My project to see at least one representative film for every Walk of Fame star in the film category is now half done. Actually slightly more than half: 51.74% if you go contiguously, covering all of the south half and starting the northwest corner. And if you don’t worry about the stars being connected, I’m 88.52% done! Favorite movie discoveries: All About Eve and Design For Living. Worst movie discoveries: Jungle Bride and Ten Laps to Go.
I watched 25 movies in the last 22 days. Here’s a sentence or two about each of them.
Madam Satan: Walk of Fame watch. The best thing about this is the dress.
Send Help: Works in spite of its ridiculous premise that Rachel McAdams could be unattractive.
Plan 9 From Outer Space: Terrible but earnest.
Arco: Probably a much better movie in the original French. The stunt English voice casting just doesn’t work.
The Heiress: Walk of Fame watch. Another movie that tries to make the Civil War era protagonists more palatable by claiming slaves actually had a pretty good time.
Little Women (1933): Walk of Fame watch. Fun to watch 26 year old Katharine Hepburn as the world’s most adult teenager.
The Nut: Walk of Fame watch. Sort of a silent movie live action Wallace & Gromit with some Mr. Bean thrown in.
Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man: Walk of Fame watch. Should be called The Wolf Man Wants to Die and Spends Less Than Ten Minutes with Frankenstein’s Monster.
Clash of the Wolves: Walk of Fame watch. Any movie that disguises a dog by putting a beard on him AND IT WORKS is okay by me.
Jezebel: Walk of Fame watch. Bette Davis destroys lives by wearing the wrong color dress.
Islands: It was fine, but so unmemorable that I had to look it up to remember what I watched.
Leave Her to Heaven: Walk of Fame watch. Pretty sure Heaven doesn’t want her.
Dancing Sweeties: Walk of Fame watch. Not very interesting story of a couple that gets married minutes after meeting as part of a promotion at a dance hall.
Stormy Waters: Walk of Fame watch. Hey, don’t cheat the captain of the rescue boat or he might have an affair with your wife.
The Magnificent Ambersons: Walk of Fame watch. Orson Welles could direct, but my favorite part was the end credits.
The Beast of Hollow Mountain: MST3K watch. Almost completely a cattle ranch story, with a little dinosaur sprinkled on at the end.
Starcrash: MST3K watch (hey, YouTube kept playing them!). Battle of the perms.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die: Sam Rockwell needs to be in more movies.
The Average Woman: Walk of Fame watch. The Below Average Movie.
Million Dollar Legs: Walk of Fame watch. Best use of W.C. Fields ever.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie: Astounding. Brilliant. I wonder how much more I would have understood if I had watched the series.
4D Man: Monsterdon watch. Why test on safe an available materials when you can do risky experiments on yourself?
The Son-of-a-Gun: Walk of Fame watch. Some decent bits, but not great. The barely watchable print didn’t help.
Wuthering Heights: The script felt like it was written by someone who had the story described to them on the subway. Somehow made sex scenes between two ridiculously beautiful people boring.
Rocco and His Brothers: Walk of Fame watch. One of Rocco’s brothers sucks.
Fifteen of these were part of my “Watch something for every motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame” project. Many of them were not great. I just finished the south half of Vine Street and I’m moving back onto Hollywood Boulevard. I’ve got almost 80% of all the stars, and over 20% of those are contiguous. Contiguous section in red:
I’m not going to make any more individual stars for my blog, but I’ll eventually update my Walk of Fame Letterboxd list.
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.
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!
Also: I’m making a Letterboxd list of all the things I’ve watched for this project.
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.
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:
One of the best things about watching this was Marie Prevost (6201 Hollywood Boulevard). I watched a different, terrible movie with her earlier in the year, and it was refreshing to see her in a role that justified her having a Walk of Fame star.
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.
Today’s fake poster is all about shooting.
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!
