Princess of Tap

My favorite top 10 films of 1944 1) Meet Me in St. Louis-- Minnelli 2) Double Indemnity-- Wilder 3) Murder, My Sweet-- Dmytryk 4) Gaslight-- Cukor 5) Laura - - Preminger 6) The Uninvited - - Allen 7) National Velvet - - Brown 8) Mr. Skeffington - - Sherman 9) Arsenic and Old Lace - - Capra 10) I'll Be Seeing You - - Dieterle

Asta was such a good actor. And he could also do all those dog tricks. The trick with the mirror was something else. And they didn't have to dub his singing, like they have to do with some actors. But I think his best role is when he has to act with the leopard in Bringing Up Baby. He had more guts than Cary Grant. Because Cary wouldn't physically appear in the same scene with the leopard!

Very few people would believe that this extremely glamourous movie star actually started as a stage actress on Broadway. She's famous for her beauty and her dates with a future president. When you identify the actress, why don't you identify the president as well.

Silky horse racing saga starring William Holden-- Boots Malone

The Everyman tap dancer, Gene Kelly Next: A little girl being obstinate

In what Elvis Presley movie, can we accuse the King of aiding and abetting a crime. Please name the movie and briefly describe the scene.

The Birds

FRANZ LISZT LISZT is one of my favorite composers. It's not often that I get to see a composer on this website whose music I actually listen to on the radio all day long. Thank you whoever put this on here. I would list my favorite compositions by Liszt, but I don't speak German and I can't spell them correctly, so I'll just name my favorite one anyway--Hungarian Rhapsody number 2. But I can supply some relevant movie information about it. The great pianist Jose iturbi played that very same composition in Gene Kelly's MGM musical Anchors Aweigh. You guys should check out some of his music.

Sorry Miss - - according to Merriam Webster the two words that you cited are equally equal. And I love both movies - - I just always felt that Follow the Fleet had more of a down to earth flavor to it than the swanky nightclubbing Swing Time. And what you said about prissy correctors is very funny to me because people who really know me characterize me as being that kind of a person. The word they usually use is pedantic. So I would hardly criticize another person for having a characteristic that is so similar to my own personality. Let's face the music and dance--

Cave Girl-- now you know all my deepest darkest secrets, so did I.

I'm the original lists girl. I make all these Preparatory lists to go to the grocery store, the organic store, the dollar store and, of course Walmart. I usually do one of two things: I'll leave the list at home or leave the list in the car. But I do okay because the list helped me to organize my mind. Also helped me to remember what it was that I was going to buy and what it was going to cost excetera excetera. I think this list thing with me started with top 40. I was a slave to the top 40 my entire time in school. Then from the top 40, we went to the top British Invasion groups and the top American Invasion groups excetera excetera. I used listen to a big station in Chicago called WLS. Every night at 9 o'clock they would compile the most requests for that day. just for that day you had the top 5. Every night would be a little different and I would compile all these lists. I recently came across all these lists from junior high school and they were really funny. They were my favorite groups, my favorite songs,actors/actresses--all that sort of thing. So for me I think it goes back to Top 40 AM radio. So much for nostalgia. LOL

When you study the history of Motion Pictures the name Wallace Reid stands out. Next to Valentino and Gilbert, Reid was probably the most popular leading man of the silents. Reid was referred to as "the screen's most perfect lover", several years before Valentino came on the scene. In 1919 Wallace Reid suffered a scalp injury in a train wreck on the way to a film location. To continue shooting, a doctor gave him morphine, which resulted in morphine addiction. Wallace Reid succumbed to the morphine addiction in 1923. His widow, actress Dorothy Davenport decided to bravely expose what had happened to her husband and to warn the public about drug addiction. In 1923 she starred and co-produced a film called Human Wreckage - - that showed the danger of morphine addiction.

The two first excellent dope movies that I can recall as a child in the 1950s was the 1955 movie Man with the Golden Arm starring Frank Sinatra, directed by Otto Preminger. Frank Sinatra starred as a drummer named Frankie Machine,who had the habit. Elmer Bernstein composed the wonderful jazz music that truly excited people at the time. And I think Kim Novak was the girl who tried to help Frankie. It got several Oscar nominations. A movie that I saw more frequently from 1957 was A Hatful of Rain starring Don Murray. It was directed by Fred Zinnemann and also had an Oscar nomination. The highest-profile Hollywood approved movie on dope addiction was the 1962 Long Day's Journey Into Night, based on the Eugene O'Neill play. This movie got the most publicity because it starred Katharine Hepburn, who was also nominated for the Oscar in her role as a morphine addicted wife and mother.

I read it about 3 months ago. At first I thought I didn't really want to, but later I was glad I read it. My mother was the biggest Carole Lombard in the world and all that still really makes me sad. I think it's the story about those ear clips and the man who needed false teeth that will always break my heart.

Howard Hughes?

Donald Crisp worried about his granddaughter, Gail Russell, in The Uninvited.

Nancy Davis' Mentor at MGM was Spencer Tracy.

Of all of Dinah's seven husbands, I thought Rafael was the cutest!

Nightmare Alley was Tyrone Power's favorite role. It was the movie that he was proudest of. Coming from a family of actors, he took acting very seriously. He was one of the few top-ranking movie stars of the Golden Age who repeatedly did stage work, even after becoming one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. I can think of very few movie stars, aside from Katharine Hepburn, who made a genuine commitment to the theater and serious acting.

Miles, this is obviously a composer that Fred Astaire dealt with more than once. And Irving Berlin would be the most prolific composer of the American song on Broadway and in Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century. It sounds like a simple question, but I had to go through all those songs. I couldn't believe all those songs he wrote in those Fred Astaire movies! Easter Parade - - was introduced by Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb on Broadway in As Thousands Cheer. Of course, Bing Crosby sang Easter Parade in Holiday Inn, which co-starred Fred Astaire. Which eventually gets us to Easter Parade - - where both Fred and Judy Garland sing Easter Parade. It reminds me of the quote they used in That's Entertainment about Irving Berlin - - they asked Jerome Kern what place Irving Berlin had in Amercan music. Jerome Kern said, " Irving Berlin is American music." In tap dance school I had to dance to Steppin Out with My Baby from Easter Parade. Al Gilbert had it all arranged on a record for kiddy tap dancers.

Miles, you're very kind in your assessment of my tap dancing, although you've never seen it. I was never in the style of Ray Bolger. I was in the basic Studio Style that was taught by Al Gilbert and very similar to what Gene Kelly did in the movies. I knew Al Gilbert from the dance conventions. He was the one who owned the studio where Annette Funicello was dancing when she was discovered by Walt Disney at one of his recitals. When she went to Disney, he also took on The Mickey Mouse Club, teaching and choreographing The Mouseketeers. Those of us outside of Hollywood studied tap dancing with records designed by Al Gilbert on grade levels that helped us to advance. Association with Annette Funicello in the Mickey Mouse Club made him the most famous children's tap dance teacher in America. He made Millions on tap dance records and he also taught Michael Jackson and Chastity Bono. After I studied ballet, I was able incorporate some of Eleanor Powell's tap turns into that Gene Kelly, basically like the number Singin' in the Rain, tap technique. But if I had been able to dance as well as Bolger, Gene Kelly or Eleanor Powell, I would have been in the movies on TCM now and not just posting about those movies. LOL But thanks for the compliment.

All this talk about Natalie Wood is really opening up my brain - - the most interesting match that she had that got the most publicity was Elvis Presley.So that the only way they could date would be that they would close the whole bowling alley and they would have a date, that sort of thing. Natalie would have been the first high-profile Show Business star that Elvis ever dated. Juliet Prowse, Ann-Margaret and so forth,they all came later. I get a lot of my primary information about Nat from the old Movie Mags, Tab Hunter's autobio and from a book that her sister, Lana Wood wrote.

M. LAFFITE-- you did all the legwork on this one. I just wanted everybody to know where they could find the short and what it was all about in That's Entertainment. I insist that you take the thread, s'il vous plaît.

Well, we don't know all the details - - but they spent an awful lot of time together and they were what we used to call an "item". The theory was that she was trying to be independent from her mother but at the same time her mother approved because she thought Natalie was safe with Raymond Burr. The benefits for Burr were obvious.

I think before this period of time, Natalie Wood was really close with Raymond Burr. People were very puzzled about the whole thing because she was a great deal younger than him.