Posts Tagged “Marilyn Monroe”
Irv Slifkin | In the Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Simon Curtis has some impressive British TV directing and producing credentials behind him: The award-winning BBC miniseries Cranford, a 1999 adaptation of David Copperfield with Maggie Smith, Ian McKellen and Daniel Radcliffe, adaptations of Uncle Vanya, Twelfth Night and Edward II, and even episodes of Tracey Ullman’s Tracey Takes Off and the American legal drama The Practice .
So, the director wanted to get things right when he set out to make his first feature film. One couldn’t imagine things going any better than My Week with Marilyn, the entertaining, eye-opening account of the making of The Prince and the Showgirl. That 1956 film starred Marilyn Monroe, who executive produced, and Laurence Olivier, who directed. Here, Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh step into the roles of those iconic performers.
“It was a gamble,” confesses the 51-year-old filmmaker about his project. ”There were other things I had talked about doing. I decided to hold out for this because it was the project I loved.”
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guest-blogs | FanFare Guests
Guest blogger David Lobosco writes:
The movie Some Like It Hot (1959) is one of the great classic comedies of all time, so it's almost pointless to write a review of the film. However, I recently watched it on TV and even though this film is over 50 years old, it is still one of the finest comedies Hollywood ever produced. I watched the film as I was going to sleep in bed, and needless to say I stayed up to the very end of the movie. I just had to!
The film is a remake by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond of a 1935 French movie, Fanfare d'Amour, from the story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan, which was itself remade in 1951 by German director Kurt Hoffmann as Fanfaren der Liebe. However, both the French and German films were without the gangsters that are an integral part of the plot of Some Like It Hot. Wilder's working title for his film was Fanfares of Love, then Not Tonight, Josephine before he decided on Some Like It Hot as its release title.
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guest-blogs | FanFare Guests
Guest blogger Sarah Crump writes:
Lyn Lesley (Anne Bancroft in her first movie role) is a bar singer at New York's McKinley Hotel. Upset that her boyfriend, pilot Jed Towers (Richard Widmark), disregarded her letter ending their relationship and has shown up to question her motives, they argue. She admits she thinks he’s too cynical and lacks an understanding heart. Meanwhile, elevator operator Eddie (Elisha Cook, Jr.) introduces his shy niece, Nell Forbes (Marilyn Monroe), to guests Peter and Ruth Jones (Jim Backus and Lurene Tuttle), who are in need of a babysitter for their daughter Bunny (Donna Corcoran) while they attend an event in the hotel's banquet hall.
After the Joneses have left, Nell reads Bunny a story and then insists she go to sleep. Nell then wanders around the room putting on Ruth’s negligee, perfume and jewelry. Jed, who has returned to his room, catches sight of Nell across the courtyard. When Nell realizes he is watching her she shuts the blinds but then opens them again. Jed decides to give her room a call, and asks to be invited over. Nell tells him someone is at the door, hangs up the phone and shuts the blinds. Her uncle Eddie is checking in on her and admonishes her for wearing Ruth’s things, upsetting Nell. He soothes her by stating that she can have nice things when she finds another boyfriend to replace the one who was killed. Eddie leaves and Nell decides to invite Jed over.
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guest-blogs | FanFare Guests
Guest blogger JPK writes:
This 1952 exercise in foolishness, directed by Howard Hawks, is constructed well enough to make itself likeable, even charming. The star-studded cast doesn't hurt anything either—Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and Charles Coburn all get their chances to jump around and use juvenile voices, doing their variously silly impressions of youthful teens, while Marilyn Monroe, on the very cusp of becoming an icon, gets by fine with her fallback little-dumb-blonde-lost shtick, cooing and swishing around and showing off body parts (I'm always a little taken aback by her voluptuousness, forever expecting that her reputation for beauty will mean the usual quasi-anorexia of today).
It's the kind of movie I used to love finding on after-school matinees on TV, a confection built out of broad concept, even broader humor, and star turns artfully deployed, which I'm pretty sure adds up simply to testament of Hawks's ability to make a picture. Cary Grant plays Dr. Barnaby Fulton, a genius—the term is bandied about so casually it's drained of the typical pretensions and becomes a kind of equivalent of "dentist"—and an affable chemist who works for a big corporation on "formulas," which in turn produce products like nylons that won't run and popcorn bags that won't crackle. In this case he is working on a fountain-of-youth drug. Well, that's kind of like a popcorn bag that won't crackle.
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Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
June 11, 1922: The "father of the documentary film," Robert Flaherty, releases his greatest achievement, Nanook of the North.
June 6, 1933: The first drive-in theater opens on a 10-acre site on Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Camden, N.J. Now Showing: Wife, Beware.
June 9, 1934: Donald Duck debuts, as a minor character uttering only eight words, in Disney's The Wise Little Hen.
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