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.