Archive for the ‘1930s’ category
The Glamour of Grit: Classic Style in New Hollywood
This post is in conjunction with the Hollywood Revue’s 2nd Annual Film in Fashion Blogathon! Angela, the lady of the manor, has rounded up a splendid roster of participating blogs and the Pictorial is honored to be counted among them! Head on over to the Hollywood Revue and check out all of the submissions!
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, that once radiant glow of Hollywood had dulled; the grand dream machine was a Miss Haversham of its former glory. Rot had set in on the studio system and was in a state of complete disrepair. The stars that once lit the celluloid galaxy had, if not fallen, were slowly dying off. Old Hollywood had hemorrhaged from the inside and its death blow was dealt in 1967, when a film about two notorious Depression-era bank robbers challenged the very notion of filmmaking and ushered in a new approach to making movies. From 1967 until around 1975, there was a revolution in the film industry that has come to be known as “New Hollywood”. New Hollywood cinema brought radical new sensibilities to filmmaking, blazing a trail to create the framework of the film industry that we know today. The studio system that had manufactured Hollywood glamour for decades had decayed to the point of collapse and the fresh, adventurous young mavericks– Arthur Penn, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin– were pushing boundaries, challenging morality and not giving a damn.
San Francisco (1936) and The Art of Disaster
Strictly entre nous: I’m not a fan of MacDonald. I am a fan of opera, thank you very much indeed (I begged–and won–for my parents to take me to see Le Nozze di Figaro at the LA Opera at age 16) but I’d much rather listen to Irene Dunne’s falsetto’s than the fluttery MacDonald’s. (MacDonald’s voice is superior, but Dunne’s has personality.) MacDonald, however, is the leading lady in the 1936 melodrama San Francisco, alongside Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy (big fans of both, for the record), and she delivers a solid performance. But that is not the point of this post. The point here is that San Francisco features a very famous disaster sequence that I have long admired, and have decided take a closer look at it here. Read more ►
James Cagney in Blonde Crazy: The Ultimate Bad-Ass
I love bad-asses. No, not this newfangled generation’s overinflated sense of importance that has managed to give every Tom Dick or Harry the belief that, because of the number of Facebook friends they have or the number of people who follow them on Twitter that they are bad-asses.
No. You’re not. You know why?
Because THIS guy could knock the stuffing out of your designer-label-wearing LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME I’M SUCH A BAD ASS narcissistic kisser. Read more ►
Project Keaton: The Artist and Buster Keaton
Submitted to Project Keaton by NYC-based writer Will McKinley ,The Artist at the New York Film Festival: Evoking Memories of Buster Keaton is a terrific look at the upcoming silent French film THE ARTIST and its surprising connection to the life and art of Buster Keaton. ”Sunday afternoon, on the final day of the New York Film Festival, I saw Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist. Sunday night on Turner Classic Movies, I watched Buster Keaton in Free and Easy. Although these two very different films were made more than 80 years apart, they actually have a lot in common…” Read Will’s full post here.