I’m sure no one would call this movie a fun watch, but it was incredibly rough as a middle school teacher to watch and recognize the bullying and shaming that happens in this movie. I seriously considered walking out, and I never walk out of movies.
I don’t mean that this is a poorly made film. It’s very well made, and the performances all feel real- but more than a little PTSD triggering for me.
Destry Rides Again
Jimmy Stewart at his Jimmy Stewartest. A very enjoyable ride. Also: I’d never seen this before, so I had no idea how much Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles was channeling Marlene Dietrich’s Frenchy. Mel Brooks got some very delayed laughter out of me.
I’m making sure I’ve seen at least one thing for every person or group represented by a motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. According to my janky spreadsheet I hit a milestone yesterday with Betty Furness: 75% viewed! But there’s a catch: I’m filling in the gaps in order, and if you look only at what I’ve consecutively completed I’m only about 15.6 percent done.
The red part is what’s done and consecutive. It looks like a long way to go, but it’s not as bad as it looks since for every star left to do I have three already done. It’s taken me 160 days to get this far. At that rate I’ll finish around May of 2028, but I don’t think that’s a very accurate predictor. Vine has a lot of old silent stars on it, and they don’t overlap much. If I keep up my current watch rate I could finish as early as April of 2028!
I could have gone my whole life without seeing Fred Astaire in blackface.
Love & marriage in old movies is wild. “I met you three days ago. I love you! Let’s get married. Wait- you’re engaged to someone else? I guess I’ll marry this other guy. But now you’re not engaged anymore? Then I’ll marry you, and the guy I was engaged to will sing to celebrate our love!” Also: Rogers and Astaire never kiss. They often ALMOST kiss, but they never actually do it. Apparently this was a thing.
Betty Furness (1533 Vine Street, plus a television star at 6675 Hollywood Boulevard) plays Margaret, the woman who seems fine with her wedding being cancelled because her fiancee thought his pants needed cuffs. Furness move from acting into being a spokesperson for Westinghouse. That led to her becoming a consumer advocate, and then a reporter.
Sneaking in a last movie of 2025 to wrap up my “Fake posters for every movie I see in 2025” project. My letterboxd list says I’ve seen 254, but my fake poster count is 258 so I’m missing something somewhere.
What a great movie to end the year. It’s hilarious. Also: I never got why people were so enthralled by Marilyn Monroe. I get it.
Pat O’Brien (1531 Vine Street) plays a cop who manages to let a lot of people get shot. He was a very popular actor who appeared in over 100 films.
My LAST FAKE POSTER is… pretty good. Not a favorite, but an acceptable end to the project.
I guess I should do some sort of “wrap-up/what’s next” post tomorrow so that all my imaginary fans aren’t left guessing about my next project.
This is Cecil B. DeMille’s last silent movie, and it is weird and unintentionally hilarious. A student forms an underground atheist society at her school, which is apparently a crime.
I guess this was before people had free speech.
When the student body president brings a mob to disrupt a society meeting, a girl is killed. Then they go to prison (well, prison-like reform school), where they find love and she finds religion.
The Godless Society has an excellent graphic department. Check this out:
Lina Basquette (1529 Vine Street) is the Godless Girl, who was loosely based on a real person. Basquette had quite a life. She had been married to Sam Warner (co-founder of Warner Bros.), and the rest of the family was upset because the Warners were Jewish and Basquette was Roman Catholic. When Sam died, Lina was pressured by Harry Warner to give up custody of her daughter so the child would be raised Jewish. The custody battle effectively blacklisted Basquette for a time. In the late 1930s she was flown to Germany meet with a German film studio and several Nazis, including Hitler. She claimed she kicked Hitler in the crotch when he hit on her, and that Hitler didn’t stop pestering her until she told him her grandfather was Jewish.
And now, the fake poster. It’s hard to find fun movies with “God” or “Godless” in the title, so I went with “Girl.”
This is John Ford’s first full length film, and he made it through trickery. He was supposed to shoot a two-reeler, but pretended some of the film was damaged during shooting so they’d give him more stock.
This was not Harry Carey’s (1521 Vine Street) first appearance as Cheyenne Harry. He first play the character a decade earlier, and played him in dozens of movies. When movies went to sound he was too old to play leads, but he was a popular character actor for decades.
I watched a VHS rip of this from the Internet Archive. I only watched Abbott & Costello if it was the only thing on TV when I was a kid, so the picture quality felt right.
The story was the same structure I remembered: Someone needs to do an unpleasant/scary/dangerous thing, and Abbott browbeats Costello into doing it. And the Andrews sisters show up to sing a couple of songs.
The best part of this movie is Joan Davis (1521 Vine Street). She’s got great timing and was a gifted physical comedian. I need to find more of her stuff.
Today’s fake poster is brought to you by the word “that.”
Not really a battle of the sexes; more of a dumb husband deciding to leave his wife for a gold digger. Not great.
Belle Bennett started as a child performer in the circus, but by this time she had been typecast as “the mother.” She died of cancer at 41, four years after this movie was released.
Ooooh! There was a movie this year with “Battle” in the title and a poster that’s not too hard to mimic!
I watched this movie a month ago but forgot to do the review & poster thing for it- probably because I didn’t care for it.
The plot: a women’s horticultural college named Mar Brynn (gee, where did they get that name?) decides to boost their flagging enrollment by forbidding frat boys from Quinceton (gee, where did they get that name?) from coming on campus. Luckily for the Quinceton boys, they just did a drag show on campus, so they send Bob, one of their members, in drag to infiltrate the school. A boy acting like a girl? CRAZY! Then the hi-jinks start, and don’t end until the school puts on a big musical number and the boy and the lead girl fall in love. Along the way, Jim Rockford’s dad tries to hook up with the boy while he’s cross-dressing, and the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island carries a small plant.
Frances Langford (1500 Vine Street) is Virginia, the girl Bob falls for. She was a popular singer who also did a ton of USO shows with Bob Hope. I wish I’d seen her in a better film.
And I wasted a good original poster on this thing.
Jimmy Cagney sure made a lot of tough guy action comedies.
Alice White (1511 Vine Street) plays the bad woman trying to cheat on her boyfriend with Cagney. White’s real life sounds like it came out of one of these Cagney movies: her career was derailed when she and her boyfriend were accused of hiring someone to beat up her ex. She ended up leaving acting and becoming a secretary. It sounds like she didn’t miss it; her quote at MUBI on her filmography page is “I wouldn’t be a movie star again for all the tea in China.”
What do you get when a movie has very few available decent images and the title contains a word from a movie with a very simple poster? You get this:
