Old Hollywood

Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita (1960, dir. Federico Fellini) (via...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:08:00 -0500

Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita (1960, dir. Federico Fellini) (via reelclassics)

Nino Rota - Blues: La Dolce Vita Dei Nobili (via La Dolce Vita:...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:01:11 -0500

Nino Rota - Blues: La Dolce Vita Dei Nobili (via La Dolce Vita: Original Motion Picture Score) (1960)

Anne Bancroft in The Graduate (1967, dir. Mike Nichols) (via...

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:08:00 -0500

Anne Bancroft in The Graduate (1967, dir. Mike Nichols) (via nytimes.com/corbis)

On playing Mrs. Robinson:

“Film critics said I gave a voice to the fear we all have: that we will reach a point in our lives, look around, and realize that all the things we said we’d do and become will never come to be. And that we’re ordinary.”

Cary Grant & Rosalind Russell in publicity still for His...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:34:00 -0500

Cary Grant & Rosalind Russell in publicity still for His Girl Friday (1940, dir. Howard Hawks) (via drmacro) (full movie on Hulu here, on Internet Archive here)

“Now, get this, you double-crossing chimpanzee:

There ain’t going to be any interview and there ain’t going to be any story. And that certified check of yours is leaving with me in twenty minutes. I wouldn’t cover the burning of Rome for you if they were just lighting it up. If I ever lay my two eyes on you again, I’m gonna walk right up to you and hammer on that monkeyed skull of yours ‘til it rings like a Chinese gong!”

Still from Hell’s Angels (1930, dir. Howard Hughes) (via...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:00:37 -0500

Still from Hell’s Angels (1930, dir. Howard Hughes) (via filmreference.com)

Stills via Jabberwocky (1971, dir. Jan Švankmajer), based on the...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:00:00 -0500

Stills via Jabberwocky (1971, dir. Jan Švankmajer), based on the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.

“Given the chance, what young girl wouldn’t happily...

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:47:00 -0500

“Given the chance, what young girl wouldn’t happily exchange a plain face for a lovely one? What girl could refuse the opportunity to be beautiful? For want of a better estimate, let’s call it the year 2000. At any rate, imagine a time in the future when science has developed a means of giving everyone the face and body he dreams of. It may not happen tomorrow — but it happens now, in the Twilight Zone.”

-Rod Serling, “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”, The Twilight Zone (online here)

Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966,...

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:02:15 -0500

Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966, dir. Mike Nichols)

“I hope that was an empty bottle, George! You can’t afford to waste good liquor. Not on your salary, not on an associate professor’s salary!”

Frances Day (via getty) Mrs. Johnson was a woman in her 70s, and...

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:41:00 -0500

Frances Day (via getty)

Mrs. Johnson was a woman in her 70s, and a figure of absolute mystery, the subject of intense and feverish local gossip. Yet she blithely ignored every question about her past.

Dressed carelessly and somewhat drably - “like the proverbial OAP” [Old Age Pensioner], according to one of her neighbours - she nevertheless had an indefinable quality that compelled attention.

McBrien, who regarded her as “a great character”, knew her to be fond of a glass or two of bubbly, a flutter on the gee-gees and the finest haute cuisine.

What he did not know was that this reclusive figure had once been one of the most legendary and celebrated stars of her age and the idol of millions of film fans and theatregoers.

-via Michael Thornton’s Frances Day profile, The Siren Who Disappeared

The Fairies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935, dir. William...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:38:00 -0500

The Fairies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935, dir. William Dieterle & Max Reinhardt) Additional stills here.

The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve;

lovers to bed;

‘tis almost fairy time.

“She was amoral. If she saw a stagehand with tight pants...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:25:22 -0500

“She was amoral. If she saw a stagehand with tight pants and a muscular build, she’d invite him into her dressing room.”

-MGM executive/busybody

“I find men terribly exciting, and any girl who says she doesn’t is an anemic old maid, a streetwalker, or a saint.”

-Lana Turner (via drmacro)

John Garfield, Lana Turner, and the not long for this...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:25:00 -0500

John Garfield, Lana Turner, and the not long for this world Cecil Kellaway as Turner’s husband in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, dir. Tay Garnett) (via drmacro)

Like death row, for example:

“With my brains and your looks, we could go places.”

“I don’t know what people expect when they meet me. They...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:05:00 -0500

“I don’t know what people expect when they meet me. They seem to be afraid that I’m going to piss in the potted palm and slap them on the ass.”

-Marlon Brando (via drmacro)

Hurd Hatfield in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945, dir. Albert...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:16:00 -0500

Hurd Hatfield in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945, dir. Albert Lewin)

“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June…If it was only the other way! If it was I who were to be always young, and the picture that were to grow old! For this—for this—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give!”

-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Stills via 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:15:00 -0500

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

Interviewer: Why does 2001 seem so affirmative and religious a film?

Stanley Kubrick: The God concept is at the heart of this film. It’s unavoidable that it would be, once you believe that the universe is seething with advanced forms of intelligent life. Just think about it for a moment. There are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe. Each star is a sun, like our own, probably with planets around them. The evolution of life, it is widely believed, comes as an inevitable consequence of a certain amount of time on a planet in a stable orbit which is not too hot or too cold. First comes chemical evolution — chance rearrangements of basic matter, then biological evolution.

Think of the kind of life that may have evolved on those planets over the millennia, and think, too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization — a period that is less than a single grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass. At a time when man’s distant evolutionary ancestors were just crawling out of the primordial ooze, there must have been civilizations in the universe sending out their starships to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos and conquering all the secrets of nature. Such cosmic intelligences, growing in knowledge over the aeons, would be as far removed from man as we are from the ants. They could be in instantaneous telepathic communication throughout the universe; they might have achieved total mastery over matter so that they can telekinetically transport themselves instantly across billions of light years of space; in their ultimate form they might shed the corporeal shell entirely and exist as a disembodied immortal consciousness throughout the universe.

Once you begin discussing such possibilities, you realize that the religious implications are inevitable, because all the essential attributes of such extraterrestrial intelligences are the attributes we give to God. What we’re really dealing with here is, in fact, a scientific definition of God. And if these beings of pure intelligence ever did intervene in the affairs of man, so far removed would their powers be from our own understanding. How would a sentient ant view the foot that crushes his anthill — as the action of another being on a higher evolutionary scale than itself? Or as the divinely terrible intercession of God?

-excerpted from The Film Director as Superstar by Joseph Gelmis

Richard Strauss - Also Sprach Zarathustra (via 2001: A Space...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:14:00 -0500

Richard Strauss - Also Sprach Zarathustra (via 2001: A Space Odyssey)

Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie (1962, dir.Jean-Luc Godard) “It...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:12:00 -0500

Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie (1962, dir.Jean-Luc Godard)

“It seems to me that in Paris today, we are all living more or less in a state of prostitution. The increase in prostitution, literally speaking, is partial proof of this statement because it calls into question the body, but one can prostitute oneself just as equally with the mind, the spirit. I think it is a collective phenomenon, and perhaps one which is not altogether new. But what is new is that people find it normal.”

–Jean-Luc Godard (1966)

Valentin Zubkov & Valentina Malyavina in Ivan’s...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 15:47:39 -0500

Valentin Zubkov & Valentina Malyavina in Ivan’s Childhood (1962, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky) (via criterion.com)

Buster Keaton in The Navigator (1924, dir. Buster Keaton &...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:43:20 -0500

Buster Keaton in The Navigator (1924, dir. Buster Keaton & Donald Crisp) (via goldensilents.com)

Very early in [Buster Keaton’s] movie career, friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn’t realize he didn’t. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occurred to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.

Keaton’s face ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record. One can never forget Keaton wearing it, standing erect at the prow as his little boat is being launched. The boat goes grandly down the skids and, just as grandly, straight on to the bottom. Keaton never budges. The last you see of him, the water lifts the hat off the stoic head and it floats away.

-James Agee, The Great Stone Face, LIFE magazine (1949)

“Say anything you like, but don’t say that I ‘like’ to work....

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:12:00 -0500

“Say anything you like, but don’t say that I ‘like’ to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch.

Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.”

-Mabel Normand & her Indian motorcycle (1920, via Looking for Mabel Normand)

Mabel Normand was a wonderful silent film actress & comedienne, as well as one of Hollywood’s first female producers, screenwriters, and directors - Normand wrote and directed for Charlie Chaplin, in addition to owning her own movie studio & production company. Normand and Mary Pickford were actually good friends as well.

A clip of some of her work can be seen on youtube here.