Movies Til Dawn

Susan Hayward's portrayal of actress/singer/alcoholic Lillian Roth in the 1955 film "I'll Cry Tomorrow" was a harrowing portrait of a woman pushed into show business by a demanding mother (wonderfully played by the also-tortured Jo Van Fleet) who self-implodes at the moment when she should be enjoying the peak of her fame. The movie was based on Roth's memoir (same title) which was certainly one of the first--if not the first--tell all show-biz/drug abuse books, a genre which might not have been invented if not for Roth's courageous telling of her tale. (Do we applaud her for this? Or blame her?) When Roth appeared on Ralph Edwards "This Is Your Life" in 1954 and talked openly of her struggle with the bottle and "cure" via Alcoholics Anonymous, the show received the largest amount of viewer mail in its history--the subject of addiction and treatment not yet having entered the national vocabulary. I've actually read Roth's boo...

Yes, it's true. Billy Wilder's Wilshire Blvd. cooperative apartment--his home from 1957 until his death in 2002--is up for sale. In fact a deal seems to be pending on it as I write this. His wife, the glammy Audrey, stayed on for another ten years until her death last year and now whoever controls the estate is letting the place go for a very reasonable million bucks and change. Click here to view the listing . And if you want to know why this is of special interest to me, click here to read one of my more obsessive and interesting posts . For years I wondered why the Wilders lived in this relatively modest abode--surrounded, of course, by his incredibly immodest art collection--and now that I've seen the place firsthand (confession: I pretended to be an interested would-be buyer and wasted a very nice real estate agents time one afternoon a few weeks ago), I can honestly say: I have no idea why they chose to live in this relatively modest abode. It's not that it...

In the massive land of cinematic missed opportunities, no movie musical misses quite so sadly as  Andrew L. Stone's 1943 "Stormy Weather".  Given the excess of talent and the brilliance of a half dozen numbers, this "what might have been" scenario joins such heady heartbreaking company as Von Sternberg's unfinished "I Claudius," Von Stroheim's lost second half of "The Wedding March," Kubrick's unmade "Napoleon"...and at least a half a dozen of my own unmade scripts. One of the key shames of the greatest single period of American cultural history (I of course refer to the nineteen-twenties, thirties and forties) is that the endemic racism of the time prevented the visual documentation of so many of the greatest black entertainers. Recently, obscure "soundies" (movies made for jukebox viewing and considered at the time to be nothing if not dispensible) have surfaced and given us a rich visual histor...