Lust for a Vampire

Yutte Stensgaard worked in British television,
but is best known as the star of Hammer Films'
Lust for a Vampire. In the foodchain of Sixties
British Blonde Starlets, she might fit in thusly:

#1 - Julie Christie
#2 - Britt Ekland
#17 - Yutte Stensgaard

You can find out more about her at
the Hammer Glamour page,
this fansite, or her Yahoo Group.

WTF #1

This new category, WTF, will include weird and

just plain stupid photos, including fashion disasters

and starlets whose hairdressers should have been

shot.

You wonder WHAT they were thinking???

Cover Girls

I thought that might get your attention.
If you're interested in pulp magazine, comic book,
and old paperback covers, try Cover Browser.
They have everything from Life to Archie to Film
Fun to Worst Album Covers. You can buy them, too.
Also check out MagazineArt.org.

Romy Schneider, Naughty Nurse

How do you steal a movie from the likes of
Orson Welles, Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau,
Elsa Martinelli, Akim Tamiroff, and Kafka?
Well, you have to be Romy Schneider and
play a naughty nurse. I watched The Trial
last night on TCM. Wish I could find some
bigger and better photos to share.
For more info, try here or here.
It is a strange movie in the fashion of New Wave,
but it is visually striking. Welles ran out of
money, which was not uncommon for him. Jeanne
Moreau is visually striking. Elsa Martinelli
is just slightly less visually striking. Romy
Schneider easily walked away with it. Her
character, Nurse Leni, makes advances toward
Anthony Perkins' character, Josef K., but he
ignores her. Gay actor Perkins looks genuinely
confused about what to do with her...or maybe
I'm reading into it too much. Last year I read
Charles Winecoff's book Anthony Perkins: Split
Image. Whoa! Perkins was one very nervous dude.
There are streets named after Romy Schneider
in Europe. (There are no Orson Welles Streets.)

Here, Kitty Kitty

One reviewer of The Curse of the Cat People
described Simone Simon's costume as "a relief
map for a book called What Every Young Husband
Should Know." (He was right, of course. It makes
the whole movie worth seeing.)

Great Earrings #1

(This could be called "Great Hair," too.)

Birthday Girl Teresa Wright

Today, Oct 27th, is Teresa Wright's birthday.
She was born in Harlem in 1918 and grew up
in the New York and New Jersey areas. She
studied acting, appeared in the legitimate
theater, and shunned cheesecake photography
and "the star treatment." She is the only
person ever nominated for an Oscar for her
first three films: The Little Foxes (1941),
Mrs. Miniver (1942), and Pride of the
Yankees (1942). She's the star of Alfred
Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and
sparkles in The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946). She once said, "I only ever wanted
to be an actress, not a star." Her husband,
Niven Busch, wrote the script for Duel in
the Sun for her just to change her "good girl"
image, but Teresa got pregnant and couldn't
do the role, which eventually fell to David
O. Selznick's girlfriend, Jennifer Jones.
So she remains in our memories as one of
Hollywood's great Good Girls.
Happy birthday, Teresa!

Girls With Pearls #1

I'm not sure who said it, but...
"Women, like dogs, should not wear hats."

Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but girls
look better in pearls.

Smoking with Barry Sullivan

So one evening in the 1970s, Barry Sullivan's
daughter, Jenny Sullivan, was appearing in or
directing a Peter Weiss play called Marat/Sade
or The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul
Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum
of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis
de Sade, which is supposed to be the longest play
name in history, at a tiny theater in Santa
Barbara, California. She was married to Jim
Messina of the band Loggins and Messina at
the time. Your parents might have listened
to their songs Your Mama Don't Dance or Angry
Eyes back in the day. Uh-huh. I digress. So
anyway, Messina was probably there, too, but
I didn't see him. It was a really strange play,
performed in-the-round, with characters popping
up out of the audience and weird things like
that. I probably enjoyed it. I don't really
remember. What I do remember is going out on
the sidewalk at the intermission for a smoke.
And Barry Sullivan was there. And we stood and
smoked cigarettes together. I said something
about the play being interesting, and Barry
looked grim and said "Yes" and seemed pretty
tense. He was probably tense that his daughter's
play would come off okay. Since then, I've been
a father, so I understand such fatherly tensions.
So the evening sun was setting, and Barry and I
finished our cigarettes. And the intermission
ended. And the play began again. And Barry died
of a "lung ailment" in 1994 at the age of 82,
so he didn't do too badly for a heavy smoker.
He wasn't a starlet, but he was in, like, 183
movies and television shows with stars like
Barbara Stanwyck and Claudette Colbert, bitchy
people like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, and
starlets like Frances Dee, Senta Berger, Angie
Dickinson, Martha Hyer, Joey Heatherton, Jane
Wyman, Phyllis Kirk, Arlene Dahl, Jane Powell,
Claire Trevor, and a bunch of others. Barry
didn't live long enough to see blogs. Ah well.

Forget Brando. Watch Janet Margolin.

Back in 1965, Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner
made a strange war movie called Morituri.
Brynner and Brando compete to see who
can chew up the most scenery. It takes
place aboard a ship, and it's about Nazis.
It was also called The Saboteur, Code Name
Morituri, and the reviewers at the Internet
Movie Database think it's just a swell film.
Yeah. Whatever. Trevor Howard is in it,
and he's always fun to watch. Much more
importantly, Janet Margolin was in it,
and she is absolutely PEACHY. (We'll talk
more about her some other time.)

You ever seen eyes like that? Jeez Louise!

Car Girl #1

No seat belts, a non-collapsing steering wheel, hard
dashboard, no safety features, and it probably gets
12 miles to the gallon. Basically a death trap.
But Pier looks great, doesn't she?