on location. Roger Livesey read the script and asked to play the role. Powell thought he was too old and portly but Livesey lost "ten or twelve pounds" (four or five kilos) and lightened his hair.

🌟Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Steve Cochran

"I don't act like a hood. I'm basically a decent person and I let this come through in my portrayals. After all, a guy has to make a living some way, even if he's a gangster. With this puss of mine, I could play a corpse and be accused of overacting. The big secret in playing a gangster in movies is to really believe that the character you are playing is doing no wrong."

 

 

🌟Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Ginger Rogers

“The truth is that when I did my first film, they asked me to smoke.  I really was caught on to smoking, by a certain director…for just a few years.  Then I saw what an ugly habit it was, and thought how my fingers and hair smelled just like smoke, so I decided to get rid of that.  I danced much better after I got rid of it, I must tell you.”  

- Ginger Rogers interviewed in 1980.

 

The Broadway Melody (1929)

 
MGM's first all-talking picture, and the first sound film to win the Best Picture, Oscar. The first musical to use playback of the musical soundtrack during filming and to be conceived and written specifically for the screen. 

The top-grossing film of 1929 starred Charles King, Anita Page, and the lovely Bessie Love who was deserving of a nomination for the Best Actress  Academy Award. A pair of sisters from the vaudeville circuit try to make it big time on Broadway, but matters of the heart complicate the attempt. 

It was written by Norman Houston and James Gleason from a story by Edmund Goulding, and directed by Harry Beaumont. Original music was written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, including the popular hit "You Were Meant for Me". The George M. Cohan classic "Give My Regards to Broadway" is used under the opening establishing shots of New York City, its film debut.

 

 

 

 

The remake, Two Girls on Broadway (1940) starred George Murphy, Lana Turner, and Joan Blondell.The sequels all bore the title of the original. Also, the first musical to spawn three more sequels.