Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961, dir. Agnès Varda)

Myrna Loy & William Powell in The Thin Man (1934, dir. Woody Van Dyke)

“Would you like a drink?”
“It’s a little early, isn’t it?”
“Too early for a drink?”
“No! Too early for stupid questions! Of course I want a drink!”

“[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer] put me right to work in Manhattan Melodrama, which precipated the demise of John Dillinger, Public Enemy No. 1. FBI agents shot him down outside the Biograph Theatre, in Chicago, after he’d seen the film. Supposedly a Myrna Loy fan, he broke cover to see me. Personally, I suspect the theme of the picture rather than my fatal charms attracted him, but I’ve always felt a little guilty about it, anyway. They filled him full of holes, poor soul.”

-Myrna Loy, in her autobiography Being and Becoming

Myrna Loy was reportedly real-life gangster John Dillinger’s favorite actress and he crept out of hiding to see her latest picture, Manhattan Melodrama (1934). The FBI was tipped off to his presence and Dillinger was shot to death leaving the theater.

Manhattan Melodrama, Loy’s first film with Thin Man co-star William Powell, is definitely worth a watch - as far as “Last Movies Seen Before Getting Plugged by the Feds” go, Dillinger could’ve done a lot worse.

via O Lucky Man! (1973, dir. Lindsay Anderson)

Touché.

“I don’t want to get married. Why spoil a good friend by making a bad husband out of him?”

-Dorothy Sebastian (1927, photo by Clarence Bull)

Alain Delon in Le Samourai (1967, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville)

“There is no solitude greater than a samurai’s, unless perhaps it is that of a tiger in the jungle.”

Christopher Plummer succumbs to Julie Andrews’s aggressively perky charms in The Sound of Music (1965, dir. Robert Wise)

The Silence (1963, dir. Ingmar Bergman)

“When I was nine I played the demon king in Cinderella and it launched me on a long and happy life of being a monster.”

-Boris Karloff(photographed here w/ make-up phenom Jack Pierce)

“There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed—master builders, artists, laborers, clowns, noblemen, priests, and burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.

Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; “eternal values,” “immortality” and “masterpiece” were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.

Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, and his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal.

Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil—or perhaps a saint—out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts. Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.”

—Ingmar Bergman, Four Screenplays

Mary Duncan in City Girl (1930, dir. F.W. Murnau)