If you ever have to become a ghost, it seems like the ones in Topper are the most pleasant. You’re basically the Invisible Woman from the Fantastic Four, without the force fields but with bonus intangibility powers.
Constance Bennett spends most of the movie hitting on Roland Young (who, despite what the billing says, is the real star of this movie).
Today’s fake poster is completely based on slant rhyme.
I’ve never watched Laurel & hardy, but based on this movie, this seems to be the formula for most of their comedy:
Can you tell which one I thought was funnier?
William Seiter’s Wikipedia entry says “Seiter earned a reputation for his charming comedies that were moderately paced and kept the laughs coming quietly, rather than resorting to obvious jokes and slapstick.” He must have abandoned that for this movie.
…and now it’s time for another “you’ll only know the reference if you’re a movie poster fanatic” fake poster!
Marilyn Monroe with glasses is so much hotter than Marilyn Monroe without them. However, I did appreciate that her vanity about being seen wearing them explained that a lot of her ditziness and clumsiness was actually symptoms of blindness.
This was one of the first CinemaScope pictures, and you can tell by the opening scene: a five minute performance by a full orchestra that has nothing to do with the story. They obviously thought “Hey, we’ve got a really wide screen- what’s a really wide thing with impressive sound we can film?”
How to Marry a Millionaire was directed by Jean Negulesco. He received his star at 6212 Hollywood Boulevard on February 8, 1960. He was one year older than I am now, so I’m hoping I get my star next year.
Today’s fake poster is based on a slightly different movie about relationships.
Gordon Hollingshead was mainly a producer of short films, so many that he was nominated twenty times for Best Short Subject Academy Awards (and won about a half dozen).
I’ve been using Justwatch to find this to see for this project, and the only Hollingshead thing it listed as available on any streaming service I have was “Why We Fight: Divide and Conquer,” one of Frank Capra’s WWII propaganda films. Pretty straightforward stuff.
No poster for this (it’s a short, not a full film) but I did make this loop:
Of course, after I watched this I looked on youtube and found a ton of shorts he worked on, including this cool one about jazz:
Hollingshead’s star is at 6200 Hollywood Boulevard, which means that in the month I’ve been doing this I’ve gone TWO WHOLE BLOCKS! Eleven more unseen movies (and way more already-seen ones) until I get to Hollywood & Vine!
A classic “You know who should be in charge of this Arabic country? The British” film. Lots of macho men and kept women.
I went through three different sources for this before I found a decent free print.
Valentino’s popularity was dropping when this came out, but then he died on the press tour and this movie became huge. He has a great face, but he looks better when you don’t see the rest of his head.
Bonus: there’s a pretty big part for Karl Dane– much larger than the film I specifically watched to see him.
Today’s fake poster is from another movie that uses the “[blank] of the [blank]” format.
Before I saw this I read the title and thought this was a war movie. I never thought it would be about a light and bubbly Bette Davis with a brain tumor.
Humphrey Bogart is in this, and I was halfway through the movie before I realized he was doing an Irish accent.
Herbert Rawlinson was a lead actor in silent movies who became a character actor when sound appeared. He has a pretty small part in this as a doctor who finds a doctor who can handle brains better than himself. He’s my last missing star at 6150 Hollywood Boulevard. On to 6166!
This is another “I think this poster’s pretty funny if you know the sources (but you probably don’t)” poster.
Apparently the concept of “No one will harm me- I’m an American!” has been around for a while.
Jeanie MacPherson wrote this, and she never met a coincidence she didn’t like. Angela (Mary Pickford) has two people courting her in America, who go to fight on opposite sides in WWI Europe. The Angela gets a letter from an aunt in France asking her to come take care of her. When she gets to France, one suitor is part of an army unit taking over the aunt’s house, and the other just happens to be leading the opposing force.
Also: one guy is fighting to free France, and has been nothing but a gentleman to Angela. The other is fighting to take over the country, and when he’s reunited with Angela he doesn’t recognize her and tries to rape her. Naturally, she ends up picking the would-be rapist. So weird.
Today’s fake poster is only roughly similar in layout, but it was fun to draw all the dripping blood in the title mockup.
Breezy fun for a movie with multiple murders. Something about young James Cagney reminds me of Malcolm McDowell.
Roy Del Ruth directed a ton of films, including a lot of musicals. He was the second highest paid director of the 1930s. His second-to-last film was the classic film “The Alligator People.“
What does today’s fake poster have to do with this movie? Not much!
This is the story of three women who live to have fun. Sometimes that means they steal each others lovers, but that’s never more than a slight annoyance. The story constantly changes into whatever requires them to stand around in their underwear.
…and the word the Greeks had was apparently hetaira.
Ina Claire plays Jane, the wildest of the three. In her first scene she hits on a stranger and convinces him to pay her bar tab (that’s somewhere around $900 in 2025 dollars). One of her signature subtle moves is to accidentally lose her dress.
In the 1920s she was popular enough to have a recognizable signature hairstyle.
Today’s fake poster started with me trying to find another movie with a title of similar length. I don’t know if anyone will recognize it without seeing the original, but I think it works pretty well!
This movie has an all-female cast, is over two hours long, and still somehow never manages to have a single conversation that isn’t centered around men. The message of the movie: if you love your husband, don’t mess things up by complaining about a little cheating.
Also: this movie is in black and white, except for a shift to color in the middle that probably would have seemed much cooler if The Wizard of Oz hadn’t come out two weeks before this.
Mary Boland’s acting niche was apparently “older woman who takes young lovers.” She has a pretty hefty part in this as Countess DeLave, a woman who helps the lead character find the strength to give up her pride and fight to win back her cheating husband. Girl power, I guess!
Today’s fake poster is completely based on the title of the movie being two words, with the first one being “the.”
