Still: American Silent Motion Picture Photography David S. Shields Release Date: June 19, 2013 The University of Chicago Press Hardcover, 401 pages In the opening pages of his recent book on American silent film photography, Still, David S. Shields estimates that over eighty percent of the silent features produced within the first three decades of filmmaking…
Jack Hunter made a name for himself as “Action Jack,” star of a series of adventure flicks in the 1930s. But by 1942, the world is at war, he’s retired from the screen, and he’s living on a ranch with his fellow survivors from a previous jungle adventure: his wife, Max; her nephew, Tyler, and…
Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 Italian opera La bohème has seen many forms in the century since its first performance in Turin. The story–itself borrowed from Henri Murger’s 1851 collection Scènes de la vie de bohème–has been retold in many forms, with and without the music. It’s been made into films, produced in countless venues featuring storied performers like…
Two decades after burning up the screen with Jean Harlow in Red Dust (1932), Clark Gable returned to the material that had made him one of the preeminent leading men of the 1930s when he starred in Mogambo (1953). This time around, the action–shot on location and brought to life in splendid Technicolor–was moved from Indochina to…
Maria (Olivia de Havilland) is a princess of a small, unnamed European country that has been overtaken by the Nazis. As the war rages on, she and her uncle, Holman (Charles Coburn), have settled into a posh New York apartment, where Maria spends her days reading in relative solitude. Though Holman pressures her to marry…
Sandra Kovak (Mary Astor) is a world-class pianist, playing to adoring fans all over the world. On an impulse (and in a drunken haze), she marries Peter Van Allen (George Brent), not realizing that her divorce from her previous husband was not yet valid. Peter is secretly relieved that the marriage to the demanding Sandra…
You know how sometimes you read something, and then something tangentially related to what you’ve only recently finished reading pops up somewhere, and you think, “My, that’s an odd coincidence?” That was the feeling I had earlier when I caught sight of an LA Times article entitled, “Long-lost early Orson Welles film ‘Too Much Johnson’ recovered.” A…
“If this letter reaches you, believe this – that I love you now as I’ve always loved you. My life can be measured by the moments I’ve had with you and our child. If only you could have shared those moments, if only you could have recognized what was always yours, could have found what…
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