Starlet Showcase

2/16/08

Heavens To Betsy!

Betsy Von Furstenberg mostly did stage and television.
My Goggle Search for her gave me results for Diane von
Furstenberg, Ira Von Furstenberg, and Tatiana Von
Furstenberg, which is irrelevant.
Anyway, Betsy has great eyes. She was born Elizabeth Caroline Maria Agatha Felicitas Therese von Furstenberg-Hedringen in Germany. That is a ridiculous name. Betsy is retired now, is active in New York high society, and probably doesn't appreciate appearing in a post for Starlet Showcase. So she and I don't have a whole lot in common.
Yeah, she has a funny nose. Like I care.
Her eyes are the thing, see?

This illustration is from Mike Ludlow.
Her Life magazine cover was posted HERE.

Natalie No Pants

It's an all-Natalie Wood post.
You can't start out a weekend much better than this.

2/15/08

Imitation of Monofonico Hi-Fi

I don't speak or write Spanish or Portuguese or any of the "Romance languages," so I don't know what these album covers are all about. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter at all. I'm listening to the Miles Davis All Stars, it's Friday, and I'm looking forward to a long weekend indoors.

This is Susan Kohner (The Gene Krupa Story, All The Fine Young Cannibals, Freud) playing Kick-The-Lamb or something in a publicity still from Imitation of Life (1959). I'd like to think those are cool jazz LPs on the floor, but they could be Rock & Roll records. I think that in 1959, most Rock & Roll was the stuff of 45 RPM records. Being that it was 1959, they could also be Calypso or Cha Cha. I haven't seen Imitation of Life in a while, and it will be a long, long time before I ever see it again. Susan Kohner may be about to kick the lamb, because she's frustrated about being multiracial in a weird little family with an ass-less Lana Turner and an annoyingly white Sandra Dee. Starlet Kohner herself was Mexican and Czech. She very sensibly left Hollywood after a 10-year career, raised a family, and had a life. She still does, in fact.
There is a strange, cluttered Myspace page about Susan Kohner HERE.

2/14/08

Bond Girl Luciana Paluzzi

I'm sure someone somewhere out there can find
a constructive use for nine little black & white
photos of Luciana Paluzzi.
(I mean, I just did, right?)

She even looks good in a hat!

2/12/08

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Baby, It's Cold Outside is, of course, a song.
It is often listed under Christmas music, but
it's really about a guy trying to get a girl to
stay inside and spend the night with him.

7 degrees F

Silly White Eyes #3

2/11/08

Transcending Noir Motif Thingies

I read a review of the 1952 Barbara Stanwyck film
Clash By Night at FilmsNoir.

It says: "Clash by Night (1952) from Fritz Lang transcends film noir in a neo-realist melodrama that turns the film noir motif upside down and inside out. Sexual abandon and existential entitlement are put on trial and found empty."
Whoa! WHO farted?
Robert Mitchum and Claire Trevor must be spinning in their graves.
All I gotta say is Barbara Stanwyck looks a $hitload better here than she does on that blog.

So there!
Can't wait for his syncretic analysis of Jayne Mansfield's Neo-Tribalism.
The F#^K???
For more of this kind of spastic intellectual self-abuse, try Senses of Cinema, film-philosophy, or the appropriately named Drain site.

I've got a mental image of a sexually ambivalent French art history student sitting in his New York loft apartment full of books on Kierkegaard, and he's got an image of me in a mobile home with a wheelchair ramp, a Nazi flag on the refrigerator, and a Rottweiler named Thor. And I'm sure we're both wrong.
Anyway, to quote Frank Bullitt, "You work your side of the street, and I'll work mine."
JEEZ!

2/10/08

Teaser!

I've been watching Universal Studios' Alfred Hitchcock Presents Season Two on DVD in glorious black and white. Near the end of the 1957 season is an episode called A Little Sleep with Barbara Cook and Vic Morrow. We all know Vic Morrow from Blackboard Jungle (1955), his first movie, King Creole (1958), which was covered here, Portrait of a Mobster (1961), the television show Combat! (1962-1967), tons of television appearances, and his accidental death while filming Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). He was also the father of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. Anyway, we all know Vic. But I didn't know Barbara Cook. And she is the dynamite doll of the episode. Singer-actress Barbara Nell Cook is best remembered for her work on Broadway. She won a 1958 Tony Award for The Music Man and a Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Barbara Cook Sings Mostly Sondheim. In fact, she is still around. In A Little Sleep, she plays Barbie Hallem, a flirtatious party girl who drinks, smokes, dances on tables, drives a T-bird convertible, and twists men around her little finger. Sometimes the stuff that Alfred Hitchcock Presents got past the television censors is quite amazing. Here are some screen captures of the episode. This is just a teaser, so I won't give away the ending. If this gets you at all curious, buy or rent the DVD. It's certainly worth it.