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.
When this was two movies, the pacing of the second one always seemed strange, and it’s even stranger as one big movie. The first half spends a huge amount of time building up The Bride and O-Ren Ishi, and their final battle feels earned.
Then intermission hits, and the second half moves at a much slower pace. We learn more about Bill, but it’s almost all from other people talking about him. The final battle is more of a conversation than a fight. I like that in theory, but as it’s done here it feels anti-climactic.
Today’s fake poster is based solely on the other movie also having a rhyming title.
I’m pretty sure plaster doesn’t work like that.
What’s weirder than a 1959 Roger Corman movie about a busboy at a beatnik bar becoming a celebrated artist by murdering people and coating them in plaster? A 1995 nearly shot-for-shot remake starring Anthony Michael Hall and a busload of character actors you’ll recognize. I didn’t watch the remake, but everything in the trailer happened in the original movie (but with less nudity).
Today’s fake poster comes from a different movie that mixes art and murder.
I like this eighty times more than Terry Gilliam’s movie. It’s easily my favorite Czech fantasy story based on a German story about the fictionalized adventures of a real human.
I had to look up how I used to do fake cross-hatching for this poster. It’s not quite right, but I did it last night when I should have been sleeping so I’m calling it good enough.
Today’s fake poster comes from a different movie about people going on crazy adventures.
My friend’s grandfather, Terry Frost, was a character actor who appeared in hundreds of movies from the forties to the sixties. Letterboxd only lists 89, but I’m guessing many of his parts were uncredited. I’d never seen any of his movies. Most of his movies were westerns, but this sci-fi horror flick had the largest part of his that I could find to watch, so I went with it.
It’s exactly what you’d expect from a 40s science fiction b-movie. Low budget, short, full of nonsense science, wild coincidences, and a laboratory with a gorilla for no reason other than mad scientist’s labs are supposed to have gorillas. A perfectly acceptable excuse to sit in the dark and eat popcorn.
Today’s fake poster is the third one I’ve done based on a movie from the seventies’ “classy porn” period. The others are here and here. I picked it mainly because there are very few decent quality images available from this movie. But I did learn how to load alternate characters from a font into Photoshop. I was afraid I’d have to draw them in manually.
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.
The Knives Out movies are fun. The murder mystery is always there, but they never have the same theme. The first was about family, the second about unchecked wealth, and this one about faith. And they mostly play fair- we get all the clues at the same time as Benoit Blanc. I hope they make a hundred more of them.
The inspiration for today’s poster is a movie that I saw a long time ago: two days before this one.
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.
