Actors with Puppies & some other important stuff

Motion Picture Gems wrote a bit of a nasty post about the Twitter account @ClassicFilmRead. (which has since been taken down.) The blogger points out that there was no announcement about the Twitter feed, no name, no identification, no nothing. Is this person just capitalizing on other's people posts? Why are certain blogs on there but others are not? Who is this Classic Film Reader person anyways?

The answer is, it's ME!

Yes, it's me. I decided to secretly create an RSS-fed Twitter account to help support classic film bloggers who put so much time and effort into their posts, I feel like they should be recognized. And maybe Twitter followers only want classic film posts to read. Maybe they don't want to read about what you ate for breakfast, how much you hate your work and what happened on last night's episode of Mad Men. But you are posting links to your articles on your Twitter along with that other junk. ClassicFilmRead, it's all posts, all the time. That's more opportunities for people to read your work. Please give me a good reason why that is a bad thing, because I would L-O-V-E to hear it!

Also, some folks use their Twitters as Readers. I know sometimes I use Twitter to alert me when a new post is up. And while I depend on Google Reader for most of my blog reading, I get alerted to a larger set of interesting links on Twitter.

I left two big honking clues on the @ClassicFilmRead account. Two images of actresses with wrenches.

First is Bonita Granville.



She's my choice as a profile picture. If you've been reading this blog long enough, you'll know that I dressed up as Bonita Granville - Nancy Drew, wrench and all.

The background is Ginger Rogers.

This is a screen cap that Jonas from All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! got for me because he knew I loved a classic film actress with a wrench. I used it in my Birthday post for Ginger Rogers.

For those of you who figured and out and kept it to yourselves, thanks for your discretion.

The blogger also likened by @ClassicFilmRead to the Pakistani blog thief that I warned people about a while back. REALLY?! That infuriates me to no end. Because unlike the Pakistani blog thief, each and every one of those RSS-fed tweets contained a prefix naming the blog in question and a link to a blog. You got all the credit! The account was just alerting people to a new post.

You know they would have found you on Google right?

I know KC inquired too. I felt really bad about not telling KC my identity but I didn't think it was necessary to reveal myself. I set up a Twitterfeed account, loaded it up with RSS feeds (even to some blogs I don't care to read), and left it at that. I haven't had many suggestions on what to add, but would have been welcome to add them. With the proliferation of classic film blogs on there, I can't follow them all, I don't know them all and it would be impossible to collect them all. So I put up what I knew and left it at that.

Why didn't I announce it? Why should I have to? I did this as a good deed, not a selfish one, and I didn't want any attention for it. Instead, I get negative attention so now I have to defend myself.

Now I would like to end this post with happy pictures of classic film actors and puppies. Enjoy!

Dirk Bogarde from Discovering Dirk Bogarde

Tony Curtis

Clark Gable

Cary Grant

William Powell

Errol Flynn

Buster Keaton

Humphrey Bogart

John Wayne

Rudolph Valentino 

Paul Newman (oh heck yeah!)



Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (provided by Noir Girl)

Gregory Peck along with his son and lots of puppies. (provided by @addieread)

Randolph Scott



Robert Cummings (via Classic Montgomery)



Richard Barthelmess (via The Long and Short of It All)



Marlon Brando (via The Long and Short of It All)



Frank Sinatra

Steve McQueen

Bobby Darin (via ClassicForever)

Leading Men shorter than Richard Widmark

I saw this the other day on Twitter.

Really? That's a fact? I don't buy it. Okay maybe it's the case with Panic in the Streets (1950) where Richard Widmark is placed against all 6' 4" of Jack Palance but I refuse to believe that most leading men were over 5' 10". In fact, there were a lot of really short leading men who starred along even shorter leading women. Alan Ladd was paired with Veronica Lake and Mickey Rooney with Judy Garland for a reason people!

Here is a list of 30 classic film actors who were under 5' 10". I'm not even including those stars who were exactly 5' 10"! If you can think of any more, do let me know.

Mickey Rooney 5' 2"

Alan Ladd 5' 6-1/2"

James Cagney 5' 6-1/2"

Edward G. Robinson 5' 5"

Humphrey Bogart 5' 8"

Tony Curtis 5' 9"

Ernest Borgnine 5' 9"

Marlon Brando 5' 9"

Tony Randall 5' 8"

Jack Lemmon 5' 9"

Frank Sinatra 5' 7"

Gene Kelly 5' 7"

Bobby Darin 5' 8-1/2"

Dean Stockwell 5' 6"

Richard Barthelmess 5' 8"

Ramon Novarro 5' 6"

Paul Newman 5' 9-1/2"

James Dean 5' 8"

Steve McQueen 5' 9-1/2"

Peter Lorre 5' 5"

Buster Keaton 5' 5"

John Garfield 5' 7"

Kirk Douglas 5' 9"

Charles Boyer 5' 9"

Dirk Bogarde 5' 8-1/2"

George Raft 5' 7"

Peter Sellers 5' 8"

Claude Rains 5' 6-1/2"

Charlie Chaplin 5' 5"

Groucho Marx 5' 7-1/2"

Images shamelessly stolen from TCMDB and stats stolen from IMDB. Thanks to my Twitter friends for suggestions and to Carlos for helping me round out the list to an even 30.

A [Love] Letter to Elia and Panic in the Streets (1950) at the Brattle

Last Tuesday, Kevin and I got to see the Martin Scorsese documentary, A Letter to Elia, at the Brattle followed by a screening of Kazan's Panic in the Streets (1950). I really wanted to write this post last week but I didn't have a chance. I especially wanted to write about it before PBS showed the documentary (last night), but alas life got in the way. If you didn't get a chance to see the documentary last night, no worries. It'll be available in the super ultra mega sexy Elia Kazan Collection that's coming out in November (which I will plonk down hard cash for). And I'm sure PBS will show the documentary again.

In A Letter to Elia, Martin Scorsese delivers a beautiful and touching tribute to Kazan, the director who inspired him and whose work moved him. Scorsese and Kazan became close friends towards the end of Kazan's life. Scorsese made sure that he was by his side when Kazan was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Oscar award at the 1999 Academy Awards. If you remember that ceremony, Kazan got a lot of grief from people in the audience who were still not too happy about his involvement in the HUAC and for ratting out other communists. At this point in the documentary, I got a bit teary eyed. The fact that Scorsese stood by Kazan's side and gave him a big embrace publicly supporting his controversial friend moved me. I really believe that this documentary should have been called A Love Letter to Elia because that is what it was: a love letter directed by Scorsese for Kazan.

Click here for some video goodness

Scorsese's love for Kazan and his work goes back far into Scorsese's childhood. As a teenage, he followed Kazan's East of Eden (1955) from cinema to cinema. Scorsese takes the audience through one scene in which the James Dean character visits his mother at a brothel. Having seen this film some time ago, I didn't remember the scene, or even the film, as anything special but when Scorsese broke down the complex layers of the scene, the lighting, the cinematography, the acting, the significance to the plot, all elements that a director would choreograph with his crew, it made East of Eden seem nothing short of genius!

Scorsese's passion for East of Eden made me wonder about what it meant to be a fan of a single film. I mean truly a fan. Then I thought of the films that I "follow". There is Metropolis (1927) which I have seen in various versions, at the HFA, at the Coolidge Corner Theater, at home, on my computer and soon I'll be seeing it again and this time with live musical accompaniment. It's a film I want to keep watching over and over and over again. Then there is Out of the Past (1947). The reason I'm a classic film fan. The inspiration for this blog. The main source of my love for Robert Mitchum. The most confusing yet enchanting film I've ever seen. I've counted the number of cigarettes in the movie, I gave the main character a Match.com profile, I've shared it with friends, I've kept it to myself, it's the foundation upon which I build my love for movies.

What I enjoyed about the documentary what that this was Scorsese's personal perspective on the life and work of Elia Kazan. Because this little blog of mine, is all about the personal perspective so I really love it when people share their own. We get to see Kazan through Scorsese's eyes. And because Scorsese had such admiration for the man, we start to develop some admiration for him too. It was fitting that I went to see this with my good friend Kevin who just happens to be a Kazan expert. He gave a lecture about Kazan back in 2007, which I attended and prepared for by doing a marathon of Kazan film viewings. And even though I met Kevin during his Film Noir class, it was really after the Kazan lecture when we started to bond and become friends.

The documentary was followed by a screening of Panic in the Streets (1950), one of my favorite noirs. Keeping in mind some of what Scorsese said about Kazan in the documentary, I paid close attention to details in the film that I could possibly attribute to Kazan. The pacing, the camera angles, the set-up of the shots, the choreography of the final chase scene, etc. Something I noticed in this viewing that I hadn't in past ones, was how the gigantic Jack Palance was positioned over very small and diminutive characters. The contrast exemplified his character's power and the level of control he exerted over everyone around him. Everyone looks up to him, not because he's a good person but because he physically and symbolically towers over them.

I learned recently was that Panic in the Streets is now in the public domain. Which means you can watch the entire film on your computer thanks to Internet Archive. But between you and me, this film, and any other Kazan classic, begs to be seen on the big screen. It's the way Scorsese fell in love with Kazan films and it's really the best way to watch any classic movie.