Tag: Los Angeles

10 Things You Should Know About Janet Gaynor

cladriteLeave a comment

Janet Gaynor‘s 112th birthday is timed perfectly, what with the third remake of the film for which she won an Oscar, A Star Is Born (1937), opening this weekend. Here are 10 things you should know about Gaynor, who was a huge star in the late 1920s and into the ’30s.

By the way, Gaynor’s A Star Is Born, in which she stars opposite Fredric March, is available via a number of streaming services: Amazon Prime, FilmStruck, Kanopy, Fandor and (with ads) Tubi TV. You could do much worse in priming yourself for the new remake than to watch the original on Gaynor’s birthday.

10 Things You Should Know About Dickie Moore

cladriteLeave a comment

Here are 10 things you should know about Dickie Moore, born 93 years ago today. Some years ago, we were lucky enough to attend a special event at NYC’s Film Forum: a Q&A with Moore and his wife, actress Jane Powell.

It was a delight to see these two Hollywood veterans in tandem that night. They couldn’t have been more charming, and their mutual affection and respect was readily apparent—in short, they were darned cute together—as they delighted those assembled with insider tales of Hollywood’s glory days.

Moore was darned cute in the movies back in the day, too. He’s one of our favorite child actors of the 1930s.

The Drive-in That Ate the San Fernando Valley

cladriteLeave a comment

Crime of Passion movie poster
Recently we watched (for the third or fourth time) Barbara Stanwyck‘s final picture that might be considered film noir: Crime of Passion (1957).

In it, she plays a columnist for a San Francisco newspaper who rather impulsively gives up her career to marry a Los Angeles police detective (Sterling Hayden). She moves into his home, which is situated, as a passage of dialogue reveals, in the San Fernando Valley.

In two or three brief scenes set outside the newlyweds’ home, we see in the background the hulking screen of a drive-in theatre towering over the neighborhood. So prominent is this screen tower that it seems almost ominous.

Each time we’ve watch this picture, we’ve been struck by this choice on the part of the filmmakers because not a word is said about the screen. No one refers to it in any way. But it’s such an imposing element in those exterior shots that we can’t help but wonder why director Gerd Oswald didn’t shoot from the other direction, so that the screen tower didn’t appear.

Mind you, we’re glad he didn’t—as a drive-in aficionado, we enjoy seeing the screen in the background when we watch the movie—but it’s undeniably a distraction.

It does speak, we think, to how relatively ubiquitous drive-in theatres once were that Oswald didn’t balk at including that huge screen in the scenes in which it appears. Who knows, it may be that someone viewing the film in 1957 wouldn’t have even given it a second thought.