This Blog is Five Years Old!

I came across the first post to this blog, on November 11, 2000. You can see it here.

The Innocents (1961)

Peter's Nite
Pizza, Salad, Fresh Baked Cookies

Note the crossovers with other recent movienites. Jack Clayton also directed Room at the Top. Freddie Francis (DP) shot The Elephant Man. John Mortomer also did the adaptation of Bunny Lake is Missing. Pamela Franklyn (the little girl making her debut) was the manipulative young student in The Prime of Miss Jean Brody.

New York Times Pamela Franklin bio:
Pamela Franklin was born in Japan, where her British father was a busy importer/exporter. Spending her early years in several Far East ports of call, Franklin was bundled off to England to study at the Elmhurst School of Ballet. At age 11, she made her motion-picture bow as the enigmatic "possessed" child, Flora, in 1961's The Innocents. Her American TV debut occurred in the 1963 Wonderful World of Disney two-parter "The Horse Without a Head." There was nothing Disneyesque about Franklin's portrayals of teen murderesses in both 1964's The Third Secret and 1965's Our Mother's House. Her first grown-up role (near-nude scene and all) was as the kidnap victim in Night of the Following Day (1969), but she was back to adolescents in Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) as the rebellious, sexually inquisitive private-school student Sandy. Though still active in TV, Pamela Franklin made her last film in 1976.

Bright Lights Film Journal:
Kerr’s acting, regardless of the role, had always evinced a basic sensuality (it’s what kept her from turning into another Greer Garson), and while it may be hard to believe her Miss Giddens has never engaged in our most basic of mating rituals, it’s very easy to believe that she’s been fixating on them morning, noon, and night.

Kolya (1996)

Nora's Nite
Salad with chicken

Libeled Lady (1936)

Pamela's Nite
Four cheese penne with roasted tomatoes and fresh basil and salad
Our last movenite on Willaman drive. Truly the end of an era.

Peeping Tom (1960)

Stuart's Nite
CPK Pizza Assortment, Coconut Cake

Via The Powell & Pressburger Pages:
The Archers Manifesto

As outlined by Emeric Pressburger in a letter to Deborah Kerr to explain why she should join them for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

One, we owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to them, the sole responsibility of ensuring them a profit, not a loss.

Two, every single foot in our films is our own responsibility and nobody else's. We refuse to be guided or coerced by any influence but our own judgement.

Three, when we start work on a new idea we must be a year ahead, not only of our competitors, but also of the times. A real film, from idea to universal release, takes a year. Or more.

Four, no artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for other reasons than her nakedness.

Five, at any time, and particularly at the present, the self respect of all collaborators, from star to prop-man, is sustained, or diminished, by the theme and purpose of the film they are working on. They will fight or intrigue to work on a subject they feel is urgent or contemporary, and fight equally hard to avoid working on a trivial or pointless subject. And we agree with them and want the best workmen with us; and get them. These are the main things we believe in. They have brought us an unbroken record of success and a unique position. Without the one, of course, we should not enjoy the other very long. We are under no illusions. We know we are surrounded by hungry sharks. But you have no idea what fun it is surf-bathing, if you have only paddled, with a nurse holding on to the back of your rompers.

We hope you will come on in, the water's fine.

From the screenonline biography:
Michael Powell was born in Bekesbourne, near Canterbury, Kent, on September 30 1905. He left Dulwich College to work (briefly) in a bank before his father, a hotelier on the French Riviera, secured him an introduction to the Hollywood Irish director Rex Ingram, who was working at the Victorine studios in Nice. Powell worked for Ingram as a bit-player (The Magician (US, 1926)) and general assistant, then entered the nascent British film industry as story analyst and stills photographer....
Without Pressburger (but with Leo Marks), Powell made a late masterpiece, Peeping Tom (1960), at once a lurid horror film and a profound meditation on the unhealthiness of cinema. Powell's personal investment is obvious from his own appearance as murderer Karl Boehm's blameworthy father and casting that includes a star he had made (Shearer), the daughter of another old comrade (Anna Massey) and, in a crucial role, his own son Columba. Though it attracted a torrent of critical abuse, the film probably did less harm to its director's subsequent career than his conservatively patriotic The Queen's Guards (1961), which seemed to fly in the face of the radical zeitgeist of the 60s.

Powell reunited with Pressburger for an Australian odyssey - They're a Weird Mob (Australia/UK, 1966) - and for a children's fantasy - The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972). Neither film did anything to restore Powell's reputation, and his final film, Age of Consent (1969) - also made in Australia, with James Mason and a young, often nude Helen Mirren - was misunderstood and critically maligned.

In his last twenty years, Powell was recognised by disciples and critics as a major filmmaker, to the point where this once-despised figure now seems too comfortably swallowed by the accepted canon. But no-one greenlit the many projects he would like to have made, from The Tempest to The Fall of the House of Usher. Powell married Thelma Schoonmaker (the editor of his American champion Martin Scorsese's films) in 1984, and completed two fine volumes of autobiography. He died in Gloucestershire on February 19 1990.

Leo Marks, Cryptographer & Screenwriter:

Leo Marks, the son of a Jewish bookseller, was born in London on 24th September, 1920. Marks joined the British Army in January 1942. Trained as a cryptographer he was assigned to the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Marks became an expert in cryptanalysis (making and breaking codes and ciphers) and eventually became head of SOE's codes and ciphers with a staff of 400 people. It was Marks's responsibility to provide agents with the ciphers with which to send information to London by radio.

These ciphers were often based on famous poems or brief passages of memorable prose such as the Lord's Prayer. Marks argued that the enemy might know the poem or the prose passage and would then be able to break the cipher. To overcome this problem Marks provided unknown poems for his agents. This included the poem The Life That I Have, that had originally been written for his girlfriend, Ruth Hambro who had been killed in an air crash in Canada. He later gave the poem as a cipher to the SOE agent Violette Szabo when she was sent to France during the war.

When agents based in Holland began sending messages without any errors, Marks suspected they had been arrested by the Gestapo. To test his theory he sent indecipherable messages to the agents. When they did not complain he knew that the short-wave morse transceivers were under the control of the Germans. His warnings were ignored by Maurice Buckmaster and agents continued to be sent to Holland where they were arrested and in most cases executed.

On 23rd June, 1943, three key members of the Prosper Network, Andrée Borrel, Francis Suttill and Gilbert Norman, were arrested by the Gestapo. Noor Inayat Khan reported back to the Special Operations Executive that she had lost contact with the rest of the group and feared they were in the hands of the Germans. Jack Agazarian, who was on leave at the time, told the SOE that if this was the case, he suspected that they had been betrayed by Henri Déricourt, a former pilot in the French Air Force, whose job it was to find suitable landing grounds and organize receptions for agents brought by air.

Gilbert Norman continued to send messages to London. Marks, was convinced that Norman was under the control of the Gestapo. Major Nicholas Bodington disagreed and persuaded Maurice Buckmaster to let him go to France to find out what had happened. Jack Agazarian was recalled from leave and the two men were taken to France.

Messages from the wireless owned by Gilbert Norman were still being sent to the Special Operations Executive in London. Instructions were passed on to Bodington by the SOE to arrange a meeting with Norman at the address he had sent them. Bodington later claimed that he and Jack Agazarian tossed to decide who should visit the address. Agazarian, who was convinced it was a trap, lost, and when he arrived at the address he was immediately arrested. Agazarian was tortured by the Gestapo for six months at Fresnes Prison before being sent to Flossenburg where he was kept in solitary confinement.

After the war Marks became a writer for stage and screen. This included writing the script for Peeping Tom. Directed by Michael Powell in 1960 it tells the story of a serial killer who films young women as he stabs them to death. Condemned as pornographic and evil, it was not shown on television until 1997.

Marks also had trouble with his autobiography Between Silk and Cyanide, that challenged the official history of the Special Operations Executive written by M.R.D. Foot. Although written in the early 1980s it was blocked by Whitehall and only appeared in 1998. He also published The Life That I Have in 1999. Leo Marks died on 15th January 2001.

Writing Peeping Tom: The script for Peeping Tom was penned by Leo Marks who recalled in Michael Powell: Interviews, "I wanted at some stage or other to do a study in scoptophilia. The idea of a young cameraman who uses his camera as a method of murder and as a symbol of murder came at the same time as thinking about doing a subject about peeping toms. I'd been introduced to Michael Powell because we wanted to do another subject altogether which was the life of Freud. But we soon discovered that another producer [John Huston] had acquired the rights and Powell said have you anything else that might interest me? So I told him the whole theme of Peeping Tom, and he listened in silence - and he has a habit of looking into the middle distance when he's interested - I didn't know it at the time, I thought it meant that he was bored - but it always means he's concentrating, and he stared into the middle distance and then he said, 'That's mine, go and write it.'"

In his autobiography, Powell remembers of Marks, "Leo was an ideal creative partner. He knew nothing about films or the theater, but a very great deal about men and women. He was malicious, inventive and unshockable." They even named their central scoptophiliac character "Mark" in homage to Marks.

And the critics went wild:
"Neither the hopeless leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay nor the gutters of Calcutta -- has left me with such a feeling of nausea and depression" vented Len Mosley of the Daily Express.

The Observer's Caroline Lejeune crowed, "It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom."

Derek Hill at the Tribune topped even those with "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer."

BBC: Actress Anna Massey collects CBE

Massey won a Bafta for her role in Anita Brookner's Hotel Du Lac
Actress Anna Massey has been awarded a CBE for services to drama.

Massey received the honour from the Queen during an investiture at Buckingham Palace.

The 67-year-old actress - who is best known for her Bafta-winning role in Anita Brookner's Hotel Du Lac - has been a stalwart of UK productions.

Her film credits include 1960's Peeping Tom, Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy in 1972, comedy The Tall Guy in 1989 and The Importance of Being Earnest in 2002.

'Wonderful tradition'

Massey - the daughter of Canadian actor Raymond Massey, best known for his role as Dr Gillespie in the TV series Dr Kildare - was named in the New Year Honours list.

"I am absolutely thrilled to receive this," she said at the time.

"It was a lovely surprise to have my name put forward. We live in a country full of tradition and this is a wonderful tradition.

"In our profession, you get quite a lot of rejections so to receive something like this is lovely."

Laura Mulvey: Peeping Tom is a summation of Powell’s life in the cinema, perhaps particularly his polemics and his disappointments. The film also suggests that there is always more to cinema than meets the eye. Powell’s project was to make visible on the screen the invisible, the intuitive, and the hidden in human life through films that were “composed” out of all the aesthetic elements of the cinema. It is the spectator’s task to decipher the hieroglyph that the voyeur may see but cannot understand.

Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)

Peter's Nite
Salad with chopped chicken, Crossont selection, Lemon Torte
Special Guest: Lisa Ottobique

All Movie Guide on Otto Preminger: Originally a law student, Otto Preminger got his first acting experience with Max Reinhardt's theater company while studying for his degree. He entered the theater as a producer and director, came to America as a director in 1935, and was hired by 20th Century Fox. After leaving the studio for Broadway at the end of the '30s, he returned in the early '40s, specializing in Nazi roles despite his Jewish faith. Preminger got back into the director's chair with Margin for Error, an adaptation of a play that he had directed on Broadway. Laura, based upon the hit novel and play by Vera Caspary, was to have been made by Rouben Mamoulian; but he was fired soon after production began, and Preminger took over finished the film, which went on to become a huge hit. The director's most important subsequent movie at Fox was Forever Amber, which failed at the box office but enhanced his reputation nonetheless.

In the early '50s, Preminger became an independent producer/director, and immediately began making a name for himself through a series of successful challenges to the restrictive production code, which forbade the use of various controversial subjects onscreen. His sophisticated comedy The Moon Is Blue broke through the barrier with regard to sexual subject matter with its relatively frank treatment of such topics as virginity and pregnancy, while The Man With the Golden Arm was the first major Hollywood film to deal with drug addiction. Preminger's Carmen Jones proved to be a critically successful venture into musicals, which led directly to being chosen by Samuel Goldwyn to direct the screen adaptation of George and Ira Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess.

Preminger's box-office record was rather scattershot during this era and included the notorious disaster Saint Joan and the hit Anatomy of a Murder.

His early-'60s movies grew in size and pretentiousness, and included such epic-length releases as Advise and Consent, The Cardinal, and In Harm's Way, but, by the middle of the decade, he had receded in ambition and success with Bunny Lake Is Missing, Skidoo, and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. The '70s saw the release of the failed thrillers Rosebud and The Human Factor. He died in 1986, several years after the onset of Alzheimer's disease brought an end to his career.

Always a flamboyant personality, Preminger was one of the more visible and better known director/producers of his era, and also became known to an entire generation of children with his portrayal of the villainous Mr. Freeze on the Batman television series.

The dark side of Preminger as Mr. Freeze: Batman Exec producer William Dozier: " Otto I had known for a long time, and he called me from New Your and said ' Bill, I must do a Batman. If I don't do a Batman, my children wont let me come home.' He hadn't acted in 17 years since Watch The Rhine on Broadway. They (guest villains) all got the same amount of money: twenty five hundred dollars. Thats what they got, period."

Adam West: Mr Freeze was out cold on the floor and Batman was supposed to run in and pick him up. In most case an unconscious actor will help the person trying to pick him or her up. They'll go with that person, move the shoulders, bend at the waist, do something, Not Otto. When I ran to pick him up, he stiffened like a sand bag and literally dug his nails into the floor. I couldn't lift two hundred pounds of resisting weight. I dropped him down and we tried again. Same thing. On the next take, my foot accidentally stepped on his hand . He yelled, but he got the message and we were able to continue. As terrible as he was, he still had enough pull in Hollywood where no one would tell him off. There are stores about him where he treated women with great disregard, commented on their breast size and would ask men if they were gay.

There is justice sometimes however, The screen Actors Guild found out he was performing and demanded $11,000 in unpaid dues. The last time he performed before Batman was in Stalag 17 (53). His disposition and general jerk attitude is the reason for the next Mr Freeze episode he was replaced with Eli Wallach.

Chris Fujiwara on Preminger: It would be easy to say that Preminger was also an artist, but this is not precisely what needs to be said. "His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer," Andrew Sarris wrote. (1) Preminger presents himself through his works as someone essentially detached, impersonal, and objective. In his impassive long takes, different ideologies and points of view battle for dominance; his films emphasise pragmatism but gravitate toward irony, doubt, and enigma. The audience leaves Exodus, as Gary Indiana wrote, less certain about the issues surrounding the formation of the state of Israel than when it went in. (2)

To the critics of Cahiers du cinéma, Preminger was almost a mystical figure. In 1954, Angel Face and The Moon Is Blue moved Jacques Rivette to ask "What is mise en scène?" and to give this definition, which sums up what attracted the more intellectual French cineastes to American cinema: "the creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space." (3)It would be easy to say that Preminger was also an artist, but this is not precisely what needs to be said. "His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer," Andrew Sarris wrote. (1) Preminger presents himself through his works as someone essentially detached, impersonal, and objective. In his impassive long takes, different ideologies and points of view battle for dominance; his films emphasise pragmatism but gravitate toward irony, doubt, and enigma. The audience leaves Exodus, as Gary Indiana wrote, less certain about the issues surrounding the formation of the state of Israel than when it went in. (2)

To the critics of Cahiers du cinéma, Preminger was almost a mystical figure. In 1954, Angel Face and The Moon Is Blue moved Jacques Rivette to ask "What is mise en scène?" and to give this definition, which sums up what attracted the more intellectual French cineastes to American cinema: "the creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space." (3)

The primary appeal to Reason made by every Preminger film thus acknowledges, in a second movement, its own provenance in the irrational to which, in a third, it returns. Reason is a fiction that is constructed to explain the inexplicable events of the narrative (Bunny Lake Is Missing [1965] is the ultimate demonstration of this process).

Preminger is an increasingly attractive figure. He represents the beauty, arrogance, and mystique of classical American cinema and embodies its highest values of craftsmanship and respect for the audience. He also represents - at a high level of formal complexity - a configuration of power, the visual, and loss that still defines cinematic seduction.

Chris Fujiwara on Preminger: It would be easy to say that Preminger was also an artist, but this is not precisely what needs to be said. "His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer," Andrew Sarris wrote. (1) Preminger presents himself through his works as someone essentially detached, impersonal, and objective. In his impassive long takes, different ideologies and points of view battle for dominance; his films emphasise pragmatism but gravitate toward irony, doubt, and enigma. The audience leaves Exodus, as Gary Indiana wrote, less certain about the issues surrounding the formation of the state of Israel than when it went in. (2)

To the critics of Cahiers du cinéma, Preminger was almost a mystical figure. In 1954, Angel Face and The Moon Is Blue moved Jacques Rivette to ask "What is mise en scène?" and to give this definition, which sums up what attracted the more intellectual French cineastes to American cinema: "the creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space."

The primary appeal to Reason made by every Preminger film thus acknowledges, in a second movement, its own provenance in the irrational to which, in a third, it returns. Reason is a fiction that is constructed to explain the inexplicable events of the narrative (Bunny Lake Is Missing [1965] is the ultimate demonstration of this process).

The end of a Preminger shot often has a hallucinatory, fantastic power, as if the scene, suddenly vacated by the narrative, were exposed to the threat - constantly present in Preminger - of the insignificant (cf. the smashed clock at the end of Laura and the camera peering down at a garbage can at the end of Anatomy of a Murder). At the end of the dance-hall sequence in Carmen Jones (1954), after Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge) and Joe (Harry Belafonte) have gone offscreen, the camera stays on the front of the house, through the curtained windows of which we see people dancing inside. Or, at the end of the party scene in Advise and Consent, Van Ackerman (George Grizzard) approaches the camera and beckons to his offscreen driver as the shot dissolves. The entire final section of Angel Face is a terrifying descent into nothingness. The threat of such a collapse haunts Bonjour Tristesse, with its repeated dissolves between color past and black-and-white present.

Preminger is an increasingly attractive figure. He represents the beauty, arrogance, and mystique of classical American cinema and embodies its highest values of craftsmanship and respect for the audience. He also represents - at a high level of formal complexity - a configuration of power, the visual, and loss that still defines cinematic seduction.

SAUL BASS (1920-1996): was not only one of the great graphic designers of the mid-20th century but the undisputed master of film title design thanks to his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese.

When the reels of film for Otto Preminger’s controversial new drugs movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, arrived at US movie theatres in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans - "Projectionists – pull curtain before titles".

Until then, the lists of cast and crew members which passed for movie titles were so dull that projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they’d finished. But Preminger wanted his audience to see The Man with the Golden Arm’s titles as an integral part of the film.

The movie’s theme was the struggle of its hero - a jazz musician played by Frank Sinatra - to overcome his heroin addiction. Designed by the graphic designer Saul Bass the titles featured an animated black paper-cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm. Knowing that the arm was a powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it – rather than Frank Sinatra’s famous face - as the symbol of both the movie’s titles and its promotional poster.

That cut-out arm caused a sensation and Saul Bass reinvented the movie title as an art form. By the end of his life, he had created over 50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese. Although he later claimed that he found the Man with the Golden Arm sequence "a little disappointing now, because it was so imitated".

Even before he made his cinematic debut, Bass was a celebrated graphic designer. Born in the Bronx district of New York in 1920 to an emigré furrier and his wife, he was a creative child who drew constantly. Bass studied at the Art Students League in New York and Brooklyn College under Gyorgy Kepes, an Hungarian graphic designer who had worked with László Moholy-Nagy in 1930s Berlin and fled with him to the US. Kepes introduced Bass to Moholy’s Bauhaus style and to Russian Constructivism.

After apprenticeships with Manhattan design firms, Bass worked as a freelance graphic designer or "commercial artist" as they were called. Chafing at the creative constraints imposed on him in New York, he moved to Los Angeles in 1946. After freelancing, he opened his own studio in 1950 working mostly in advertising until Preminger invited him to design the poster for his 1954 movie, Carmen Jones. Impressed by the result, Preminger asked Bass to create the film’s title sequence too.

Now over-shadowed by Bass’ later work, Carmen Jones elicited commissions for titles for two 1955 movies: Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife, and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. But it was his next Preminger project, The Man with the Golden Arm, which established Bass as the doyen of film title design.

Over the next decade he honed his skill by creating an animated mini-movie for Mike Todd’s 1956 Around The World In 80 Days and a tearful eye for Preminger’s 1958 Bonjour Tristesse. Blessed with the gift of identifying the one image which symbolised the movie, Bass then recreated it in a strikingly modern style. Martin Scorsese once described his approach as creating: "an emblematic image, instantly recognisable and immediately tied to the film".

In 1958’s Vertigo, his first title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock, Bass shot an extreme close-up of a woman’s face and then her eye before spinning it into a sinister spiral as a bloody red soaks the screen. For his next Hitchcock commission, 1959’s North by Northwest, the credits swoop up and down a grid of vertical and diagonal lines like passengers stepping off elevators. It is only a few minutes after the movie has begun - with Cary Grant stepping out of an elevator - that we realise the grid is actually the façade of a skyscraper.

Equally haunting are the vertical bars sweeping across the screen in a manic, mirrored helter-skelter motif at the beginning of Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho. This staccato sequence is an inspired symbol of Norman Bates’ fractured psyche. Hitchcock also allowed Bass to work on the film itself, notably on its dramatic highpoint, the famous shower scene with Janet Leigh.

More on Saul Bass: One marked characteristic of the Bass title is that its images undergo a journey whereby they are transformed into the unexpected. A famous example is the flower petal in the opening sequence to Bonjour Tristesse, which transforms several times before resolving into a teardrop. In the opening to Hitchcock's North by Northwest, bars of text ascend and descend, mimicking elevators in motion, white lines invade the screen, simulating the grid pattern in the skyscraper that dominates the opening shot. Another of Bass's famed transformations is the eyeball that swirls into the vortex at the opening of Vertigo.

Saul Bass. Did I actually make l1 films with Preminger? After the sixth, I stopped counting. Otto had a vision. A true artistic, visual vision. He believed that he knew what he knew and he believed that what he knew, together with what would come out of our work, was worth defending to the death. He also had the bullheadedness to take that position and the clout to pull it off. Stanley Kubrick is that way too, but I don't know anybody else quite like it. There are many directors today who have enormous clout, but they don't have a graphic vision. They care about the advertising, but they don, t start with a point of view. And if they have a point of view, they're not sure enough about it, or don't care enough to make a federal case out of it. You can see the result in the state of film graphics and advertising today. In many cases the advertising is quite effective, but ultimately, unmemorable.

When I began to do titles many many years ago - the dark ages, when designers lived in caves - I went through a very intense learning experience with some extraordinary film-makers. I'm referring to the Wylers, the Wilders, the Hitchcocks, and the Premingers. It was an extraordinary experience, cutting your eye teeth within that framework. So I began thinking about what to do at the beginning of a film. Obviously, the point of any title is to support the film. As you know, I created a lot of stuff, which, it would be fair to say, constituted a reinvention of the film title.

My initial thoughts about what a title could do was to set mood and to prime the underlying core of the film, s story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.

I had a strong feeling that films really began on the first frame. This was, of course, back when titles were strictly typography - mostly bad typography - and constituted the period when people were settling in, going to restrooms, or involved in chitchat. I just felt that this was a period that could work for the film. Otto Preminger agreed with me and we took a shot at it.

My actual entry into film began when Otto asked me to design a title for The Man with the Golden Ann. This opportunity grew out of my having designed the original graphic symbol for the film. The symbol for the film turned out to be about as difficult to accept as the film itself. It also broke from the general point of view about how you sold films. The notion that a single visual element, good, bad, or indifferent, could become a statement for a film is not a notion that existed before The Man with the Golden Arm. Before that period, almost all film ads, no, all film ads, used a potpourri approach. Advertisers threw everything into the pot, using the theory that, as a filmgoer, you would find something in the ad that would inspire you to see the film. I used to call this the "See, See, See" approach: See the missionaries boil in oil. See the virgins dancing in the temple of doom. See Krakatoa blow its to - that kind of thing. If you didn't like one image, you'd like another. The idea of having a film expressed within the framework of one single, reductive statement was a very daring notion in the 50s. It was a particularly scary notion for distributors and filmmakers alike. You were saying, of course, that you could make one statement that would be sufficiently provocative and true to the film, and that would sell the film. At the time, and this was to Otto's credit, he didn't flinch when this occurred.

New York Times: Cleveland-born Keir Dullea found himself in the thick of Manhattan's intellectual scene when his parents took over the management of a Greenwich Village bookstore. Dullea attended Rutgers and San Francisco State, then launched his acting career in regional theater. He made a spectacular film debut in The Hoodlum Priest (1961), playing a born-to-hang juvenile delinquent.

He was more sympathetic but no less emotionally disturbed in 1962's David and Lisa; as late as 1965, he was still playing mentally unstable youths in films like Bunny Lake is Missing. The biggest film hit with which Dullea was associated was 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in which he played the time-and-space-travelling astronaut Bowman. He repeated this characterization (and answered several of the questions posed by 2001) in the 1984 sequel 2010. Though he'd been active on the New York stage in the 1950s, Keir Dullea did not appear on Broadway until 1970, when the 34-year-old actor portrayed a twentysomething blind man in Butterflies are Free.

Cinematographer Denys Coop: Entered film industry at the age of 16 under apprenticeship to Freddie Young at Elstree Studios. Worked at Pinewood Studios and Denham Studios. Served in the Fleet Air Arm. Was transferred to the Army Kinematograph Service near the end of WW2. Re-entered the industry at Shepperton Studios under contract to Alexander Korda. Became freelance in 1956. Ph commercials dir by Dick Clement, Tom Bussmann, a.o. Was member and president of the BSC.

Awards: BAFTA Film Award nom [1964] for 'Billy Liar'; BAFTA Film Award nom [1965] for 'King and Country'; BAFTA Film Award nom [1967] for 'Bunny Lake Is Missing'; 'Oscar' AA 'Special Achievement Award' [1978; shared] & BAFTA 'Michael Balcon Award' [1979; shared] for 'Superman'.

'Kordas, Reeds and (especially) visiting Yanks - it reads like a potted history of better class British cinema. Unfortunately there is no better class British cinema any more, and Coop now films boring asylums and other vaults of horror. And there is also the question of the colour. Without wishing to put down Coop's recent colour work too drastically, it hasn't even remotely matched the perfectly measured blacks and whites of 'Bunny Lake Is Missing' or the additional greys of 'King & Country' and 'This Sporting Life'. British cinema will no doubt stick to the belief that colour and only colour is beautiful. Obviously, this is no fault of Coop's and quite probably he regrets the situation as much as we do.' [Markku Salmi in Film Dope, No. 8, October 1975.]

Screenonline on John Mortimer: Educated at Harrow and Oxford, barrister-author John Mortimer has had one of the most eclectically prolific careers of any British writer of the latter half of the 20th century. Most famous now as the creator of TV's irascible Rumpole of the Bailey (ITV, 1978-79, 1983, 1987-88, 1991, 1992), he also wrote such other series as Brideshead Revisited (ITV, 1981), one of TV's greatest succès d'estime, and Paradise Postponed (ITV, 1986), as well as the autobiographical stage play, Voyage Round My Father (1971, with Alec Guinness; on TV, 1982, with Laurence Olivier).

His cinema work has been comparatively limited: as a scriptwriter with the Crown Film Unit during WW2, he worked on such films as Children on Trial (d. Jack Lee, 1946); he contributed dialogue to Ferry to Hong Kong (d. Lewis Gilbert, 1959) and The Innocents (d. Jack Clayton, 1961); two of his plays were adapted to the screen, Lunch Hour (by himself) and The Dock Brief (both d. James Hill, 1962); and he wrote several other screenplays over a long period, including the surprisingly sentimental Tea with Mussolini (UK/Italy, d. Franco Zeffirelli, 1999).

He married two women called Penelope: the first the novelist Penelope [Fletcher] Mortimer (b.North Wales, 1918) with whom he co-wrote the screenplay for Bunny Lake Is Missing (d. Otto Preminger, 1965) and whose novel, The Pumpkin Eater, was filmed in 1964 (d. Jack Clayton); the second Penelope Glossop, mother of Emily Mortimer. He was made a CBE in 1986 and knighted in 1998.

The Public Enemy (1931)

Nora's Nite
Homemade Chili, Salad, Birthday Cake

Filmsite: The Public Enemy (1931) is one of the earliest and best of the gangster films from Warner Bros. in the thirties. The film's screenplay (by John Bright and Kubec Glasmon), which received the film's only Academy Award nomination, was based upon their novel Beer and Blood. Unfortunately, the film wasn't even given a Best Picture nomination, nor was Cagney rewarded with a nomination for his dynamic and kinetic performance. Jean Harlow's small role as a sexy call-girl was her only screen appearance with Cagney and her only lead role with Warners.

Director William Wellman's pre-code, box-office smash, shot in less than a month at a cost of approximately $151,000, was released at approximately the same time as another classical gangster film - Little Caesar (1930) that starred Edward G. Robinson as a petty thief whose criminal ambitions led to his inevitable downfall. The Public Enemy was even tougher, more violent and realistic (released before the censorship codes were strictly enforced), although most of the violence is again off-screen.

The lead character is portrayed as a sexually magnetic, cocky, completely amoral, emotionally brutal, ruthless, and terribly lethal individual. However, the protagonist (a cold-blooded, tough-as-nails racketeer and "public enemy") begins his life, not as a hardened criminal, but as a young mischievous boy in pre-Prohibition city streets, whose early environment clearly contributes to the evolving development of his life of adult crime and his inevitable gruesome death. Unlike other films, this one examined the social forces and roots of crime in a serious way.

Cagney's character was based on real-life Chicago gangster Earl "Hymie" Weiss (who also survived a machine-gun ambush) and bootlegging mobster Charles Dion "Deanie" O'Banion (an arch-rival to Al Capone). Reportedly, an exasperated Weiss slammed an omelette (not a grapefruit) into the face of his girlfriend. Similarities also exist between the demise of Nails Nathan and the 1923 death of real-life Samuel J. "Nails" Morton of the O'Banion mob. The retaliatory horse killing in the film was a replay of a similar incident when organized crime figure Louis "Two-Gun" Alterie (and other North Side gang members) executed the offending horse in Chicago after the death of their friend.

James Cagney's dynamic, charismatic and magnetic characterization of the murderous thug was his fifth film performance. He had previously performed tough-guy roles in two other Warner Bros. features: Sinner's Holiday (1930) (his film debut with co-star Joan Blondell) and director Archie Mayo's The Doorway to Hell (1930). This volatile role made him famous and instantly launched his celebrated film star career, but it also typecast him for many years. [Originally, the roles were reversed, with Edward Woods playing the lead role, and Cagney in a secondary role, but a switch occurred when the contract screenwriters suggested that a mistake had been made. Therefore, the end credits bill Edward Woods above Cagney.] Cagney went on to play other criminal roles, including such films as Smart Money (1931) with Edward G. Robinson (their only teaming together), and Lady Killer (1933).

Unfortunately, the film also appeared to glamorize criminal activities such as bootlegging (although that was not its intent), and emphasized their high style of life with various floozies (portrayed by Joan Blondell, Mae Clarke, and Jean Harlow). Hence, the film hastened efforts of Hollywood's self-imposed Production Code in the early thirties to strictly censor films (with criminal and sexual subject matter) that depicted undesirable social figures or sexual subjects in a sympathetic or realistic way.

John Bright - Screenwriter (1908 - 1989)
Born in Baltimore, Maryland. He began his career at 13 as Ben Hecht's copy boy on the Chicago Daily News. He later became a crime reporter and at 19 published his first book, Hizonner Big Bill Thompson, an unauthorized biography of Chicago's mayor. When the mayor sued him, he moved to Hollywood, where he began writing gangster stories with Kubec Glasmon, a Polish-born pharmacist who employed him as a soda jerk. Their novelette-length Beer and Blood became the basis for THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931), a milestone in the American cinema's gangster genre and in the career of the star, James Cagney. Under contract to Warner Bros., the two collaborated on a number of other crime and action films in 1931-32. Bright then moved to Paramount.

In 1933, rebelling against the low wages and poor working conditions of Hollywood writers, Bright and Glasmon were among the 10 founders of the Screen Writers Guild (now the Writers Guild of America). A political activist with leftist leanings, Bright was blacklisted in 1951 after being named a Communist in testimony before the House Un-American Activities hearings.

Returning to Hollywood from seven years of self-exile in Mexico, he wrote magazine articles and became a reader, story editor and literary advisor for Bill Cosby's production company. He was instrumental in the company's filming of JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (1971), the antiwar film by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten.

Other notable screenwriting credits (alone or in collaboration) include SMART MONEY (1931), UNION DEPOT, THE CROWD ROARS, THREE ON A MATCH and IF I HAD A MILLION (all 1932), SHE DONE HIM WRONG (1933), THE ACCUSING FINGER, HERE COMES TROUBLE and GIRL OF THE OZARKS (all 1936), JOHN MEADE'S WOMAN and SAN QUENTIN (both 1937), BROADWAY and SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE VOICE OF TERROR (both 1942), I WALK ALONE, JOE PALOOKA IN FIGHTING MAD, OPEN SECRET and CLOSE-UP (all 1948), THE KID FROM CLEVELAND (1949), THE BRAVE BULLS (1951) and LA REBELIÓN DE LOS COLGADOS / THE REBELLION OF THE HANGED (1954, uncredited).

New York Times on John Bright: Distinguished screenwriter John Bright began his career as a teenage copyboy at the Chicago Daily News. He was soon promoted to reporter, and before he was 20 wrote the unauthorized biography Hizzoner Big Bill Thompson. Soon after being sued by the notorious Chicago mayor, young Bright came to Hollywood with his partner Kubec Glasmon, a former drugstore owner who had once hired Bright as a fountaineer, and began writing gangster stories. Together they penned the novelette "Beer and Blood," which they later adapted into the classic film Public Enemy (1931). The two wrote several more gangster and action films before splitting up in late 1932 when Bright moved to Paramount.

The following year, he and Glasmon began stridently protesting the low pay and poor working conditions that Hollywood writers endured. To change things, they and eight others founded the Screen Writers Guild (which later became the Writers Guild of America). In 1951, after writing The Brave Bull, Bright's leftist political activism--which began during the Sacco and Vanzetti trial--led him to be blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Six years before, his involvement with the Conference of Studio Unions caused him to be fired by MGM. Following the blacklisting, Bright exiled himself to Mexico for seven years. Upon his return he became a free-lance journalist, a story reader, story editor, and a literary advisor for Bill Cosby's production company.

In 1971, Bright played a key role in the filming of Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun.

Jean Harlow Official Bio (?!): Jean left home at age 16 to marry 23-year-old Charles McGrew. Shortly after the wedding the couple left Chicago and moved to Beverly Hills. Jean's true aspiration in life was to be a wife and mother, however she sought work as an extra in films to please Mother Jean. Although at first Jean was not interested in making films, she received her first role in Why is a Plumber? in 1927. She and McGrew divorced after two years, but her big career break was about to occur.

In 1930, movie producer and entrepreneur Howard Hughes became interested in Jean and cast her in Hell's Angels. In Hell's Angels, she spoke the now famous line, "Would you be shocked if I changed into something more comfortable?" Jean's appearance in Hell's Angels solidified her role as America's new sex symbol. This victory was followed by another hit, Platinum Blonde, and several films with Clark Gable. In total, she and Gable would star in six movies together including Red Dust, The Secret Six and Wife vs. Secretary. During the filming of Red Dust, Jean's second husband of only two months, producer Paul Bern, committed suicide.

In 1933's Dinner at Eight, Jean was at her comedic best. Later that year she starred in Bombshell, a Hollywood parody based loosely on her real-life experiences with her controlling mother and greedy stepfather. Also in 1933, Jean married cinematographer Harold Rosson in a union that would only last eight months. To accompany her escalating career, in 1935 she legally changed her name to Jean Harlow, her mother's maiden name.

Following the end of her marriage, Jean found the love of her life in actor William Powell. They were together for two years, however before they could wed, Jean's health declined. While filming Saratoga in 1937, Jean was hospitalized with uremic poisoning and kidney failure, a result of the scarlet fever she had suffered during childhood. In the days before dialysis and kidney transplants, nothing could be done and Jean died on June 7, 1937. The film had to be finished using long angle shots and a double, Mary Dees. Clark Gable was reported to have said that he felt as if he was "in the arms of a ghost." After a large Hollywood funeral organized by Louis B. Mayer of MGM, Jean was buried in the mausoleum in Forest Lawn Glendale, in Los Angeles.

Gregory Speck interviews James Cagney:

James Cagney: It was basically no different then than it is today. It was just everyday living. With me, it was fighting, more fighting, and more fighting. Life then was simply the way it was: ordinary, not bad, not good, just regular. No stress, no strain. Of course, no one had much of anything, but we didn't know that we were poor.

We certainly didn't feel poor. My family lived mostly in a variety of tenement apartments in Yorkville on the Upper East Side, which at that point still had a lot of ethnic flavor: Irish, German Zech, Hungarian, and so forth. On address I remember was 81st Street and York Avenue, where my father had a saloon. Yes, it was rough, and it was tough, but since I was a fighter, and a good one at that, it was not really so hard. In fact, you could say that it was easy for me, for I guess I was a pretty tough little kid. For my brothers Harry and Eddie, though, who eventually became doctors, it was not so easy. They were athletic, but didn't like to fight, so I had to stick up for them, which I was glad to do. My brother Bill, who became my Hollywood business manager, didn't mind a fight either, so we made a pretty strong family. We stuck together; We had to, because it was a "knock'em down, drag'em out" kind of world. It built character and made us strong. I learned how to take care of myself by fighting in the streets, and it was all part of the game. It helped me later in Hollywood, too.

Speck: In 1931 you created a sensation in The Public Enemy, directed by William Wellman.

Cagney: I don't know about this sensation business, but The Public Enemy was the film that really launched my career. I played a mean, mixed-up hood, a tough kid who tried to throw his weight around and ended up dead. It was a good part. I don't think I took anything away from it. It just kind of flowed along. As you may know, the first title was Beer and Blood. It was one of the first of many chances I had to portray that kind of person, the fist-swinging gangster who becomes ruthless in order to succeed. There were many tough guys to play in the scripts that Warner kept assigning me. Each of my subsequent roles in the hoodlum genre offered the opportunity to inject something new, which I always tired to do. One could be funny, and the next one flat. Some roles were mean, and others were meaner. A few roles among them were actually sympathetic and kind-hearted, and I preferred them, but generally did not get to do many of those parts until much later in my career, for the public seemed to prefer me as a bad guy. Since I was most frequently cast as a criminal, constantly on the prod, I rarely to do the comedy roles I really would have preferred. I am really not at all like the character I played in The Public Enemy. I'm chiefly pretty quiet and reserved and private. Nervertheless, I had lots of gangster roles then, and in The roaring Twenties and in White Heat, and too much of the same thing gets to be too much. I don't understand why the public never tired of those awful hoodlums. William Wellman did a good job on The Public Enemy I thought, as he did on the earlier picture I did with him, Other Men's Women , in which I played opposite Joan Blondell and Mary Astor. He let me go my way and develop my own interpretation whenever it was possible. With other members of the cast of The Public Enemy such as Jean Harlow and Joan, however, he was less understanding. Having this kind of discernment makes for a good director. It was he who suggested that I squash that half a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face in the famous scene, and it set a precedent in the abuse of women in films. In my next film, Smart Money, which starred Edward G. Robinson, I again had to hit a lady in the face.

What advice would you give someone just coming into the profession?

Cagney: Just walk in , plant your feet, look'em in the eye, and tell the truth. When you're an actor, you go out on the stage, or the set, and you act. But if you're a dancer, you're everything, for you have to act and often sing as well when you're dancing. I did all three. Luckily, I started to learn it at an early age, and I could make my body behave as I wanted it to. I heard everything I could when I was still young.
Anecdote: James Cagney, famed for his tough guy persona, was understandably nervous about making his first stage appearance in 1919 - as a chorus girl - complete with a red wig and tutu - in a female impersonation show called Every Sailor!

Another Anecdote: After seeing James Cagney in a Broadway production, Twentieth Century-Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck gave him a small role in George Arliss's The Millionaire (1931). Though he had been impressed with the novice actor on Broadway, Zanuck was stunned when he saw the rushes. Cagney, apparently, was uncomfortable before the lens. In a loop of unedited film, however, Cagney turned toward the camera and, thinking that the scene was over, curled his lip in anger, and suddenly exclaimed: "For God's sake! Who wrote this crappy dialogue anyway!" And Zanuck knew he had found the tough young punk he was looking for.

Awesome William Wellman interview: Are you scared of dying?

I hate to think about it. Certainly I am. I don't want to die now and I didn't want to then. I just didn't think about it as much then as I do now. I'm funny that way; I'm an Episcopalian, supposedly. I'm supposed to think there's a God. I say my prayers every night because my mother always taught me to.

Nowadays, lots of people look on World War One with nostalgia, as the last of the "noble" wars.

Balls. In that movie The Blue Max and others, these guys would come back to these beautifully dressed dames and champagne. Goddamn! At Lunéville, where I was stationed, there was one fairly good-looking girl and her mother. One. All the menfolk had been killed and she and her mother took in laundry. She wore wooden shoes, and your reputation was based on whether you were a no shoe man, a one shoe man or a two shoe man. If, during sex, you could shake both her shoes off, you were a hell of a lay.

She took everybody on?

Not everybody. She confined it mostly to flyers. But, hell, there was no one else.

How many pilots were left after the war?

Out of 222, eighty-seven were killed. I flew with Tom Hitchcock, the great polo player. Tom and I were in the "Black Cat" group.

On making The Public Enemy: How did you come to make Public Enemy?

I got the story from two druggists from Chicago. They were visiting the studio when they stopped me and asked me if I'd read their story. They were such nice guys that I asked them to sit down and have lunch with me. There they told me the story. At that time, it was called "Beer and Blood". I went nuts about it and went in to see Zanuck and told it to him. He said, "Bill, I can't do this, I've just made Little Caesar and Doorway to Hell." I said, "I'll make this so goddamn tough you'll forget both of them." So he said O.K.

How'd you pick Cagney?

Didn't pick Cagney - Eddie Woods played the role, the main role. We had shot for three days, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. On Sunday, I went in to see the rushes and called Zanuck who was in New York at the time.

"We've made a frightful mistake. We've got the wrong man playing the wrong part. This Cagney is the guy."

So he said, "O.K., make the switch."

Didn't Woods resent it?

Sure he resented it, but I didn't give a goddamn. I said, "Look, you're not good enough for us. Play the second lead." And he was lucky to get that. I had to be honest with him. So he agreed - what else could he do? I could always get somebody else if he didn't like it and he knew it.

What about the famous grapefruit scene?

I've been married so many times, and they were all beautiful. 90% of all the domestic troubles I had with these wives was my fault. But this one particular wife, whenever there was any anger (and you've got to have a few rows, for Christ's sake), this beautiful face would just freeze and wouldn't say a word. It used to just kill me. You're whipped, you're licked before you start. Anyway, I like grapefruit halves and when we used to eat breakfast I often thought of taking that goddamn grapefruit and just mushing it right in that lovely, beautiful, cold face. I never did it really, because I did it in Public Enemy.

That was your scene?

That was my scene. I know Zanuck says it's his but he's a goddamn liar. I can show you in the script. Cagney was supposed to throw the grapefruit at the woman.

I'm one of the very few directors who likes Zanuck - as a producer. You see, pictures that still live, that are still successful, are made with the combination of a writer and a director and a producer. The writer and the director gave the producer the talent, the producer gave them the money and got the hell out of the way. Now, for Christ's sake, there's the Producer, the Associate Producer, the Assistant to the Producer, the Assistant to the Associate Producer, all of them lined up against one poor goddamn director. And all the women that they've got, whether they're married to them or living with them . . . Jesus, the pillow talk that goes on has ruined more great pictures than anything you can imagine, including the agents and the unions.