Fun mindless nonsense. Not afraid to go full screwball. Also, apparently Tarantino loves this movie.
Pola Negri was an actor who was also an opera singer. She plays an opera singer in this, but the twist is that she’s playing a bad opera singer. Gotta love someone unafraid to poke fun at themselves.
Today’s poster is all about doubled words. Today’s poster is all about doubled words.
thought I was past the point of laughing at people making silly faces, but Marion Davies made me giggle. This is a “small town girl goes to Hollywood to make it big” movie, and it’s full of references to and cameos of stars who have faded from public memory. At one point Peggy (Davies) gets excited and yells “That’s John Gilbert!”, and I had to look him up to see if he was a real person or made up for the movie (he was real). I did recognize Charlie Chaplin, though.
This movie is a sort-silent film. There’s no recorded dialogue, but it came with a soundtrack record. Trying to keep them synchronized must have been a nightmare for the projectionist.
Much like Mona Barrie and Syncopation, I picked this movie specifically to see a Karl Dane performance, and he’s barely in it. He does a thirty second bit as himself at a luncheon. I probably should have gone with The Red Mill.
Dane is one of those successful actors who had their career killed by sound pictures; He had a thick Dutch accent, and no one could understand him. He looked for other work, but ended up broke. He died from suicide, and only received a proper funeral when MGM was shamed into paying for it.
Today’s poster is all about the people. It’s also my second attempt at reasonable handwriting in a week. I need more practice.
Syncopation needs to pick a lane. It starts out looking like it will be about the evolution of jazz from slave music, then about the parallel struggles of a black boy and a white girl struggling to be accepted as musicians at the start of the swing era, before (mostly) settling in to a story about a couple of white people saving jazz (as white people do in movies).
Mona Barrie has a small part in this movie, which doesn’t seem to surprise Wikipedia. Their page about Barrie says “her lack of a glamorous beauty resulted in her generally being cast in important but secondary roles.” Rude.
Even though her part is small, I made sure to mention her on today’s fake poster.
Priscilla Dean looks like a cross between Drew Barrymore and Tina Fey. She’s easily the best part of this forgettable movie.
I had three movie choices for Raymond Griffith:
I probably should have gone with Hands Up!. It’s a comedy, and he was a famous silent comedian (his nickname: The Man with the Silk Hat). But I’ll try to make it up to you, Raymond. If All Quiet on the Western Front comes up as an option for someone with a larger part, I’ll watch it.
Today’s fake poster is based on a different “Color + Animal” movie.
This is the last star at 6124 Hollywood Boulevard. Next up: 6140!
I haven’t seen Hitchcock’s 1956 self-remake of this, but I sure hope it’s better than this. The best thing in the movie is Peter Lorre; he’s an oily ball of creepy charm.
This movie has Edna Best’s best-known part as a mother/clay pigeon sharpshooter. Her last movie was 1948’s The Iron Curtain, but she was on radio and television through most of the 1950s.
Fun Fact: Edna Best’s star is the first one I’ve been able to identify on google maps! And someone is stepping on it- how rude!
I almost used the poster for the 1956 version for the model of this one, but I thought this was funnier. Certainly harder to lay out!
I wonder how many times Coralie Fargeat has seen this. It’s not the same story as The Substance, but it sure seems to share a lot of style DNA. I bet Lynch saw this, too.
I had somehow never seen a Rock Hudson movie, so naturally the one I did see is the weirdest movie he ever made.
Hey look! A fake poster!
Here’s a rough map of the Walk of Fame and my progress. Yellow is incomplete, red is done.
This map makes it look like I have a lot of stars to cover- and I do – but fewer than you think. It only shows completed sections. I’ve already seen something in almost every section, and almost every movie I watch for this project covers more than one star, so this should speed up as I go. If I really pushed I could probably finish by Christmas.
I will not finish by Christmas.
Well, this isn’t very good. Just over an hour long with probably twenty minutes of not-compelling stock footage, and lots of weak dialogue and stiff performances. One thing I was glad it do not do: it didn’t have any racist “jungle tribes.”
I really only watched this for one thing:
Anita Page had a weird career. She started in Silents, was a co-star with Joan Crawford, and apparently at one point second only to Greta Garbo at MGM. She worked sound movies for about a year and retired, then came back for a film in the sixties (that didn’t get released until 2001!) and retired again, then came back in the late 1990s/early 2000s to make a few low budget shot on video movies.
Jungle Bride is a pre-code film, and has some nudity: about a tenth of a second of exposed breast. The fake poster is based on another shipwreck movie that featured controversial nudity.
A woman falls in love with two men, so they all live together? Where man has sex with a laundry woman so he can have a clean shirt for a date with someone else? Pretty wild for 1933.
Will Hays had nothing to do with this move. He never starred in a movie. He never wrote, directed, or produced a movie. He was a politician and chairman of the Republican National Committee before becoming the first chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. He’s best remembered for the Hays Code, a set of moral rules that films were required to follow. I thought there could be no better way to celebrate him than to watch a film that gleefully breaks a bunch of those rules.
Lucky for us, the Hays Code was abandoned, and no Republicans ever try to censor any one any more.
This fake poster is based on the incredibly clever idea that the opposite of “living” is “dead.”
What if seeing a stranger murder someone made you CRAY-ZEE??? And the only doctor who could help you turns out to be the murderer??? If this happens to you, you’re probably a character in a film noir.
Wikipedia says Lynn Bari “specialized in playing sultry, statuesque man-killers.” She’s more of a “get a man to be a killer” here, but close enough. Her real name is Marjorie Fisher, and I can totally see a parallel world where Marge Fisher specializes in playing the sassy friend to the romantic lead. She worked on at least 113 films over 20 years, so she kept busy.
It’s hard to find posters to mimic for titles as generic as this. I ended up making something that matches the layout of the original, but that’s about it.
Why are all the other characters in this movie smitten with George (Montgomery Clift)? He’s handsome, but he’s a lunkhead. George’s uncle gives him a job where one rule is explicitly given as unbreakable: Don’t date employees. If George had just followed that one rule, everyone ends up happy. Grow up, George.
George is played by Montgomery Clift, who I knew stories about but mostly knew through the Clash song about him. He played a lot of aloof, sensitive men. I won’t get into it here, but he had a rough, short life.
There are only two motion picture Walk of Fame stars at 6104 Hollywood Boulevard. Next up: 6116!
The dumb thinking for today’s poster: This movie is called “A Place in the Sun,” and the sun shines, so…
