HITCHCOCK & HERRMANN: "NORTH BY NORTHWEST" COMES TO THE SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY

On Friday, December 1 and Saturday, December 2, The San Francisco Symphony will present the Alfred Hitchcock blockbuster, North by Northwest (1959), featuring Bernard Herrmann's iconic score, in evening performances at Davies Symphony Hall. As with all SFS film series presentations, North by Northwest will be screened with its score scrubbed from the soundtrack and instead performed live by the symphony orchestra.

FASCISM, NATIONALISM and the BANNED FILMS of MARLENE DIETRICH

This is my entry for the Classic Movie Blog Association's Fall 2017 blogathon, Banned and Blacklisted, for links to all contributions, click here.

Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel

In 1930, 29-year-old Marlene Dietrich created a sensation with her breakout performance as cabaret temptress Lola-Lola in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel), the tale of a straitlaced professor spellbound by a low-rent vamp.  It was Germany’s first sound picture, produced in both German and English versions, and made for Ufa, the country’s then-eminent film production company. Brand spanking new toast-of-Berlin Dietrich departed that city for Hollywood the morning after The Blue Angel's premiere. She was signed by Paramount with the hope she would be its answer to MGM’s Garbo, and she quickly rocketed to worldwide fame, earning a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her next performance, in Morocco (1930). Dietrich would stay in Hollywood and, reinventing herself more than once in her long career, attain a level of international stardom that would last until the end of her life and beyond.