Some behind the scenes photos of Alfred Hitchcock holding a plaster dummy head of himself on the set of Frenzy (1972).
Frenzy was the third and final film that Hitchcock made in Britain after he moved to Hollywood in 1939. The other two were Under Capricorn (1949) and Stage Fright (1950). The last film he made in Britain before his move to America was Jamaica Inn (1939). Frenzy was screened at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, but it was not entered into the main competition.
Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearance can be seen three minutes into the film in the center of a crowd scene, wearing a bowler hat. Teaser trailers show a Hitchcock-like dummy floating in the River Thames and Hitchcock introducing the audience to Covent Garden via the fourth wall.
Naughty Marietta is a 1935 American musical romance film based on the 1910 operetta of the same name by Victor Herbert. Jeanette MacDonald stars as a princess who flees an arranged marriage. She sails for New Orleans and is rescued from pirates by Captain Richard Warrington (Nelson Eddy).
Five of Herbert’s most famous songs come from the score of Naughty Marietta, with words by lyricist Rida Johnson Young: “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life”, “Italian Street Song”, “Neath the Southern Moon”, “I’m Falling in Love with Someone” and “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! (Along the Highway)”. Additional lyrics for several of Herbert’s songs were penned for the film by Gus Kahn. The film was written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, John Lee Mahin and Rida Johnson Young.
It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Douglas Shearer won the Academy Award for Best Sound Recording for his work on the picture. In 2003, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
These beautiful photos captured portrait of Jeanette MacDonald during the filming of Naughty Marietta in 1935.
When The Terminator hit theaters on October 26, 1984, it took the world by storm. James Cameron’s futuristic thriller redefined both the post-apocalyptic and time-travel sub-genres, while introducing fascinating concepts about the dangers of modern technology. It also cemented Arnold Schwarzenegger’s status as one of the biggest action icons of the 1980s and beyond.
The movie launched the career of James Cameron, who went on to direct the top two box-office earners of all time, Avatar and Titanic. It also boosted Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose monotone delivery and muscle-bound swagger made a cyborg assassin the height of cool.
Schwarzenegger originally read for the part of Kyle Reese. In his fledgling acting career, he had already played the title character in Hercules in New York, and Conan the Barbarian, and naturally wanted to be the hero of The Terminator movie. Although he may have first been put forward for this role by his agent, Cameron was cool on the idea: “I was very negative on the idea of Arnold playing Reese.”
And Schwarzenegger, at lunch with Cameron after his reading, couldn’t stop thinking about the Terminator: “The more I read the script, the more I got fascinated by the Terminator – the bad guy – which I thought was the real cool guy. We were talking along the lines of me playing the heroic character.”
After looking at a mocked up painting that Cameron had made of him as the Terminator, Schwarzenegger had made up his mind: “I am the Terminator, I’m gonna make this call now, I called [Cameron] right away and I said ‘I want to play the Terminator,’ and the deal was made.”
Hounds of Love is the fifth studio album by English singer-songwriter and musician Kate Bush, released by EMI Records on September 15, 1985. It was a commercial success and marked a return to the public eye for Bush after the relatively poor sales of her previous album, 1982’s The Dreaming.
The cover art for the album Hounds of Love by Kate Bush.
The album’s lead single, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)”, became one of Bush’s biggest hits. The album’s first side produced three further successful singles, “Cloudbusting”, “Hounds of Love”, and “The Big Sky”. The second side, subtitled The Ninth Wave, forms a conceptual suite about a woman drifting alone in the sea at night.
Hounds of Love received critical acclaim both on its release and in retrospective reviews. It is considered by many fans and music critics to be Bush’s best album, and has been regularly voted one of the greatest albums of all time. It was Bush’s second album to top the UK Albums Chart and her best-selling studio album, having been certified double platinum for 600,000 sales in the UK,and by 1998 it had sold 1.1 million copies worldwide.
In the US, it reached the top 40 on the Billboard 200. The album was nominated at the 1986 Brit Awards for Best British Album, at which Bush was also nominated for Best British Female and Best British Single (for “Running Up That Hill”).
Love Is News is a 1937 romantic comedy film starring Tyrone Power, Loretta Young, and Don Ameche. The movie was directed by Tay Garnett and was the first film for which Power had top billing. The picture was remade in 1947 as That Wonderful Urge, with Power again and Gene Tierney.
Love Is News was presented on Screen Guild Players June 13, 1943. The 30-minute adaptation starred Jack Benny, Ann Sheridan, and James Gleason.
These vintage photos captured portrait of a beautiful Loretta Young during the filming Love Is News in 1937.
Lynda Carter (born July 24, 1951) is an American actress, singer, model, and beauty pageant titleholder who was crowned Miss World USA 1972 and finished in the Top 15 at the Miss World 1972 pageant. She is best known as the star of the American live-action television series Wonder Woman, in the role of Diana Prince / Wonder Woman. The role was based on the DC comic book fictional superheroine character of the same name, and aired on ABC and later on CBS from 1975 to 1979.
Carter’s acting career took off when she landed the starring role on Wonder Woman as the title character and her secret identity, Diana Prince. The savings she had set aside from her days of touring on the road with her band to pursue acting in Los Angeles were almost exhausted, and she was close to returning to Arizona when Carter’s manager informed her that Joanna Cassidy had lost the role and Carter had the part of Wonder Woman. Carter’s earnest performance greatly endeared her to both fans and critics and as a result, she continues to be closely identified with Wonder Woman.
The Wonder Woman series lasted for three seasons, which aired on ABC and later on CBS from 1975 to 1979. Carter’s performance, rooted in the character’s inherent goodness combined with a comic-accurate costume and a catchy theme song made for a depiction that was nothing less than iconic. After the show ended, Carter told Us that “I never meant to be a sexual object for anyone but my husband. I never thought a picture of my body would be tacked up in men’s bathrooms. I hate men looking at me and thinking what they think. And I know what they think. They write and tell me.”
Daughter of the Dragon is a 1931 American pre-Code crime mystery film directed by Lloyd Corrigan, released by Paramount Pictures, and starring Anna May Wong as Princess Ling Moy, Sessue Hayakawa as Ah Kee, and Warner Oland as Dr. Fu Manchu (for his third and final feature appearance in the role, excluding a gag cameo in Paramount on Parade).
The film was made to capitalize on Sax Rohmer’s then current book, The Daughter of Fu Manchu, which Paramount did not own the rights to adapt. Despite being the starring lead and having top billing in this film, Wong was actually paid only $6,000, half the money for her role that Oland was paid for his ($12,000), even though Oland had less screen time than Wong. A decision that O, The Oprah Magazine in an article about Wong published in 2020 linked to racism.
These fabulous photos captured portrait of Anna May Wong during the filming Daughter of the Dragon in 1931.
In two key moments of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather 2 (1974), Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) kisses his brother Fredo (John Cazale) at a New Year’s Eve party in Havana as a kind of “ocular proof” of his unspoken decision to murder him. In a now-legendary scene, Michael clutches his brother’s head with both hands, stares directly into his eyes, kisses him roughly on the mouth, and declares, “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.”
Especially in the context of the Cuban revolution, whose celebratory origin serves as the occasion for the scene, the kiss renders explicit themes of love and violence which define not only the brothers’ relationship but also the internal battle being fought over Michael’s soul. Coppola staged the kiss as perhaps the pivotal moment in the saga, for in choosing to kill Fredo rather than forgive him, Michael will seal his own fate.
Later in the film, during the brothers’ funeral for their mother, Michael kisses Fredo a second time, signaling to hit man Neri (Richard Bright) that, because their mother is dead, the hit can finally occur. Thus Coppola alluded to two crucial biblical passages — the archetypal first murder of Abel by his brother Cain, and the betrayal of Jesus by his beloved disciple Judas — to dramatize Michael’s damnation.
Both Coppola and screenwriter-novelist Mario Puzo have spoken about their nervousness in screening Michael’s murder of Fredo. As Puzo explained, “We had a disagreement... I didn’t want Fredo to be killed. Psychologically, I felt that if Michael killed his brother while his mother was still alive, the audience would never forgive him.”
Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola
Together, the writers settled on two focused strategies for handling the murder. The obvious one was to delay the actual murder of Fredo until after the death of his mother. The more interesting strategy, involved their attempt to aestheticize or render “poetic” the murder and the two kisses leading up to it, a move that succeeded by shifting interest from consequence and realism to aesthetics. Coppola thus managed a visual language capable of redeeming the tragic protagonist at precisely the same moments that his damnation is most glaringly self-evident.
“Not all of my ideas went over so well,” the director revealed. “Mario was dubious about the idea that it was Fredo who betrayed Michael; he didn’t think it was plausible. But he was absolutely against Michael ordering his own brother to be killed. It was a stalemate for a while, as nothing would happen unless we both agreed.”
He continued, “Finally I tossed him the idea that Michael wouldn’t have Fredo killed until their mother died. He thought about this for a moment, and then said okay, it would work for him. He was the arbiter of what the novel’s characters would do, while I was offering a kind of interpretation from the perspective of what a movie director would do.”
The kiss of death (Italian: Il bacio della morte) is the sign given by a mafioso boss or capo that signifies that a member of the crime family has been marked for death, usually as a result of some perceived betrayal. It is unclear how much is based on fact and how much on the imagination of authors, but it remains a cultural meme and appears in literature and films.
On the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Marilyn Monroe sat and posed while co-star Jane Russell drawing a portrait of her. When told she was not the star of the film, Marilyn was quoted as saying: “Well, whatever I am, I AM the blonde.”
This was Jane Russell’s only film with Marilyn Monroe. They got along well. According to Russell’s 1985 autobiography, she called Monroe “Blondl” and was often the only person on the set who could coax Monroe out of her trailer to begin the day’s filming.
In her very last interview (10 years after making Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Monroe recalled the lack of respect studio execs had for her, but made a point of mentioning co-star, Jane Russell: “I remember when I got the part in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Jane Russell, she was the brunette in it and I was the blonde. She got $200,000 for it, and I got my $500 a week, but that to me was, you know, considerable. She, by the way, was quite wonderful to me.”
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell spent much of this film walking, singing, and dancing in absolute unison. For this film Gwen Verdon coached they in both their dance and walk – Monroe with less sex, Russell with more.
During a story conference for this film with Darryl F. Zanuck, director Howard Hawks suggested to Zanuck that the studio change Marilyn Monroe’s look and screen persona a bit, so that Marilyn would be more of an actress and less of a blonde bombshell type. The results in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes made Marilyn a massively huge film star in the 1950s and early 1960s.
