Festival of Preservation 2009: Joan Bennett, Michael Redgrave, William Powell, Fay Wray, William Desmond Taylor
Tonight at 7:30 pm at UCLA’s Festival of Preservation you’ll be able to catch a screening of Fritz Lang’s unfairly neglected Secret Beyond the Door (above), a 1947 noirish psychological melodrama starring Joan Bennett as woman married to Michael Redgrave, whom she suspects is out to kill her (possibly for her money).
Unlike Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) and George Cukor’s similarly themed Gaslight (1944), Secret Beyond the Door boasts a highly stylized Gothic feel that makes the viewer feel just as off-kilter as both the heroine and the hero. Stanley Cortez, who also shot Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons, was the cinematographer.
Tomorrow, Sunday, April 5, at 7pm, the Festival of Preservation will feature two rarities from the 1910s: Lena Rivers, a [...]
by Andre Soares | April 4, 2009
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Tags: Amos 'n Andy, Bigamy, Check and Double Check, Classic Movies, Fay Wray, Festival of Preservation, Film Festivals, Film Noir, Film Preservation, Fritz Lang, He Fell in Love with His Wife, Helen Kane, Irene Rich, Joan Bennett, Lena Rivers, Los Angeles Screenings, Michael Redgrave, Musicals, Phillips Holmes, Pointed Heels, Production Code, Secret Beyond the Door, Silent Films, Stanley Cortez, William Desmond Taylor, William Powell
Joseph I. Breen: Anti-Semite?
Thomas Doherty in The Forward:
"’These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence,’ fumed Joseph I. Breen in a letter to the Rev. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., editor of the Jesuit weekly America. The year was 1932, and the hot-tempered Irish Catholic, lately summoned to Hollywood, Calif., by motion picture czar Will H. Hays to convert a reprobate medium, was raging at the moguls who blocked his missionary work. ‘People whose daily morals would not be tolerated in the toilet of a pest house hold the good jobs out here and wax fat on it,’ he marveled. ‘Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the scum [...]
by Andre Soares | December 14, 2007
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Tags: Anti-Semitism, Censorship, Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, Jane Russell, Joseph I. Breen, Production Code, The Outlaw, Thomas Doherty, Wilfrid Parsons
BABY FACE at the 2004 London Film Festival
Long thought lost, the original version of the 1933 Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Baby Face will be screened at the London Film Festival in November.
The Warner Bros. picture was initially released in all its sauciness, but had to be withdrawn shortly thereafter because of vociferous protests against its purported immorality: a woman uses her body, her sensuality, and her determination to ascend the corporate ladder during the Depression — and succeeds admirably.
Bowing to pressure, Warners reedited Baby Face and even redubbed much of the dialogue of one character, who was transformed from the power behind the young woman’s sexual awareness into the film’s moralizing voice.
Directed by unfairly neglected Alfred E. Green, Baby [...]
by Andre Soares | September 10, 2004
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Tags: Alfred E. Green, Baby Face, Barbara Stanwyck, Censorship, Classic Movies, George Brent, London Film Festival, Pre-Code Hollywood, Production Code, Sex
