Very odd to see the leads of Wuthering Heights in a goofy rom-com. Fun, though!
Binnie Barnes (1501 Vine Street) had a 50 year run on screen. She had dozens of roles, but don’t expect any of those parts to be a frail and fainting weakling. She once said “One picture is just like another to me, as long as I don’t have to be a sweet woman.” Good for her!
Today’s poster is from a movie about a different lady.
One of the best things about this Walk of Fame project is seeing classic actors do things I didn’t know they did. I’ve seen William Powell do a bunch of suave & sophisticated parts, but I’d never seen him do broad physical comedy. Watching him try to fish was a whole new experience.
Before Jack Conway (1500 Vine Street) started directing, he was a silent film actor. Most of his parts were in Westerns, which explains his cowboy outfit in this picture.
Today’s fake poster is based on one for a movie that as far as I can tell has zero connection to this one.
While it’s pretty impressive that this 75 year old movie says “hey, the USA did handle indigenous populations correctly,” it’s also a movie with a very white lead actor in full on red face.
Also: it’s certainly not the fault of the movie, but it is weird that the subtitles for a film about people being forcibly ejected from their land choose to show all the Shoshone dialogue as “SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE.”
Another thing that’s not the fault of the movie: Every time I hear “Devil’s Doorway” I think of Satan’s Alley.
Robert Taylor (1500 Vine Street) looks plain silly in his dark makeup and light eyes, but his actual performance isn’t as stereotypical as you might expect.
OH LOOK A POSTER!
If your whodunit only has one reasonable suspect, it’s not much of a whodunit. Even the characters in the movie know it’s a flimsy story; the lead detective’s method to sole the crime is pretty much “I’ll stand near that guy until he screws up.”
William K. Howard (1500 Vine Street) directed over 50 movies, and at his peak was considered a leading director. Not that you can tell that from this movie. ZING!
Today’s fake poster might make you think of merlot.
Lights of New York is the first “all-talking” picture. Other movies had synchronized sections, but this is the first one that synchronized the whole movie. It’s a pretty terrible movie, but that’s no surprise. Most of the effort probably went into capturing sound, and it was probably very expensive to do multiple takes or camera angles; it’s full of stiff, unbroken scenes.
Helene Costello (1500 Vine Street) is another casualty of the jump from silent films to talkies. She’s buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Calvary Cemetery, one of the oldest cemeteries in Los Angeles. And she wasn’t related to Lou Costello, but he claimed he changed his last name to Costello to honor her.
Today’s fake poster is based on one from a different story of New York.
Things I learned from this movie:
The most interesting part of this movie was seeing how the restoration team dealt with the degraded film stock.
Norma Talmadge (1500 Vine Street) was one of the top silent film stars. Like many other actors, her popularity fell with the rise of talkies. Unlike many others, she had saved a ton of money and was happy to get out of the public eye.
If you’ve ever driven down Talmadge Street in Los Feliz and wondered who it was named after, now you know.
Today’s poster makes a morality tale about drug abuse look like a rom-com.
A fun little caper flick. Does it make sense? No, but everyone in the movie believes it does, and that’s enough to make it work. Jack Elam is a glorious twitchy rag doll of creepiness.
Edward Small (1501 Vine Street- I accidentally did this one early) produced about a billion movies, mostly westerns. There are very few pictures of him online. I guess he was camera shy, but you wouldn’t guess that from his production company’s logo:
Today’s source poster was pretty obscure, but it looked cool so I went for it.
Well, this one’s a stinker. More than once it tries to make asking someone “Did any of this happen by mail? Do you have the correspondence?” seem really exciting. It feels like a particularly dull episode of Dragnet. It also features the lead actor complaining about his little brother’s girlfriend for no reason.
Ricardo Cortez (1500 Vine Street) plays Inspector Bill Davis. He was born Jacob Kranze (or Krantz), but the studio thought he’d sell better as a Latin Lover than a Jewish guy. He had a long career: mostly as a character actor, but he was also the first Sam Spade in the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon. I’m not sure how I landed on this dud to watch him.
Today’s fake poster is all about the inspectors, baby:
Maureen O’Hara and Louis Hayward might be top billed, but this is Lucille Ball’s movie. I really only knew her work from I Love Lucy onward, so it was kind of wild to see her as a sexy burlesque star dancing the hula.
Dance, Girl, Dance was directed by Dorothy Arzner (1500 Vine Street) and HOLY CRAP WAS SHE AWESOME. The first woman in the Director’s Guild of America, the first woman to direct a sound film, and the inventor of the freaking boom mic!
She had a 40 year relationship with choreographer Marion Martin. She tried to keep her private life private, but she never hid who she was.
Today’s fake poster comes from a different Girl movie.
Normally I write a little blurb about the movie and a second blurb about the featured Walk of Fame person, but I don’t think it’s possible to separate these two.
Mae West (1560 Vine Street) isn’t my cup of tea, but she was an undeniable powerhouse. She was a woman in her forties (who didn’t try to hide her age) who wrote her own movies, and and didn’t shy away from sex right as the Hayes Code was cracking down on movie content.
Part of the problem I had with this movie was I kept thinking “She’s just doing a Mae West impression.” She made her self into such an icon that watching her movies now feels like a parody, even though she’s the source.
Today’s fake poster is based completely on both movies having “No” in the title.
