5/23/08
Happy Birthday, Dorothy Lee
May 23rd is Dorothy Lee's birthday.
Keeping up with funnymen Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey must not have been easy, but Dorothy Lee managed quite well. Her interview in William M. Drew's book At the Center of the Frame: Leading Ladies of the Twenties and Thirties is a fascinating look back at pre-Code Hollywood.
Half the fun of Dorothy Lee is her voice.
You can watch her and hear her on YouTube
HERE
HERE
HERE
and
HERE
Happy birthday, Dorothy.
5/22/08
Ring, Romy, Ring
I had sort of an excess of Romy Schneider-
on-the-telephone type pictures, so I'm
dropping them off here.
If you like Romy, you might want to go back to
the Naughty Nurse post.
"It's for you, dear."
Happy Birthday, Barbara Parkins
May 22nd is Barbara Parkins' birthday.
There are even more pictures of her in our
Sixties Doll post from February.
Happy birthday, Barbara.
5/21/08
Thank God for the IMDb
Thank God for the Internet Movie Database. What a resource! Is it perfect? No, it's only human, like you and me. Does it contain mistakes? Yes, occasionally. Do I have it permanently bookmarked and refer to it all the time? Absolutely! Is it a lifesaver when you can't quite name that actress with Lee Marvin in Prime Cut (1972), the one who wasn't in Carrie (1976) and wasn't in Playboy magazine; you know the one, the girl with the handful of nickels. She was the sister of the Playmate of the Month who starred in Gator Bait (1974), the sister whose shotgun murder needs avenging, remember?
I am not encyclopedic in my knowledge of movie history. You know those guys, right? At the film festival intermission, they stand in the lobby and wonder aloud, "Was it Viola Dana's chauffeur who was left-handed? You know the fellow I mean, right? He showed up at Cary Grant and Randy Scott's Halloween party dressed as a giant pineapple." Makes you wonder if the guy has ever in his life held down a meaningful full-time job. Lots of people amaze me with their knowledge of film history. But nothing amazes me like the Internet Movie Database, which is an accumulation of real credits and dates and things that a single human brain cannot store.
As I get older, I find that the old hard drive in my skull simply isn't as big as it used to be. It's like a clunky old desktop with a 20-Gig drive in a world full of lightning fast laptops with 160-Gig drives. It's not nearly as quick, and it holds much less data. So I have to conserve space on my drive by forgetting things. If I meet a new employee at work and remember his last name, I have to forget my sister's birthday. If I have to remember the new employee's first and last name and where he's from, well, I'll have to forget the capitol of Rhode Island and the conversion factor of centimeters to inches. The old brain bag just won't hold it all. And that's where the Internet Movie Database comes into play. I don't have to remember all those facts and dates. True, the "Trivia" sections are often trite. And, true, the "User Comments" range from truly learned to truly retarded. But what a resource! I can't imagine anyone writing a term paper on cinema without once referring to the IMDb. I never said it was perfect, but I'm certainly glad it's here.
If you're wondering about Viola Dana's chauffeur, I can't help you.
If you're wondering about the actress from Prime Cut and Gator Bait, well, it's Janit Baldwin and, interestingly, the Internet Movie Database DOESN'T seem to know her birth date.
And I don't either.
I had to forget it when I remembered a doctor's appointment last year.
(You can learn more about her here.)
Vulnavia (In Screaming Color)
Virginia North, of course, from
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971).
She only made six movies.
(B&W pictures simply wouldn't cut it.)
Click on the pictures; they make
nice wallpapers.
5/19/08
Happy Birthday, Nancy Kwan
May 19th is Nancy Kwan's birthday.
Here's a large photo of her.
And there are a bunch more HERE.
Happy birthday, Nancy.
5/18/08
Alice White, Picture Snatcher
Last night I watched Picture Snatcher (1933), a Warner Brothers-First National pre-Code programmer starring James Cagney. It's about an ex-con who becomes a photographer for a tabloid paper. Interestingly, Cagney's character sneaks a camera into Sing Sing Prison and snaps a picture of a woman being executed in the electric chair. This is based on an actual 1928 incident in which photographer Tom Howard, using a camera strapped to his leg, secretly snatched a picture of the execution of murderess Ruth Snyder. The famous photo appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News. The film gives brief lip service to the actual ugliness of electrocution as a mode of capital punishment and the morality of publishing such a picture.
Picture Snatcher has all the Warner players, rapid-fire dialogue, a frantic pace, and Alice White. She is not the good-girl love-interest. She is the naughty girl. Alice White (1904-1983) herself was a bit of a naughty girl, starting as a secretary and script girl for Charlie Chaplin and Josef von Sternberg. And she got around...sex scandals, divorces, being named "the other woman," and that sort of thing. When her career tanked, she went back to being a secretary. But, in Picture Snatcher, Alice White snatches the picture away from good-girl Patricia Ellis. Alice White also appeared in The Satin Woman (1927), Lingerie (1928), Naughty Baby (1928), Hot Stuff (1929), and The Naughty Flirt (1931), which are promising titles. In Picture Snatcher, she manhandles Cagney. He pushes her around. She gives as good as she gets, but he hits harder. Their wrestling matches would never have passed the censors a year later. The DVD commentary by Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta is entertaining, informative, and not overly serious.
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