What a beautiful movie.
Deliberate, but not tedious; every frame is there for a reason. I’m sad that most people will watch this on Netflix, because it looks amazing on a real movie screen.
I went for an easy poster today, based on one from a recent movie that has surprising parallels to this movie.
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.
If this movie were made now, the production company would have hired someone to ghostwrite Liev Schreiber’s “man with a dog head” book.
I recently had a wave of fake posters that worked really well. That appears to have passed. This is another “there’s a good idea in there somewhere, I think” poster.
Some clues that this is a pre-Code film:
…and of course the thief gets away.
This was Helen Vinson’s first movie role. She acted for a dozen or so years before retiring. Her star is at 1560 Vine Street.
Today’s poster is based on a very similar film about police corruption.
I wonder if I would have liked Aziz Ansari’s first attempt at directing more than this, but Bill Murray creepiness apparently killed that project. This is pretty mediocre, but Keanu is perfectly cast as a dim-witted angel.
Today’s poster is also mediocre, but I thing the logos for the movie and Lionsgate-as-Nickelodeon work.
I would buy a Flying Wombat from Roland Young.
The most interesting fact I could find about Richard Wallace- and who knows if it’s actually factual- is that he made the jump from shorts to full length films with the help of noted identity chameleon Corrine Griffith.
I kept wanting to call this movie “The Young at Heart,” so this is a good choice for a fake poster.
