Old Hollywood
Cinema
1900-1979
Nostalgia is a seductive liar - George Wildman Ball
Sylvia Sidney in Sabotage (1936, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) (via)

Sylvia Sidney in Sabotage (1936, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) (via)

Ennio Morricone - Algiers, November 1954 (The Battle of Algiers: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) 5

The Conformist (1970, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci) (via)

The Conformist (1970, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci) (via)

Alla Nazimova & Montgomery Clift in publicity still for the Broadway production of The Mother (1939) (via)

Alla Nazimova & Montgomery Clift in publicity still for the Broadway production of The Mother (1939) (via)

Marilyn Monroe & Montgomery Clift on the set of The Misfits (1961, dir. John Huston) (via) Photo by Eve Arnold.

Marilyn Monroe & Montgomery Clift on the set of The Misfits (1961, dir. John Huston) (via)

Photo by Eve Arnold.

Son of Frankenstein (1939, dir. Rowland V. Lee) Expressionistic set design by art director Jack Otterson. (via)

Son of Frankenstein (1939, dir. Rowland V. Lee) Expressionistic set design by art director Jack Otterson.

(via)

Frank Skinner - Monster’s Rampage (Son of Frankenstein: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Elsa Lanchester on the set of Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir. James Whale)  On her maternal instincts: “I held a baby once. It felt like a bag of hot snakes.” (via)

Elsa Lanchester on the set of Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir. James Whale) 

On her maternal instincts:

“I held a baby once. It felt like a bag of hot snakes.”

(via)

Louis Armstrong - I’m In The Mood For Love 

Orson Welles performing the “Broomstick Suspension” magic trick with Lucille Ball during the filming of the I Love Lucy episode, “Lucy Meets Orson Welles” (1956)  “I’ve never had a friend in my life who wanted to see a magic trick, you know. I don’t know anybody who wants to see a magic trick. So I do it professionally; it’s the only way I get to perform. I went once to a birthday party for [MGM boss] Louis B. Mayer with a rabbit in my pocket which I was going to take out of his hat. On came Judy Garland and Danny Kaye and Danny Thomas and everybody you ever heard of and then Al Jolson sang for two hours and my rabbit was peeing all over me, you know. And the dawn was starting to rise over the Hillcrest Country Club as we said goodnight to Louis B. Mayer and nobody’d asked me to do a magic trick. So the rabbit and I went home.” -Welles, in the 1982 documentary The Orson Welles Story

Orson Welles performing the “Broomstick Suspension” magic trick with Lucille Ball during the filming of the I Love Lucy episode, “Lucy Meets Orson Welles” (1956) 

“I’ve never had a friend in my life who wanted to see a magic trick, you know. I don’t know anybody who wants to see a magic trick. So I do it professionally; it’s the only way I get to perform.

I went once to a birthday party for [MGM boss] Louis B. Mayer with a rabbit in my pocket which I was going to take out of his hat. On came Judy Garland and Danny Kaye and Danny Thomas and everybody you ever heard of and then Al Jolson sang for two hours and my rabbit was peeing all over me, you know. And the dawn was starting to rise over the Hillcrest Country Club as we said goodnight to Louis B. Mayer and nobody’d asked me to do a magic trick. So the rabbit and I went home.”

-Welles, in the 1982 documentary The Orson Welles Story

Eva May in The Count of Charolais (1922, dir. Karl Grune) (via)

Eva May in The Count of Charolais (1922, dir. Karl Grune) (via)

Gort escorts Patricia Neal to his space shuttle in The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951, dir. Robert Wise) (via)

Gort escorts Patricia Neal to his space shuttle in The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951, dir. Robert Wise) (via)

Bernard Herrmann - Prelude/Outer Space/Radar (The Day The Earth Stood Still: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

“[Herrmann’s score for the sci-fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still] was another scoring milestone that anticipated the era of electronic music with its then unheard of instrumentation for electric violin, electric bass, two high and low electric theremins, four pianos, four harps and a ‘very strange section of about 30-odd brass.’…What the film needed was an extraterrestrial strangeness, a sense of the bizarre and unsettling; this Herrmann achieved through his wisely sparse electronic soundtrack.

If the music’s impact is lessened today, the reason is not the score itself but the host of inferior imitations its success spawned.”

-excerpted from A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann by Steven Smith

Klaus Kinski on the set of That Most Important Thing: Love (1975) Photo by Jean Gaumy (via)  “I felt this thing coming up in myself, just really physically growing in myself and happening, but it was a jungle, so I couldn’t distinguish things so much. I knew there were, in myself, the souls of millions of people who lived centuries ago - not just people but animals, plants, the elements, things, even, matter - that all of these exist in me. … And through the years it became clearer and clearer, this thing; it started to separate itself. I could make it come when I had to concentrate on, let’s say, a person I had to become - this thing became stronger. And took more of me. In this moment, I let it do it, because I wanted, I had to be this person. And as I was led to doing it, there was then no way back. And the more I tried to do it, the more I hated it. But there was no way back anymore; it was always going farther and farther and farther. Until one day, when I was walking through the streets of Paris, I started crying, because I could look at a man, a woman, a dog, anything, and receive it, anything, everything; there was no difference between physical and psychological. I felt like I was breaking out, breaking up, receiving everything, every moment, even things I did not see. There is no turning back from this. But this danger is the power you have. It is this same power that lets you hold an audience when you are on a stage. Then it is a concentration, the same concentration that in kung fu is used for the kick that kills or to break a table with your hand. It means that you are sure of the power and that you relinquish yourself to it.” -Kinski, quoted in Playboy magazine (November 1985)

Klaus Kinski on the set of That Most Important Thing: Love (1975) Photo by Jean Gaumy (via) 

“I felt this thing coming up in myself, just really physically growing in myself and happening, but it was a jungle, so I couldn’t distinguish things so much. I knew there were, in myself, the souls of millions of people who lived centuries ago - not just people but animals, plants, the elements, things, even, matter - that all of these exist in me.

… And through the years it became clearer and clearer, this thing; it started to separate itself. I could make it come when I had to concentrate on, let’s say, a person I had to become - this thing became stronger. And took more of me. In this moment, I let it do it, because I wanted, I had to be this person. And as I was led to doing it, there was then no way back. And the more I tried to do it, the more I hated it. But there was no way back anymore; it was always going farther and farther and farther.

Until one day, when I was walking through the streets of Paris, I started crying, because I could look at a man, a woman, a dog, anything, and receive it, anything, everything; there was no difference between physical and psychological. I felt like I was breaking out, breaking up, receiving everything, every moment, even things I did not see. There is no turning back from this.

But this danger is the power you have. It is this same power that lets you hold an audience when you are on a stage. Then it is a concentration, the same concentration that in kung fu is used for the kick that kills or to break a table with your hand. It means that you are sure of the power and that you relinquish yourself to it.”

-Kinski, quoted in Playboy magazine (November 1985)

Klaus Kinski & Isabelle Adjani in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1978, dir. Werner Herzog) (via) “I never thought of my film Nosferatu as being a remake. It stands on its own feet as an entirely new version..It is a very clear declaration of my connection to the very best of German cinema, and though I have never truly functioned in terms of genres, I did appreciate that making a film like Nosferatu meant understanding the basic principles about the vampire genre, and then asking, ‘How am I going to modify and develop this genre further?’ The images found in vampire films have a quality beyond our usual experiences in the cinema. For me genre means an intensive, almost dreamlike, stylization on screen, and I feel the vampire genre is one of the richest and most fertile cinema has to offer. There is fantasy, hallucination, dreams and nightmares, visions, fear and, of course, mythology. What I really sought to do was connect my Nosferatu with our true German cultural heritage, the silent films of the Weimar era, and [F.W.] Murnau’s work in particular.”  -Werner Herzog, quoted in Herzog on Herzog

Klaus Kinski & Isabelle Adjani in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1978, dir. Werner Herzog) (via)

“I never thought of my film Nosferatu as being a remake. It stands on its own feet as an entirely new version..It is a very clear declaration of my connection to the very best of German cinema, and though I have never truly functioned in terms of genres, I did appreciate that making a film like Nosferatu meant understanding the basic principles about the vampire genre, and then asking, ‘How am I going to modify and develop this genre further?’

The images found in vampire films have a quality beyond our usual experiences in the cinema. For me genre means an intensive, almost dreamlike, stylization on screen, and I feel the vampire genre is one of the richest and most fertile cinema has to offer. There is fantasy, hallucination, dreams and nightmares, visions, fear and, of course, mythology. What I really sought to do was connect my Nosferatu with our true German cultural heritage, the silent films of the Weimar era, and [F.W.] Murnau’s work in particular.” 

-Werner Herzog, quoted in Herzog on Herzog