Frances Dee movies: From 'An American Tragedy' to 'Four Faces West' Frances Dee began her film career at the dawn of the sound era, going from extra to leading lady within a matter of months. Her rapid ascencion came about thanks to Maurice Chevalier, who got her as his romantic interested in Ludwig Berger's 1930 romantic comedy Playboy of Paris. Despite her dark(-haired) good looks and pleasant personality, Dee's Hollywood career never quite progressed to major – or even moderate – stardom. But she was to remain a busy leading lady for about 15 years. Tonight, Turner Classic Movies is showing seven Frances Dee films, ranging from heavy dramas to Westerns. Unfortunately missing is one of Dee's most curious efforts, the raunchy pre-Coder Blood Money, which possibly features her most unusual – and most effective – performance. Having said that, William A. Wellman's Love Is a Racket is a worthwhile subsitute, though the...
- 5/18/2017
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Each year New York residents can look forward to two essential series programmed at the Film Forum, noirs and pre-Coders (that is, films made before the strict enforcing of the Motion Picture Production Code). These near-annual retrospective traditions are refreshed and re-varied and re-repeated for neophytes and cinephiles alike, giving all the chance to see and see again great film on film. Many titles in this year's Essential Pre-Code series, running an epic July 15 - August 11, are old favorites and some ache to be new discoveries; all in all there are far too many racy, slipshod, patter-filled celluloid splendors to be covered by one critic alone. Faced with such a bounty, I've enlisted the kind help of some friends and colleagues, asking them to sent in short pieces on their favorites in an incomplete but also in-progress survey and guide to one of the summer's most sought-after series. In this entry: what's playing Friday,...
- 8/4/2011
- MUBI
Lamberto Maggiorani in Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves Some good and/or unusual offerings tonight on Turner Classic Movies. Silent Sundays will feature the 1925 version of The Wizard of Oz. Directed by and starring silent-film comedian Larry Semon, The Wizard of Oz features Dorothy Dwan in the role that would become associated with Judy Garland, especially in the minds of some gay men — and that's one mystery I've never been able to fathom. I mean, why Judy's Dorothy? Why Dorothy to begin with? Why not Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face? Or Norma Shearer in Let Us Be Gay? Or Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs? Or Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro? Or Ramon Novarro in Ben-Hur? Or Frances Dee in Blood Money (or The Gay Deception or I Walked with a Zombie)? Why not Toto or Asta? It's a mystery. Albert Lamorisse's Academy Award-winning...
- 12/27/2010
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Above: Richard Dix in Hell's Highway.
Rowland Brown (born with the appealing first name of Chauncey), was an interesting, almost unique filmmaker of the early thirties, who made three films. In those days, when it was a matter of principle that directors should not write, nor writers direct, and that writers, in Preston Sturges' words, "should work in teams, like piano movers," Brown was an honest-to-God hyphenate, writing and directing three two-fisted pre-code thrillers, Quick Millions, Hell's Highwayand Blood Money.
There was Chaplin, of course, a living exception to nearly every industrial practice of the age, but Brown's entire directing career occurred during the lull between City Lights and Modern Times. Brown wrote (albeit sometimes with collaborators) and directed, and his films have a strong sense of their maker's personality: tough, even brutish, with a hard-bitten and cynical sense of humor, and a frankness about human nature and sexual foibles,...
Rowland Brown (born with the appealing first name of Chauncey), was an interesting, almost unique filmmaker of the early thirties, who made three films. In those days, when it was a matter of principle that directors should not write, nor writers direct, and that writers, in Preston Sturges' words, "should work in teams, like piano movers," Brown was an honest-to-God hyphenate, writing and directing three two-fisted pre-code thrillers, Quick Millions, Hell's Highwayand Blood Money.
There was Chaplin, of course, a living exception to nearly every industrial practice of the age, but Brown's entire directing career occurred during the lull between City Lights and Modern Times. Brown wrote (albeit sometimes with collaborators) and directed, and his films have a strong sense of their maker's personality: tough, even brutish, with a hard-bitten and cynical sense of humor, and a frankness about human nature and sexual foibles,...
- 10/14/2010
- MUBI
Leave it to The Daily Beast to get Scorsese talking about films. Not that it would be hard to do. The man is “Mr. Cinema.” He directs, produces and he even has his own nonprofit organization for preserving classic films, The Film Foundation. The director may have toyed with other genres during his lifetime, but the one people would discuss aplenty is his contributions to crime cinema. To think of Scorsese is to think of Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed, despite also directing films like After Hours and The Last Temptation of Christ. As he turns his attention to the small screen with HBO’s Boardwalk Empire – touted as being the network’s costliest production to date – the director lists off his 15 favorite gangster movies. Scorsese writes:
“Here are 15 gangster pictures that had a profound effect on me and the way I thought about crime and how to portray it on film.
“Here are 15 gangster pictures that had a profound effect on me and the way I thought about crime and how to portray it on film.
- 9/17/2010
- by thedvdlounge
- Examiner Movies Channel
Hamsterdam, MD - News at 4:20. As part of the celebration for the upcoming season of Weeds, Glick University polled over 4,000 Americans about what TV News personalities they wanted to see get high during a broadcast.
Naturally there were ground rules including the disqualifications of news organizations that contain notorious on air potheads. This meant no votes were collected for the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert Report and Fox and Friends. You think Steve Doocey is sober? Hard to think that any of those folks have eyes that aren’t pied 24-7.
10, Bill O’Reilly (Fox News) had a lot of folks who reacted that it’d be like, “Dude, I’m getting high with dad.” Of course this initial elation is cut down with the horrifying fact of “Dude, I’m getting high with dad and it’s just not someone I need to party with.”
Rick Sanchez...
Naturally there were ground rules including the disqualifications of news organizations that contain notorious on air potheads. This meant no votes were collected for the cast of The Daily Show, Colbert Report and Fox and Friends. You think Steve Doocey is sober? Hard to think that any of those folks have eyes that aren’t pied 24-7.
10, Bill O’Reilly (Fox News) had a lot of folks who reacted that it’d be like, “Dude, I’m getting high with dad.” Of course this initial elation is cut down with the horrifying fact of “Dude, I’m getting high with dad and it’s just not someone I need to party with.”
Rick Sanchez...
- 7/23/2010
- by UncaScroogeMcD
According to his official website, Jody McCrea, the actor-son of Frances Dee and Joel McCrea, died in in Roswell, New Mexico, of cardiac arrest on April 4. He was 74. Born on Sept. 6, 1934, in Los Angeles, Jody McCrea was the oldest of McCrea and Dee’s three sons. Frances Dee was best known for playing sweet young things in the 1930s, e.g., Little Women and The Gay Deception (though her most remarkable performance at that time was the nymphomaniac in Blood Money), and for the atmospheric I Walked with a Zombie in 1943. Joel McCrea starred in dozens of dramas and comedies in the 1930s and 1940s, including the classics The Palm Beach Story (1942) and The More the Merrier (1943), but in the 1950s spent most of his on-screen time riding horses and wearing cowboy hats, usually in B+ productions. Jody McCrea began his acting career in the short-lived 1959 television series Wichita Town,...
- 4/7/2009
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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