Category: Golden Age Hollywood
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The Beauty of Your Youth: Clara Bow Receives a Kindness.
A while back I wrote of one tragic sex zombie, and referred to Clara Bow as having written the script of that now all-too-familiar scenario: Girl from unsettled family with ambitious/crazy mother and absent/worse father ends up in Hollywood and ignites the screen. She becomes the hot ticket in town, going through the A-list men like […]
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A Star is Born, Again and Again
Oh, autumn. I could howl from dread of winter’s approach. Evenings pull in as summer’s romantic dreams fade to sepia, then fall like brittle lace down to earth. Here in Manhattan it’s the season of tourists and torch songs, of ties worn but loosened in the lingering heat of the subway. Of stilettoed boots beating […]
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Monroe: Some Kind of Mirror
In just over a decade, she worked with the greatest directors in Golden Age Hollywood: Huston, Wilder, Cukor, and Hawks. Moviegoers paid $200,000,000 to watch her project her trademark combination of atomic-age sexuality and childlike, vulnerable astuteness. She was born into an orphan’s chaos and lived the shadowy Los Angelean life of a Raymond Chandler […]
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The Life of a Sex Zombie
Veronica Lake was in my living room yesterday morning, poised and bored, with the lissome form of a young dancer and the dead eyes of. . .well, the eyes of someone who’s seen Veronica Lake’s future. Which wouldn’t be a cheery vision. In the watchful coolness of this siren’s gaze, you’d be right to sense […]
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Judy Garland: The Blue Bird Has Flown
As a kid I watched her early movies—the cheesy faux-America Andy Hardy ones—on an old TV I stole from the attic. I had a special routine for watching Judy Garland (June 10, 1922-June 22, 1969): lying on my bed, propped up on my elbows and peeling a McIntosh apple with the rusted bean peeler from […]
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Twentieth Century Tweets: The Hollywood Telegram, Part I
You wouldn’t think, at first glance, that Albert Brooks and Cary Grant were soul mates. Cary Grant was the epitome of urbanity and screwball aplomb, and has been stated by no less than David Thomson to be the best film actor of the 20th Century. Brooks is a poodle-haired multi-talent with the demeanor of an […]
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The Great and Powerful Roz
Just now, while flicking Jungle Red fingernails through the spammed questions I receive for this blog, I noticed the sort of query I usually relish (since it would lead us straight to Kenneth Anger territory– I am worryingly familiar with that dirty turf). The question was: “Could you tell me more about classic Hollywood’s grubby underbelly?” Why […]
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To Hell with God Damned “L’Amour” (A Letter from Noel Coward)
By 1956, Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich had been friends for over two decades. One day, Coward received a letter from his old pal in which she lay out her broken heart and told a tale of humiliation. What should she do? How could she go on? Immediately, the playwright sat down to write an […]
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Another City, Another Life. . .
Since reading an Economist’s report on the competitiveness of global cities, I’ve been thinking about just what makes a city livable, and indeed how one thinks of cities at all. I have lived in many cities and, as a born romantic, never once asked myself the Economist’s practical question–how does this town compete in terms […]
Dana Dunbaugh Burnell 