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.
When the witch is Veronica Lake, of course you marry her.
Here’s some bad luck that messed with the legacy of Fredric March (1620 Vine Street): He was once part of a group at school called the Ku Klux Klan- but it was a student honor society, completely unrelated to the infamous Klan, that was founded before the Klan had a significant presence. The student group changed their name when the bad Klan gained notoriety, but when the original name was discovered people thought March had been racist. In fact, March worked with the NAACP and other civil rights organizations for a half century.
Witches? Significant trees? Maryland? Today’s fake poster was practically begging to be made.
If you’ve ever wanted to waste an hour watching a lifeless story about a woman raising chickens at the end of World War One, then this is the movie for you!
Eugene O’Brien (1620 Vine St) plays Major Baldwin, who pretends he isn’t a soldier so he can more easily talk to the locals. Everyone hates him for not being a soldier, so that didn’t work.
There are very few images for this movie online, so I went with the simple and obvious choice. Fun fact: this is the first one of these posters to include horrible blackface. Not that there’s good blackface.
If a mysterious car throws a bag of money into your car, just take it to the police and say you found it. When no one claims it, it’ll be yours. Seems a lot easier than murder and stuff.
Also: Mulholland Drive has barely changed in 75 years. While I was watching them drive I kept thinking “I’ve been there on my bike!”
Lizabeth Scott (1624 Vine Street) is the casual femme fatale. No planning here; just a lot of “I guess I’ll fix this with murder.”
And now, the fake poster. It’s weird and stretchy because the original is weird and stretchy.
Alice Lake
Alice Lake was often the female lead in Fatty Arbuckle shorts. I watched her in “Good Night, Nurse!,” where she played the important role of “Crazy Lady.” Her star is sometimes listed at 1624 Vine Street, and other times at 1620 Vine Street. I understand the confusion, since street number order on that block is really weird. If you look on Google Maps the street numbers overlap and flip around.
It’s like film noir, but with oversaturated color and a truly nonsense storyline featuring two sisters: one who works for a man trying to become mayor and clean up the town, and one who is a kleptomaniac just out of prison. And there’s a weird love quadrangle thing going on. And Chekov’s speargun.
One thing is sure- Arlene Dahl (1624 Vine St) worked all the angles to wring as much cash as she could out of this gig. Besides whatever she got for acting, there was a line in the credits that said “Arlene Dahl’s lingerie by Arlene Dahl Fashions.” and then there’s this:
Two fake posters based on beach movies in a row. One more and I have to change my name to Moondoggie.
