“Staff Notes” Archive
Irv Slifkin | Staff Notes
Joan Crawford was a bitch.
That may not come as a revelation to the folks who know Ms. Crawford from the image that has been perpetuated since Mommie Dearest, the book and the movie, were released in 1978 and 1981, respectively.
From the portrayal of Joan in book and film, “bitch” may have been a kind word. After all, here was a woman who was crocked most of the time, showed little regard for her kids and regularly abused them, slept with most of the men (and many of the women) in Hollywood, had a horribly violent temper and showed an unusually strong disdain for wire hangers. The book, of course, was written by Christina Crawford, her adopted daughter, who was left out of her mother’s will along with her brother Christopher, also adopted.
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George D. Allen | Staff Notes
World-renowned Swedish violinist Holger Brandt (Gosta Ekman) knows what he is about to do is wrong, but he does it anyway, and invites gifted student pianist Anita Hoffman (Ingrid Bergman) out for a “late dinner and wine” after they meet—not so much by coincidence at all—exiting a theatrical performance.
Anita has been providing piano lessons for Anne-Marie, Holger’s little daughter, while he has been away from his wife and children on a long tour; at the girl’s birthday party earlier, she had performed an impromptu duet with him, electrifying the assembled guests. Immediately, Holger realized that Anita would be the perfect choice to replace his retiring accompanist. He also realized he was in love.
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Irv Slifkin | Staff Notes
It was in the old Cheltenham Theater in the mid-1970s, with the pungent smells of fried chicken and Lysol wafting through the aisles, that I first got acquainted with David Cronenberg.
I was definitely in the “horror movie phase” of my moviegoing life, seeing everything and anything that smacked of scary. The movie was They Came from Within, a creepy and disgusting little Canadian shocker about tenants at a Montreal apartment who are stricken with an illness that is one part aphrodisiac, one part venereal disease.
My memories of the film are somewhat vague, but I do remember scream queen Barbara Steele taking a bath and icky cockroach-like insects creeping out of the bathtub faucet and entering her through her privates.
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George D. Allen | Staff Notes
Rested up?
Ready for some serious movie watching?
Perhaps at the outset of this year, you’re feeling frosty enough to curl up and commit to a Movie Marathon. With the recent completion of the eight-part Harry Potter film franchise fresh in everyone’s minds—at least for fans, it ought to be, as Warner Bros. saw fit to announce the imminent pull of the entire series off the shelves, to be discontinued Disney-style for a time—it’s easy to picture the fun of sitting down for the entire run of a popular movie franchise and follow a great character or story through a long and entertaining arc of action.
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Irv Slifkin | Staff Notes
Blame PBS.
If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have the tsunami of auction shows populating the TV screen like we do now.
It all started with Antiques Roadshow, originally a British show on the BBC that began in the late 1970s. The premise was simple: People showed experts the stuff they thought was valuable. Experts appraised the stuff. People went home either elated or miserable.
The Americanized version started to air on PBS in 1997. The experts became regulars, while the hosts shifted every few years. Stops were made throughout the country as folks had hopes that the plate that Aunt Sally left them or the baseball card they found at the estate sale cha-chinged for big bucks. Then there was the possibility that the stain with which they finished Uncle Henry’s rocker made the value drop from $23,000 to $23.
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George D. Allen | Staff Notes
New Year’s resolution: Watch more foreign films.
Watching foreign cinema is a lot like eating your vegetables. You know you must do it to maintain a balanced and healthy diet, and while you may actually find you enjoy them once you taste them, it’s so much easier to just load up on cheeseburgers and fries.
Maybe I’m just speaking for me, but I would guess those sentiments articulate the unfortunate habits of many a movie fan. To be clear, I have absolutely zero aversion to foreign films (I have no problem “reading” while watching a movie)—I just don’t watch nearly as many as I “should.” I find them just as rewarding—or not, as the case may be—as American-made films.
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Irv Slifkin | Staff Notes
“Speech is silver; silence is golden.”
--Ancient Egyptian proverb.
Who would have thunk it? Two films about the world of silent movies, showing in theaters at the same time.
We have Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s mesmerizing 3-D adaptation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the graphic novel/kid’s book about an orphan living in a in a Paris train station who encounters a toy store proprietor with a mysterious past. The boy uses a robot that his late father gave him to find out the secret of the toy salesman, who turns out to be none other than—SPOLIER ALERT!—Georges Melies, the French pioneer of early fantasy and science fiction films.
Then there’s The Artist, the delightful, heavily praised silent black-and-white picture from French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, in which dashing silent screen star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) fears his career may be in danger when talkies are introduced in the late 1920s. At the same time, a female fan (Berenice Bejo) with aspirations of becoming a movie actress finds her stock rising as his descends in the new era of sound motion pictures. Any similarities between the lead character and real actor John Gilbert are probably not coincidental.
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Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
Type the keyword "Christmas" into the Internet Movie Database, and you'll get a listing of more than 3,000 film and TV titles stretching back to 1897. Certainly no other holiday comes close to the number of times some aspect of the 25th of December has been depicted on the big screen. Sometimes it's a fleeting scene or two (The Thin Man, The Greatest Story Ever Told), sometimes it's a key part of the plot (The Man Who Came to Dinner, Die Hard), and sometimes it's a picture's entire raison d'être (Christmas in Connecticut, Scrooged).
Yes, the Yuletide season has been the driving force for movies ranging from the sublime (White Christmas) to the ridiculous (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians), but what's the one "Fa-la-la" flick that stands above all its holly-bedecked brethren as the definitive cinematic Christmas statement? Elsewhere on this site, my esteemed colleague Irv Slifkin has presented his case for director Frank Capra's 1946 paean to Americana and small-town values, It's a Wonderful Life. I would now like to offer my arguments--20 of them, in fact (I was hoping for an appropriate 34; I trust some of you readers out there will be able to help me.)--in favor of the 1947 20th Century-Fox film Miracle on 34th Street.
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Irv Slifkin | Staff Notes
Frank Capra was a great director, but probably a lousy businessman. How else do you explain his Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life falling into the public domain, and not earning a nickel for the director or his family for decades?
Although the financial rewards were obviously non-existent for some time, the value of Capra’s film rose higher and higher over the years because of its unpaid exposure. VHS tapes, then DVDs, were duped by anyone who wanted to earn some quick cash. Television stations looking for cheap yuletide programming just slotted Frank’s film in the schedule. The result was the multi-decade rollout of It’s a Wonderful Life, a film that made little impact when first released in 1946 although it was nominated for five Academy Awards, but is now recognized as a classic and, in many people’s estimation, the greatest Christmas movie of all time.
The movie is far from simple and not altogether cheery. Its themes of greed, morality and troubles in small town America play particularly powerful in this day and age. Set on Christmas Eve in 1946 in the hamlet of Bedford Falls, New York, the film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, the owner of a failing savings and loan company, who is contemplating suicide. We learn that a mistake has put George in the red for $8000 and likely to be sent to prison for the debt, while the local businessman/despot Potter (Lionel Barrymore) takes over the town.
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Chris Cummins | Staff Notes
Happy holidays from MovieFanFare!
With Christmas right around the corner, I thought I'd pose a simple question to you faithful readers out there: what movies do you hope to recieve this year?
Did you ask Santa for any cinema classics or recent releases this year? Or do you just hope that Jolly Old Saint Nick brings some TV gift sets down your chimney?
Regardless of what you religious affiliation is, we are curious about what DVDs and Blu-rays you are wishing for right now whether you celebrate the season or not. So let us know in the comments!
Ho! Ho! Ho!
George D. Allen | Staff Notes
Remakes, blah. Reboots? They’re so yesterday. I own thousands of comic books, but even this hardcore comics fan has had just about enough of comic book movies.
Big-budget motion pictures based on videogames are old hat. Films based on board games—which you’d think would have been buried forever based on the public and critical response to Clue—are about to enjoy a mini-renaissance with the release of Battleship and, no kidding, an eventual adaptation of the game Monopoly being headed up (at least for now) by none other than Ridley Scott.
Maybe you’ve heard of him:
Alien. Blade Runner. Thelma & Louise. Gladiator. Black Hawk Down. Alien, for crying out loud. Scott has been nominated for the Best Director Oscar three times.
It is indeed tempting to openly mock the notion of a Parker Brothers'-inspired blockbuster, where the hero may be a short, portly fellow with a handlebar moustache (Philip Seymour Hoffman in an “A”-list cast, or Jason Alexander if it’s deemed straight-to-video-worthy instead?); where “Passing Go” and “Community Chest” will have to be worked into a script that also features red hotels, a Scottie terrier, and a thimble—but we should remember that we’ve already had “the Facebook Movie.”
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Jay Steinberg | Staff Notes
The skill and professionalism honed onstage since he could walk, combined with an inimitable exuberance, made this diminutive Brooklynite Hollywood's hottest draw over his adolescence, and a welcome screen presence throughout a career that continues to infinity. The son of vaudevillians who divorced when he was four, Joseph Yule Jr. was doggedly pushed by his mother, who brought him to Southern California in search of film opportunities for the boy. He was only seven when he received his name-making opportunity, cast as pugnacious Mickey McGuire in a series of shorts based on the then-popular Toonerville Trolley comic panel. Though his mother unsuccessfully lobbied to legally change his name to that of the character, he adopted his familiar stage name instead, and would make over four dozen Mickey McGuire comedies over the ensuing eight years, which added into his lifetime output, totaled his appearances before the cameras at more than 300 times.
As the series wound down, Mickey signed with MGM, and began receiving supporting roles in features for the studio like his role as young Blackie in Manhattan Melodrama (1934) with Clark Gable and William Powell.
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Tags: Joan Crawford