Yes, you could spend your holiday in the company of family and friends. But wouldn’t you rather curl up with a new book centered on cinema? There are new options aplenty, but let’s start with the latest from one of the most insightful, compelling voices we have: the great Karina Longworth.
Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood by Karina Longworth (Custom House)
Is there more to say about Howard Hughes after decades of biographies and films? Indeed, and the latest from Longworth, the host of the essential podcast You Must Remember This, is evidence. The focus in Seduction is not only Hughes himself, but the many women in the mega-tycoon’s orbit. These include household names like Katharine Hepburn but also figures like silent star Billie Dove and Mighty Joe Young star Terry Moore. Longworth brings these women to vivid life, and captures the absurdity of Hughes’s universe.
Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood by Karina Longworth (Custom House)
Is there more to say about Howard Hughes after decades of biographies and films? Indeed, and the latest from Longworth, the host of the essential podcast You Must Remember This, is evidence. The focus in Seduction is not only Hughes himself, but the many women in the mega-tycoon’s orbit. These include household names like Katharine Hepburn but also figures like silent star Billie Dove and Mighty Joe Young star Terry Moore. Longworth brings these women to vivid life, and captures the absurdity of Hughes’s universe.
- 12/10/2018
- by Christopher Schobert
- The Film Stage
'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl': Johnny Depp as Capt. Jack Sparrow. 'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl' review: Mostly an enjoyable romp (Oscar Movie Series) Pirate movies were a Hollywood staple for about three decades, from the mid-'20s (The Sea Hawk, The Black Pirate) to the mid-to-late '50s (Moonfleet, The Buccaneer), when the genre, by then mostly relegated to B films, began to die down. Sporadic resurrections in the '80s and '90s turned out to be critical and commercial bombs (Pirates, Cutthroat Island), something that didn't bode well for the Walt Disney Company's $140 million-budgeted film "adaptation" of one of their theme-park rides. But Neptune's mood has apparently improved with the arrival of the new century. He smiled – grinned would be a more appropriate word – on the Gore Verbinski-directed Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,...
- 6/29/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Howard Hughes movies (photo: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in 'The Aviator') Turner Classic Movies will be showing the Howard Hughes-produced, John Farrow-directed, Baja California-set gangster drama His Kind of Woman, starring Robert Mitchum, Hughes discovery Jane Russell, and Vincent Price, at 3 a.m. Pt / 6 a.m. Et on Saturday, November 8, 2014. Hughes produced a couple of dozen movies. (More on that below.) But what about "Howard Hughes movies"? Or rather, movies -- whether big-screen or made-for-television efforts -- featuring the visionary, eccentric, hypochondriac, compulsive-obsessive, all-American billionaire as a character? Besides Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a dashing if somewhat unbalanced Hughes in Martin Scorsese's 2004 Best Picture Academy Award-nominated The Aviator, other actors who have played Howard Hughes on film include the following: Tommy Lee Jones in William A. Graham's television movie The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), with Lee Purcell as silent film star Billie Dove, Tovah Feldshuh as Katharine Hepburn,...
- 11/6/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Charlton Heston movies: ‘A Man for All Seasons’ remake, ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ (photo: Charlton Heston as Ben-Hur) (See previous post: “Charlton Heston: Moses Minus Staff Plus Chariot Equals Ben-Hur.”) I’ve yet to watch Irving Rapper’s melo Bad for Each Other (1954), co-starring the sultry Lizabeth Scott — always a good enough reason to check out any movie, regardless of plot or leading man. A major curiosity is the 1988 made-for-tv version of A Man for All Seasons, with Charlton Heston in the Oscar-winning Paul Scofield role (Sir Thomas More) and on Fred Zinnemann’s director’s chair. Vanessa Redgrave, who plays Thomas More’s wife in the TV movie (Wendy Hiller in the original) had a cameo as Anne Boleyn in the 1966 film. According to the IMDb, Robert Bolt, who wrote the Oscar-winning 1966 movie (and the original play), is credited for the 1988 version’s screenplay as well. Also of note,...
- 8/5/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Charlton Heston: Moses has his ‘Summer Under the Stars’ day Charlton Heston is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" star on Monday, August 5, 2013. TCM will be presenting one Heston movie premiere: Guy Green’s Hawaiian-set family drama Diamond Head (1963), in which Heston plays a pineapple grower, U.S. Senate candidate, and total control freak at odds with his strong-willed younger sister, the lovely Yvette Mimieux. Also in the Diamond Head cast: France Nuyen, Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winner George Chakiris (West Side Story), The Time Tunnel‘s James Darren, and veteran Aline MacMahon (Gold Diggers of 1933, Five Star Final) in one of her last movie roles. And last but not least, silent film star Billie Dove reportedly has a bit role in the film. (Photo: Charlton Heston ca. 1955.) (Charlton Heston movies: TCM schedule.) Now, with the exception of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, in which Charlton Heston...
- 8/5/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
If you think you’ve never seen this poster for William Wellman’s 1931 The Public Enemy (playing tomorrow in Film Forum’s invaluable Wellman retrospective) before, it’s with good reason. Unseen for decades, it was discovered last fall, along with about 30 others posters from the same era, in an attic in Pennsylvania. The Berwick Discovery, as it is known, was described to me by Grey Smith, Director of Heritage Vintage Movie Poster Auctions, who will be auctioning the posters on March 23, as “the most exciting find of my 35 years in the business.”
What is extraordinary about these posters is that they had not been lovingly preserved by a collector. Instead, they had initially been glued one on top of each other for display (one replacing another each time a new release came to town) and then peeled off in one stack. While most posters would have been thrown out at that point,...
What is extraordinary about these posters is that they had not been lovingly preserved by a collector. Instead, they had initially been glued one on top of each other for display (one replacing another each time a new release came to town) and then peeled off in one stack. While most posters would have been thrown out at that point,...
- 2/24/2012
- MUBI
Ann Blyth is Turner Classic Movies Star of the Evening tonight, as part of TCM's "The Essentials" film series. [Ann Blyth Movie Schedule.] Opera- and Broadway-trained Ann Blyth began her film career in the mid-1940s at Universal, appearing in light B musicals opposite Donald O'Connor and/or Peggy Ryan, among them The Merry Monahans, Chip Off the Old Block, and Babes on Swing Street. Blyth's big break came in 1945, when — following back surgery — she played Joan Crawford's pathologically selfish daughter Veda in Michael Curtiz's classic film noir-cum-melodrama Mildred Pierce. A well-deserved Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination followed, and so did leads in darker, bigger-budgeted productions, among them Jules Dassin's Brute Force (1947), with Burt Lancaster; Zoltan Korda's A Woman's Vengeance (1948), opposite Charles Boyer; and Michael Gordon's film version of Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest (1948), a prequel to The Little Foxes. Unfortunately, TCM isn't showing any of Blyth's hard-to-find Universal titles.
- 9/18/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Howard Hughes If all goes as planned, Warren Beatty will be the next big-screen Howard Hughes, following The Aviator's Leonardo DiCaprio. In Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated drama, DiCaprio was a boyish Hughes; in fact, Cate Blanchett's Katharine Hepburn looked more like his surrogate mother than his lover. Beatty, on the other hand, will play the older Howard Hughes, though I seriously doubt it that this particular Hughes will look at all like Jason Robards' in Jonathan Demme's 1980 gem Melvin and Howard. Barring a Hollywood miracle, Beatty's Old Hughes will have his hair carefully conditioned and his fingernails neatly clipped. In The Aviator, Howard Hughes is linked to four actresses: the aforementioned Katharine Hepburn, Jean Harlow, Ava Gardner, and Faith Domergue. (Hughes' 1920s marriage to socialite Ella Rice is ignored in the film.) In Beatty's project, Hughes will be involved with a "much younger woman." Here's a...
- 7/11/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Madonna, Warren Beatty, Dick Tracy Warren Beatty used to be known as a Ladies' Man. Before Annette Bening, there were stories about Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Jean Seberg, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Joan Collins, Carly Simon, Faye Dunaway, Madonna, etc. The same goes for Howard Hughes, whose list included Katharine Hepburn, Olivia de Havilland, Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow, Ava Gardner, Billie Dove, Bette Davis, Yvonne De Carlo, Gene Tierney, Lana Turner, wives Terry Moore and Jean Peters, and others. Probably not coincidentally, Beatty has always wanted to play Hughes, and he'll now have his chance according to Deadline.com. For his first directorial effort since Bulworth in 1998 and his first starring vehicle since the [...]...
- 6/23/2011
- by Anna Robinson
- Alt Film Guide
(Albert Parker, 1926, U, Park Circus)
As Johnny Depp is about to make his fourth appearance as Captain Jack Sparrow in the latest film in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, it's worth looking back to the authentic, silent, swashbuckling classic, an early two-colour Technicolor production that the athletic Douglas Fairbanks starred in 85 years ago. Fairbanks, who'd created United Artists with Chaplin, Dw Griffith and Mary Pickford, came to the role after appearing as Zorro, D'Artagnan and Robin Hood, and he's a marvellous presence as the only survivor of a brutal pirate attack, bent on avenging his father's death by infiltrating a pirate crew. He performs his own stunts, fences gracefully and rescues the beautiful heroine, Billie Dove. This is a handsomely restored print, using the original score, and has an informative commentary by film historian Rudy Behlmer. The film's American director, Albert Parker, came to Britain and gave up film-making to become a successful agent,...
As Johnny Depp is about to make his fourth appearance as Captain Jack Sparrow in the latest film in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, it's worth looking back to the authentic, silent, swashbuckling classic, an early two-colour Technicolor production that the athletic Douglas Fairbanks starred in 85 years ago. Fairbanks, who'd created United Artists with Chaplin, Dw Griffith and Mary Pickford, came to the role after appearing as Zorro, D'Artagnan and Robin Hood, and he's a marvellous presence as the only survivor of a brutal pirate attack, bent on avenging his father's death by infiltrating a pirate crew. He performs his own stunts, fences gracefully and rescues the beautiful heroine, Billie Dove. This is a handsomely restored print, using the original score, and has an informative commentary by film historian Rudy Behlmer. The film's American director, Albert Parker, came to Britain and gave up film-making to become a successful agent,...
- 5/14/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
In TheWrap, writer and television producer Irma Kalish writes about Billie Dove’s last years at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, inland from Malibu. The article is a great read. Billie Dove, though not the "Queen of Silent Movies" as claimed in Kalish’s piece, was a popular star in the 1920s. Not one of her fifty or so movies could be called a classic, but Dove did appear in a number of well-regarded and/or box-office friendly vehicles. Among her films of that era were All the Brothers Were Valiant (1922), with Lon Chaney; The Black Pirate (1926), [...]...
- 6/10/2010
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
By Irma Kalish
“Aside from a brief cameo in Diamond Head (1962), Billie Dove never returned to the movies. She spent her retirement years in Rancho Mirage before moving into the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California where she died of pneumonia in 1997, aged 94.”
If you were to research actress Billie Dove on Google, you would read the above concluding information, and perhaps never know that there was a story behind those words, and that I, as a then Board Member of the Fund, was part of the story.
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“Aside from a brief cameo in Diamond Head (1962), Billie Dove never returned to the movies. She spent her retirement years in Rancho Mirage before moving into the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California where she died of pneumonia in 1997, aged 94.”
If you were to research actress Billie Dove on Google, you would read the above concluding information, and perhaps never know that there was a story behind those words, and that I, as a then Board Member of the Fund, was part of the story.
<img alt="" style="margin:...
- 6/8/2010
- by Lew Harris
- The Wrap
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