Class of '54 ....

Audrey in Paris: SABRINA

A quick look at those 1954 gals all going places ... Marlon (in DESIREE Napoleon costume) meets Marilyn (in one of her THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS frocks); Audrey scores in SABRINA - Wilder's valentine to her after the success of ROMAN HOLIDAY; a marvellous shot of Grace by Irving Penn - 1954 was her busy breakout year with those Hitchs + THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI and the GREEN FIRE programmer; 
Ava scored as THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA, and Elizabeth looked sensational in that haircut for THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS, one of 4 she did that year. (here with young Roger Moore),

Marilyn consolidated her 1953 successes with the Fox musical and then off to Canada for RIVER OF NO RETURN.and created headlines marrying and divorcing Joe DiMaggio. 

Other busy gals included Shelley Winters, Virginia Mayo, Janet Leigh, Jean Simmons, Deborah Kerr, June Allyson, while Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and Susan Hayward were out west. Judy Garland delivered and how in A STAR IS BORN. Over in Italy young Sophia Loren had her first teaming with Marcello in the delightful TOO BAD SHE'S BAD, one of 8 she did that year ...  while in England Dirk Bogarde and pal Kay Kendall helped make DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE the comedy of the year. And again, that great REAR WINDOW shot with Hitch, Grace, Stewart and that set. Brando and Mason were actors of the year as Kazan began a new drama with an exciting youngster James Dean, who would explode on the scene next year in 1955 and be gone just as quick ...

Not so amazing, Grace

The Projector is now screening a new clutch of Trash Classics, and we are starting with the recent GRACE OF MONACO, which sank without a trace here (but now Sky Movies are showing it a lot). Actually it is not even entertaining enough to be a Trash Classic, it is just tepid and bad and gets dull halfway through its 90 minutes so one wants to fast-forward some of it, but it looks plush, a lot of money must have gone into it, but could they not have got a better script or story? It is not a biopic of Grace Kelly at all, but purports to show some fictional events:

The story of former Hollywood star Grace Kelly's crisis of marriage and identity, during a political dispute between Monaco's Prince Rainier III and France's Charles De Gaulle, and a looming French invasion of Monaco in the early 1960s.

It starts promisingly with that road she used to drive with those hairpin bends, and then we see Alfred Hitchcock arriving with a new script for the princess - it is MARNIE of course. It is amusing to see another Hitch impersonation to go with those other recent ones, but the first big mistake is here. We see the date on the screen - December 1961, and Hitch tells Gracie her co-star will be this new Scottish chap who is sensational in a new Cubby Broccoli film, but DR NO did not open until late 1962 - Hitch would hardly have signed Connery in 1961 ... he had not made THE BIRDS by then.

This farrago was widely reviled by and laughed at by critics across the world, it finally limped into London late (Nicole wisely cancelled London publicity tv appearances due to illness). It actually opened the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, no doubt as Monaco was just down the road from them. It is all about as truthful as the 1964 trash masterpiece HARLOW - a movie we love to hate here (Trash label) but that at least was more fun..

Nicole Kidman initially suggests Grace until we see her up close, but playing Grace has not harmed her career, she just keeps on filming, and was fun in PADDINGTON. (we liked her in THE PAPERBOY too). Tim Roth is all wrong as the podgy Rainer, and suggests nothing more than a suburban bank manager, and isn't that Robert Lindsey as Onassis. (bringing to mind Somerset Maugham's comment that Monaco or Monte Carlo was "a sunny place for shady people"). Old reliables like Derek Jacobi turn up as an old queen (sorry, nobleman) to tutor Grace - an Oscar-winning actress - on how to behave like a princess. This is where all credibility goes out the window. Grace gets to make a big speech at the end and we leave her there ,,,,  it all seems to be a simplistic story for those who know nothing about the real Grace Kelly or her career or movies.

We know Grace's marriage was no real fairy tale, she and Rainier were practically leading separate lives and she had a bolthole in Paris she used to visit, before that fatal accident. What we see here is a soapy melodrama - odd that director Olivier Dahan also did LA VIE EN ROSE about Edith Piaf.

GRACE OF MONACO may be a terrific Trash double bill with DIANA (no, I never wanted to see that). The two princesses met several times and oddly both died in strange car accidents ....

Coming Up: Shirley McLaine's excruciating WHAT A WAY TO GO, Ava Gardner's dreadful TAM LIN, Brigitte Bardot's terrible last film IF DON JUAN WAS A WOMAN !

Then: some classy European fare, starting with Jeanne Moreau and Alida Valli as nuns in the 1960 THE CARMELITES, and one of Sophia Loren's last Italian films before Hollywood called, the 1955 THE SIGN OF VENUS.

Plus the recent INTO THE WOODS and FOXCATCHER. We are going to be busy !

Hitchcock blonde

When I was a kid in the mid-50s TO CATCH A THIEF seemed the height of glamour, no movie stars were more perfect that Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, and this Hitchcock movie was the ultimate with those South of France locations - and so it remains now. Not a major Hitchcock of course, he is rather tongue in cheek here, the film remains a fabulous entertainment, with quite a few Hitch touches he would explore further: someone dangles from a rooftop (VERTIGO), Grant again pulls someone up from a perilous drop (NORTH BY NORTHWEST), and has a rooftop struggle - oops, thats Donen's CHARADE, perhaps the best Hitch movie not made by Hitch and the perfect hommage to TO CATCH A THIEF.  Hitch provides (courtesy of scriptwriter John Michael Hayes) witty, racy dialogue and has a lot of fun with Jessie Royce Landis, splendid as Grace's mother (this is the one where she stubs out the cigarette into a fried egg, Hitch didn't like eggs ...). She seems more or less the same age as Cary but its her daughter (Grace was 26) who is his romantic lead (Audrey and Sophia were also much younger in theirs' with Cary). Landis also played Grace's mother in THE SWAN, another good role for her - and then Cary's mother in N BY NW ! - a very Hitchcock joke.
 

TO CATCH A THIEF must have dazzled audiences in 1955, with those South of France locations, Cary's perfect hilltop home where he serves that new concoction Quiche Lorraine to an appreciative John Williams, the insurance man protecting those jewels which retired burglar The Cat is determined to nab. Cary really is the retired burgler who has to stop the impersonator incriminating him in these jewel robberies. Cue lots of to-ing and fro-ing (odd to see Grace driving on those roads where she had that fatal accident in 1982...) and lots of dressing up, particuarly for that fancy dress ball at the climax. Grace wears that stunning gold ensemble for that; she is dressed by Edith Head here and has some dazzling outfits: that ice blue dress for her first encounter with Grant, and the stunning white dress for the fireworks scene. Hitch is obviously in his element here as he circles the pair, gettting closer and closer, as the fireworks explode and Kelly taunts Grant about her necklace, or maybe her other attributes as encased in that show-stopping dress. Its a stunning scene, surely reprised in the 1968 THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR for that chess-playing scene ...

This is surely Kelly's best role (even more than REAR WINDOW or HIGH SOCIETY) and Hitch showcases her perfectly.  He continued with his blondes of course, transforming Kim Novak and Eva Marie Saint and Janet, until Tippi came along ....

Stylish entertainment doesnt get much better than this, and never goes out of date. We love too Grace's final comment: "So this is where you live, mother will love it up here".

Hitchcock is certainly on a roll now, the new film HITCHCOCK has opened to middling reviews - ok it is a pedestrian work of fiction, but one has to see it - and the classics are on show all over again: THE BIRDS was on again last night, VERTIGO is on tonight, SABOTEUR and TOPAZ also scheduled, as in REAR WINDOW. We watch them over and over .... see Hitchcock label for reports on these and MARNIE and "Sight & Sound"'s last year new list with VERTIGO as the new number one ...
For the record: my Top 10 Hitchs: THE BIRDS, PSYCHO, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, VERTIGO, REAR WINDOW, NOTORIOUS, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, ROPE, THE 39 STEPS, REBECCA. and I quite like STAGE FRIGHT and UNDER CAPRICORN, the early RICH AND STRANGE, and that final FAMILY PLOT. 

Send in the gowns ....

Katharine Hepburn, “Christopher Strong”, 1933 (via mothgirlwings)

There have been of course no end of iconic gowns in the movies, here are just a tiny selection - that crazy art deco insect outfit worn by the young Katharine Hepburn in CHRISTOPHER STRONG, 1933; one of Travis Banton's designs for Dietrich in SHANGHAI EXPRESS, 1932; one of Adrian's opulent costumes for the Norma Shearer MARIE ANTOINETTE in 1938; the famous Travilla gold gown for Marilyn, circa GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES; one of Edith Head's Grace Kelly outfits, REAR WINDOW 1954; Helen Rose's iconic white dress for Elizabeth Taylor in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, 1957; Sophia's wet dress in BOY ON A DOLPHIN, 1957 and one of her later ritzy head-dresses; Irene Sharaff's amazing designs for Elizabeth Taylor as CLEOPATRA, 1963 - Sharaff also did Sreisand on stage and screen in FUNNY GIRL and HELLO DOLLY, where she has some great hats; Kay Kendall in Balmain in THE RELUCTANT DEBUTANTE, 1958 working that feather boa; Cecil Beaton's terrific gown for GIGI, 1958, and Cecil's Regency outfits for Barbra in Brighton in ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER, '69; Keira Knightley in that green gown in ATONEMENT - hardly a gown but we have to add Debra Paget's "costume" in that sizzling number dancing with the snake in Fritz Lang's 1959 double THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR and THE INDIAN TOMB, I really must look at that Masters of Cinema new edition...

200th post

Just because ! 4 from that magic year 1954 ( when I was 8 and just discovering cinema ) :



REAR WINDOW, A STAR IS BORN, Sophia and Marcello in TOO BAD SHE'S BAD [didn't see that till last year!], Dirk and Kay Kendall in DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE, and those westerns which were my first movie experiences...(more on 1954 at label)

Grace Kelly - Style Icon - London V&A

It is hard to believe now that Grace Kelly’s career was just 5 years, from 1951 to 1956, such is her enduring legacy and stylish image - the Kelly look - which was created in the main by Edith Head for her Paramount films and Helen Rose at MGM, its as iconic as Audrey Hepburn with Givenchy.

She made 11 films during those 5 years and of course the Hitchcock ones are still out there and endlessly analysed. Her wardrobe for REAR WINDOW being particularly marvellous – I also like her Edith Head outfits for TO CATCH A THIEF – the ice blue dress, the bathing costume, the outfit for an afternoon picnic: “leg or breast?” when offering the cold chicken to Cary Grant, and of course that spectacular gold number for the climax.

Grace, who like all the great stars had an unique voice, was along with Audrey Hepburn Hollywood’s two new golden girls of the ‘50s and thus both won the Academy Award in succeeding years – 1953 and 1954 – just as those two new ‘60s girls Julies Andrews and Christie did a decade later. Grace and Audrey were the other side of Marilyn and Elizabeth Taylor, making up that quartet of Hollywood greats circa 1954, when they all reigned supreme. That 1954 best actress award is still a bone of contention for movie buffs and just fans – did Grace deserve to win for THE COUNTRY GIRL, for just looking dowdy and wearing cardigans and spectacles, over Judy Garland’s towering performance in A STAR IS BORN? But really by then Judy was seen as a has-been making a comeback and had been regarded as difficult for years, whereas the cool and crisp Kelly was the new sensation that audiences could not get enough of. I will need to re-see THE COUNTRY GIRL myself to make up my own mind.

Grace of course had that patrician image which so fascinated Hitchcock, the cool and feisty ice maiden who melted with the right man. Grace was about 20 years younger than those older leading men but there were rumoured romances with the likes of Cooper, Gable, Milland, Crosby, Holden, and the perfect on-screen partnerships with Stewart and Grant. Fashion designer Oleg Cassini was also a boyfriend. [Of course Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren, when she began in international movies in 1957, were also 20 or 30 years younger than their male co-stars].

Two of Grace’s I particularly like are that routine programmer she had to do, GREEN FIRE in '54, where she looks very cool and tailored down in the South American jungle as sister of plantation owner John Ericson as prospectors Stewart Granger and Paul Douglas dig for those emeralds. Its hokum but fun and she is very understated and affecting in THE SWAN, again nicely dressed (by Helen Rose) and with a nice hairstyle as the princess falling for tutor Louis Jourdan while being wooed by prince Alec Guinness (who became a lifelong friend of hers, they played endless jokes on each other thereafter) – THE SWAN also has the full MGM period look and provided good roles for Jessie Royce Landis, Estelle Winwood and Agnes Moorehead. One can see Eva Marie Saint's Eve Kendall as a tailored Grace Kelly type in Hitch's NORTH BY NORTHWEST, even as she dangles from Mount Rushmore wearing her white gloves, and then of course there is Tippi and THE BIRDS...

It would have been interesting if Grace had been allowed to return to the screen for Hitchcock in MARNIE and who knows how her career might have developed, but we will always have those ‘50s treats. Audrey Hepburn of course remains an equal style icon...

The exhibition on Grace at London's V&A Museum runs until September with those iconic clothes and other items [like the Kelly bag], and is getting a lot of attention. I shall be going.