Burt Lancaster

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

December 6, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 10 Comments

“I’ve never had a dull moment in my life. I’ve always wanted to try something new. When I was a child, I wouldn’t wear what the other kids had. I won’t now. I had the first pantie girdle, the first broadtail suit, the first sack dress — from Givenchy. I was even the first Gloria. Everybody named their children after me. I can always tell how old Glorias are.”
—Gloria Swanson
Photo by Charles Sheldon, 1925

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

June 14, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 6 Comments

“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant. Let me expand a bit. I sense that you may feel that I am free of problems. Let me assure you that I have the same anxieties and insecurities as anyone… maybe more.”
—Cary Grant

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

May 24, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 5 Comments

Tuesday Weld was Stanley Kubrick’s first choice for *Lolita*, but she turned him down, later claiming “I didn’t have to play it. I was Lolita.”’

In Memoriam: Joan Fontaine, 1917 – 2013

December 19, 2013 by Robert J. Avrech 17 Comments

Joan Fontaine and Burt Lancaster in Kiss the Blood Off My Hands. — Joan Fontaine and Burt Lancaster in *Kiss the Blood Off My Hands*.

A few hours after Peter O’Toole’s death was announced, Joan Fontaine’s death was also made public.

Fontaine, the younger sister of Olivia de Havilland, is best known for her breakout role in Rebecca (’40). Notice, the character she played is nameless. She is merely The Girl. Crushed by a life of diminishing expectations The Girl steps into a marriage and a mansion that bring oppressive psychological tensions to new heights. Fontaine, blessed with aristocratic beauty, turns herself into a hunched victim, assaulted by the mad Mrs. Danvers and the ghost of Rebecca, never seen, but always present.

Maureen O’Hara claims that Hitchcock first offered the role to her, but she had to decline because she was already committed to Hunchback of Notre Dame. Hitchcock considered Vivien Leigh, Margaret Sullavan, Anne Baxter, and Loretta Young. But David O. Selznick was smitten with Fontaine and convinced Hitch to go with her.

Fontaine, scared to death by the role, by Hitchcock, and a hostile leading man, Laurence Olivier, played the nameless character to a pitch of uncertain perfection.
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The Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1940’s: ’46-’49

December 15, 2011 by Robert J. Avrech 13 Comments

We continue our series of the Twenty Greatest Movies of each decade. Here are our our picks for the last five great movies of the 1940’s.

16. Notorious, 1946. No American actor has tampered with his own charming image more successfully than Cary Grant. In Only Angels Have Wings (1939) he is the tough boss of a suicidal jungle mail service. In Suspicion (1941) one is forced to ask: Is Grant playing his usually charming self but capable of cold-blooded murder? In None But the Lonely Heart (1944) a film I loathe, Grant convincingly plays a Cockney tough with mother issues. And in Notorious, Hitchcock, who understood Grant’s image better than any other director, cast Grant as a sexually repressed government agent who recruits bad girl Ingrid Bergman, daughter of a convicted Nazi spy. Grant’s dark side is brilliantly exploited as his character initially treats Bergman with contempt but gradually falls in love with the damaged, vulnerable beauty. Notorious succeeds, not because of the plot—tedious spy stuff—but because the love story is central and brilliantly convincing.