Harley Wood smokes her first joint (aka “the weed with roots in hell!”) in Marihuana (1935, dir. Dwain Esper) (via). This film clearly subscribes to the “Gateway Drug Theory”, because within 10 minutes of that fateful puff, sweet little Harley has morphed into a depraved, knocked-up, skinny-dipping, orgy-having, heroin-dealing harlot. Let that be a lesson to you (film online here).

Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964, dir Jacques Demy)

”[The Umbrellas of Cherbourg] was a film that existed before it was even shot. I remember that when we heard the music, we were all incredibly moved, even though there were no images yet. Jacques Demy was very demanding but also very shy, and he liked to laugh. I recognized myself completely in his way of working. The making of the film was pretty nonsensical and I found that very attractive: everything seemed extraordinary. And I think that I felt that he regarded me as indispensable.

I realized that cinema had the potential to be like that: meetings between people who want to do very unusual things. If the film hadn’t done well, I think it would have been a different story—it confirmed that the most important thing was to do the things you want to do with people you trust and whose ideas don’t seem too conventional to you. For me, something truly shifted when I worked with Jacques. Something profound happened around the relationship you can have with a film.”

-Deneuve, Film Comment (Nov./Dec. 2008)

Corinne Marchandsings San Toi in Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961, dir. Agnès Varda) (scene here)

On the art of graciously telling someone you don’t want their hideous gift:

(In 1958, Art Roth, a publicist for Levi-Strauss, sent four shirts to Cary Grant as a gift, along with a promise, or threat, to send more should Grant find them to his liking)

CARY GRANT

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA

June 6, 1958

Dear Art Roth:

It’s about time you were thanked for those four Western shirts that greeted my return from another recent trip to Europe: if they had not been buried under the usual mess of accumulated trivia that demanded immediate attention, your kindness would have been acknowledged days ago. Still, I am once again grateful to you, as you must know.

The shirts are, for a conservative such as myself, rather, rather….if you dig me….and I’m not at all sure if I can swagger out in gold-threaded finery. I shall await a braver mood.

My temerity is at a low ebb today, but I venture to ask that you let me know if Levi Strauss ever evolve a line of absolutely plain un-checked, un-metal-threaded, absolutely solid-colored shirts…no matter what the colors: I will rush to the nearest shop.

You have my happy and grateful thought, Art Roth; when are you and I going to meet?

(Signed)

Cary Grant.

(scan of original letter here, via, photo by F.C. Gundlach)

Sieg heiling duck via Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943, dir. Jack Kinney)

Der Fuehrer’s Face, an animated Walt Disney cartoon, was released during WWII as an anti-Nazi propaganda film. The short film, which employs numerous sight gags & songs to mock the German, Italian, & Japanese enemy, stars Donald Duck as a factory worker living under the Nazi Regime, where all are forced to salute the Führer at every turn.

via Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943, dir. Jack Kinney) (online here)

In this parody of life in the Third Reich, Donald Duck is forced to study the finer points of the Nazi’s “Master Race” philosophy while working “48 hours/day” at bayonet-point in an artillery factory. After a nervous breakdown, Donald awakens in the United States to find that it was all a nightmare & kisses a miniature Statue of Liberty, thankful for his American citizenship.

The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, dir. James Sibley Watson) (online here)

“I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.

I looked upon the scene before me with an utter depression of soul. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it - I paused to think - what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?”

-Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher

Katharine Hepburn as Amazon warrior princess Antiope in stage production of The Warrior’s Husband (1932)

“We opened cold at the Morosco Theatre in New York. I had an entrance down a narrow stairway. It was about 20 steps and steep. I had a stag over my shoulder. A tight tunic made of metal links. Beautiful silver leather shin guards showing the leg to a good advantage, and a silver shield and a high silver helmet, and a cape. A great costume. And I was very surefooted. So the fact that the stairs were only about three and a half feet wide with a high narrow step and had no railings did not bother me.

And anyway, I did not mind risking my life for fame.

I leapt down the stairs, three or more steps at a time…rounded the corner…one jump for the last four steps…threw the stag on the ground and landed on one knee. The audience, of course, burst into applause. They could hardly do anything else. I had all but asked for it. But I was unaware. I was just full of the joy of life and opportunity and a wild desire to be absolutely fascinating. At that point in my progress, I was sailing through the air anyway – down a stair – up a stair – no guardrails. Hell, no stair whatsoever…no matter – life – joy – youth. “

-Katharine Hepburn, in her autobiography Me

Katharine Hepburn as Amazon warrior princess Antiope & Colin Keith-Johnston as Theseus in stage production of The Warrior’s Husband (1932) (Corbis)

“Diane Keaton & Woody Allen in Annie Hall” by Al Hirschfeld

Marianne Faithfull on the set of Girl on a Motorcycle (1968, dir. Jack Cardiff) (via)

“I am a Fabulous Beast, and as such, I should only be glimpsed very rarely, through the forest, running away for dear life.”

Sammy Davis Jr. (Manhattan 1959, photo by Burt Glynn)

Q: Your nightclub and theater audiences are predominantly white. Do you think there may be some element of race consciousness in your compulsion to win their approval?

Sammy Davis Jr.: No question about it…Ever since I recognized what prejudice is, I’ve tried to fight it away, and the only weapon I could use was my talent. Away back, when I was learning the business, I had no education, no power, no influence; entertaining was the only way I had to change prejudiced thinking. 

Again in the Army, especially the Army, where I met the most concentrated bunch of haters I ever experienced: On that stage, for the eight months I was in Special Services, that spotlight erased my color. It made the hate leave their faces temporarily. It was as if my talent gave me a pass from their prejudice, if only temporarily. And when I spotted haters in the audiences, I tried to give extra-good performances. I had to get to them, to neutralize them, to make them recognize me…

Q: You said “the most concentrated bunch of haters” you ever met was in the Army…will you give us some idea of what you went through?

SDJ: I met some prejudiced cats—all right? I got pushed and banged around some, got my nose broken twice—all right? But the roughest part wasn’t that; the roughest was the psychological. I had never known one white agent, manager or anybody else who hadn’t been friendly…until the Army, nobody white had ever just looked at me and hated me—and didn’t even know me.

From the day I got into the basic-training center from the first 10 minutes, I started hearing more “nigger” and seeing more sneers and hate looks than I’d ever known all my life. Walked inside the gate, asked a cat sitting on some barracks steps to show me how to get to where I had to go: “Excuse me, buddy, I’m a little lost-” Cat told me, “I’m not your buddy, you black bastard!” When I got assigned a barracks, cats in there—most of them from the South and Southwest—don’t want to sleep nowhere next to me. And there was this one guy elected himself head of the haters. First move he made, he ground his boot heel down on the $150 chronometer watch my dad and Will had borrowed the money to give me as a present. I had treasured that watch.

Man, they did all kinds of things, sick things. One time I remember, I had just done my first show there at the center, and I mean I had entertained them. Well, back in the barracks, suddenly they all acted friendly. Offered me this beer—but it wasn’t beer, man, it was warm piss. Then a cat “accidentally” poured it on me. Well, I went for him, ready to kill. He was a big cat, and I didn’t weigh but 115 pounds. He broke my nose the first punch, but, man, I fought him like a wildcat, and before he beat me unconscious, I broke his nose, too. From then on, nearly as long as I stayed there, maybe every other day I had some knockdown, drag-out fight, until I had scabs on my knuckles! Got my nose broken again. It got so everybody white I saw, I expected to hear “nigger.” Somebody ask me if I want my coffee black, I was ready to fight.

Q: Were all the white soldiers that anti-Negro?

SDJ: No, there was good cats there, too—don’t get me wrong—at least some that didn’t want to get involved, or who didn’t hate Negroes that bad. And I had a sergeant who was one of the finest men I’ll ever meet. Anyway, I met George M. Cohan Jr., and we got an act going with this Women’s Army Corps captain in charge of us. Well, one time some cats from headquarters came and said the captain wanted to see me, and I went with them into a building where they said she was—but there were four other cats waiting instead.

Pushed me into a latrine; some of them held me and the others beat me. They wrote “coon” in white paint across my forehead, and “I’m a nigger” across my chest. Then they ordered me to dance for them. “Dance, Sambo—fast!” Man, I fought to get at them, but they pinned me and punched me in the gut until it looked like I’d have to dance or die. Don’t even like to think about it! Sick cats! I danced until I couldn’t no more. Then—bam! In the gut again—and I had to dance some more, until finally they saw I was ready to pass out. Then they poured turpentine over me, and told me the reason they’d given me “this little lesson”: They’d been watching me “making eyes” at the white WAC captain. She was my boss, man, my commanding officer—and that’s the way I treated her. Didn’t make no difference. Anyway, they finally left me there. I was so sick, I just wanted to crawl into the latrine walls and die, man; I just lay down and cried.

That was when, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to go out and do my act—go out there and smile at people who despised me. But I made myself do it anyhow. I was fighting myself so hard to stay out there that the fighting made me do maybe one of the best shows I ever did in my life. And I’m glad it did, because I discovered something. I saw some of those faces out there grudgingly take on different expressions. I don’t mean for a minute that anybody suddenly started loving me—I didn’t want that from them anyway—but they respected me. It taught me that the way for me to fight, better than with my fists, was with my talent. For the next eight months, going across the country doing my act, I nearly killed myself every show trying to make them respect me. Maybe I still am.

-excerpted from Alex Haley’s Playboy interview with Davis, December 1966