Still of the day ...

Two of our favourite blondes: Faye and Michael - Dunaway and York that is, in Richard Lester's all-star extravaganza THE FOUR MUSKETEERS, the more sombre follow-up to his jolly THREE MUSKETEERS, both filmed in 1973. Faye is a deliciously wicked Milady with the York boy as the hapless D'Artagnan .... Charlton Heston scores too as the devious Richelieu, as does Olly Reed as Athos and Christopher Lee in a different role for him. Lots of enjoyment here .... it all looks great too,

The wrong envelope!

Star power

Interesting news that Warren Beatty. 79, and Faye Dunaway, 76, will present the Best Film Award at the upcoming Oscars, 50 years after BONNIE AND CLYDE. I was 21 when Faye and Warren bowled us over in Penn's extraordindary film back in that glorious year 1967 - are we all 50 years older? 

Here's another example of star power: Paul Newman, 67, and Elizabeth Taylor, 60, presenting the Best Film Award in 1992, decades after their CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. 

Bad Movies We Love

Here is a Trash Classic indeed. Rebello and Marguilies' 1995 tome on those bad movies we love, with a foreword by Sharon Stone, who gets a whole chapter to herself. The usual suspects though are here in force: Lana, Susan, Joan (Crawford), Bette and all those delirious movies of theirs.

Browsing it again makes one want to dig out QUEEN BEE (Joan - ["wearing the kind of gown a female impersonator would choose"]: "Any man's my man if I want it that way" or: "You look sweet - even in those tacky old clothes"); or Lana's PORTRAIT IN BLACK or LOVE HAS MANY FACES - perennial favourites of ours. Others like THE CHAPMAN REPORT, THE  BEST OF EVERYTHING, SERENADE, PARRISH and those Troy Donahue spectaculars get their due (I will have to look out for PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND, which sounds a hoot).

Pity they did not include Suzanne Pleshette's opus A RAGE TO LIVE, or THE SUBTERRANEANS or THE SOUND AND THE FURY or Lee Remick's SANCTUARY or Jean Simmons' HILDA CRANE or Jane Russell's THE REVOLT OF MAMIE STOVER or Shelley's A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME or Debbie's THE SINGING NUN.... maybe in a new edition, and with a foreword by Joan Collins please? At least JOHNNY GUITAR gets it due - a delicious piece on its gay subtext, as does TORCH SONG, AUTUMN LEAVES, FEMALE ON THE BEACH, Bette's THE STAR and DEAD RINGER and Lucille's MAME, plus the pure trash of THE OSCAR and THE LOVE MACHINE and ... those 'disasters' get trashed again too: those AIRPORTs, THE CASSANDRA CROSSING, EARTHQUAKE etc. too easy to make fun of those! 

Lets' savour a few comments on the usually-respected THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (the 1968 one, natch): "Its not the money" business tycoon Steve McQueen drawls soulfully "Its me and the System" - that 60s phrase explains why the ineffably cool McQueen - who plays polo, drives a Rolls, pilots his own glider plane and dune buggy, and lives in a killer Boston mansion - masterminds multi-million dollar bank robberies on the side.... Everything's so terribly, laughably with-it in Norman Jewison's chi-chi epic - that you could bliss out with glee from all the faux hip dialogue, multiple-screen images ... Dunaway, all teeth and legs, and blissfully unaware of how disasterously dated she is going to look in those Theodora Van Runkle costumes, sets a trap to catch a thief, McQueen, whom she just knows is the mastermind".

Lots more here too on bad girls we love like Gina Lollobrigida in GO NAKED IN THE WORLD, Taylor and Burton get roasted for THE SANDPIPER and THE VIPs and Liz' THE DRIVER'S SEAT and X, Y AND ZEE (one I have been meaning to return to...). Carroll Baker gets her due (SYLVIA, THE CARPETBAGGERS, HARLOW) as does Natalie Wood (MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR), Ann-Margret ("THE SWINGER might just be the all-time tackeiest major studio  movie") and so many more .... its well worth seeking out for Trash devotees.   

Above: Bette, Susan and director Edward Dmytryk who after his early successes (THE YOUNG LIONS, RAINTREE COUNTY) hit the Trash trail with a vengance: WHERE LOVE HAS GONE, THE CARPETBAGGERS, BLUEBEARD ...

Something for the weekend 2: Faye !

Time for some more Faye Dunaway glamour .... we can never get enough of Faye, as per previous posts on her - see label. 

Watching items like THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR again or even De Sica's A PLACE FOR LOVERS or Kazan's THE ARRANGEMENT all from Faye's late 1960s goddessy period, not to mention her endlessly fascinating Evelyn Mulwray in CHINATOWN are enduring pleasures, as is her wicked Milady in the THREE and FOUR MUSKETEERS films.

Bottom: Faye in Ireland in 1983 photographed by Jack McManus.

Some choice Oscar moments

Remember when the Academy Awards shows were exciting back in the 1970s as we saw the great stars presenting or collecting prizes. Before multi-channel 24 hour TV, these were treats indeed. Here are a few:

Susan Hayward's last public appearance in 1974 on the arm of old co-star Charlton Heston who was propping her up. Hayward was already fatally ill, she would die the next year, but here she is bewigged, medicated and determined to complete her last public outing in style. Watch the surprise on Ellen Burstyn's face as Glenda Jackson - not even there - wins a second Best Actress award for a comedy which I had no interest in seeing ...

I knew James Stewart and Kim Novak had teamed again sometime in the '80s to present an award. Here it is in 1989 .

Ingrid Bergman is choice as usual as she wins Best Supporting Actress for her cameo role in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, also 1974 - and she had wanted Valentina Cortesa to win, to the chagrin of her fellow co-nominess ...

Faye Dunaway arrives to collect her Best Actress Oscar in 1976. Some wag wrote that the goddess looked like she had been doing drugs and having sex in her limousine before arriving all tousled on stage ...

Deborah Kerr receiving her Honorary Oscar, introduced by Glenn Close, in 1994.

Madame Faye

Here is a treat: Faye Dunaway as the BEVERLY HILLS MADAM, does 1980s glitz get any better? 
Faye plays this 1985 trash like its gold-plated. Its now on YouTube in 4 parts, each one a lulu. (For some reason, it won't allow me to post the clip itself...).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9a0M4tzFC8&feature=youtu.be

Its all so deliciously '80s and Faye looks fabulous in those fashions .... See Faye label for more on it, she is of course one of our main favourites and has been since the Sixties. 

Another ship of fools ....

Based on the true story of a ship carrying German-Jewish refugees which was sent to Havana in 1939 by the Nazis but was denied permission to land anywhere. The ship was eventually obliged to return to Germany, where certain death awaited its passengers. This terrible outcome had been cynically anticipated by the Nazis when granting permission for the voyage in the first place.

The 1970s was that era of all-star disaster movies: the US studios gave us EARTHQUAKE, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, AIRPLANE 75 and all the rest, while in England TV mogul Sir Lew Grade assembled several all star packages, some of which were amusingly awful like our favourite THE CASSANDRA CROSSING (Sophia! Ava! Ingrid Thulin! Alida Valli! Burt Lancaster! John Philip Law! and more) and others like ESCAPE TO ATHENA was just silly, but VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED in 1976 was meant to be a serious drama but it is so crammed with names that one just sits there bemused by it all - "look, there's Julie Harris talking to Wendy Hiller" - but a lot of them have nothing to do and some barely get a look in: 

James Mason, Katharine Ross as a prostitute, Orson pops in a scene or two, as does Ben Gazzara, Helmut Griem reprises his evil Nazi (a la CABARET and Visconti's THE DAMNED), Malcolm McDowell, playing nice for once, is the young steward having a romance with Lynn Frederick (the last Mrs Peter Sellers), her parents are Lee Grant (who goes over the top spectacularly as the berserk mother cutting her hair in the concentration camp style) and Sam Wanamaker. Other well known faces here are Nehemiah Persoff and Maria Schell (also barely seen), while Jonathan Pryce is one of the persecuted refugees hoping for a new life. 

Topping the bill are Faye Dunaway and Oscar Werner (his final role) - Faye as an embittered wife displays her haughty glamour and gets to wear a monacle and strut around while her husband, Werner, practically reprising his role in SHIP OF FOOLS plays an esteemed Jewish surgeon. The captain of the "St Louis" is none other than Max Von Sydow. It should be a grim drama but the all-star cast and plodding direction of Stuart Rosenberg render it interesting for all the wrong reasons. Kramer's 1965 plodder SHIP OF FOOLS, which we caught and reviewed a year or so ago (Simone Signoret label), did it all much better. 

THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN in 1969 was also an all-star spectacular, helmed by the reliable Michael Anderson - one of several that year (BATTLE OF BRITAIN, OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR) - from a novel about the first Russian pope and how he tackles world poverty, from a novel by Morris West - which is another long, if entertaining, plod to see now, but at least it employed Anthony Quinn as the pope, Laurence Olivier as a wily Russian official, Oscar Werner again as another doomed priest, Gielgud as another ailing pope, and many, many more. 

October Trashfest

The IMDB Classic Film Board people are having their annual October challenge, seeing and reviewing the obscurer-the-better horror films for the Halloween season. I’ve rustled up my own October Trashfest, with some choice doozies:

Paul Schrader in 1982

CAT PEOPLE. The glossy 1982 remake from Paul Schrader (of DeWitt Bodeen’s story as filmed by Jacques Tourneur in 1942, a '40s classic) after his AMERICAN GIGOLO (which defined the early '80s), where he continues exploring his Calvinist background (he couldn't see any films until he was 18) and attitudes to sex and violence (as in his terrific script for TAXI DRIVER and early films HARDCORE and BLUE COLLAR, and his later LIGHT SLEEPER). Schrader certainly liked getting his attractive leads out of their clothes – as in GIGOLO and here, where leading lady Nastassja Kinski is starkers for the closing scenes …. I can’t imagine it being shown on TV uncut!

SPOILERS AHEAD:First thing, it looks terrific of course, shot by John Bailey (who lensed GIGOLO), and again Ferdinando Scarfiotti (1941-1994) is “visual consultant” (presumably like Hoyningen–Heune used to be for Cukor), the score is again by Giorgio Moroder, and David Bowie contributes that dynamic song “Putting Out Fire with Gasoline” – which leads us to the subject matter. Brother and long lost sister re-unite in suitably spooky New Orleans (OBSESSION, ANGEL HEART) – Irina (Kinski) though turns into a black panther when erotically aroused – brother Malcolm McDowell, who also transforms, wants her to sleep with him so they can protect each other, but she falls for a zoo director (John Heard). The copious amounts of nudity and the erotically charged story and the stunning visuals keep one watching, but the ending is problematic. We get a man tying a naked woman with rope to the four corners of a bed (which will be a turn-on for some people) before having sex with her – to save himself when she transforms into the panther! – and then the last scene has her as the panther in her cage at the zoo, as he looks at her wistfully and pets her and gives her treats, his pet captive. 

It seems it is her choice to be captured and sacrifice her freedom and he goes along with it, but will she turn back into human form again? There are gruesome scenes along the way, as well as Annette O’Toole’s topless swim in the pool, and some terrific special effects. Kinski (TESS), McDowell, Heard and Ruby Dee all do as their director requires and the Bowie song rounds it off nicely. Its certainly a fascinating, offbeat, cult movie that bears a rewatch. Interesting features on the dvd have interviews with Schrader (now married to Mary Beth Hurt) on set discussing Scarfiotti and the cast. Bowie of course went on to THE HUNGER with Deneuve, the next year in 1983, another stylish horror movie (as per my review Deneuve label).

THE KILLER NUN.  This is the real eurotrash treat, from 1979.

A demented nun sliding through morphine addiction into madness, whilst presiding over a regime of lesbianism, torture and death. Sister Gertrude is the head nurse/nun in a general hospital, whose increasingly psychotic behavior endangers the staff and patients around her.Or as the blurb says:

Legendary Swedish sex bomb Anita Ekberg (LA DOLCE VITA) stars as Sister Gertrude, a cruel nun who discovers depraved pleasure in a frenzy of drug addiction, sexual degradation and sadistic murder. Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro (ANDY WARHOL’S FRANKENSTEIN), Alida Valli as the mother superior, Lou Castel, Massimo Serato co-star in this notorious “Nunsploitation’ branded as obscene around the world and banned outright in Britain, but now available in a new restored transfer …

Well, yes, it’s a lot of fun, Trash Heaven in fact. Anita still has that Ekberg magnetism here (see label for my other reviews on her classics like SCREAMING MIMI or ZARAK), hilarious moments include her stamping on false teeth and having some hot girl on girl action. Directed by one Giulio Berruti.

THE NUN OF MONZA, 1969. “The Nun of Monza” by Mario Mazzuccheli was a respected Penguin paperback in the ‘60s which I remember enjoying reading. The film, by Epirando Visconti (a nephew of Luchino), finally turns up, a 1969 romp from that era of nun exploitation cinema. The story is based on real events emphasizing on the hypocrisy and abuse of power of the Catholic Church in 17th Century Italy. 
It all looks great of course, the buildings and the costumes. Anne Heywood is the Mother Superior who against her will has to give shelter to handsome Antonio Sabato who soon has those nuns all aflutter. Hardy Kruger is the priest who wants him protected. Soon though Sabato and Anne have a passionate affair resulting in a baby. Then they have to go on the run due to various plot twists and turns. It all ends with her being walled up alive for 10 years …. A fate worse than death, probably. Not as lurid as THE DEVILS it still packs a punch and looks great. Good score too by Ennio Morricone. 

RED RIDING HOOD, 2011. The classic fairly tale re-imagined for the TWILIGHT generation, as its director Catherine Hardwicke fashions a marvellous village and forest setting for more werewolf mischief … This time, Amanda Seyfried is Valerie (and she seems as vapid as she was in MAMMA MIA!) the girl torn between two men, the man she loves and the one her parents want her to marry. Gary Oldman on autopilot is Solomon, the werewolf hunter brought in to aid the villagers as it seems the wolf who prowls the forest is actually one of them in daylight hours … Julie Christie (right) is the grandma with her cottage in the woods who gives Valerie her scarlet cloak. I would not really bother with this, apart from Christie, who has some good moments. The ending though is rather a mystery as Riding Hood kills the werewolf (her own father!) but does not mind that the man she loves will also become one, as she takes grandma's place and waits for him. It has moments of campy fun but left a lot to be desired, some of it looks so murky one can hardly see what is going on – I was wishing I was back at Neil Jordan’s THE COMPANY OF WOLVES in 1984. 

I KILLED RASPUTIN. A rather tatty entry in the Rasputin stakes, this 1967 farrago is directed by actor Robert Hossein, who also appears. Hossein did some neat French thrillers I like a lot, but this one is not in those league. Peter McEnery is young Prince Yusupof , with Geraldine Chaplin as one of Rasputin’s devotees. Rasputin though is Gert Froebe – perfect as GOLDFINGER but all wrong here (Christopher Lee was a much more compelling Mad Monk for Hammer Films). Hossein’s father Andre did the music score. The real aged Prince Yusopov appears in person at the start, a few months before he died, which is the only fascinating thing here. We like Peter McEnery too, the first HAMLET I saw on stage about that time, in 1968, but wasted here. 

SERIAL MOM, 1994. Director John Waters puts a twist on the everyday mediocrity of suburban life in the hilarious satire SERIAL MOM. See Kathleen Turner like never before as Beverly Sutphin, the seemingly perfect homemaker who will stop at nothing to rid the neighbourhood of anyone failing to live up to her moral code. This is great fun but not quite in the same league as Waters’ HAIRSPRAY or indeed his earlier, wilder classics like FEMALE TROUBLE or PINK FLAMINGOS. Turner lets rip as people who do not recycle properly or who do not re-wind their rented video-cassettes get into a lot of trouble, as the body count piles up, even a leg of lamb can be a murder weapon! With Sam Waterston, and Waters regulars Ricki Lake, Mink Stole, Tracy Lords, Patricia Hearst and Suzanne Somers. Kitsch is the word! 

BEVERLY HILLS MADAM. I recorded this 1986 telemovie from a cable channel and foolished wiped it, I wish I had kept it now Its a kitschfest with all the requisite '80s glossy trappings and with those big hair and big shoulders, and Faye Dunaway cheerfully chomping the scenery as the Madam - hadn't she learned anything from MOMMIE DEAREST? - we are a long way from CHINATOWN here! A bordello catering to rich and wealthy clients, run by Lil Hutton (Faye) experiences a series of crises as one girl ends up pregnant, and another dead. As a subplot, a young woman, Julie Taylor, makes a trip to LA to surprise a friend, but never finds her. Julie is mugged, and seeks help from Lil. She sees how much the callgirls are making, and is tempted into the lifestyle. On her first "job" is hired by a rich father for his 18-year old virgin son as a birthday gift, and they fall in love. But the relationship comes to a quick end as soon as the son learns she is a "whore"; Julie breaks down and runs off after realizing prostitution is a cold and loveless occupation that cannot fulfill her emotional emptiness.This treat also features Louis Jourdan, Melody Anderson (those 80s names!), Donna Dixon, Terry Farrell and Robin Givens who sashay through this farrago, directed by Harvey Hart. 

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER, 1981. Sylvia Kristel is the lonely young wife of a wealthy aristocrat in this tale of love, lust and forbidden fantasies as adapted from D.H. Lawrence’s famously erotic novel, featuring the tortuous conflict between duty and desire. Paralysed from the waist down due to a war injury, Sir Clifford Chatterley urges his wife Constance to take a lover to satisfy her physical needs, but when she begins an intense affair with a man of shockingly lower class – the virile and rugged gamekeeper Mellors – the unexpected stirring of passions will spell the end of their marriage ….. 
Shane Briant makes Chatterley a nasty bore, whereas Nicholas Clay is a perfect Mellors, totally at ease washing himself au natural. I suppose Kristel is adequate as Lady C, as directed by Just Jaeckin, and Ann Mitchell scores again as that devious nurse with it seems her own plans for the estate and Lord Chatterley. It’s a Golan/Globus production with better than usual production values. I wonder how it compares to the ’93 Ken Russell version? Can I be bothered to find out?

TOO HOT TO HANDLE, 1960. Sex bomb Midnight Franklin is the star at the Pink Flamingo nightclub in London’s wild Soho district. Midnight’s lover, club-owner Johnny Solo, carefully handpicks the exotic dancers from the scores of actresses, art students and young housewives that seek to join the well-paid Flamingo strippers. Johnny and the girls are not adverse to after-hours “deals” with the club’s wealthy clientele. The cash is rolling in and life is good. So good in fact that a rival club owner wants a piece of the pie and is prepared to use violence to get it. But Johnny is not one to back down from a fight, setting off a downward spiral of events that will explode in betrayal and murder! 

Delirious blurb – delirious movie. I had thought this was a cheapo effort not worth bothering with, but it proves a delicious cocktail of 1960 tropes among the Soho stripper set, tawdry but fun, like 1958's PASSPORT TO SHAME (revew at Diana Dors label) or EXPRESSO BONGO. It is directed by Terence Young (a few years before he moved on to James Bond and DR NO) and the cast all shine. Leo Genn is just right as Solo, while Jayne Mansfield is sweet and likeable as Midnight – this may have been the start of her slide from 20th Century Fox to cheapo movies, but she shines as the den mother to the strippers, and she has a nice scene with young Barbara Windsor (right, with her own assets to the fore, well they would have to be to compete with Jayne…) as 15 year old Ponytail. (Barbara is now one of our National Treasures here in the UK, so its amusing seeing her this early in her career in this context). Carl Boehm (PEEPING TOM that same year) is also to hand with nothing much to do, and Christopher Lee is actually rather sexy with that moustache as the devious club manager. Its all a lot of fun actually. 

Julia ? On the Beach ? The Arrangement ?

This week I am looking at and revaluating some "prestige" films that were  big in their day,  but do they still stand up now ? JULIA, ON THE BEACH, THE ARRANGEMENT.

JULIA was one of those hits from 1977 which we all went to at the time, and have been rather forgotten about since - THE TURNING POINT was another one - I will return to that later, when I have re-seen it. 

Looking at JULIA now it screams "prestige cinema" but it sees to have been has been debunked - just how much of it is true? Did Lillian Hellman make it all up? - its part of her memoir "Pentimento". It does all seem rather phoney now. Every scene is designed to be impressive, starting with the older Hellmann fishing in her boat at dawn, then that perfect period beach shack she shares with writer Dashiell Hammett (Jason Robards, to the manner born) as they fry fish on the beach - Cape Cod presumably. It is 1934 as we see from the calendar on the wall - the time of the Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal. Hellmann is also a writer (after her success with the play THE CHILDREN'S HOUR), but with writer's block as we see her grappling with that old typewriter. Jane Fonda is actually ideal here, in her 70s prime, like a young Katharine Hepburn. The fastidious Fred Zinnemann carefully fashions it all - I like his other great movies like FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, THE NUN'S STORY, THE SUNDOWNERS and he always gets superior perforances from his actors, and so it is here ....

Then the plot begins - we get flashbacks to her youth with her great friend Julia, with her wealthy grandmother Cathleen Nesbitt, and then their years at Oxford - all golden spires, and Vanessa Redgrave radiant as Julia striding around in her tweeds  while declaiming the brave new future to come ... but then of course the War intervenes .... and Julia devotes her life to fighting fascism, putting her life in danger ...

The central scene has Lillian meeting Julia in a restaurant, but they have to be very careful in case they are being watched. Julia is now on crutches .... and has a mission for Lillian to smuggle money (in her hat!)  As a thriller though its rather suspense-less. Max Schell appears as Julia's friend Johann, and the young Meryl Streep has that minute appearance. There is that train journey - will Lillian get the money throiugh safely?. But then the plot goes haywire, and suddenly Julia is dead. Lillian goes to see the body in a suburban funeral parlour (with Maurice Denham) and tries to find the baby Julia supposedly had.   

It is all still watchable, but I think we have to take it with a large pinch of salt. Redgrave and Robards both won Best Supporting Oscars here and it was nominated for a slew of other including best picture and director. It was Zinnemann's last big success (he did just one more), great score by Georges Delerue, and lensed by Douglas Slocombe. Fonda of course is a far prettier Hellman. 

ON THE BEACH

I really cannot find much to say about ON THE BEACH, that big one from 1959 by Stanley Kramer from the Nevil Shute novel. Shute's novels usually featured big ideas: aviation in NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY, war in A TOWN LIKE ALICE and only the end of the world in ON THE BEACH. Kramer like Kazan, was big in the 50s and early 60s, with those self-important movies on big themes, like THE DEFIANT ONES, INHERIT THE WIND, JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBURG (with their great star turns) and this one set in Australia. Even Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner cannot make it sing as the ponderous affair also drags down Fred Astaire and Tony Perkins as the young naval husband. It is actually set in 1964 as atomic war wipes out humanity in the northern hemisphere; 

one American submarine finds temporary safe haven in Australia, where life-as-usual covers growing despair, as they wait for the radiation to reach them. The only interesting sequence is the submarine returning to San Francisco to investigate a tapping noise (which turns out to be a trapped blind cord), but where is everybody as there is no sign of dead bodies?. Did everyone just vaporise? The end coda couldn't be more in your face: that slogan "There is still time, brother"! That must have wowed them in 1959 as The Cold War escalated, it was one of the main films of that great year - but it simply does not stand the test of time and is a colossal bore now. One simply wants to fast-forward through most of it. 

THE ARRANGEMENT. Elia Kazan of course had his great decade in the 1950s, but like a lot of other once important directors may have felt left behind by the late sixties. THE ARRANGEMENT is from his own novel and it is all just too much as Kazan throws everything at us. Kirk Douglas is the business executive sick of the rat race his life as become as he deliberately crashes his car in that grim traffic scene. Deborah Kerr, getting rather matronly by then, is his worried steely wife doing all she can to help him rehabilitate himself, as he keeps flashing back to his exciting mistress Gwen - Faye Dunaway at the height of her glossy '60s glamour - who keeps taunting him about what he could have been. 

She does have that memorable line: "The screwing I'm getting is not worth the screwing I am getting". But it is all too much and too overwrought as Kirk fixates on his old Greek father Richard Boone and his nude frolics at the beach with Gwen ...

Eddie is a very rich man who has everything he wants; money, family, success, but a car crash causes him to reevaluate the life he leads. Searching for the happiness he lost, he remembers his one-time lover, Gwen, even as his wife conspires to take his fortune...

Like AMERICAN BEAUTY, Kazan's story looks anew at The American Dream and finds it wanting; looking at it now it is not as bad as some reviews said at the time, there's lots of interesting ideas here, but Kazan throws it all at us without being able to streamline it.  Right: Dunaway and Kazan.

Showpeople: more candids of stars at work and play ...

A Monroe and Brando shot I had not seen before, from 1954: he is in his Napeoleon outfit for DESIREE and she is wearing one of her THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW-BUSINESS dresses, and smoking!; those LES GIRLS relax between takes in 1957: divine Kay Kendall, Taina Elg and Mitzi Gaynor in those Orry-Kelly costumes; Faye Dunaway in her goddess period with Kazan on THE ARRANGEMENT, 1969; James Dean holding court with his EAST OF EDEN co-stars: Julie Harris, Richard Davalos, Lois Smith and Harold Gordon; Marilyn again with Robert Mitchum, Rock Hudson and Terry Moore at a party at Jean Negulesco's house in 1953 - her breakout year, this is the Marilyn I first got to know from those '50s magazine covers. That could be Negulesco in the background. Mitchum had been in the marines with MM's first husband, and they went on to star in RIVER OF NO RETURN in '54. Bette Davis visits Audrey Hepburn on THE NUN'S STORY in 1959, left, and right: Rock and Marilyn again, in 1962 when he presented her with an Italian award. And again: that fascinating shot of Montgomery Clift visiting Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon on SOME LIKE IT HOT!

Sophia and Ingrid in 1958 on set of INDISCREET. See Showpeople label for more candids,including Marilyn with Marlene, and with Gina Lollobrigida, and Marlene meeting Elizabeth Taylor, or Sophia meeting Audrey, Dirk meeting Rock, or ....