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.
More saccharine than I expected, but far less saccharine than you’d think from the trailer’s use of Ooh La La by The Faces. Strong performances all around, but it never quite pulled me in.
I’m way behind in my fake poster for real movie based on real poster for other movie project, so I’m starting to lean in to the simpler ones. At this rate my last one will be a remake of the advance poster for Ant-Man.
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.
