Alice Walker published her acclaimed novel “The Color Purple” in 1982. It sold five million copies; Walker became the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and she also received the National Book Club Award. Three years later, Steven Spielberg directed the lauded film version which made stars out of Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. It earned 11 Oscar nominations. The story revolves around a young woman who suffers abuse from her father and husband for four decades until she finds her own identity. Not exactly the stuff of a Broadway musical.
But the 2005 tuner version received strong reviews, ran 910 performances and earned ten Tony nominations, winning best actress for Lachanze. The 2015 production picked up two Tonys for best revival and actress for Cynthia Erivo. The movie musical version opened strong Christmas Day with $18 million and is a strong contender in several Oscar categories especially for Fantasia Barrino and Danielle Brooks.
But the 2005 tuner version received strong reviews, ran 910 performances and earned ten Tony nominations, winning best actress for Lachanze. The 2015 production picked up two Tonys for best revival and actress for Cynthia Erivo. The movie musical version opened strong Christmas Day with $18 million and is a strong contender in several Oscar categories especially for Fantasia Barrino and Danielle Brooks.
- 1/2/2024
- by Susan King
- Gold Derby
Mickey Kuhn, a child actor whose long credits list in the 1930s and 1940s included “Gone With the Wind” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” has died in Naples, Florida, at the age of 90, his wife, Barbara told reporters.
Kuhn was the last surviving credited cast member of “Gone With the Wind,” playing Beau Wilkes, the son of Ashley and Melanie Wilkes, who were played by Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland. Kuhn’s most well-known line comes near the end of the film, when Melanie is on her deathbed from pregnancy complications and Beau asks his father, “Where is my mother going away to? And why can’t I go along, please?”
Despite the mother-son relationship between their characters, Kuhn and de Havilland never appeared on-screen together and had never even met on set. In fact, he told the Naples Daily News in 2017 that his first meeting with de Havilland...
Kuhn was the last surviving credited cast member of “Gone With the Wind,” playing Beau Wilkes, the son of Ashley and Melanie Wilkes, who were played by Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland. Kuhn’s most well-known line comes near the end of the film, when Melanie is on her deathbed from pregnancy complications and Beau asks his father, “Where is my mother going away to? And why can’t I go along, please?”
Despite the mother-son relationship between their characters, Kuhn and de Havilland never appeared on-screen together and had never even met on set. In fact, he told the Naples Daily News in 2017 that his first meeting with de Havilland...
- 11/22/2022
- by Jeremy Fuster
- The Wrap
As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***Sometime in '28 or '29, Raoul Walsh saw his first talking picture. He didn't like it. The stuff and stuffy theatrical performances, airless studio atmosphere and rigid, immobile staging and camerawork was all profoundly off-putting to this cinematic man of action. But on the same program was a Fox Movietone newsreel, and Walsh was dazzled by the way the small crew captured a noisy union meeting. He rushed to the studio and pitched an idea...All he needed was a western script and a newsreel van...
- 1/30/2020
- MUBI
Sinister stabbings, women kicked and beaten, perverse hoodlums selling cocaine and murdering street-beat bobbies: what happened to civilized English crime? Cavalcanti’s vicious postwar Brit Noir shocked critics for The Times and was cut to ribbons for American distribution. A disillusioned, bored Raf hero turns to smuggling and skullduggery; this fully restored crime classic gives us Trevor Howard, Sally Gray and Griffith Jones in one of the best — and most brutal — crime pix of its day. Plus attractive Pi extras.
They Made Me a Fugitive
Region-free Blu-ray
Powerhouse Indicator
1947 / B&w / 1:37 flat full frame / 102 78 min. / I Became a Criminal / Street Date September 23, 2019 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99
Starring: Sally Gray, Trevor Howard, Griffith Jones, René Ray, Charles Farrell, Maurice Denham, Vida Hope, Peter Bull, Sebastian Cabot.
Cinematography:Otto Heller
Film Editors: Margery Saunders, Terence Fisher (uncredited)
Original Music: Marius-François Gaillard
Written by Noel Langley from a novel by Jackson Budd...
They Made Me a Fugitive
Region-free Blu-ray
Powerhouse Indicator
1947 / B&w / 1:37 flat full frame / 102 78 min. / I Became a Criminal / Street Date September 23, 2019 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99
Starring: Sally Gray, Trevor Howard, Griffith Jones, René Ray, Charles Farrell, Maurice Denham, Vida Hope, Peter Bull, Sebastian Cabot.
Cinematography:Otto Heller
Film Editors: Margery Saunders, Terence Fisher (uncredited)
Original Music: Marius-François Gaillard
Written by Noel Langley from a novel by Jackson Budd...
- 11/12/2019
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Howard Hawk's prelapsarian rom-com, Fig Leaves (1926)Along with the output of Universal, the films of Fox, before the merger with Twentieth Century, have long been among the more mysterious and hard-to-see products of Golden Age Hollywood. When TCM made Warners' pre-Codes readily available to American eyes, these competing studios' outputs remained shut in some vault, unrestored and unavailable. Well, the Museum of Modern Art has liberated some fantastic early Universal films, and now it's the turn of William Fox's lost masterworks to see the light of the projector beam once more in MoMA's "William Fox Presents: Restorations and Rediscoveries from the Fox Film Corporation," May 18 - June 5, 2018.The season showcases little-seen films by John Ford, F.W. Murnau, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks and Frank Borzage, five of the starriest names on the studio's roster of directing talent, but also makes a case for genuinely obscure journeyman talents like Sidney Lanfield,...
- 5/17/2018
- MUBI
Anyone who isn’t poised to win the Oscar for Best Director is certainly entitled to hate Damien Chazelle, and there’s not an openly fascistic executive order in the world that can stop them. But, as of late, the infuriatingly accomplished “La La Land” mastermind has been making it very difficult to do so. As if it weren’t frustrating enough that his sensational, stimulating new film is a quantum leap forward from the comparatively airless “Whiplash,” Chazelle further endeared himself to many by giving the rare awards show acceptance speech that actually engendered a deeper appreciation for the honoree’s work.
Accepting the Best Picture prize from the New York Film Critics Circle, the mustached wunderkind pandered to the audience with the same crowd-pleasing cinephilia that’s been squeezed into every frame of his box office phenomenon. Instantly grabbing the room’s attention, his remarks began by name-checking legendary American filmmaker Frank Borzage,...
Accepting the Best Picture prize from the New York Film Critics Circle, the mustached wunderkind pandered to the audience with the same crowd-pleasing cinephilia that’s been squeezed into every frame of his box office phenomenon. Instantly grabbing the room’s attention, his remarks began by name-checking legendary American filmmaker Frank Borzage,...
- 2/24/2017
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
Pat O'Brien movies on TCM: 'The Front Page,' 'Oil for the Lamps of China' Remember Pat O'Brien? In case you don't, you're not alone despite the fact that O'Brien was featured – in both large and small roles – in about 100 films, from the dawn of the sound era to 1981. That in addition to nearly 50 television appearances, from the early '50s to the early '80s. Never a top star or a critics' favorite, O'Brien was nevertheless one of the busiest Hollywood leading men – and second leads – of the 1930s. In that decade alone, mostly at Warner Bros., he was seen in nearly 60 films, from Bs (Hell's House, The Final Edition) to classics (American Madness, Angels with Dirty Faces). Turner Classic Movies is showing nine of those today, Nov. 11, '15, in honor of what would have been the Milwaukee-born O'Brien's 116th birthday. Pat O'Brien and James Cagney Spencer Tracy had Katharine Hepburn.
- 11/11/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Coleen Gray actress ca. 1950. Coleen Gray: Actress in early Stanley Kubrick film noir, destroyer of men in cult horror 'classic' Actress Coleen Gray, best known as the leading lady in Stanley Kubrick's film noir The Killing and – as far as B horror movie aficionados are concerned – for playing the title role in The Leech Woman, died at age 92 in Aug. 2015. This two-part article, which focuses on Gray's film career, is a revised and expanded version of the original post published at the time of her death. Born Doris Bernice Jensen on Oct. 23, 1922, in Staplehurst, Nebraska, at a young age she moved with her parents, strict Lutheran Danish farmers, to Minnesota. After getting a degree from St. Paul's Hamline University, she relocated to Southern California to be with her then fiancé, an army private. At first, she eked out a living as a waitress at a La Jolla hotel...
- 10/14/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Coleen Gray actress ca. 1950. Coleen Gray: Actress in early Stanley Kubrick film noir, destroyer of men in cult horror 'classic' Actress Coleen Gray, best known as the leading lady in Stanley Kubrick's film noir The Killing and – as far as B horror movie aficionados are concerned – for playing the title role in The Leech Woman, died at age 92 in Aug. 2015. This two-part article, which focuses on Gray's film career, is a revised and expanded version of the original post published at the time of her death. Born Doris Bernice Jensen on Oct. 23, 1922, in Staplehurst, Nebraska, at a young age she moved with her parents, strict Lutheran Danish farmers, to Minnesota. After getting a degree from St. Paul's Hamline University, she relocated to Southern California to be with her then fiancé, an army private. At first, she eked out a living as a waitress at a La Jolla hotel...
- 10/14/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Uggie: 'The Artist' dog star. Uggie, 'The Artist' scene-stealing dog star, has died The biggest non-human movie star of the 21st century, Uggie, whose scene-stealing cuteness helped to earn Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist the 2011 Best Picture Academy Award, has died. According to his official Facebook page, Uggie had been suffering from prostate cancer; he was euthanized last Friday, Aug. 7, '15. Born in 2002, Uggie was 13 years old. An announcement posted on Tuesday night, Aug. 11, on the Fb page Consider Uggie read: We regret to inform to all our friends, family and Uggie's fans that our beloved boy has passed away. We were not planning on posting anything until we healed a little more but unfortunately somebody leaked it to TMZ and they will be announcing it. In short, Uggie had a cancerous tumor in the prostate and is now in a better place not feeling pain.
- 8/12/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
A long time ago, sometime around 1912, a director by the name of D.W. Griffith packed up his filmmaking wares and took his crew, including favored cinematographer Billy Bitzer and star Mae Marsh, across the water to a relatively mysterious island off the Southern California coast to shoot a short film. The project, Man’s Genesis, subtitled A Psychological Comedy Founded upon the Darwinian Theory of the Evolution of Man (Is that Woody Allen I hear whimpering with envy?), isn’t one for which Griffith is well remembered, in the hearts of either academics or those given to silent-era nostalgia. (One comment on IMDb suggests that no one would ever mistake Griffith’s simple tale of a landmark of human development—man discovers his ability to craft and use tools in order to achieve a specific goal-- for “a serious work of speculative anthropology” and wonders “what the director and his...
- 7/30/2015
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
'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
First Best Actor Oscar winner Emil Jannings and first Best Actress Oscar winner Janet Gaynor on TCM (photo: Emil Jannings in 'The Last Command') First Best Actor Academy Award winner Emil Jannings in The Last Command, first Best Actress Academy Award winner Janet Gaynor in Sunrise, and sisters Norma Talmadge and Constance Talmadge are a few of the silent era performers featured this evening on Turner Classic Movies, as TCM continues with its Silent Monday presentations. Starting at 5 p.m. Pt / 8 p.m. Et on November 17, 2014, get ready to check out several of the biggest movie stars of the 1920s. Following the Jean Negulesco-directed 1943 musical short Hit Parade of the Gay Nineties -- believe me, even the most rabid anti-gay bigot will be able to enjoy this one -- TCM will be showing Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command (1928) one of the two movies that earned...
- 11/18/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell: Studio manufactured romance [See previous post: "Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson Rumors and Gossip = Hard Cash."] In the late ’20s and early ’30s, Fox (not yet 20th Century Fox) used on-screen lovebirds Charles Farrell and (first Best Actress Academy Award winner) Janet Gaynor in a series of romantic melodramas and light comedies. As a box-office incentive of sorts, studio publicists and the fan magazines came up with a Farrell-Gaynor off-screen love affair as well. Never mind the fact that the two were not lovers: Farrell eventually married silent-film actress Virginia Valli; Gaynor, who at one point was attached to Warner Bros. contract player Margaret Lindsay and later became an intimate companion of Broadway star Mary Martin, retired from films after marrying costume designer Adrian. [Photo: Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in Frank Borzage's 7th Heaven.) In the early '30s, in order to both lift the sagging popularity of former superstar Ramon Novarro and boost the rising popularity of new contract player Myrna Loy, MGM manufactured a romance for the couple, then starring in Sam Wood's The Barbarian. Neither Novarro, who was gay and determined to keep his love/sex life under wraps, nor Loy, who was having an affair with (married) producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., was pleased. When it comes to those sorts of rumors, nothing has changed in the last eight or nine decades. Gee, could two performers play love scenes in a movie without actually falling in love with one another? Not according to the tabloids and their "news feeders." Will it help the box-office of their movies? Well, let's say it definitely won't hurt it. (See also: "Hollywood Scandals: Errol Flynn / Roman Polanski / Charles Chaplin.") Recently, Oscar contender Bradley Cooper dismissed rumors that he was dating his Golden Globe-winning and fellow Oscar contender Silver Linings Playbook co-star Jennifer Lawrence. Not that long ago, it was the turn of Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, whose alleged affair was buzzed about right at the time their 2011 romantic comedy Friends with Benefits came out. (The following year, Timberlake married Jessica Biel.) And so on. Privacy concerns: It's all about one's public image Now, one key difference between what we see today and what was published during the Studio Era is that the movie fan magazines weren't tabloids. They generally plugged the studios' products -- i.e., the movies, the stars -- according to the dictates of the studios' own p.r. machines and/or the stars' own publicists. Some stars of yore, much like Jodie Foster at this year's Golden Globes, might claim in interviews that they prized their privacy, but most of those same people gladly discarded that fiercely protected possession when aspects of their personal lives could be used as self-promoting tools. At other times, they quite willingly gave it up when the "private" issue was deemed professionally unthreatening. Examples of the private and public spheres becoming one range from Vilma Banky and Rod La Rocque's Marriage of the Decade in the late '20s to Joan Crawford's various child adoptions. Late in life, the ever-so-private Katharine Hepburn wrote a bestselling book of (conveniently selective) memoirs, while just a few years ago Jodie Foster herself openly talked with More magazine about her role as a mother. In other words: if private matters were/are detrimental to a person's public image, they should remain private. If not, everyone should know about them. In that regard, public figures are truly no different than private ones. Back when the studios controlled access to their players (and had the all-too-willing support of the local police and government officials), it was easy to maintain that sort of balance. ["Studio-Manufactured Love Affairs: Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell" continues on the next page. See link below.] Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven photo: Fox publicity image. This post was originally published at Alt Film Guide (http://www.altfg.com/). Not to be republished without permission.
- 1/18/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Continuing this month's Tuesday night survey of how movies have depicted persons with disabilities over the years, Turner Classic Movies offers an Oct. 9 prime-time lineup of films focusing on wounded veterans returning from the wars.
The night's titles lead off with "Lucky Star," a 1929 drama that has the dubious distinction of being one of the first films in which a disabled character -- in this case a World War I hero (Charles Farrell) -- is inexplicably and sentimentally healed of his condition at the climax, and conclude with the Oscar-winning 1946 wartime classic "The Best Years of Our Lives," for which real-life amputee Harold Russell received an Academy Award as best supporting actor.
Hosted by TCM's Ben Mankiewicz and Lawrence Carter-Long, a frequent spokesman on topics relating to media representation of the disabled, the weekly festival, dubbed "The Projected Image: A History of Disability in Film," features more than 20 films drawn...
The night's titles lead off with "Lucky Star," a 1929 drama that has the dubious distinction of being one of the first films in which a disabled character -- in this case a World War I hero (Charles Farrell) -- is inexplicably and sentimentally healed of his condition at the climax, and conclude with the Oscar-winning 1946 wartime classic "The Best Years of Our Lives," for which real-life amputee Harold Russell received an Academy Award as best supporting actor.
Hosted by TCM's Ben Mankiewicz and Lawrence Carter-Long, a frequent spokesman on topics relating to media representation of the disabled, the weekly festival, dubbed "The Projected Image: A History of Disability in Film," features more than 20 films drawn...
- 10/9/2012
- by editorial@zap2it.com
- Zap2It - From Inside the Box
Allegorical War Drama Highlights TCM.s Dec. 14 Salute
to The George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is set to make movie history this December when it presents the world television premiere of Fear and Desire (1953), the rarely seen debut film by legendary director Stanley Kubrick. Premiering Wednesday, Dec. 14, at 8 p.m. (Et), the allegorical war drama from the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Shining (1980) will be the centerpiece of an extraordinary 24-hour marathon honoring the preservation efforts of the Motion Picture Department at George Eastman House. TCM host Robert Osborne will be joined by Jared Case, Head of Cataloguing and Access at George Eastman House, to present 15 cinematic rarities from one of the country.s leading moving-image archives.
TCM.s Dec. 14 salute to the Motion Picture Collection at George Eastman House will begin at 6:15 a.m. (Et) with The Blue Bird...
to The George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is set to make movie history this December when it presents the world television premiere of Fear and Desire (1953), the rarely seen debut film by legendary director Stanley Kubrick. Premiering Wednesday, Dec. 14, at 8 p.m. (Et), the allegorical war drama from the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Shining (1980) will be the centerpiece of an extraordinary 24-hour marathon honoring the preservation efforts of the Motion Picture Department at George Eastman House. TCM host Robert Osborne will be joined by Jared Case, Head of Cataloguing and Access at George Eastman House, to present 15 cinematic rarities from one of the country.s leading moving-image archives.
TCM.s Dec. 14 salute to the Motion Picture Collection at George Eastman House will begin at 6:15 a.m. (Et) with The Blue Bird...
- 12/5/2011
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
In the mid-1920′s, Hollywood’s most popular actor was not Charlie Chaplin, not Rudolph Valentino, not Lon Chaney. America was crazy about dogs. Not all dogs – just one in particular: Rin Tin Tin. The German shepherd ruled the box office and was so popular that he is often credited with saving the struggling Warner Brothers Studio from bankruptcy. Rin Tin Tin, at the peak of his career, received 10,000 fan letters a week, was paid a weekly salary of $6,000, and had a personal chef. St. Louis film fans have the rare opportunity to view a vintage silent Rin Tin Tin film on the big screen this Friday night when Cinema St. Louis shows the 1925 silent adventure Clash Of The Wolves with live music accompaniment as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival.
The original Rin Tin Tin starred in 26 films, mostly silent, between 1922 and his death ten years later.
The original Rin Tin Tin starred in 26 films, mostly silent, between 1922 and his death ten years later.
- 11/17/2011
- by Tom Stockman
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Josef von Sternberg, Charles Chaplin, John Ford: Shasta County Silent Film Festival Friday, October 21 6:00 p.m. Angora Love (1929, Laurel & Hardy). Stanley and Oliver are adopted by a runaway goat, whose noise and aroma in turn get the goat of their suspicious landlord. Attempts to bathe the smelly animal result in a waterlogged free-for-all. Pass the Gravy (1928, Max Davidson). Max Davidson plays a widower father who enjoys raising prize flowers. His neighbor, another widower father, raises prize poultry. The two families spat because the chickens are eating Max's flower seeds. In a Romeo and Juliet-like twist, the men's children decide to marry each other, and the fathers decide to hold a celebratory dinner to show no hard feelings. However, the roast chicken on the table looks very suspicious. It's a Gift (1923, Snub Pollard) Along with a Felix the Cat. A group of oil magnates are trying to think of new ways to attract business.
- 10/7/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
The 6th Annual Silent Film Festival at Shasta County, Calif., to be held October 21-22 at the Shasta County Arts Council's Performance Hall, will feature an eclectic group of silent-movie classics. Those range from Josef von Sternberg's crime drama Underworld (1927) to Carl Theodor Dreyer's marital drama Master of the House (1925). [Full schedule of the Shasta County Silent Film Fest.] Also: Rin Tin Tin in Clash of the Wolves, featuring Charles Farrell (who would later team up with Janet Gaynor to become one of the most popular screen couples of the late silent era/early talkie era); John Ford's ambitious Western The Iron Horse (1924), starring George O'Brien and Madge Bellamy; and the Douglas Fairbanks romantic comedy When the Clouds Roll By (1919), directed by Victor Fleming of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz fame. Attending the festival will be silent-film restorationist and historian David Shepard and Bay Area Royal Jazz Society's Frederick Hodges. Check out...
- 10/7/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
The Australian Silent Film Festival returns to Sydney from 10-24 September with a classic line up of films from before the talkies took over.
Films by Alfred Hitcock, Charlie Chaplin (including The Immigrant – below), Charles Farrell, Janet Gaynor, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd will screen over three Saturdays in September (10, 17, 24) at three different locations.
For more information, visit www.ozsilentfilmfestival.com.au...
Films by Alfred Hitcock, Charlie Chaplin (including The Immigrant – below), Charles Farrell, Janet Gaynor, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd will screen over three Saturdays in September (10, 17, 24) at three different locations.
For more information, visit www.ozsilentfilmfestival.com.au...
- 7/15/2011
- by Colin Delaney
- Encore Magazine
(Fw Murnau, 1929, U, Eureka)
The great German director Fw Murnau made three silent movies for Fox in Hollywood before co-directing his only sound film, Tabu, with the documentarist Robert Flaherty, and dying in 1931 aged 42. His first Hollywood silent, Sunrise, is universally acclaimed; the second one, Four Devils, no longer exists; and the third, City Girl, was for years known only through a re-edited, semi-sound version which Murnau disowned. The silent City Girl is a lyrical masterwork of pastoral realism, in which Lem, a simple farm boy from Minnesota (Charles Farrell), in Chicago to sell the family's wheat crop, meets and marries Kate (Mary Duncan), a waitress yearning for an idyllic life in the countryside. When they return to Minnesota, however, they're met with hostility by coarse, lascivious harvesters and Lem's overbearing father. It is a rural melodrama of great beauty and honesty, the inspiration for Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven...
The great German director Fw Murnau made three silent movies for Fox in Hollywood before co-directing his only sound film, Tabu, with the documentarist Robert Flaherty, and dying in 1931 aged 42. His first Hollywood silent, Sunrise, is universally acclaimed; the second one, Four Devils, no longer exists; and the third, City Girl, was for years known only through a re-edited, semi-sound version which Murnau disowned. The silent City Girl is a lyrical masterwork of pastoral realism, in which Lem, a simple farm boy from Minnesota (Charles Farrell), in Chicago to sell the family's wheat crop, meets and marries Kate (Mary Duncan), a waitress yearning for an idyllic life in the countryside. When they return to Minnesota, however, they're met with hostility by coarse, lascivious harvesters and Lem's overbearing father. It is a rural melodrama of great beauty and honesty, the inspiration for Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven...
- 5/21/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
F.W. Murnau followed up his masterpiece Sunrise with this pastoral drama set in the wheat fields of Minnesota. Starring Mary Duncan and Charles Farrell it's nowhere near as iconic but City Girl holds its own rewards including a beautiful performance from Duncan as the displaced ‘city girl’ battling her cowardly husband and his tyrannical father.
Given Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is such an undisputed classic motion picture it is easy to see why City Girl is perhaps not as burned into the cultural memory as it should be. Several themes and ideas are shared between the two features but City Girl plays them out differently.
Originally titled Our Daily Bread the story follows young farmer Lem (Charles Farrell) on a trip to Chicago. He’s tasked with selling the wheat crop at a decent price but once he’s ensconced in the big smoke he discovers the love...
Given Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is such an undisputed classic motion picture it is easy to see why City Girl is perhaps not as burned into the cultural memory as it should be. Several themes and ideas are shared between the two features but City Girl plays them out differently.
Originally titled Our Daily Bread the story follows young farmer Lem (Charles Farrell) on a trip to Chicago. He’s tasked with selling the wheat crop at a decent price but once he’s ensconced in the big smoke he discovers the love...
- 4/6/2011
- by Martyn Conterio
- FilmShaft.com
Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman in Barry Levinson's Academy Award winner Rain Man (1988). Hoffman won the Best Actor Oscar that year; Cruise wasn't even nominated. Biggest Oscar Snubs #8e: Non-Nominated Actors – From Charles Farrell to Rock Hudson Jean Simmons, Elmer Gantry (1960) Robert Mitchum, The Sundowners (1960) Fredric March, Inherit the Wind (1960) Fred MacMurray, The Apartment (1960) Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier, Fanny (1961) Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer, West Side Story (1961) Laurence Harvey, Summer and Smoke (1961) Alec Guinness, Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Paul Newman, Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) Joan Crawford, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Cleopatra (1963) Brandon DeWilde, Hud (1963) Susannah York, Tom Jones (1963) Alan Bates and Irene Papas, Zorba the Greek (1964) Dick Van Dyke, Mary Poppins (1964) Vivien Leigh, Ship of Fools (1965) Jason Robards and Barbara Harris, A Thousand Clowns (1965) Laurence Harvey and [...]...
- 1/29/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Popular late ’20s lovebirds Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell (7th Heaven, Street Angel), Photoplay Inside The Hollywood Fan Magazine: From Mary Pickford to Elizabeth Taylor How did the Hollywood fan magazine come about? Who came up with that idea? Had there been film fan magazines in Europe or was that an American invention? The fan magazine was an American invention. Earlier, there had been trade papers published for the film industry, but the idea for a fan magazine, geared towards the filmgoing public, came from the popular, general magazines of the day, which had begun in the 1880s and whose style and format the first fan magazines copied. The first fan magazine was The Motion Picture Story Magazine (which later became Motion Picture), [...]...
- 5/5/2010
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
A trifecta of stars dot Hollywood's Walk of Fame for TV legend Gale Storm, who died at age 87, in Danville, California. The beautiful actress starred in films, recorded music and was a huge hit on the smallscreen. In her own words, Gale noted on her website: "My first TV series, My Little Margie, with Charles Farrell was originally a summer replacement for I Love Lucy. I was overwhelmed by the immediate success of it. During the next four years, millions of people saw the 126 episodes of 'Margie' on TV and listened to separate, live episodes on network radio." Following the success of "Margie," Gale starred in "The Gale Storm Show," and "Oh Susanna" where Zasu Pitts...
- 6/29/2009
- by April MacIntyre
- Monsters and Critics
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