Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Religious Zionist. Republican. Movie fanatic. Gun owner. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Alfred Hitchcock

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“The main problem in marriage is that for a man sex is a hunger like eating. If the man is hungry and can’t get to a fancy French restaurant, he goes to a hot dog stand. For a woman, what is important is love and romance.”
—Joan Fontaine

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Keaton had a great influence on me. A lot of his moves I intuitively copied in doing some numbers. I know I was thinking of him when I did a dance with a squeaky board and a newspaper. I didn’t look like him, but I often wish I did. He was a complete genius, and there was a lot of dance inherent in his movements.”
—Gene Kelly

Once again Friday Photos appears on Wednesday due to the last days of Sukkot which begin tonight and then run into Shabbat. Enjoy!

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Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1960s: 36 Hours

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Rod Taylor and James Garner, 36 Hours

We continue our survey of the Greatest Movies of the 1960s.

For the Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1950s, click here.

For the Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1940s, click here.

For the Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1930s click here.

For the Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1920s click here.

From the 1960s I have already written about: Psycho, Spartacus,  Lawrence of Arabia,  The Manchurian Candidate,  Ride the High Country,  To Kill a Mockingbird,  The Birds,  Bye Bye Birdie,  Knife in the Water,  Zulu

11. 36 Hours, 1965

Caution, spoilers ahead!

This World War II thriller might be the most obscure movie in this series. In fact, when I mentioned 36 Hours to a few of my movie nerd friends they were totally baffled.

James Garner, one of the the most underrated male actors in Hollywood, plays U.S. Army Major Jeff Pike. After attending General Eisenhower’s final briefing on the Normandy invasion, Pike is sent to Lisbon on June 1, 1944, to contact a spy in order to confirm that the Nazis still expect the allied invasion to take place at the Pas de Calais.

In Lisbon, Major Pike is double-crossed, abducted, and whisked away to Germany.

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Hitchcock: The Primacy of Emotion

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Francois Truffaut: Are you in favour of the teaching of cinema in universities?
Alfred Hitchcock: Only on condition that they teach cinema since the era of Méliès and that the students learn how to make silent films, because there is no better form of training. Talking pictures often served merely to introduce the theatre into the studios. The danger is that young people, and even adults, all too often believe that one can become a director without knowing how to sketch a decor, or how to edit.

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I have gone through such a time, and more, and survived. I traveled in a world that once was—Hollywood of the war and immediate postwar years. And I existed in a world that never is—the prison of the mind. If what I have learned from these experiences can be summed up in one sentence, it would be this: life is not a movie. But I do not make that point in a sad or regretful way. I can only wonder, if my life had been a movie, would a director have cast Gene Tierney to play the part? The bitter with the sweet makes for a better part.” —Gene Tierney
“I have gone through such a time, and more, and survived. I traveled in a world that once was—Hollywood of the war and immediate postwar years. And I existed in a world that never is—the prison of the mind. If what I have learned from these experiences can be summed up in one sentence, it would be this: life is not a movie. But I do not make that point in a sad or regretful way. I can only wonder, if my life had been a movie, would a director have cast Gene Tierney to play the part? The bitter with the sweet makes for a better part.”
—Gene Tierney

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