Isn't Amarilly the one is which Mary is introduced cleaning a window? She's sitting on the window ledge, with her feet dangling inside, and wiping the soap off the outside of the glass, and as she does so, she reveals her face and her 'star presence' to the camera and to the cinema audience? It's a ...

I've just been reading Night Has a Thousand Eyes as well - and before that, Rendezvous in Black. I'm hoping to get I Married a Dead Man for Christmas (as part of a noir anthology including Nightmare Alley, The Big Clock, etc.). He's a peculiar talent - the quality of his sentences is often wincingly...

I absolutely loved Jannings' performance which I didn't find as hammy as usual. Oh, I know what you mean about Emil Jannings! I've seen him in two silents, Der Letzte Mann/The Last Laugh and Faust. I enjoyed him in Faust, since if you can't be over the top as the Devil, when can you be? But in Der ...

http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m160/rocketeer67/larshanson.jpg Jezebel, I wonder if you've come across a book called Strangers in Hollywood by Hans J. Wollstein? Its subtitle is The History of Scandanavian Actors in American Film. It might have some biographical information on Lars Hanson. I ha...

And I thought it was just Hollywood which imposed happy endings on its literary adaptations... Talking of which, I was reading about Ivan Mosjoukine recently. Apparently he got his break in Russian cinema through filming alternative unhappy endings for American films, since the Russian audiences pre...

Thanks, Ann Harding and Synnove, for your interesting posts. I have added The Phantom Carriage to my Amazon rental list, and also Haxan, from the box set. I'm also going to add Sir Arne's Treasure to my Christmas present list (I'm quite good with delayed gratification!) Your reaction to Garbo in Gös...

I had the Kino DVD of this for my birthday recently, and have just watched it as my first experience of Swedish silent cinema. I really liked it! The storytelling was very generous - so much going on, and so many interrelated plots. It's interesting, I think, to see something from a different but re...

This week I've watched Call Northside 777, one of Twentieth Century Fox's late '40s documentary style thrillers. Directed by Henry Hathaway and based on a true story, it stars James Stewart as a crusading journalist investigating the wrongful arrest of a man for the murder of a policeman at the end ...

Louise Brooks has a tiny part and when she talks she is never in close-up? (She was probably dubbed afterwards???) I seem to remember reading somewhere that she was dubbed in this film, by Margaret Livingston, if I recall, which is rather ironic, given that M.L. didn't exactly prosper in the talkie...

This film was on television in the U.K. in the middle of the night last week, and I taped and watched it again. I liked it very much too - it really is quite a radical film for its time, very much on the side of the workers and against the capitalists. Jean Arthur has a terrific speech on the sands ...

Thanks for your opinions, jdb1 and MissGoddess. Don't worry, jdb1, we all have our opinions - I'm not one of those people who can't stand to be disagreed with! I suppose I'm basing my idea of her being constrained by Selznick on a chapter in Michael Powell's autobiography, Million Dollar Movie, abou...

http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m160/rocketeer67/jenniferjones.jpg Here she is in Portrait of Jennie (1948). Anybody else an admirer of Ms Jones? I first became interested in her years ago when the British Film Institute restored Gone to Earth (1949). I come from Shropshire, the area of England ...

Thanks everyone for the feedback on The Bitter Tea of General Yen. I've just ordered a copy via Amazon.co.uk Marketplace. It looks like people have started breaking up the Stanwyck Screen Goddess boxset and are selling off the individual titles - I got The Miracle Woman very reasonably this way. I'v...

moirafinnie wrote:The only thing that could've made this Henry Hathaway movie better? Edna May Oliver!
To each his own, Phil!

I can see I've stumbled into an Edna May Oliver cult! Perhaps I'll give the old girl another chance...

Thanks, Ann Harding. Yes, I'd heard Aimee Semple McPherson had some influence on the character. I remember reading about her in The Collected Dorothy Parker where D.P. pokes fun at her autobiography (I think she calls it Our Lady of the Loudspeakers). Wasn't there some scandal in the '20s where A.S....