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Alfred Sole’s Alice, Sweet Alice opens with young Karen (Brooke Shields) preparing for her first communion. Her mother, Catherine (Linda Miller), and the well-meaning Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich) are so excited for her that they overlook the crazed behavior of the girl’s sister, Alice (Paula E. Sheppard). After starting to wear a yellow raincoat (an obvious nod to Don’t Look Now) and a translucent mask that suggests a smiling albino face decked out in garish makeup, Alice bullies Karen, stealing her clothes and toys and leading her to a warehouse and briefly locking her behind a sliding door.

Throughout these episodes, Sole focuses on crosses, statues, and a creepy Janus-faced doll, emphasizing the violence festering under a righteous community’s nose, as well as a split between tolerance, especially of more modern relationships, and wrath and judgment in the key of the Old Testament. This is...

You can’t beat pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck, who glows as a knockout thieves’ accomplice, tough prison convict and deceitful lover of an incorruptible revivalist preacher-politician. She’s matched by the sassy, naughty Lillian Roth. In this Warner crime-tale-duel between piety and sin, darned if Stanwyck and Roth don’t make the crooked path seem cozy. There’s a girl-girl punch-out and an ill-fated prison break, but just watching Barbara ooze attitude as she saunters through the prison is worth the price of admission. Even more eye-opening is a positively lewd cartoon extra, also from the pre-Code halls of joyful infamy.

Ladies They Talk About

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1933 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 69 min. / Available at Amazon.com / Street Date , 2021 / 21.99

Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Foster, Lyle Talbot, Dorothy Burgess, Lillian Roth, Maude Eburne, Ruth Donnelly, Harold Huber, Mary Gordon, Madame Sul-Te-Wan, Robert Warwick, Etta Moten, Helen Ware.

Cinematography: John F. Seitz

Production Designer:...

(See previous post: “Gay Pride Movie Series Comes to a Close: From Heterosexual Angst to Indonesian Coup.”) Ken Russell's Valentino (1977) is notable for starring ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev as silent era icon Rudolph Valentino, whose sexual orientation, despite countless gay rumors, seems to have been, according to the available evidence, heterosexual. (Valentino's supposed affair with fellow “Latin Lover” Ramon Novarro has no basis in reality.) The female cast is also impressive: Veteran Leslie Caron (Lili, Gigi) as stage and screen star Alla Nazimova, ex-The Mamas & the Papas singer Michelle Phillips as Valentino wife and Nazimova protégée Natacha Rambova, Felicity Kendal as screenwriter/producer June Mathis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), and Carol Kane – lately of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt fame. Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) is notable as one of the greatest musicals ever made. As a 1930s Cabaret presenter – and the Spirit of Germany – Joel Grey was the year's Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner. Liza Minnelli...

Susan Hayward Centennial Week

"this story was filmed on location... inside a woman's soul!"

-I'll Cry Tomorrow's tagline.

by Eric Blume

I’ll Cry Tomorrow, a biopic of singer Lillian Roth, won Susan Hayward the fourth of her five Oscar nominations, in 1955. The film starts with a young Lillian and her stage mother, played by Jo Van Fleet. Ten minutes in, though, Hayward gets a true star entrance belting out “Sing You Sinners” in a lengthy number with only four cuts.

It’s a fun introduction, partially because you try to place yourself in 1955, when part of the excitement (one guesses) was hearing Hayward sing for the first time, and it’s quite a boisterous number. Then Hayward was known mostly as a tragedienne (Hollywood star variety), it must have been a blast for audiences to see Hayward let loose (Hollywood star style) in a big production number...

'The Merry Widow' with Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald and Minna Gombell under the direction of Ernst Lubitsch. Ernst Lubitsch movies: 'The Merry Widow,' 'Ninotchka' (See previous post: “Ernst Lubitsch Best Films: Passé Subtle 'Touch' in Age of Sledgehammer Filmmaking.”) Initially a project for Ramon Novarro – who for quite some time aspired to become an opera singer and who had a pleasant singing voice – The Merry Widow ultimately starred Maurice Chevalier, the hammiest film performer this side of Bob Hope, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler – the list goes on and on. Generally speaking, “hammy” isn't my idea of effective film acting. For that reason, I usually find Chevalier a major handicap to his movies, especially during the early talkie era; he upsets their dramatic (or comedic) balance much like Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese's The Departed or Jerry Lewis in anything (excepting Scorsese's The King of Comedy...

Susan Hayward. Susan Hayward movies: TCM Star of the Month Fiery redhead Susan Hayward it Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Month in Sept. 2015. The five-time Best Actress Oscar nominee – like Ida Lupino, a would-be Bette Davis that only sporadically landed roles to match the verve of her thespian prowess – was initially a minor Warner Bros. contract player who went on to become a Paramount second lead in the early '40s, a Universal leading lady in the late '40s, and a 20th Century Fox star in the early '50s. TCM will be presenting only three Susan Hayward premieres, all from her Fox era. Unfortunately, her Paramount and Universal work – e.g., Among the Living, Sis Hopkins, And Now Tomorrow, The Saxon Charm – which remains mostly unavailable (in quality prints), will remain unavailable this month. Highlights of the evening include: Adam Had Four Sons (1941), a sentimental but surprisingly...

Groucho Marx in 'Duck Soup.' Groucho Marx movies: 'Duck Soup,' 'The Story of Mankind' and romancing Margaret Dumont on TCM Grouch Marx, the bespectacled, (painted) mustached, cigar-chomping Marx brother, is Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” star today, Aug. 14, '15. Marx Brothers fans will be delighted, as TCM is presenting no less than 11 of their comedies, in addition to a brotherly reunion in the 1957 all-star fantasy The Story of Mankind. Non-Marx Brothers fans should be delighted as well – as long as they're fans of Kay Francis, Thelma Todd, Ann Miller, Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, Allan Jones, affectionate, long-tongued giraffes, and/or that great, scene-stealing dowager, Margaret Dumont. Right now, TCM is showing Robert Florey and Joseph Santley's The Cocoanuts (1929), an early talkie notable as the first movie featuring the four Marx Brothers – Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo. Based on their hit Broadway...

Part of a series by David Cairns on forgotten pre-Code films.

Trawling through Hollywood musicals before Gold Diggers of 1933 is a fascinating job. Asides from Lubitsch and the operetta-film, the most salient feature of films like Sunnyside Up (1929) and Follow Thru (1930) is the slenderness of their plots, which are willowy and attenuated in the extreme. Of course one expects musicals to have rather lightweight, simplistic storylines, but these movies extend rudimentary narrative conceits farther than one would think possible, coasting on pure charm.

In today's cinematic world, the art of the musical looks hopelessly difficult: how do you maintain enough story tension to keep the audience hooked, while suspending plot for minutes at a time to indulge in musical numbers which tend to capture the mood of a moment, extending it well past any narrative requirement? In the 30s, they not only did it regularly and effortlessly, they didn't...

Jung talks of the anima and animus as the unconscious's ego--a dark figure of our dreams--for men it's an elusive princess, devouring witch, beautiful maiden asleep in a block of ice; for women a werewolf lover, a dark demon wolf with big eyes all the better to drink your essence with, like Twilight. The animus is best exemplified in the Beauty and the Beast myth. The unassimilated animus is a wild beast, untamed and surly. The assimilated is tamed and 'absorbed' into the female consciousness, i.e. once the animus becomes a prince and not a beast, the woman starts to get bossy and surly herself!

Don't we see this all the time in marriages? Before the marriage the man is in charge, tall and dominating... sometime after the wedding the alchemical change occurs and the woman starts bossing him around, making important decisions. In my essay on the Twilight mythos,...

Jose here.

Today is the anniversary of Susan Hayward's birth (she would've turned 93). Browsing through her filmography it struck me how conflicted I am regarding her acting. Despite her extreme beauty (what did they feed these women back then?) I find her acting slightly hammy sometimes and rather inexpressive on different occasions.

Hayward was nominated for five Best Actress Oscars and perhaps the reason for my slight discontent with her is that in a way, she created the "easy way to an Oscar nod". Let's take a look at the characters that got her Oscar's attention and the reasons why AMPAS couldn't resist to nominate her:

1946 Angelica 'Angie'/'Angel' Evans Conway in Smash-Up, The Story of a Woman

Angelica is a club singer who marries a rising performer, gives up her career and becomes an alcoholic. The plot is loosely based on the life of Dixie Lee, Bing Crosby's first wife.