People we like: Janet Leigh

When I was doing those "People We Like" profiles here a few years ago (see label), one I somehow omitted was Janet Leigh - one of our perennial favourites, and always a pleasure in any movie. Janet (1927-2004) was a blonde California girl who famously got discovered when Norma Shearer saw her photograph at the ski lodge where Leigh's parents worked and, as legend has it, she was soon signed to MGM being one of their ingenues in the late '40s, in a variety of films. She was one of the LITTLE WOMEN in 1949, when HOLIDAY AFFAIR with Mitchum is a delightful Christmas classic. WHEN WINTER COMES was interesting too. The '50s though was her main era.

She is gorgeous in some costumers: SCARAMOUCHE in 1952, and cardboard castle time in comic strips like PRINCE VALIANT and THE BLACK SHIELD OF FALWORTH, with her then husband Tony Curtis. She is a '20s flapper in PETE KELLY'S BLUES, and good in a tough cop drama ROGUE COP with Robert Taylor, both 1954. I somehow missed her and Curtis in HOUDINI. 
She also excels out west in Mann's THE NAKED SPUR in 1953. She was MY SISTER EILEEN in the delightful 1955 musical and gets to dance with Bob Fosse.  We like it a lot, as per review. 1956 saw her in Africa in a routine jungle saga SAFARI with Victor Mature. 1958 was maybe her peak year: with Heston in TOUCH OF EVIL, directed by Orson at his most flamboyant, a modern noir classic where she gets terrorised in a motel, hiding her broken arm most of the time; then the Boys-Own classic THE VIKINGS, filmed in Norway and looking great as photographed by Jack Cardiff, where we love her Princess Morgana, its a perennial that boys of all ages still tune into. There was also a comedy I like, THE PERFECT FURLOUGH (or STRICTLY FOR PLEASURE) in Paris, with Curtis, for Blake Edwards. The marriage to Curtis made them one of the star couples of the era. Then Alfred Hitchcock came calling .... 

I have written about PSYCHO a lot here. Janet may only have been in the first forty minutes, but her Marion Crane dominates the rest of the film, and it is surely a leading performance, and she looks great here. She will always be the girl in the shower at the Bates Motel ... Hitchcock told her he knew she could act and left the role up to her as long as he got what he needed for his camera setups. That long scene with Perkins at the motel is particularly effective.

Frankenheimer's THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE was another classic in 1962, though her part was not major in it and she continued throughout the early Sixties: another musical: BYE BYE BIRDIE in '63, a comedy WIVES AND LOVERS, Paul Newman's estranged wife in HARPER in 1966. There was a Jerry Lewis comedy I saw around that time too, purely because she was in it. 
Lesser roles followed but she had more or less retired after a long happy second marriage (she and Curtis divorced in '62). John Carpenter lured her back with a role in THE FOG in 1980, starring her daughter scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis. She also did a good COLUMBO episode in 1975. Janet also wrote some novels and a charming autobiography and seems to have been well liked by everybody. 

Howard Hughes liked her a lot, with her perfect figure, she did his JET PILOT with John Wayne in 1951, directed by Von Sternberg, but it was 1957 by the time Hughes stopped tinkering with it and released it. She looks marvellous emerging from that flying suit in that white tee-shirt, but says in her book that she had to arrange to never be left alone with Hughes, till he eventually found more willing actresses .... 
She will always be one of the essential actresses of the 1950s, along with Kim, Doris, Debbie, Lee, Jean, Deborah, Susan, Ava, Natalie etc. and did sterling work with Hitchcock, Welles, Von Sternberg, Mann etc. (above: Janet in a 1969 "Sight & Sound" interview).

Lists: 20 Costume films

We love a good costume or period drama here at The Projector: Here's 20 of the best to continue our Lists: (we are not including biblicals or epics)

• THE SCARLET EMPRESS - 4 from the 1930s. Dietrich stuns in 1934 in Von Sternberg's amazing sets.
• MATA HARI - Garbo ideal and looks dazzling, 1931
• MARIE ANTOINETTE - MGM's opulent 1938 retelling with a perfect Norma Shearer. Kitsch classic.
• JEZEBEL - Bette got the kudos in 1938 through with this classic Wyler - and that red dress in black and white.   

• 4  by Luchino Visconti:  THE LEOPARD. No-one does classic costume drama like Visconti (until Kubrick came along with BARRY LYNDON). This 1963 epic is sheer bliss, particularly that long ballroom sequence at the climax, as Burt and Claudia dance to that Verdi waltz .... sheer cinema, (as per my many comments at Visconti label)
• DEATH IN VENICE. Even if one does not like the film much one has to admire how stunning it recreates the Venice lido, and Dirk's performance. I met him in 1970 at the BFI when he was promoting it. 
• LUDWIG. The new full version on 4-disk bluray is long overdue, as per recent review. Romy and Helmut are sheer perfection. 
• L'INNOCENTE. Luchino's final, directed from a wheelchair in 1976, looks so stupendous, as per review Visconti label. 
  

• MOONFLEET and QUENTIN DURWARD (below) both 1955, are the height of 1950s MGM costume dramas,  I love them both. Stewart Granger, Joan Greenwood, George Sanders ideal here. 
• QUENTIN DURWARD - as are Robert Taylor and Kay Kendall among those French chateaus.
• THE VIKINGS - Jack Cariff shot this in Norway and its still fantastic now. 
  
• TEMPEST - An Italian spectacle from De Laurentiis and Lattuada in 1958, Silvana Mangano shines as does Viveca Lindfors as Catherine The Great. I liked it as a kid. 
• EL CID - Anthony Mann's timeless saga set in medieval Spain, Heston and Loren at their peaks.
• TOM JONES - Tony Richardson's 1963 romp looks perfectly 18th Century, with great roles for Finney, York, Greenwood, Evans, Griffiths etc. 
• DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES. Polanski makes this 1967 vampire comedy look perfectly period too, as per recent review below. 
  
• THE LION IN WINTER. We love this view of medieval England as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II go head to head in 1968. 
• BARRY LYNDON. THE Kubrick classic? I can watch it over and over, particularly that scene at the gaming tables by candelight as the Countess of Lyndon locks eyes with Barry, as the music throbs ....
• THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. Scorsese's perfect costume drama from 1992.
  
• A ROOM WITH A VIEW and MAURICE: We have to include Merchant-Ivory's best, great performances and period detail. 
• MARIE ANTOINETTE. Sofia Coppola's very modern take on the doomed French queen has a lot of great moments too and some perfect casting.
• Zeffirelli too with ROMEO AND JULIET and BROTHER SUN SISTER MOON.
  

• And on television: Working our way through all 14 episodes of the 1982 classic series THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN, mesmerising stuff set in India in 1942 and 1943. 
• Those Jane Austens: the BBC's impresive PRIDE AND PREJUDICE from 1996, the lovely 1995 film of PERSUASION and Ang Lee's SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, and the tv remake .... as per reviews, 
• And the BBC's smouldering Mr POLDARK returns for 9 episodes of Series Three on Sunday. Ideal Sunday night stuff to relax with a G&T as 'Poldark and handsome' rides his trusty steed Seamus over those 18th Century Cornish cliffs, with Demelza and all the usual characters, Again, most of these covered in detail at labels. 

Summer re-views: 1930s: Garbo, Marlene, Loretta

Another look at Garbo as MATA HARI (we love Greta as Mata, one of her lesser known roles), Marlene on that SHANGHAI EXPRESS (it was either that or BLONDE VENUS or THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN), and Loretta as one of those LADIES IN LOVE .....

The glamour of the 1930s for me means those two exotic European imports to Hollywood, as the talkies got underway - Garbo and Dietrich. A large part of their mystique of course is not just their looks but those fascinating voices.. Our Sky Arts channel repeated a Garbo programme, so one had to watch again - a whole hour of Garbo clips, they focus though on those best known ones: CAMILLE, QUEEN CHRISTINA, ANNA KARENINA, NINOTCHKA - I love them too, particularly CHRISTINA and NINOTCHKA, but they ignored THE PAINTED VEIL, from 1934, 

which I loved a year ago, as per my post here, see Garbo label, and I now think everything about MATA HARI in 1931 is utterly fantastic: the art design, her odd but mesmerising dance with the giant statue, Ramon Novarro, her stunning outfits, and that ending as she faces the execution squad ..... its amazing the number of different posters in various colours that are still around.  Jeanne Moreau's MATA HARI AGENT H21 in 1964 though very different is rather dull by comparison! 

I love that dialogue exchange between Lili and her stuffy officer ex--lover Clive Brook, when they meet again on the SHANGHAI EXPRESS in 1932 amid Von Sternberg's moody interiors, talk about light and shade! This is the one where Marlene delivers one of her most famous lines: "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lili". She is now the "notorious white flower of China", a "coaster" plying her trade on the rail line, along with fellow prostitute, the very slinky Anna May Wong.

"I wish you could tell me there'd been no other men" says Clive reproachfully .. "I wish I could, Doc" replies Marlene, "but five years in China is a long time". She is wearing his hat by this stage as he asks her if she has any regrets, to which she laconically replies "I wish I hadn't bobbed my hair".

The delirium increases as Wong uses a knife to dispose of the bandit chieftain who is holding up the Shanghai Express. Clive proves to be unworthy of Shanghai Lili who is prepared to sacrifice herself ... but you can guess the outcome. Its one of my favourite Von Sternbergs, almost as good as THE SCARLET EMPRESS or BLOND VENUS, or THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN. Marlene is again dressed by Travis Banton in furs and feathers and veils and shot in shadows praying ...
See Dietrich/Theatre labels for when I saw her in her 1973 concert tour in London ... 

Three working girls in Budapest pool their resources to get a better apartment and impress their dates (how  very HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE).

LADIES IN LOVE may not be Pre-Code as such, being 1936, but its one I like a lot now and is a great re-view now Probably the first of the Fox '3- girls-sharing-an-apartment-and-looking-for-love' movies it is set in Budapest and teams up Loretta Young, Constance Bennett and Janet Gaynor, with a young Tyrone Power and Paul Lukas in support, as well as Simone Simon. The others may look dated now, but Loretta is lovely and quite modern here, nicely dressed in black and white outfits, with interesting line readings and just being very appealing. [This was just after Loretta's CALL OF THE WILD with Clark Gable which resulted in her having his baby (on the rebound from her romance with Tracy) which she later adopted; Loretta was later one of Hollywood's most prominent Roman Catholics]. She and Tyrone look perfect here, they did several others together too then. I must dig out that Tyrone boxset ....
We must return to the 1930s for more of Katharine Hepburn, Crawford, Stanwyck, Margaret Sullavan, Irene Dunne, Norma Shearer ...

Something for the weekend: Marlene & Von Sternberg

Just a couple of stills to remind ourselves how marvellous those Von Sternberg films like BLOND VENUS, THE SCARLET EMPRESS, MOROCCO etc were and they still look mysterious, glamorous and amazing now - thanks to Marlene (particularly emerging from that gorilla skin, does 1930s cinema get better?). John Lodge looks the business too ... then there is the delirious THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN .... must see that again soon, and then back to Garbo and all her classics.

All those directors !

Following on from the lists of actors and actresses we like, here is the Directors list .... its bigger than I imagined ! 

Michelangelo Antonioni  (right)

Alfred Hitchcock 

Howard Hawks 

Ingmar Bergman
David Lean
Michael Powell
Martin Scorsese

John Huston 

William Wyler 

Billy Wilder 

Joe Mankiewicz 

George Cukor 

Vincente Minnelli 
Josef Von Sternberg 

Orson Welles 

THE REST OF THE PANTHEON: 

Frank Borzage, Preston Sturges, John Ford, Frank Capra, Michael Curtiz, George Stevens, Fred Zinnemann, Alan J Pakula, Sidney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, Michael Mann, Terrence Malick, Charles Walters.

OF THEIR TIME ('50s/'60s): 

Elia Kazan, Stanley Kramer, Douglas Sirk, Frank Tashlin, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann, Robert Rossen, Martin Ritt, Stanley Donen, John Frankenheimer, Richard Brooks, Jean Negulesco, John Sturges, Blake Edwards, Richard Quine, George Roy Hill, Robert Wise, Robert Mulligan, Richard Fleisher. 

CURRENT DIRECTORS: 

Mike Leigh, Francois Ozon, Pedro Almodovar, Nicholas Winding Refn, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, Todd Haynes, Bill Condon, Ang Lee, Paul Schrader.

BRITISH: 

John Schlesinger, Joseph Losey*, Richard Lester*, John Boorman, Nicholas Roeg, Ridley Scott, Carol Reed, Clive Donner, Desmond Davis, Tony Richardson, Basil Dearden, J. Lee Thompson, Philip Leacock, Alexander McKendrick, Lewis Gilbert, Ronald Neame [* honorary Brits]  Right: Losey directs MODESTY BLAISE.

EUROPEAN (after Antonioni): 

Federico Fellini, Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Jacques Demy, Agnes Varda, Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Mauro Bolognini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Max Ophuls, Luis Bunuel, Wim Wenders, Francois Truffaut, Rene Clement, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Claude Lelouch, Roger Vadim, Claude Sautet, Julian Duviver, Robert Hossein, Henri Verneuil.
Left and right: Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy.

WORLD CINEMA:

Ozu, Mizoguchi, Ray, Kurosawa, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Wong Kar-wai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Hitch & Cary

Last look back to: MOVIE magazine, 1965

The red cover of MOVIE magazine, Nr 13, dated Summer 1965 - what a treasure trove to find while unpacking boxes recently! This is my summer 1965 - I was 19 and new in London, living a rather solitary life in my room in North London and travelling over the starting-to-swing city in search of movies ... MOVIE was my companion, with its new style of layout and graphics, along with those issues of "Films & Filming" and "Sight & Sound" (see labels) before my social life took off and I became part of the great metropolis.

Lets have a look at the contents:

This issue is mainly about Josef Von Sternberg, a large portion of the issue is devoted to him with an annotated filmography by Peter Bogdanovich who also describes a meeting and interview with the despotic director; plus an article on 6 of his films (THE BLUE ANGEL, MOROCCO, DISHONOURED, THE SCARLET EMPRESS, THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN and THE SHANGHAI GESTURE) - this was before Von Sternberg was "discovered" by the new generation (like me) and those films were hard to see, unless you were near the British Film Institute's National Film Theatre - it would be a few years more before I discovered that shrine to cinema (and where I spent a lot of the '70s and '80s, and its been fun going back again recently after my decades away from the city). Then there is Robin Wood analysing Ozu's TOKYO STORY (which was running at the prestigious Academy Cinema), Philip French on Godard's UNE FEMME MARIEE, Ian Cameron (who interviewed me once for a job which I did not get...) on Bergman's NOW ABOUT THESE WOMEN (his first comedy and in colour, which caused a lot of interest at the time), Robin Wood again on Antonioni's

RED DESERT (with those great photos of the dark haired Vitti). There there is Otto Preminger on his current films BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING and IN HARM'S WAY (loved the former, didn't want to see the latter, I would probably like it a lot more now with Wayne, Neal, De Wilde etc). Then there are reviews of Franju's THERESE, Siegel's THE KILLERS which I liked a lot, ditto CLEOPATRA, LORD JIM (how I liked O'Toole and Daliah Lavi in that), Renoir's LE CRIME DE M. LANGE, and Jerry Lewis's THE PATSY (no, thank you).

Then there are capsule reviews of THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD, MATA HARI, DEAR HEART, THE ROUNDERS, A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA, REPULSION, COMEDY OF TERRORS, THE IPCRESS FILE, THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY, VON RYAN'S EXPRESS, THE KNACK, BABY THE RAIN MUST FALL and MAJOR DUNDEE, with some great comments: "Whatever happened to the George Stevens of THE MORE THE MERRIER and I REMEMBER MAMA?"; "Jeanne Moreau (as MATA HARI) sometimes looks radiant, more often looks like hell"; my cult favourite THAT MAN FROM RIO is slated for being dubbed into American, and HUSH HUSH SWEET CHARLOTTE has that great line "Turn off the light, its only real when its dark".

The Hollywood scene is covered by Bogdanovich, and in that age of booming international cinema there are reports from Madrid, Rome, Stocknholm, London and New York. The NY notes by Andrew Sarris are particularly interesting now: On that year's Oscars "I can't make up my mind about Julie Andrews. Is she the new combined Greer Garson and Jeanette Macdonald, or can she have an intelligent career? ... the main interest in Academy Awards lies in what it reveals about the thinking of the industry, not in the relation of the awards to justice and judicious good taste. After all, neither Chaplin nor Garbo ever won a competitive Oscar, and you could write a film history with the films that were never even considered for best picture." (No change there then, all these years later...).

So there you have it, 1965 in a nutshell. Ian Cameron and Mark Shivas edited MOVIE and it was a terrific little magazine with no advertisements at all, unlike what one has to wade through now (I am looking at you EMPIRE). I did a RIP on Cameron who died a while ago.

Movies I love: The Scarlet Empress (Jet Pilot is O.K.!)

Or MOROCCO, SHANGHAI EXPRESS, BLOND VENUS, or THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN - all as spell-binding as Von Sternberg/Dietrich's 1934 classic THE SCARLET EMPRESS - and lets not forget THE BLUE ANGEL or DISHONOURED ...

Young Princess Sophia of Germany is taken to Russia to marry the half-wit Grand Duke Peter, son of the Empress. The domineering Empress hopes to improve the royal blood line. Sophia doesn't like her husband, but she likes Russia, and is very fond of Russian soldiers. She dutifully produces a son -- of questionable fatherhood, but no one seems to mind that. After the old empress dies, Sophia engineers a coup d'etat with the aid of the military, does away with Peter, and becomes Catherine the Great.

That's the bones of the story, as delirious as Marlene emerging from the gorilla suit in BLOND VENUS, or the journey on the SHANGHAI EXPRESS, or that mythical Spain of THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN... or the exotic settings of Von Sternberg's MACAO or THE SHANGHAI GESTURE ....

THE SCARLET EMPRESS was the sixth and most expensive of their 7 films together but did not perform too well at the box office. Maybe it was too expensive, opulent, staggeringly visual for audiences just coming out of the depression and preferred simpler, most optimistic and accessible subjects? There was also that other version of the Catherine The Great story a more basic version. This one is a lurid tale set in 18th century barbaric Russia about the corruption of an innocent young girl forced into marriage with a despotic halfwit. As with all Von Sternberg films the camerawork and sets are stupendous. Dietrich ages as the young princess (her daughter Maria plays her in the early scenes). It is a stunning work full of great moments with those enormous sets.   

Marlene is dazzling, but so is John Lodge making a very attractive foil for our wilful princess.... 

JET PILOT, 1957 - Von Sternberg's last film was also screened this week and remains an odd curiosity, produced as it was for Howard Hughes. We all know Howard's prediliction for the female form and he certainly gets young Janet Leigh into all kinds of poses as she changes from her bulky flying outfit to having a shower and posing in her mini tee shirt, with that chest jutting out ... no wonder Howard kept tinkering with this material shot in 1950 when Janet was a lovely pert ingenue, until 1957 when it finally saw the light of day and Janet was a much older leading lady. (In 1958's THE VIKINGS her chest is equally eye-catching, and of course PSYCHO starts with her in her bra ...)

The airline footage is terrific of course, and 1957 also saw another defecting Russian, the equally oddly-paired Katharine Hepburn and Bob Hope in THE IRON PETTICOAT farrago, and let's not forget Cyd Charisse in the remake of NINOTCHA, that SILK STOCKINGS musical, which I like a lot. The Cold War has a lot to answer for !

Janet here looks more like Wayne's daughter than romantic lead - he fared much better with 23 year old Sophia Loren in LEGEND OF THE LOST, also 1957. So THE CONQUEROR was not the worst of Wayne's for RKO, though JET PILOT now has the Universial-International logo. It must surely have been a colossal dud back in 1957 ? Of course its main point of interest now (apart from Janet's attractions) is it was directed by the legendary Von Sternberg ... his last credit, and writer Jules Furthman (who scripted Von Sternberg's SHANGHAI EXPRESS and BLOND VENUS) only did the screenplay for RIO BRAVO after this. Left: Janet with Von Sterberg.