Robert Montgomery

Flashback: Hollywood Valentine

February 14, 2018 by Robert J. Avrech 3 Comments

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

September 30, 2016 by Robert J. Avrech 10 Comments

Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940) “Had I known of the actual horrors of Nazi concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator. I wanted to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race. The English office at United Artists were against my making an anti-Hitler film - until the war had started.” -Chaplin, quoted in My Life in Pictures (1974) — Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940)
“Had I known of the actual horrors of Nazi concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator. I wanted to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race. The English office at United Artists were against my making an anti-Hitler film — until the war had started.”
—Chaplin, quoted in My Life in Pictures (1974)

Hidden Hollywood: Ava Gardner and Mickey Rooney’s Wedding Night

September 12, 2016 by Robert J. Avrech 8 Comments

Ava Gardener, The Killers, 1946, the film that made her a star. — Ava Gardner, The Killers, 1946, the film that made her a star.

MGM’s roster of female stars constituted the greatest collection of beautiful and talented women the world has ever known.

One of the greatest was Ava Gardner.

As an emerging starlet in the early 1940’s, before she made a single movie the breathtaking Southern beauty was the talk of the town.

Mickey Rooney was MGM’s golden boy, a versatile star equally adept at musicals, comedy and drama. His signature role as the small-town youngster Andy Hardy made him something of a cash cow for the studio. The Hardy movies were cheap to produce and earned enormous profits.

In his compulsively readable autobiography, Life is Too Short, Rooney claims that his mother worked as a prostitute in order to put food on the table during the depths of the Depression. Thus, it’s not surprising that Rooney pursued women with an obsessive compulsion, seeking affection and love in all the wrong places: call girls, ambitious actresses and mature women–including Irving Thalberg’s widow Norma Shearer–were smitten by Rooney’s brash boyish charm.

Hollywood: I Drive Therefore I am… Free

July 28, 2011 by Robert J. Avrech 22 Comments

marilynlincoln — Here's a perfect illustration of the iconography of freedom. Marilyn Monroe displays a picture of Abraham Lincoln, The Great Emancipator, in a sleek convertible with the open road beckoning.

As noted in my last post about Hollywood stars and their cars, automobiles represent freedom. You climb into a car and go whenever and wherever you want.

The car is modern man’s most potent path and symbol of liberty.

Contrast cars with trains.

Trains and subways are an expression of the collective. Individual identity is erased. You are at the mercy of a state run system that turns the citizen into a small cog manipulated by unmotivated, inefficient government bureaucrats.

That’s why Progressives-Liberals-Leftists are obsessed with high-speeed rail. The freedom of the road is repellent to statists who want to regulate/control diet, education, light bulbs, health care, your very geography.

Need I mention that Nazis just adored trains AKA cattle cars. And hey, the Italians boasted that Mussolini made the trains run on time.

At a certain point, one must acknowledge the convergence of philosophy between post-modern liberalism and iron-fist facism. Both ideologies assert the power of the state as the final arbiter of human affairs. Hence, the government replaces G-d and family as the center of man’s universe. It’s no surprise that the Nazi party’s formal title was The National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

Anyhoo.

Hollywood produced great stars who proudly posed with their autos, symbols of glamour, affluence, and freedom.