Old Hollywood
Cinema
1900-1979
Nostalgia is a seductive liar - George Wildman Ball
via The Lost Weekend (1945, dir. Billy Wilder) “Don’t wipe it away, Nat. Let me have my little vicious circle. You know, the circle is the perfect geometric figure. No end, no beginning.”

via The Lost Weekend (1945, dir. Billy Wilder)

“Don’t wipe it away, Nat. Let me have my little vicious circle. You know, the circle is the perfect geometric figure. No end, no beginning.”

Max Steiner - Kong Escapes/Finale (via King Kong: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940, dir. Charlie Chaplin) “Had I known of the actual horrors of Nazi concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator. I wanted to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race. The English office at United Artists were against my making an anti-Hitler film - until the war has started.” -Charlie Chaplin, My Life in Pictures (1974)

Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940, dir. Charlie Chaplin)

“Had I known of the actual horrors of Nazi concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator. I wanted to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race. The English office at United Artists were against my making an anti-Hitler film - until the war has started.”

-Charlie Chaplin, My Life in Pictures (1974)

Humphrey Bogart in publicity still for Dead Reckoning (1947, dir. John Cromwell) “Bogart did drink. ‘I think the whole world is three drinks behind,’ he used to say, ‘and it’s high time it caught up.’ On one occasion he and a friend bought two enormous stuffed panda bears and took them as their dates to El Morocco. They sat them in chairs at a table for four and when an ambitious young lady came over and touched Bogart’s bear, he shoved her away. ‘I’m a happily married man,’ he said, ‘and don’t touch my panda.’ The woman brought assault charges against him, and when asked if he was drunk at four o’clock in the morning, he replied, ‘Sure, isn’t everybody?’ (The judge ruled that since the panda was Bogart’s personal property, he could defend it.)” -excerpted from Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Hell’s In It In a 1949 LA Times article about Pandagate, Bogart defended his drunken misbehavior on constitutional grounds: “So we get stiff once in a while. So we have a little fun. What’s wrong with that? This is a free country, isn’t it? I can take my panda any place I want to. And if I wanna buy it a drink, that’s my business.” (TIME magazine’s original 1949 article about the incident can be read here)

Humphrey Bogart in publicity still for Dead Reckoning (1947, dir. John Cromwell)

“Bogart did drink. ‘I think the whole world is three drinks behind,’ he used to say, ‘and it’s high time it caught up.’ On one occasion he and a friend bought two enormous stuffed panda bears and took them as their dates to El Morocco. They sat them in chairs at a table for four and when an ambitious young lady came over and touched Bogart’s bear, he shoved her away. ‘I’m a happily married man,’ he said, ‘and don’t touch my panda.’

The woman brought assault charges against him, and when asked if he was drunk at four o’clock in the morning, he replied, ‘Sure, isn’t everybody?’ (The judge ruled that since the panda was Bogart’s personal property, he could defend it.)”

-excerpted from Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Hell’s In It

In a 1949 LA Times article about Pandagate, Bogart defended his drunken misbehavior on constitutional grounds: “So we get stiff once in a while. So we have a little fun. What’s wrong with that? This is a free country, isn’t it? I can take my panda any place I want to. And if I wanna buy it a drink, that’s my business.”

(TIME magazine’s original 1949 article about the incident can be read here)

Jerry Goldsmith - Love Theme from Chinatown (Chinatown: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

“The score to Chinatown features a highly unorthodox instrumental lineup: one trumpet, four pianos, four harps, two percussionists and a string section. At first glance that looks like the sort of ensemble from which you’d expect to hear a piece of avant-garde classical music, and some parts of the Chinatown score are startlingly modern-sounding. But the film opens with an elegiac yet sensuous trumpet solo that floats freely over a cushion of tolling harps and brooding strings, a “love theme” that evokes the doomed romance of Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, the film’s stars.

Uan Rasey, the celebrated Hollywood studio trumpeter heard on the soundtrack, later told an interviewer that Arthur Morton, Goldsmith’s arranger, ‘told me to play it sexy—but like it’s not good sex!’”

-Terry Teachout, “The Perfect Film Score”, Wall Street Journal (via)

Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944, dir. Howard Hawks) Q. How did the Bacall character in To Have and Have Not develop? Howard Hawks: We discovered that she was a little girl who, when she became insolent, became rather attractive. That was the only way you noticed her, because she could do it with a grin. So I said to Bogey, “We are going to try an interesting thing. You are about the most insolent man on the screen and I’m going to make a girl a little more insolent than you are.” “Well,” he said, “you’re going to have a fat time doing that.” And I said, “No, I’ve got a great advantage because I’m the director. I’ll tell you just one thing: she’s going to walk out on you in every scene.” So as every scene ended, she walked out on him. It was a sex antagonism, that’s what it was, and it made the scenes easy. -excerpted from Howard Hawks: Interviews

Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944, dir. Howard Hawks)

Q. How did the Bacall character in To Have and Have Not develop?

Howard Hawks: We discovered that she was a little girl who, when she became insolent, became rather attractive. That was the only way you noticed her, because she could do it with a grin. So I said to Bogey, “We are going to try an interesting thing. You are about the most insolent man on the screen and I’m going to make a girl a little more insolent than you are.”

“Well,” he said, “you’re going to have a fat time doing that.” And I said, “No, I’ve got a great advantage because I’m the director. I’ll tell you just one thing: she’s going to walk out on you in every scene.” So as every scene ended, she walked out on him. It was a sex antagonism, that’s what it was, and it made the scenes easy.

-excerpted from Howard Hawks: Interviews

Street Angel (1928, dir. Frank Borzage) (via)

Street Angel (1928, dir. Frank Borzage) (via)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick) Q. Did you deliberately try for ambiguity as opposed to a specific meaning for any scene or image? Stanley Kubrick: No, I didn’t have to try for ambiguity; it was inevitable…But it’s the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don’t need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to “explain” them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial “cultural” value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living. Reactions to art are always different because they are always deeply personal. Q. The final scenes of the film seemed more metaphorical than realistic. Will you discuss them — or would that be part of the “road map” you’re trying to avoid? Kubrick: No, I don’t mind discussing it, on the lowest level, that is, straightforward explanation of the plot. You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man’s first baby steps into the universe - a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there’s a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system. When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he’s placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny. That is what happens on the film’s simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself. Q. What are those areas of meaning? Kubrick: They are the areas I prefer not to discuss because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded. -1969, via Stanley Kubrick: Interviews

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

Q. Did you deliberately try for ambiguity as opposed to a specific meaning for any scene or image?

Stanley Kubrick: No, I didn’t have to try for ambiguity; it was inevitable…But it’s the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don’t need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to “explain” them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial “cultural” value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living. Reactions to art are always different because they are always deeply personal.

Q. The final scenes of the film seemed more metaphorical than realistic. Will you discuss them — or would that be part of the “road map” you’re trying to avoid?

Kubrick: No, I don’t mind discussing it, on the lowest level, that is, straightforward explanation of the plot. You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression.

Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man’s first baby steps into the universe - a kind of cosmic burglar alarm.

And finally there’s a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system. When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he’s placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny.

That is what happens on the film’s simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself.

Q. What are those areas of meaning?

Kubrick: They are the areas I prefer not to discuss because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded.

-1969, via Stanley Kubrick: Interviews

Johann Strauss II - The Blue Danube (Reprise) (via 2001: A Space Odyssey: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Q. You have abandoned original film music in your last three films.

Stanley Kubrick: “Exclude a pop music score from what I am about to say. However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time?”

(via Michel Ciment’s Kubrick: The Definitive Edition)

In The Impossible Voyage (1904, dir. Georges Méliès), a group of intrepid explorers fly into outer space in a rocket-train hybrid, only to accidentally fly straight into the yawning mouth of the rising sun (this film, like most of Méliès’s color films, was hand painted by a team of women in a production-line method - the coloring was done frame by frame)

In The Impossible Voyage (1904, dir. Georges Méliès), a group of intrepid explorers fly into outer space in a rocket-train hybrid, only to accidentally fly straight into the yawning mouth of the rising sun (this film, like most of Méliès’s color films, was hand painted by a team of women in a production-line method - the coloring was done frame by frame)

The Impossible Voyage (1904, dir. Georges Méliès) The explorers crash inside the sun, where they fear they will die from the heat. Good thing the flying space train had a giant ice tank!

The Impossible Voyage (1904, dir. Georges Méliès)

The explorers crash inside the sun, where they fear they will die from the heat. Good thing the flying space train had a giant ice tank!

In 1956, the LA Junior Chamber of Commerce hired Vampira & comedian Doodles Weaver to portray the fictional couple “Mr. & Mrs. Droopert” for their eighth annual traffic safety campaign. This picture, in which Vampira’s impressive physique causes Doodles to jaywalk & get hit by a car, is apparently meant to warn the public about the threat posed to traffic safety by sultry goth pedestrians. (via)

In 1956, the LA Junior Chamber of Commerce hired Vampira & comedian Doodles Weaver to portray the fictional couple “Mr. & Mrs. Droopert” for their eighth annual traffic safety campaign.

This picture, in which Vampira’s impressive physique causes Doodles to jaywalk & get hit by a car, is apparently meant to warn the public about the threat posed to traffic safety by sultry goth pedestrians.

(via)

Fredric March in production still from Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931, dir. Rouben Mamoulian) (photo by Gordon Head, via Hollywood Horror: Gothic to Cosmic)

Fredric March in production still from Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931, dir. Rouben Mamoulian)

(photo by Gordon Head, via Hollywood Horror: Gothic to Cosmic)

Rooftop view of the filming of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931, dir. Rouben Mamoulian) & art director Hans Dreier’s studio recreation of the gas-lit streets of Victorian London. (photo by Gordon Head, via Hollywood Movie Stills: The Golden Age)

Rooftop view of the filming of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931, dir. Rouben Mamoulian) & art director Hans Dreier’s studio recreation of the gas-lit streets of Victorian London.

(photo by Gordon Head, via Hollywood Movie Stills: The Golden Age)

Sergio Leone, Eli Wallach, & Clint Eastwood on the set of The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly (1966, dir. Sergio Leone) (via Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone) “I am bringing back the action Western. The cowboy picture has got lost in psychology. There have been too many attempts to explain the motives of both the heroes and the bad men and to make them understandable and acceptable in modern terms. The West was made by violent, uncomplicated men and it is this strength and simplicity that I try to recapture in my pictures.” -Sergio Leone

Sergio Leone, Eli Wallach, & Clint Eastwood on the set of The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly (1966, dir. Sergio Leone) (via Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone)

“I am bringing back the action Western. The cowboy picture has got lost in psychology. There have been too many attempts to explain the motives of both the heroes and the bad men and to make them understandable and acceptable in modern terms. The West was made by violent, uncomplicated men and it is this strength and simplicity that I try to recapture in my pictures.”

-Sergio Leone