THE CAFTAN WOMAN BLOGATHON - HONORING PATRICIA NOLAN-HALL

Patricia Nolan-Hall

The Caftan Woman Blogathon – Honoring Patricia Nolan-Hall will be hosted here at Lady Eve’s Reel Life and at Jacqueline's Another Old Movie Blog on Friday, May 6^th.

On March 7^th, the classic film blogger world lost one of its great writers and champions of classic film, Patricia Nolan-Hall, also known as Caftan Woman, the name of her delightful blog.  You can visit her blog here. 

Paddy was very supportive of other bloggers, and eagerly contributed to many blogathons, always graciously commenting on the posts of others.  It seems fitting to celebrate her time with us with a special blogathon in her honor.

Holiday Movie Memories: 3 Favorites from the Vault

  

As time goes by I find myself in a reflective mood on Christmas Eve, often savoring memories of holidays gone by, some long, long ago, others from just a few years past. This year as I perused TCM's Christmas Eve schedule, I noticed that several longtime favorites were in the lineup and realized that I'd blogged about some of them early in the life of this blog (which is now 11 years old). Being in a reminiscing frame of mind, I thought it might be fun to post these "oldies but (hopefully) goodies" once again and take readers on a nostalgic walk down holiday movie memory lane...

The Everlasting Imprint of Conrad Veidt

Berlin-born Conrad Veidt packed nearly 120 film roles into his all too brief lifetime, but it was the last film released before his death that guaranteed him a special brand of eternal life, the “filmmortality,” or film immortality, actors acquire when they’ve played a key role in a film that becomes a timeless classic. For Veidt the film was Casablanca (1942) and the role was cold-as-marble Major Heinrich Strasser, Nazi commanding officer. The film opened wide in the US on the day after Veidt’s 50^th birthday, and he lived long enough to see it achieve its early success. He was gone by the time Casablanca was nominated for eight Oscars and went on to win Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Veidt had enjoyed making the film but could not have imagined that the movie Warner Bros. had initially feared would fail would one day be universally beloved and frequently touted as the best studio film of Hollywood’s classic era.

FRENCH NOIRVEMBER RETURNS: The French Had a Name for It 2021

On October 24, a rare and potent combination of “atmospheric river” and “bomb cyclone” generated a ferocious storm that pounded Northern California, dumping more than a foot of rain in some areas. As high winds blew and heavy rains fell, streets and roads flooded, power lines and trees came down and wildfire areas were slammed with mudslides. Many events and gatherings in the region were scrapped due to the weather, but the show would go on at San Francisco’s venerable Roxie Theater. It was here, beginning early in the afternoon, that a four-film French noir program honoring two gods of the French cinema, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Gabin, went ahead as scheduled. Reflecting on the impact of the storm, Don Malcolm, whose Midcentury Productions produced the show, said, “We got hit about as bad as you can get hit without having to evacuate and have the event cancelled.” He reported that 60 “incredibly hardy and loyal fans showed up and were thrilled by all the films.” Don noted that the Jean Gabin sleeper People of No Importance/Des gens sans importance (1956) particularly pleased the crowd. Given the severity of the weather, it seems several attendees were especially hardy and loyal – it was their first time in a theater since the pandemic began. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them, forced instead to hunker down at home in one of the most storm-battered towns north of the city.

To Be or Not to Be (1942), a Daring Mixed-Genre Satire from Ernst Lubitsch

This Hollywood-savvy item appeared in the December 1932 issue of Vanity Fair,   "…although a German director [he] is now claimed by America. His gay and cynic touch, his dramatic use of detail, have reconditioned many an otherwise anemic script and saved it from the shelf – until at one time the studio wise-crack of the hour was always, “For God’s sake, send for Lubitsch.""

Eddie Muller's Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, Out of the Past and Into the Present

Eddie Muller's Original Noir Bible in a New Updated and Expanded Edition

Eddie Muller

Before he was film noir's czar and long before he was a TCM host, Eddie Muller made a decision to take a leap and, as mythologist Joseph Campbell might've put it, follow his bliss. Muller had been a writer with a 16-year run as a print journalist. Now he would become a "wordslinger," peppering the page with gritty prose on a subject about which he was passionate, the film genre that has come to be known as noir. The first edition of Dark City: The Lost World of Film

Old Hollywood Haunts, Pt. 3: The Hollywood Canteen, 1942 - 1945

Clockwise from top: Bette Davis and John Garfield; Rita Hayworth; Hedy Lamarr and Bob Hope; GIs at the Canteen

 A Very Special "Old Hollywood Haunt"

In her 1987 memoir, This 'n That, Bette Davis remembered a day not long after World War II began when fellow Warner Bros. star John Garfield sat down next to her in the studio commissary. He told her he'd been thinking about all the GIs who were then streaming through the area and said he thought Hollywood ought to do something about welcoming and entertaining them while they were in town. "I agreed," she wrote, "and then and there the idea for the Hollywood Canteen was born."  Bette approached her friend and agent, Jules Stein, president and co-founder of MCA, with their plan to create a nightclub for servicemen and women and invited him to head its financial committee.

Summer's Here and the Time is Right for ... SUMMER MOVIES

Just in time for summer, TCM and Running Press offer John Malahy's delectably readable Summer Movies: 30 Sun-Drenched Classics. Featuring summertime-set films dating from the '20s (Lonesome/1928) to the present day (Call Me by Your Name/2017), it's a wide-ranging collection, detailed, photo-packed and filled with tantalizing backstory.

I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), a Black & White Jewel from Powell & Pressburger

Rich, vivid Technicolor is one of the hallmarks of the most well-known and celebrated of the gorgeous, masterful films from the production team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Archers. From the mid-1940s into the early '50s, almost all of their films were shot in striking 3-strip Technicolor, often by cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Cardiff had been a camera operator for Denham Studios when the American Technicolor Company recruited him as their first technician in Great Britain. He would shoot England's first color film and initially work with Powell and Pressburger as a second unit camera operator on their first Technicolor film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). He would graduate to cinematographer on their second color outing, A Matter of Life and Death/Stairway to Heaven (1946). But there would be a lengthy delay in the production of the second film because of a limited availability of Technicolor cameras and film stock in England at that time.