Movies Til Dawn

Did you know Bette Davis could sing? She could. Sort of. Apropos of my previous posting featuring a behind-the-scenes look at the making of "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?", I am now veering into "Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte" territory. The film was a sort of follow-up to WHTBJ and began production with both Davis and Joan Crawford re-teamed. But Crawford walked after a few days of shooting, claiming illness--yeah, right. Production was shut down and the film was almost abandoned (in which case it would have been a prime candidate for my D.O.A. Film Festival ). Director Robert Aldrich apparently offered the role to, among others, Katherine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck and Vivian Leigh, all of whom passed. (The Leigh pass is curious--she might have been ill at the time as it seems like a great opportunity for her at that sad and late stage of her career). Finally Davis's old Warner Brothers friend Olivia De Havilland bailed things out and the show went on. This cli...

Yes, Ryan Murphy's much-anticipated "The Feud" promises to take us behind the scenes of the legendary "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane", showing us the no-doubt tense and downright nasty dynamic between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. But what was it really like on that fabled set? The answer is "I don't know". But I did find the above studio-sanctioned six-minute behind-the-scenes promo piece for the movie, showing us director Robert Aldrich, viewfinder slung around his neck, putting his all into shooting the picture. Aldrich was always a bold filmmaker and he seems to have reveled in the dark (and often tasteless) script by Lukas Heller. Clearly he had no fear of his two (to me) terrifying diva's and the film still holds up terrifically well. This all started because I interviewed his daughter Adell Aldrich for a doc I'm shooting on the actor Burt Young. Adell was her father's script supervisor on a number of films and this was the ...

Above I've posted part one of a terrific American Masters documentary on Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan called "None Without Sin". The relationship between the playwright and director, who collaborated on "Death Of A Salesman", "All My Sons" and "After The Fall" was symbiotic, close and ultimately deeply strained by Kazan's HUAC testimony. They shared theatrical ambition, working class backgrounds, highly charged political activity and Marilyn Monroe. Yes, MM was actually sleeping with Kazan while she and Miller were still courting. I have to assume that Miller didn't know about this perfidy, but Kazan was such an erotomaniac that Miller would have to have been frigging blind not to sense what was going on. Miller finally made the break from his family and married Marilyn, who figures quite importantly in this doc--she helped defend Miller at the time of his own HUAC testimony (unlike Kazan, he refused to cooperate) before ultimately ...

Above is a very good one-hour documentary portrait of the great director, novelist and turncoat ratfink Elia Kazan. It was shot in 1981 when Kazan was 72 years of age and, while you don't really learn anything new about Kazan (assuming you've read his mountainous autobiography) you do get to hear it in his own words. But the doc is important for another, more important reason; it affords us views of Kazan's three homes--a country spread in Newtown Connecticut, a brownstone on West 68th Street and a beach house (shack is more accurate) in Montauk, Long Island. The film opens at the country spread, with Kazan rowing a boat on a lake that spans fourteen or so acres of his hundred or so acre property. There are no formal gardens, to put it mildly. The place is straight-up country, with thickets of trees, branches, patchy lawn and thorny woods through which we wander with Kazan and the interviewer Michel Ciment. It turns out that there are two houses on the property--one is ...