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...

The below is one of the saddest stories I've ever run across in the annals of show-biz. Actually it's pretty fucking sad even without the show-biz angle. First, behold the below video, a wonderful 1963 "Hollywood Backstage" newsreel that covers a party thrown by Jerry Lewis and his then-wife Patti. The theme, "Think Pink", was chosen because Mrs. Lewis was pregnant. Having previously birthed four boys (the Lewis' also adopted a fifth), Jerry was determined to have a little girl. A man who clearly sets out to get what he wants, he designed a splashy Hollywood party that would collectively, I suppose, drum up enough karma to insure that what was inside Patti Lewis's tummy was, indeed, of the feminine persuasion. Or so I suppose the thought process went. Not too much pressure for the wife, right? Jerry even served pink cake and ice cream--topped with caricatures of Jerry, natch. Present at this very groovy event are Steve Allen, Jimmy Durante, Rory...

"You've just had a train wreck, son" intones Jerry Lewis (channeling J.J. Hunsecker?) to a young imitator in a manner so chilling, so deadly, so filled with a cobra's poisonous bile (if cobra's have bile) that I'm not sure the young man has yet to recover. Certainly I haven't. And I'm only watching the video. This lovely video--homemade and probably from about ten years ago--shows a teenager named Ed who volunteers to jump on stage with Jerry and do an imitation of him. Jerry is game. The kid clearly has moxie. But his choice of material--the MDA anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone"--doesn't sit well with Buddy Love. I think the crappiest part of this moment is the gratuitous insult after the teen is dismissed from the stage. And if you listen to his imitation (he gets the first three notes out) he's actually really good. At the tag end of this brief moment of shame, I think I hear the kid in the audience throwing out a Jerry sc...

The critic and historian, Martin Gottfried, in his excellent biography of the demonic Broadway producer Jed Harris, notes that the 1920's were "times of floridity, of vamps with panthers on leashes, of Rudolph Valentino and Bela Lugosi...in the 1920's it was not so odd to view and even live life in purple." This is one of the finest--and spookiest--evocations of any era that I know of, in large part because it looks beyond the usual "gin some and sin some" party-time, Wall Street-booming, Charleston-dancing image that we generally assign to the period--the "Ain't We Got Fun" racoon coats at the Harvard/Yale game bit. Indeed there was much about the 1920's, as reflected in its popular culture, that was exceedingly dark, strangely perverse, masochistic and sadistic to a degree that it may be hard for us to understand today. For in the twenties, the lines between sex and death, booze-fueled fun and booze-fueled collapse, living life on ...

Question: Name the movie director who began his career as a bacteriologist, became a set designer for F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, and directed two groundbreaking end of the silent era/beginning of the sound era works before abandoning his film career to take up anthropology, becoming one of the world's most respected figures in that fascinating field? If you guessed Paul Fejos, you're correct (and something of a geek as well). This fascinating figure's life is worth more than a cursory glance    In addition to his varied and always distinguished careers, Fejos married journalist Inga Arvad, whose sexual resume is fascinating--she "appeared" with Hitler at the Summer Olympics in 1936, then slept with John F. Kennedy in 1941, leading the FBI to begin their file on him. She later married the actor Tim McCoy, if that's your idea of a good time. Below I've posted two clips from Fejos' groundbreaking (and long thought to be lost) film of the gr...