Fedya

Poor Clive looks extremely pallid in those posters.

Ah, Dick Clark the actor. (For some values of "actor".)

And then there were her roles after her death....

The producers wanted Rachmaninoff to write something, but he wanted too much money (I think; he might have just wanted not to do a movie in the first place), so they hired Addinsell to write something that sounded as if Rachmaninoff wrote it. Boy did he succeed.

George Jessel and his Russian Art Choir (1931) Jessel tells some bad jokes before introducing a Russian choir who sing a couple of songs. I have no idea whether the choir was Soviet and on some sort of cultural exchange (remember, James FitzPatrick was able to visit the USSR in 1932 and made a short that predates the Traveltalks shorts and was edited into one of the shorts during World War II), a choir of émigrés, or totally made up. There's little in this one as Jessel is woefully unfunny and the camera work is static. 2/10, and I'm being generous. This is an extra on the Smart Money DVD in the Warner Gangsters set, Volume 3. The features in the box set are worth the price; this Jessel short sure isn't.

No comments on Cary's wig?

That's not how you get pregnant.

Life Begins (1932) is set in a maternity hospital. Glenda Farrell doesn't want her baby.

Every time I see Goodbye, Mr. Chips on the schedule, I think of the Peter O'Toole "Word of Mouth" piece. Where. Did. My. Child. Hood. Go?

I enjoy Mickey and Judy's impressions of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in Babes in Arms (on later today).

During what month of pregnancy does a woman begin to look pregnant?

I had it last week (as did much of the office), and then my dad got it over the weekend. I finally got around to watching several movies off my DVR. That and my DVD of It Always Rains on Sunday.

I posted a picture of my physique.

I got a kick out of the ad for the recent version, which had the tag line, "Everyone's a suspect." First, in a good Agatha Christie story, almost everybody is a suspect, and second, if you know this particular story you'd know why everybody is a suspect.

The Emigrants (1971). Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann are parents in a family of subsistence farmers in 1840s Småland, a province in southern Sweden. Disaster after disaster after disaster befalls the family, from Grandpa breaking his leg to Uncle getting assaulted for not being a good enough indentured farmhand to another uncle being a dissident pastor. Disasters continue to befall the family, and when they hear about good free land being available in America, they decide to emigrate. The acting is excellent, the cinematography is excellent, the set design is excellent (the cramped scenes onboard ship are particularly effective), and the costume design was very good. However, the movie has a flaw in that it was extremely extremely slow. And it's only half of the story; the second half of the story is in the follow-up movie The New Land. (It's actually based on four novels by acclaimed Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg.) 8/10.

Elia Kazan was approaching 90 when he got his honorary Oscar, and look at how people treated him. But that's different because we're supposed to celebrate communist mass murderers apparently.

Have you seen The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle? It's my favorite Fred/Ginger movie in part because it's a biopic and as such relatively grounded in reality (at least, as far as Hollywood biopics are grounded in reality).

Hell, there are still people defending child-rapist Roman Polanski.

You liked Barbara Bain's jumpers, didn't you?

For some reason, I'm surprised you haven't seen it. I DVRed it off of TCM when they had their True Crime night back in January, but I think it's available on DVD from Columbia's MOD scheme.

10 Rillington Place (1971) Based on a true story, Richard Attenborough plays John Christie, a serial killer who in the opening scene kills a woman in 1944 London. Cut to five years later. The Evanses (John Hurt and Judy Geeson) sublet a flat from Christie. When Mrs. Evans gets pregnant, she tries to get an abortion from Christie, who uses the opportunity to kill her and put the blame on the illiterate, dim-witted Mr. Evans. Christie and Hurt are both excellent in their roles, Hurt playing it by looking hollow-eyed throughout. Location shooting makes this a thoroughly unromantic Notting Hill. 9/10

As I said elsewhere, there's a place for actors whose job it is to allow the female lead to shine. George Brent made a career out of it at Warner Bros. in the 30s. Will we get a long, long thread on John Gavin's tuchus too?

Interestingly, it was his second marriage; his first ended in divorce. Ronald Reagan actually had a longer second marriage. Ernest Borgnine's last marriage was his longest, at close to 40 years, and Zsa Zsa Gabor's last (the eighth?) lasted longer than all the others put together.

He's survived by his wife of 43 years, actress Constance Towers.