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.
I wonder if this was originally written as a play. Almost every scene is shot in the same room from the same angle. It’s supposed to be a murder mystery, but that’s really just an excuse for Raymond Griffith to do his shtick.
Eleven years before this movie, Earle Williams (1560 Vine Street) was voted America’s number one star. A year after it was released, he was dead from pneumonia.
Today’s fake poster is my second James Bond ripoff homage.
Okay, I’ll admit it: sometimes I’m dumb. The whole idea of this movie is that Rex Harrison has fantasies about dealing with his possibly cheating wife, but I didn’t realize they were fantasies until the first one ended. This is even though the camera literally zooms right up to Harrison’s face and into his eye before each vignette.
This movie is a lot of fun if you disregard the sudden turn from the most devoted husband ever to would-be murderer and back over the course of a few hours.
Kurt Kreuger (1560 Vine Street) plays Harrison’s assistant. This is a change from a lot of the roles Kreuger was getting. He was just the right look and age to get cast as a bunch of Nazis, and he wasn’t thrilled about it.
Today’s poster reminds us that what’s mine is yours, and what’s enemy is unfaithfully.
If movies had nutritional value, this would be a bowl of Cap’n Crunch.
…but if they made a movie about Corinne Griffith it would be a steak dinner. She was a real estate tycoon. She married multiple times, and during one divorce proceeding she tried to get out of paying alimony by claiming that Corinne Griffith was dead and she was actually Corinne’s little sister. And later she changed her story and claimed that she was Mary, Corinne’s identical twin, who took over her sister’s life when Corinne unexpectedly died in Mexico. Billy Wilder’s second to last film Fedora was inspired by her story.
A movie made by a very conservative director starring two very conservative actors that says you can’t trust the rich and you can’t stop ordinary people from doing good. I wonder how they’d feel about today’s political climate?
Rod La Rocque (1580 Vine Street) plays Ted Sheldon, the nephew of the richest man in the movie, and the closest thing Gary Cooper has to a romantic rival. In real life he had been a popular silent film star ho transitioned into character roles in talkies, then retired in his fifties. His marriage to fellow silent film star Vilma Banky (who I recently saw in Son of the Sheik) was huge, and they stayed together until his death in 1977.
Today’s fake poster is another “Meet [name of person]” movie, but I doubt anyone will recognize it.
Walk of Fame Progress Report
Depending on how you look at it, I’m either very far along or just getting started. There are 1227 motion picture stars. If you look at contiguous stars, I’ve only completed 142, or about 11.5%. That’s the part in red. But if you don’t worry about them touching, I’ve seen 876, about 71%. And a lot of these old movies cover more than one star, so it should only go faster as I see more stuff. That’s good, because at the rate I’m going this thing is going to take me four years!
Whoever designed the original poster for this sure had fun adding not-very subtle subtext:
Nothing to see here. Just a man named Richard Dix, in chains, turned away from the viewer, with “Hell’s Highway” written across his butt.
Richard Dix (1608 Vine Street) is Duke, a bank robber on a brutal chain gang. He plans an escape, but when Johnny, his brother, gets put in the same gang, Duke decides to stay in to protect him. He doesn’t do a great job.
Anne Baxter thinks she murdered a very creepy Raymond Burr, but isn’t sure because she got blackout drunk on Polynesian Pearl Divers. My favorite part is when she uses a handkerchief over the the mouthpiece of a phone to disguise her voice, and it totally works. It turns out Detective Drebin was right.
Ann Sothern (1600 Vine Street) plays one of Baxter’s roommates. The location of the fictional bar where Burr gets Baxter drunk is actually very close to Sothern’s star. This was filmed right around when she moved from film to television. I’m sure we all remember her best as the voice of the car in My Mother The Car.
Today’s fake poster is the second one I’ve done that’s based on a “classy” adult movie, but the other one is better.
Maybe I should have changed it to blue to match the title.
The hero of this movie is a screenwriter who’s a better detective than the cops, contaminates evidence without consequence, solves the crime, and gets the girl. These days he’d be called a Mary Sue (or maybe a Gary Stu).
It’s not a great movie, but it’s fun to see three of the leads from Dracula in wildly different roles.
Adrienne Ames (1612 Vine Street) plays the main suspect, an actress who was recently divorced from the murder victim. In real life she had already been divorced twice, even though she was only in her early twenties. Her first marriage happened when she was 13 or 14. Gross.
Today’s fake poster isn’t very complex, but it did amuse me.
There’s something funny about making a silent movie based on an opera…
…and it’s funnier when you cast an opera singer as the lead. That’s a little unfair: Geraldine Farrar (1620 Vine Street) was popular enough to have her own version of Swifties.
Today’s poster is based on a different staged music production that was made into a movie.
