Lon McCallister, Suzanne Flon, Steven Spielberg, THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES
June 16, 2005:
Brief obit: Lon McCallister, the cute, pleasant star of several “family” films of the 1940s, such as Home in Indiana (1944) with Jeanne Crain and June Haver, and The Big Cat (1949) with Peggy Ann Garner, died of heart failure in the Lake Tahoe area, Calif., on June 11.
The boyish McCallister quit acting at age 30 to invest in real estate. He had a long-time relationship with fellow 20th Century-Fox contract player William Eythe, an alcoholic who died of acute hepatitis at age 39 in 1957.
Lon McCallister was 82.
…
Brief obit: French stage and screen actress Suzanne Flon has died following complications from a stomach illness. Flon appeared in dozens of films, almost invariably in supporting roles, including Orson Welles‘ Mr. Arkadin (1955) and Roger Vadim’s Château en Suède / Nutty, Naughty Chateau (1963). She won two Césars as best supporting actress, for L’Été meurtrier / One Deadly Summer (1983) and La Vouivre / The Dragon (1990). Her last film was Fauteuils d’orchestre / Avenue Montaigne (2006).
Suzanne Flon was 87.
June 13, 2005:
Stills of Leni Riefenstahl’s Tiefland to be auctioned in England
The BBC reports that 33 original photographs taken during the shooting of Tiefland (Lowlands), the last feature film directed by Leni Riefenstahl, Adolf Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, go on sale in Shropshire, England, this week.
The photos from Tiefland include those of gypsy children who allegedly had been forced to take part in the shoot and who are supposed to have died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The sale includes a letter Riefenstahl wrote in 1954 — the year the film finally opened in Germany — denying that the children had been sent to Auschwitz.
In October 2002, German authorities dropped a case against the then 100-year-old former filmmaker for falsely claiming that “each and every one” of the gypsies who appeared in the film had survived the war. (Leni Riefenstahl died in September 2003 at the age of 101.)
Filmed in Spain, Tiefland was based on Eugen D’Albert’s opera which itself was taken from Catalan playwright Ángel Guimerá’s Terra Baixa, an indictment against social corruption and tyranny. Jean Cocteau was an ardent admirer of Riefenstahl’s film, comparing its imagery to the work of Breughel. As president of the 1954 Cannes Film Festival, Cocteau insisted that Tiefland be screened at the event.
As for the auction, documents specialist Richard Westwood-Brookes, from Shropshire auctioneers Mullock Madeley, stated that “the present photographs of the gypsy children are extremely moving in their simplicity and tragic beyond belief if the claims against Riefenstahl are true.”
June 11, 2005:
The [London] Guardian reports that the 1972 adult flick Deep Throat, directed by Gerard Damiano and starring Linda Lovelace, was given its first UK cinema screening last night at the Everyman Cinema in North London. In his article, Simon Hattenstone refers to the sexually explicit Deep Throat as “probably the most controversial film of all time.”
That’s quite an overstatement. What about The Birth of a Nation or Last Tango in Paris? And really, what about Damiano’s own The Devil in Miss Jones, not to mention everyone’s family favorite, Debbie Does Dallas?
Surprisingly, Hattenstone repeats the absurd claim that Deep Throat grossed US$600 million, thus becoming the most profitable movie ever made. (The Godfather, for instance, which also came out in 1972 and played in many more theaters than Deep Throat, earned $135 million).
It’s like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ oft-repeated claim that the Oscarcast is watched by 1 billion people around the globe — however baseless your assertion, if you repeat it often enough and it gets printed in enough publications, it becomes true. (Deep Throat, by the way, did not win any Oscars, though it did become the subject of a 2005 documentary, Inside Deep Throat, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.)
June 07, 2005:
“Aren’t you afraid that audiences in some parts of the world may even applaud when they see Americans lying on the ground?” asked the German weekly Der Spiegel to War of the Worlds director Steven Spielberg and star Tom Cruise during an illuminating interview about the raison d’être for the latest film version of H. G. Wells‘ science-fiction classic.
The Spiegel interview also broaches the fact that although War of the Worlds is supposed to depict a worldwide invasion, almost all of the action (including the miraculous planetary rescue) takes place among Americans in the United States.
According to Spielberg, that is so because the film “describes a global catastrophe from a subjective point of view.” The director might have added that plain old economics played a part in the selection of the film’s setting, since most of the War of the Worlds grosses, including ancillary sales, will be generated in the U.S. (By the way, Wells’ original novel, published in 1898, is set in England.)
Additionally, Spielberg is asked about his previous fascination with nice aliens and mean sharks, while Cruise discusses his increasingly outspoken devotion to Scientology, which some in Germany perceive as a dangerous cult.
Note: In the interview, Spielberg says that Orson Welles‘ radio rendition of War of the Worlds took place right after the start of World War II, when “the headlines were dominated by reports on Hitler’s invasion of Poland and Hungary.” Actually, Welles’ broadcast terrified thousands of Americans in October 1938, almost a year before the Sept. 1939 invasion of Poland. (Germany invaded Hungary near the end of the war, in 1944.)
Comments
Leave a Reply
NOTE:
All comments are moderated and may take some time before they are posted. Different views and opinions are welcome, but courtesy is imperative. Rude/crass/bigoted comments and name-calling of any sort will be immediately deleted.
Also, please be aware that the Alternative Film Guide has no contact information for the talent mentioned in this blog and no information pertaining to or access to distributors'/producers' film prints.
