Old Hollywood
Cinema
1900-1979
Nostalgia is a seductive liar - George Wildman Ball
“What? I totally dress up like a picnic table and pose with peacocks all the time. This isn’t weird.” (via)

“What? I totally dress up like a picnic table and pose with peacocks all the time. This isn’t weird.”

(via)

Humphrey Bogart & Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942, dir. Michael Curtiz) “Bogart’s response to the success of Casablanca was more typically sardonic. He enjoyed telling his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, how Charles Enfield, the studio’s head of publicity, had the amazing revelation that the actor had sex appeal. Says Bacall, ‘Bogie would say, ‘Of course, I did nothing in Casablanca that I hadn’t done in twenty movies before that, and suddenly they discover I’m sexy. Any time that Ingrid Bergman looks at a man, he has sex appeal.’” -excerpted from The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

Humphrey Bogart & Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942, dir. Michael Curtiz)

“Bogart’s response to the success of Casablanca was more typically sardonic. He enjoyed telling his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, how Charles Enfield, the studio’s head of publicity, had the amazing revelation that the actor had sex appeal.

Says Bacall, ‘Bogie would say, ‘Of course, I did nothing in Casablanca that I hadn’t done in twenty movies before that, and suddenly they discover I’m sexy. Any time that Ingrid Bergman looks at a man, he has sex appeal.’”

-excerpted from The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and some other dapper gentleman (John Howard?) recording The Philadelphia Story for radio (via)

Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and some other dapper gentleman (John Howard?) recording The Philadelphia Story for radio (via)

Laurence Olivier & Vivien Leigh (1948, via nytimes)

Laurence Olivier & Vivien Leigh (1948, via nytimes)

 Lights Out in Europe (1940, dir. Herbert Kline) For those who cannot experience war at first hand, the next best thing is to see Lights Out in Europe. It begins in England when war with Germany was only a weekly scare and not an hourly terror. It shows war overtaking children. The snout-nosed gas mask appears. For infants too small for the mask, there is the gasproof container. There are shots of a terrified baby being forced into a container, staring through its big glass pane in panic as he is sealed in. In their back yards people construct flimsy-looking air-raid shelters, decorate them with potted plants. On Sept. 1, the Nazis invade Poland. The Polish roads are crammed with the piled carts of fleeing peasants. They pass Polish cavalry going against German motorized forces, horses dragging anti-tank guns. Across the fields refugees run desperately carrying whatever they can. Desperately they pile on trains. Sometimes German planes machine-gun the trains. There are gruesome shots of a young Polish woman clutching the train seat in her death spasm, a father shot through chest and abdomen sitting helplessly between his hopeless wife and frightened, bewildered little girl. Sometimes the peasants stand around their ruined homes. Pathetic shots show old peasant women futilely pouring buckets of water on mountainous heaps of lavalike embers, once their houses. Sometimes they stare at the burst carcasses of cattle burned alive. A woman stirs with her bare foot a half-burned sheep, then covers her eyes with her hands and weeps. There are prayers in the open and upraised faces. …Lights Out in Europe is as negative as all peace propaganda, which can never do more than repeat parrotwise what every adult knows—that war is horrible. But for Americans who wish to think with the utmost realism about Europe’s war, Lights Out in Europe is important because it lets them live through one hour of the real thing. -Time Magazine, 1940

 Lights Out in Europe (1940, dir. Herbert Kline)

For those who cannot experience war at first hand, the next best thing is to see Lights Out in Europe.

It begins in England when war with Germany was only a weekly scare and not an hourly terror. It shows war overtaking children. The snout-nosed gas mask appears. For infants too small for the mask, there is the gasproof container. There are shots of a terrified baby being forced into a container, staring through its big glass pane in panic as he is sealed in. In their back yards people construct flimsy-looking air-raid shelters, decorate them with potted plants.

On Sept. 1, the Nazis invade Poland.

The Polish roads are crammed with the piled carts of fleeing peasants. They pass Polish cavalry going against German motorized forces, horses dragging anti-tank guns. Across the fields refugees run desperately carrying whatever they can. Desperately they pile on trains. Sometimes German planes machine-gun the trains. There are gruesome shots of a young Polish woman clutching the train seat in her death spasm, a father shot through chest and abdomen sitting helplessly between his hopeless wife and frightened, bewildered little girl.

Sometimes the peasants stand around their ruined homes. Pathetic shots show old peasant women futilely pouring buckets of water on mountainous heaps of lavalike embers, once their houses. Sometimes they stare at the burst carcasses of cattle burned alive. A woman stirs with her bare foot a half-burned sheep, then covers her eyes with her hands and weeps.

There are prayers in the open and upraised faces.

…Lights Out in Europe is as negative as all peace propaganda, which can never do more than repeat parrotwise what every adult knows—that war is horrible. But for Americans who wish to think with the utmost realism about Europe’s war, Lights Out in Europe is important because it lets them live through one hour of the real thing.

-Time Magazine, 1940

Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)

Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)

Hedy Lamarr & Victor Mature in Samson & Delilah (1949, dir. Cecil B. DeMille) In her lively 1967 autobiography, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, Hedy Lamarr recalls having cocktails at Romanoff’s with a sleazy talent scout (whom she pseudonymously refers to as Sidney), who tries to seduce her by offering her an audience with Cecil B. DeMille, who was in the process of casting Samson and Delilah. “C.B.’s a genius at those things,” Sidney says, “By the time he’s through spreading the money and talent around, every man in the world will want to screw the heroine of that particular biblical drama. It’s a natural; a guy with muscles, a broad with virginity.” “Who plays Samson?” Lamarr asked. “They’re thinking of Victor Mature. But who cares? It’s only a body to set you off in the ruins. Muscles and tits sugarcoated with religion. It’s for you.” As repulsed as Lamarr was by Sidney’s vulgar approach to filmmaking, she bit the carrot and met with the director. A few days later, the role was hers. Later, Lamarr’s agent echoed Sidney’s sentiments, “C.B. is brilliant. When it comes to sex and spectacle, no one can tear down a temple and tear off a piece at one and the same time like he can. When he sells sex, sister, people buy because he wraps it in fancy paper with pink ribbons.” -Bret Wood, TCM (via)

Hedy Lamarr & Victor Mature in Samson & Delilah (1949, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

In her lively 1967 autobiography, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, Hedy Lamarr recalls having cocktails at Romanoff’s with a sleazy talent scout (whom she pseudonymously refers to as Sidney), who tries to seduce her by offering her an audience with Cecil B. DeMille, who was in the process of casting Samson and Delilah.

“C.B.’s a genius at those things,” Sidney says, “By the time he’s through spreading the money and talent around, every man in the world will want to screw the heroine of that particular biblical drama. It’s a natural; a guy with muscles, a broad with virginity.”

“Who plays Samson?” Lamarr asked.

“They’re thinking of Victor Mature. But who cares? It’s only a body to set you off in the ruins. Muscles and tits sugarcoated with religion. It’s for you.”

As repulsed as Lamarr was by Sidney’s vulgar approach to filmmaking, she bit the carrot and met with the director. A few days later, the role was hers.

Later, Lamarr’s agent echoed Sidney’s sentiments, “C.B. is brilliant. When it comes to sex and spectacle, no one can tear down a temple and tear off a piece at one and the same time like he can. When he sells sex, sister, people buy because he wraps it in fancy paper with pink ribbons.”

-Bret Wood, TCM (via)