The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1930, dir. Marcel L’Herbier) (via)

“For the problem is this: we know by what way the assassin gained admission - he entered by the door and hid himself under the bed, awaiting Mademoiselle Stangerson. But how did he leave? How did he escape? If no trap, no secret door, no hiding place, no opening of any sort is found; if the examination of the walls—even to the demolition of the pavilion—does not reveal any passage practicable—not only for a human being, but for any being whatsoever—if the ceiling shows no crack, if the floor hides no underground passage, one must really believe in the Devil.”

-Gaston Leroux, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907)

Tony Curtis & Jack Lemmon on the set of Some Like It Hot (1959, dir. Billy Wilder)

“We hung out a lot. After we made Some Like It Hot, we’d meet at parties, with movie people, dinner and dancing. And I’d always walk up to Jack’s table, tap him on the shoulder, and say, ‘Would you like to dance?’ And he’d get up and we’d waltz through the dance floor. It was too good.”

-Tony Curtis, excerpted from Dallas News interview, July 2002

The Pearl (1929, dir. Henri d’Ursel)

Woman in the Moon, Fritz Lang’s 1929 silent science fiction film about mankind’s first trip to the moon

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Fritz Lang, actress Gerda Maurus  & crew on the set of Woman in the Moon (1929, dir. Fritz Lang), which included a giant backdrop painting of a lunar landscape (click to enlarge) (via)

The Lodger, Alfred Hitchcock’s third silent film (1927) (online here)

“The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in…In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.

I always try first to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between. In writing a screenplay it is essential to, whenever possible, rely more on the visual than on dialogue…To me, one of the cardinal sins for a scriptwriter, when he runs into some difficulty, is to say ‘We can cover that by a line of dialogue.’ Dialogue should simply be a sound among sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”

-Alfred Hitchcock, excerpted from Francois Truffaut’s & Helen G. Scott’s Hitchcock (1967)

Elevator to the Gallows (1958, dir. Louis Malle)

Salvador Dalí sketching Harpo Marx (1937, via).

Dalí, a huge Marx Brothers fan with a particular admiration for Harpo, whom he viewed as “the most surrealist figure in Hollywood”, sent him a harp with barbed wire for strings and forks & spoons for tuning knobs as a Christmas present in 1936. Delighted, Harpo wrote Dalí that he would be “happy to be smeared by you” if the artist ever found himself in Hollywood. The next month Dalí arrived, brushes and easel in hand. The resultant painting is lost, but a monochrome pencil-and-ink study has survived (here).

Dalí wrote an entertaining, if rather implausible, account of this meeting in a 1937 Harper’s Bazaar article:

“I met Harpo for the first time in his garden. He was naked, crowned with roses, and in the center of a veritable forest of harps (he was surrounded by at least five hundred harps). He was caressing, like a new Leda, a dazzling white swan, and feeding it a statue of the Venus de Milo made of cheese, which he grated against the strings of the nearest harp. An almost springlike breeze drew a curious murmur from the harp forest. In Harpo’s pupils glows the same spectral light to be observed in Picasso’s.”

Dalí later wrote a script for a Marx Brothers movie, Giraffes on Horseback Salad, which included, among other things, burning giraffes wearing gas masks & Harpo catching dwarves with a butterfly net. The film was never made. Groucho Marx, that killjoy, claimed to have scuttled the project: “It wouldn’t play.”

Dinner in the desert lit by giraffes on fire, Salvador Dalí’s design for Giraffes on Horseback Salad, his proposed Marx Brothers film (1937)

Sophia Loren & her Mercedes SL (1959, via)

“It is not luck. I don’t believe in luck. It is wanting that counts. I have always wanted. That is the secret of me. Even as a child from a poor family whose mother was not married to my father I wanted and I got. I did not want - ever - for others to get for me. I pay, not just in money, but in suffering and pain and anxiety for what I have achieved.”

Sophia Loren & Eleonora Brown in Two Women (1960, dir. Vittorio de Sica)

“I am basically an unhappy man. Life gives me always the impression of cruelty. I read the newspaper - crimes, murders, divorces, and so on. I do not find evidence of sincerity or solidarity there. I love humanity, I trust humanity, but humanity has a way of disillusioning me. The pictures I direct are nearly always melancholy. This comes from the contrast between my love and my disillusion. I am an optimist. I love life. I seek perfection. If my art seems pessimistic, it is a consequence of my continuing optimism and its disillusion.”

-Vittorio de Sica, New Yorker, June 1957

Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931, dir. Tod Browning) Art direction by Charles D. Hall

“When I am given a new role in a horror film, I have a character to create just as much as if I were playing a straight part. Whether one thinks of films like Dracula as ‘hokum’ or not does not alter the fact; the horror actor must believe in his part. The player who portrays a film monster with his tongue in his cheek is doomed to fail.

In playing Dracula, I have to work myself up into believing that he is real, to ascribe to myself the motives and emotions that such a character would feel. For a time I become Dracula - not merely an actor playing at being a vampire. A good actor will ‘make’ a horror part. He will build up the character until it convinces him and he is carried away by it.

There is another reason why I do not mind being “typed” in eerie thrillers - with few exceptions, there are, among actors, only two types who matter at the box office. They are heroes and villains. The men who play these parts are the only ones whose names you will see in electric lights outside the theater. Obviously you will not find me competing with Clark Gable or Robert Montgomery! Therefore, I have gone to the other extreme in my search for success and public acclaim.”

-Bela Lugosi, Film Weekly, July 1935

Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde (1967, dir. Arthur Penn) (via)

“Never have I felt so close to a character as I felt to Bonnie. She was a yearning, edgy, ambitious southern girl who wanted to get out of wherever she was. I knew everything about wanting to get out, and getting out doesn’t come easy. But with Bonnie there was real tragic irony. She got out only to see that she was heading nowhere and the end was death.

There was a real kind of fierceness I’d seen in Bonnie that I recognized in myself as well. You look at photos of her and see it in her eyes, the set of her jaw. It takes fierceness in life to get ahead. I already knew that. Bonnie was Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof time. She knew the only way to get what she wanted was through her own sheer force of will. She was driven by her own desire. I know that territory - you do whatever it takes. She wanted to be something special, something out of the ordinary.”

-Dunaway, in her autobiography Looking for Gatsby