Robert Taylor

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.

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

October 9, 2015 by Robert J. Avrech 15 Comments

“The boy's got a lot to learn and I've got a lot to teach.” —Barbara Stanwyck when first meeting future husband Robert Taylor. — “The boy’s got a lot to learn and I’ve got a lot to teach.”
—Barbara Stanwyck upon first meeting Robert Taylor.

New Year, Old Hollywood

December 31, 2014 by Robert J. Avrech 4 Comments

Here at Seraphic Secret we try to remain optimistic. However, after six years of Obama, this state of mind becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

IslamoNazis are on the march all across the globe. Iran edges closer to becoming a nuclear power even as Obama touts what a good friend Iran could be. ObamaCare is, as we knew it would be, a disaster. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the ubiquitous presence of the race baiting, tax cheating Al Sharpton in the White House. Sharpton is no ordinary professional demagogue like Barack Obama. Sharpton is a proven liar, and a toxic Jew-hater who provoked a pogrom in Brooklyn that lead to multiple deaths.

And this is the man who has become Obama’s de facto Minister of Blackishness, or something.

Tough Guys, Tough Dialogue

September 12, 2013 by Robert J. Avrech 18 Comments

The trick in writing dialogue for movies is to write as little as possible.

Less is more.

But when you do use dialogue, every word counts; every word a precious jewel that, ideally, delivers the proper balance of tone, characterization, and story.

Here are a few examples of brilliant dialogue where we learn everything we need to know about the leading man’s attitude… towards women.

“Dead Reckoning” Humphrey Bogart to Lizabeth Scott: “You know the trouble with women is—they ask just too many questions. They should spend all their time just being beautiful.” — *Dead Reckoning* (’47) Humphrey Bogart to Lizabeth Scott: “You know, the trouble with women is they ask too many questions. They should spend all their time just being beautiful.”

The Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1940s: ’40-’43

December 1, 2011 by Robert J. Avrech 13 Comments

Several months ago I started a list of my picks for the Greatest Movies ever made. I began with silent films, made my way through the 30’s, then started the 40’s but got sidetracked by, um, laziness.

My apologies.

I’m going to continue with my list of the 20 films that I feel are the best of the 40’s. My picks are deeply personal and will enrage many film school types who will wonder why Citizen Kane is absent. Answer: it’s boring, pretentious and I have no idea what the film is about. Just try watching the movie with an audience of actual normal human beings instead of film geeks.

As you can see, the list is heavy on screwball comedies because anyone who knows anything about film knows that comedy is the hardest genre to master.

There is one foreign film on my list, Day of Wrath, directed by Carl Dreyer, a true masterpiece that never fails to reveal unexpected depths.

There are omissions, films that I love, but hey, this list is not written in stone and next year I can always come up with another list of the Greatest Movies—entirely revised.

All the films are available on DVD to which I link and many, if not all, on Netflix.