6 from the '60s for National Classic Movie Day

It's May 16, National Classic Movie Day, and Rick over at the Classic Film & TV Cafe is hosting his annual blogathon to celebrate the occasion. This year the subject is 6 from the '60s, in which we participating bloggers put the spotlight on six films of that decade. Click here to find out more and for links to all participating blogs.

The Many Loves of Elizabeth Taylor

This exploration of the life, loves and career of Elizabeth Taylor is my entry for "The Wedding Bells Blogathon" hosted by Hometowns to Hollywood

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She exchanged wedding vows for the first time at age 18 in 1950 and married for the eighth and last time in 1991 at 59. Of her apparent proclivity for collecting husbands, actor/composer/raconteur Oscar Levant would razz Elizabeth Taylor with the quip, "Always a bride, never a bridesmaid!"

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Celebrating "The Shop Around the Corner" on its 80th Birthday

Today marks the 80^th anniversary of the premiere of what has been called Ernst Lubitsch’s “most discreet tour de force of art concealing art,” The Shop Around the Corner (1940).

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Joyce Compton, What a Character!

 
This is my entry for the fabulous What a Character! blogathon hosted annually by Once Upon a Screen, Outspoken & Freckled and Paula's Cinema Club...check these blogs for links to entries from all participating blogs.

This Noirvember: DARKNESS IN THE SIXTIES!

Parlez vous French noir? 

Three years ago I discovered French film noir thanks to Don Malcolm and his annual "The French Had a Name for It" film festival in San Francisco. Don heads MidCentury Productions and since 2014 MCP has presented yearly - and, lately, more frequent - noir screenings at the city's Roxie Theater. This month brings "French 6," the last in MCP's series of French noir fests 'til further notice.

Bridging Old Hollywood and New: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

This post is my entry for the Classic Movie Blog Association's Fall 2019 Blogathon. This year we honor the CMBA's 10th anniversary with an "Anniversary Blogathon." Click here for links to other member posts on classic film and classic film-related anniversaries.

In this piece I take a circuitous look back at Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, "the Citizen Kane of buddy films," on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

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It was during the 1950s that William Goldman, then a young novelist, first got interested in "the Butch Cassidy story." He was so fascinated with Cassidy, ringleader of a late 19th century band of outlaws, and one of his gang members known as the Sundance Kid, that he would research them off and on for another eight years.

It was also in the 1950s that young method actor Paul Newman left the Broadway stage and made his way onto the Hollywood sound stage. Once there, he would steadily be cast in leading roles in films like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), for which he received his first Oscar nomination, The Young Philadelphians (1959), and From the Terrace (1960).

Hitchcockian: François Truffaut 's The Soft Skin (1964)

 ...For the Vive la France Blogathon...

35 years after his death in 1984, François Truffaut is best known today as the most successful of the youthful filmmakers to emerge from the nouvelle vague (New Wave) movement that swept French cinema in the late 1950s. But before he would write and direct his first full-length feature in 1959, Truffaut would make his name as an enfant terrible critic at the influential post-war film journal Cahiers du cinema (Notebooks on Cinema). It was Truffaut who authored a famous/infamous January 1954 article, an impassioned and polemic piece, that advanced the “auteur theory.”  This theory maintains that auteur films reflect the filmmaker’s personal/artistic vision and possess an identifiable style along with recurring themes and motifs. Alfred Hitchcock, a director revered by Cahiers’ young critics, personified the auteur concept and Truffaut was one especially smitten with his work. He would author 27 articles on Hitchcock over the course of the 1950s.

"Vive la France!" - the Blogathon

Welcome to the Vive la France! blogathon. My co-host, Christian Esquevin of Silver Screen Modes, and I have been thrilled that so many joined in with us to celebrate the films of France along with non-French films set in France. Our participating bloggers have chosen an exciting range of subjects - covering nine decades - we know you will enjoy.

Blog post titles in bold contain links to each piece - click-and-read on!

• 4 Star Films | Leon Morin, Priest (1961) 
• Caftan Woman | Paris Blues (1961)
• Classic Film & TV Cafe | Truffaut's Homage to Hitchcock: The Bride Wore Black (1968)
  
• Critica Retro | Faces of Children/Visages d' enfants (1925)
• Lady Eve's Reel Life | The French Roots of Noir: Marcel Carné and Jean Gabin
• Lady Eve's Reel Life |  Hitchcockian: Francois Truffaut's The Soft Skin (1964) 
• Maddy Loves Her Classic Films | Five French Classics You Should See 
• Make Mine Film Noir | Merci pour le chocolat (2000) 
• The Midnite Drive-In | The Blue Meanies: Fantastic Planet/La planete sauvage (1973)
• Mike's Take on the Movies | Farewell, Friend (1968)
• Motion Picture Gems | Small Change (1976) directed by Francois Truffaut
• Movies Silently | A Tale of Two Cities (1911)
• Old Hollywood Films | How to Get Away with Murder, or, What I Learned from All This and Heaven, Too (1940)
  
• The Old Hollywood Garden | Les Diaboliques (1955) 
• Once Upon a Screen | Disney's The Aristocats (1970)
• A Person in the Dark | Liliom (1934): A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Hollywood...or What Happened When 2 Germans and a Frenchman Met in Budapest
• Realweegiemidget | Leon/The Professional (1994)
• Retro Movie Buff | La Grand Fête: The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)
• A Shroud of Thoughts | The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
• Silver Screenings | The Baker's Wife (1938): The Importance of Good French Bread
• Silver Screen Modes | Z: The 50th Anniversary (1969)
• Strictly Vintage Hollywood | Gay Purr-ee (1962)
• The Stop Button | Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir 1932) 
• Twenty Four Frames | Deneuve, Polanski and Repulsion (1965)

A very big thank you to all the wonderful bloggers who took part in our blogathon. Who knows, maybe we'll do it again next year - on Bastille Day...

The members of the Classic Movie Blog Association have honored the Vive la France! blogathon with the 2019 CMBA Award for Best Classic Film Blog Event.

The French Roots of Noir: Two Films by Marcel Carné with Jean Gabin

...For the Vive la France Blogathon...

In 1946 four relatively recent American films inspired Italian-born French film critic Nino Frank to pen an article for the August 1946 issue of the newly launched film periodical L'Écran français. Titled “A New Kind of Police Drama: the Criminal Adventure,” the article pointed out that these films - The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura and Murder, My Sweet - seemed more concerned with psychological motivations and undercurrents than crime solving. In his piece, Frank would use the term film noir and from then on be given credit for coining the phrase.

The research of film studies professor Charles O’Brien, among others, many years later would reveal that the term film noir had been in use in France since the late 1930s in reviews and articles written about a new trend in French films.