MUSIC BREAK: CARY GRANT - CHRISTMAS LULLABY

RECENTLY VIEWED: DEAR SANTA

Dear Santa is a horrible movie. I liked the premise but it fell short.It  film directed by Bobby Farrelly, written by Ricky Blitt, Jack Black, and Peter Farrelly from a story by Ricky Blitt, Peter Farrelly, and Dan Ewen, and starring Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Robert Timothy Smith, Brianne Howey, Hayes MacArthur, Austin Post, and P. J. Byrne. It tells the story of a dyslexic and meek sixth-grader who writes a Christmas list to Santa Claus to help with his problems only for his misspelling to lead to him meeting Satan who helps him out.

Liam Turner is a dyslexic and meek, but polite, sixth-grader whose parents Bill and Molly are having marital problems following the recent death of his brother Spencer and their move to another town. Adding to the problem is that Liam is too insecure to properly introduce his new friend Gibby to his parents and keeps embarassing himself over his schoolmate and crush Emma, who is the only one in his class to defend him for his disability.

To hope for things to get better, Liam writes his Christmas wishlist and mails it out, but unfortunately accidentally misspells "Santa" as "Satan". Satan receives the letter and appears the very next night in Liam's room. Though confused by his visitor's appearance and manners, Liam still believes he is Santa. Satan decides to play along and offers to grant Liam three wishes. Liam offhandedly wishes that Emma would give him a chance, and Satan appears to Liam the next day in school and encourages him to approach Emma. Despite his awkwardness, Liam succeeds in getting a date with her at a Post Malone concert, for which Satan even provides VIP tickets.

Liam later tells his mother and Gibby about his encounter with "Santa", whereupon Gibby informs him of his mistake. Liam confronts Satan and tries to get out of the deal, but Satan refuses and tries to entice him into making his two remaining wishes, with his soul as final payment. When Liam returns home, he finds his parents waiting with child psychologist Dr. Finkleman, because of their worry that Liam's "fantasies" are gradually getting out of hand. The session is interrupted by Gibby and Satan, who take Liam to the concert. With a little help from Satan, Liam is called onto the stage and amidst raving cheers dances onstage alongside Emma and Malone, followed by a cheek kiss from Emma. Gibby, who feels left out, leaves early after a girl rejects him due to his overbite.

Later at home, when Liam talks with Gibby over phone about the concert, he notices his friend's disappointment. When Satan visits him later, he uses his second wish to fix Gibby's teeth and invites him to a joint date with Emma at the local Christmas carnival. However, Bill and Molly have overheard his phone conversation, and with their worries increased, they pull Liam away from his date and bring him to Finkleman's clinic. However, their assumption that Liam has gone delusional is shattered by a nurse who visited the concert. In addition, Satan tries to make Liam use up his third wish by showing him images of Gibby and Emma apparently enjoying the carnival without him.

Back home, Liam angrily locks himself in his room, and his regretful parents begin to reconcile. Overhearing them and mistakenly believing they're about to break up for good, Liam sneaks out and visits Satan at his motel room, asking him to use his third wish to keep his parents together and in love forever. Satan agrees, but declares that he will not take Liam's soul until he has died naturally, and tells him to have "a good time" until then. With the deal closed and believing his soul is lost, Liam begins to talk back to his everyday tormentors, alienating Emma.

In Hell, Satan is revealed to be a low-ranking half-demon under trial for becoming an actual demon, which he failed. Chastised by the true lord of Hell and his master Lucifer for granting Liam two unselfish wishes, which rendered the deal for his soul invalid, he is given one hour to say his goodbyes before getting banished. Satan visits Liam and tells him about the deal's cancellation, and Liam figures out that he is a faker. Before leaving, Satan confesses how much he has come to like Liam and explains that his third wish was negated because his parents made up on their own, so he used the contents of Liam's original letter to fulfill his third and final wish.

When Christmas arrives the next day, Liam finds his brother resurrected to celebrate Christmas with his family in their new home. In a twist ending, Liam gets a call from Gibby who has convinced Emma to give Liam another chance by appealing to her sympathy and telling her about Spencer's death, causing Liam to panic on how he'll explain his brother's resurrection to her.

The movie is pretty depressing and short on laughs. There is a wasted cameo of Ben Stiller as the actual head Satan. Post Malone is actually in the film, playing himself. I agree with what this reviewer wrote...Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com gave the film one out of four stars and wrote, "There was a time when Jack Black reuniting with the Farrelly brothers to make a family comedy would have made a few cultural waves. This is not that time. Most people probably have no idea that Bobby Farrelly's Dear Santa has been buried on Paramount+, released on a Monday with almost no promotion at all. Why? The marketing team probably had no idea how to sell a movie that seems resolutely made for no one.

I can honestly say if you don't ever watch this movie, you will be better off. This did nothing for my Christmas spirit...

MY RATING: 1 OUT OF 10

MUSIC BREAK: THE FOUR ACES - THE CHRISTMAS SONG

MUSIC BREAK: CONNEE BOSWELL - WHEN CHRISTMAS IS GONE

DICK VAN DYKE AT 99

 Today marks Dick Van Dyke's 99th birthday. He's led an amazing life, and here is an amazing video he just made with Coldplay. It's a tearjerker so have a tissue ready...

HEALTHWATCH: CHEVY CHASE

Comedian Chevy Chase has had his share of health in recent years with a near fatal heart failure in 2021. In the below picture, it shows Chevy with his new grandchild. Unfortunately, he has a bad bruise on his eye. Sources close to Chevy say that it is from a fall in a hotel room. The Christmas vacation actor, who is 81 years old now, rarely makes movies these days and travels throughout the country doing Q&A showings and meet and greets...

STORY BEHIND THE PHOTO: VERA-ELLEN

 Here is an interesting photo. Upon looking at it, it might not mean much to many people. It's a mother and her daughter. However, that daughter would become the wonderful dancer Vera-Ellen. The White Christmas actress was a long way from Hollywood. The picture was taken in 1939, when Vera-Ellen was 18. Her mother Alma was 48...

HOLLYWOOD SCANDALS: THE DEATH OF PAUL BERN

Before she died at the very young age of 26, actress Jean Harlow had already lived quite a life of scandal and intrigue. Her first marriage, which began when she was only 16, lasted just two short years. Her second marriage to MGM producer Paul Bern also ended in tragedy. Two months after marrying Jean Harlow, on September 5, Bern was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head in their home on Easton Drive in Beverly Hills, California.The coroner ruled his death a suicide.

Police discovered a note at the scene that read as follows:

"Dearest Dear,
Unfortuately  this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done you and to wipe out my abject humiliation, I Love you.
Paul
You understand that last night was only a comedy"

Authorities viewed this as a suicide note signed by BernTo the police, and before a grand jury, Harlow's only statement was that she "knew nothing". Harlow was made an executor of her husband's estate by the Californian judge. Harlow never publicly spoke on the matter. She died of renal failure (caused by a childhood bout of scarlet fever) in June 1937 at the age of 26.

Two thousand people attended Bern's funeral, held on September 9, 1932, at the Grace Chapel at Inglewood Park Cemetery.Conrad Nagel delivered the eulogy. Bern was cremated, and his ashes were interred in the Golden West Mausoleum at Inglewood Park Cemetery.

In 1990, film producer Samuel Marx, a friend and MGM colleague of both Bern and Irving Thalberg, published a book giving a different version of Bern's death. Marx, at the time MGM's story editor (the head of the screenwriting department), said he had gone to Bern's house in the early morning of September 5, 1932, before the police were notified of the body's discovery, and had seen Thalberg tampering with the evidence. The next day, he had been among the studio executives who were told by Louis B. Mayer that the case would have to be ruled "suicide because of impotence" in order to avoid a scandal which would have finished Harlow's film career. Marx, after reviewing the evidence, concluded that Bern was murdered by his abandoned common-law wife Dorothy Millette, who then committed suicide by drowning, jumping overboard from the Delta King on the way from San Francisco to Sacramento, California...

THE BOX OFFICE STARS: 1955

 It is hard to believe that when one talks about 1955 - it is nearly 70 years ago! It just doesn't seem right. Anyways, here are the top ten stars of 1955. What a great year for movies...

1. JAMES STEWART

2. GRACE KELLY 

3. JOHN WAYNE

4. WILLIAM HOLDEN

5. GARY COOPER
6. MARLON BRANDO
7. DEAN MARTIN/JERRY LEWIS
8. HUMPHREY BOGART
9. JUNE ALLYSON
10. CLARK GABLE

   
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                                                                            

HISTORY OF A SONG: I'VE GOT PLENTY TO BE THANKFUL FOR

This song is one of twelve original songs Irving Berlin wrote for the 1942 film “Holiday Inn,” which also included “White Christmas,” the best-selling single of all time. In this film, the main character Jim, played by Bing Crosby, has given up a life in show business to work on his farm. He decides to turn the farm into a country inn, open only for holidays. As he goes through his first year at the Holiday Inn, we hear songs for each season, all through the lens of Jim’s romantic and professional struggles. By Thanksgiving, he is depressed and lonely, having lost his sweetheart. He has been asked to write a song for a film about his Holiday Inn, which we hear as “I’ve Got Plenty To Be Thankful For.” This song is quite chipper compared to his mood, and as we hear the song in the movie, Jim has a negative comment to answer every positive notion in the song. Fortunately for Jim (and the viewer!), shortly after Thanksgiving, Jim makes it back to his love and we get a happy Hollywood ending.

Whether you’re in the new romance stage of life or not, I bet you can relate to this song, both at its face value and with how Jim experiences the song during the movie.On its face, this song is all about simple happiness, the small things that fill you with gratitude for life and living. These are my favorite lines:

I’ve got eyes to see with
Ears to hear with
Arms to hug with
Lips to kiss with
Someone I adore

This song even has a dose of reality for those of us who are happy even without everything, with Bing Crosby singing, “I haven’t got a great big yacht to sail from shore to shore/But I’ve got plenty to be thankful for.” The song offers a way to feel gratitude for the smallest things in life.

Irving Berlin, as always, outdid himself with this beautiful song. It got forgotten in the movie Holiday Inn, but during Thanksgiving it is a great song to remember and be thankful for!

RECENTLY VIEWED: WICKED

My daughter loves the music of Wicked. Because I talked her into going to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice so to repay her I said I would go see Wicked with her. No offense but I feel that Ariana Grande is annoying and not htat great of an actress, but Wicked changed that for it! The movie was absoluting amazing and one of the best movies I have seen in years! Wicked (titled onscreen as Wicked: Part I) is a 2024 American musical fantasy film directed by Jon M. Chu, and written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox. It is the first of a two-part film adaptation of the stage musical Wicked by Stephen Schwartz and Holzman, loosely based on the 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire; which in turn is based on L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, its sequels, and its 1939 film adaptation. The film covers the musical's first act and stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba Thropp and Ariana Grande-Butera as Galinda Upland. Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Yeoh, and Jeff Goldblum feature in supporting roles.

Set in the Land of Oz, largely before Dorothy Gale's arrival from Kansas, it follows the story of Elphaba beginning her path to becoming the Wicked Witch of the West, and her unlikely friendship with her classmate Galinda, who becomes Glinda the Good.

Universal Pictures and Marc Platt, who both produced the stage musical, announced the film adaptation in 2012. After a long development and multiple delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chu was hired to direct, with Erivo and Grande cast in 2021. The film was split in two to avoid cutting plot points and to expand the journeys and relationships between the characters. Principal photography on both films began in December 2022 in England, but was disrupted in July 2023 due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, and concluded in January 2024.

Wicked premiered at the State Theatre in Sydney, Australia, on November 3, 2024, and was theatrically released in the United States on November 22. It received praise for its performances (particularly for Erivo, Grande, and Bailey), direction, humor, musical sequences and faithfulness to the source material, although its runtime and cinematography were met with some criticism. It has grossed $164.2 million in its opening weekend against a $150 million budget. Wicked Part Two will be released on November 21, 2025.

The movie was just amazing. My daughter knows the whole score, but it was new to me. Ariana and Cynthia were unbelievable in their roles, and I can not say enough about the film. The run time is over 2 hours and 30 minutes, but the time flew by like it was 30 minutes. I could go on and on, but do yourself a favor and go see this movie. You will get lost in the land of Oz!

MY RATING: 10 out of 10

BORN ON THIS DAY: GERALDINE FITZGERALD

Geraldine Mary Fitzgerald, born on this day in 1913 was an accomplished Irish stage, film, and television actress. She was an Academy Award and Tony Award nominee, and an Emmy Award winner. She was a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame. Fitzgerald was born in Greystones, County Wicklow, south of Dublin,

She studied painting at the Dublin School of Art. Inspired by her aunt, actress Shelah Richards, Fitzgerald began her acting career in 1932 at Dublin's Gate Theatre. After two seasons in Dublin, she moved to London, where she found success in British films including The Mill on the Floss, Turn of the Tide, and Cafe Mascot.

Fitzgerald's success led her to New York and the Broadway stage in 1938. She made her American debut opposite Orson Welles in the Mercury Theatre production of Heartbreak House. Hollywood producer Hal B. Wallis saw her in this production and subsequently signed her to a contract with Warner Bros. She had two significant successes in 1939: a role in the Bette Davis film Dark Victory, and an Academy Award nomination for her supporting performance as Isabella Linton in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights.

She then appeared in Shining Victory (1941), The Gay Sisters (1942), and Watch on the Rhine (1943) for Warner Bros., and Wilson (1944) for 20th Century Fox, but her career was hampered by her frequent clashes with studio management. She lost the role of Brigid O'Shaughnessy, villainess in The Maltese Falcon (1941), after clashes with executive Jack L. Warner. Although she continued to work throughout the 1940s, co-starring with John Garfield in the Warner Bros. crime drama Nobody Lives Forever (1946), the quality of her roles began to diminish and her career lost momentum.

In 1946, shortly after completing work on Three Strangers, she left Hollywood to return to New York City, where she married her second husband, Stuart Scheftel, a grandson of Isidor Straus. She returned to Britain to film So Evil My Love (1948), receiving strong reviews for her performance as an alcoholic adultress, and The Late Edwina Black (1951), before returning to the United States. She became a naturalized United States citizen on April 18, 1955.

Throughout the next decades, Geradine remained a powerful force in movies, on television, and on the stage. Her son's resemblance to Orson Welles, with whom she worked and was linked romantically in the late 1930s, led to rumors that Welles was his biological father. Fitzgerald never confirmed this to her son, but in his 2011 autobiography Lindsay-Hogg wrote that this question was resolved by his mother's close friend Gloria Vanderbilt, who had written that Fitzgerald told her that Welles was his father. Geraldine Fitzgerald died at the age of 91 on July 15, 2005...

GUEST REVIEW: GOOD NEWS

We are spotlighting another great review that my late friend Bruce Kogan posted. His reviews were always thorough and well thought out. This time we spotlight his review of 1947's Good News...

Good News was the best musical from the Roaring Twenties from the premier songwriting team of DeSylva,Brown&Henderson. It ran on Broadway for 557 performances in the 1927-29 season and gave the team a number of song hits identified with them like the title song, Just Imagine, Lucky In Love, and The Best Things In Life Are Free. All of those songs made it as well as one of the great dance numbers of the Roaring Twenties, The Varsity Drag.

The musicals of that era had the lightweight nonsensical plots which also was taken from the Broadway show. Big man on campus, Peter Lawford, has to get a passing grade in French to stay eligible for the football squad. He gets mousy student librarian June Allyson assigned as a tutor and the inevitable happens as it does in these films. After that Lawford has to choose between mercenary coed Patricia Marshall and Allyson. It's a struggle, but you guess who he winds up with.

This film is strictly about the music and dance numbers and it offers a rare opportunity to see Joan McCracken singing and dancing which she mostly did on the Broadway stage. She introduces a song especially written for the film Pass That Peace Pipe which was a big hit in 1947 and won for Good News its only Academy Award nomination. Pass That Peace Pipe lost to Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah for Best Song. But the number is one of the best dance numbers ever to come from an Arthur Freed produced MGM musical. Joan McCracken died way too young as oddly enough her dancing partner Ray McDonald.

Good News presents an idealized version of the Roaring Twenties and is the quintessential college musical which flooded Hollywood mostly in the years before World War II. It holds up well as entertainment and the songs are still fabulous.

BRUCE RATING: 7 out of 10

MY RATING: 10 out of 10

FORGOTTEN ONES: BELLE BAKER - PART TWO

Later in 1927, Belle Baker introduced the song My Yiddishe Momme to the American public. The song was made even more famous by Sophie Tucker and popularized by The Barry Sisters. The song was extremely important from a Jewish American standpoint during this time, as it represented internal conflict over Jewish assimilation into western societies.The song was viewed very positively by gentiles and eventually became so popular around the world that it was banned in Nazi Germany and that Jewish prisoners of concentration camps would often sing it.

Baker had a brief film career as silent film gave way to lavish technicolor musical talkies. She made her film debut starring in the 1929 talkie Song of Love. The film survives and has been screened at film festivals but not released on DVD. Song of Love features two songs performed by Baker written by her husband, "I'm Walking with the Moonbeams (Talking to the Stars)" and "Take Everything But You". She made two more film appearances, in Charing Cross Road (1935) and Atlantic City (1944; in which she performed "Nobody's Sweetheart").

In 1932, Baker became a regular on Jack Denny's radio program on CBS. She was a guest performer on The Eveready Hour, broadcasting's first major variety show, which featured Broadway's top headliners. Baker continued performing through the 1930s, but limited her performances to radio shows.

Baker's first marriage was in 1913, to producer and promoter Lew Leslie. The couple divorced in 1918. In 1919, she married Maurice Abrahams, a successful Russian-American songwriter/composer, who wrote such songs as "Ragtime Cowboy Joe", "He'd Have to Get Under — Get Out and Get Under (to Fix Up His Automobile)", "I'm Walking with the Moonbeams (Talking to the Stars)", and "Take Everything But You". The couple had one child, Herbert Joseph Abrahams, later known as Herbert Baker, who became a screenwriter. After Abrahams' death in 1931, Baker restricted her performing to radio. On September 21, 1937, she remarried, to Elias Sugarman, editor of the theatrical trade magazine, Billboard. The couple divorced in 1941. She made one final television appearance in This Is Your Life in 1955, just two years before her death.

Baker was a Zionist, stating in 1924: "I am a firm believer in Zionism. I believe that the Jewish people should have a home of their own. It is the one prayer our fathers have been saying through the centuries." While in England in 1935, Baker hosted a show to raise money for Jews fleeing Nazi persecution through the United Jewish Appeal.Several years before her death, she performed several songs at the opening of a Congregation Sons of Israel on Irving Place alongside the president of the American Jewish Committee, Rabbi Irving Miller.

Many of Baker's family later became involved with show business after her. Her brother, Irving Becker, married stage actress Vinnie Phillips and became a road manager for a production of Tobacco Road. Additionally, the broadway actress, Marilyn Cooper was her niece.

Baker was very well known and famous throughout her lifetime. At the height of Baker's popularity in the 1920s, a poll taken from over 3 million people found her and Sophie Tucker to be tied for the most popular Vaudeville stars.

Many of Baker's songs, such as My Yiddishe Mama, Blue Skies and All Of Me are still popular to this day. During her lifetime, she was referred to as "the Female Al Jolson and the Sarah Bernardt of Songland." Like Jolson and Bernardt, Belle Baker is sadly forgotten today in 2024...

MUSIC BREAK: BELLE BAKER - MY MAN

FORGOTTEN ONES: BELLE BAKER - PART ONE

Time has been flying by and with each decade old stars are more and more forgotten. One such big star that is largely forgotten is Belle Baker. Born in Los Angeles) was a singer and actress. Popular throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Baker introduced a number of ragtime and torch songs including Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" and "My Yiddishe Mama". She performed in the Ziegfeld Follies and introduced a number of Irving Berlin's songs. An early adapter to radio, Baker hosted her own radio show during the 1930s. Eddie Cantor called her “Dinah Shore, Patti Page, Peggy Lee, Judy Garland all rolled into one.”

Baker was born Bella Becker in 1893 to a Russian Jewish family originally from Akmene, Lithuania on New York's Lower East Side. She was the third child of eight children born to Hyman (Chaim) Becker and Sarah Rabinowitz. Her mother was chronically ill. Born into extreme poverty, Baker was unable to attend school and was forced to work in a factory when she was 6 years old.

Baker started performing at the Lower East Side's Cannon Street Music Hall at age 11, where she was discovered by the Yiddish Theatre manager Jacob Adler. She was managed in vaudeville by Lew Leslie, who would become Baker's first husband. She made her vaudeville debut in Scranton, Pennsylvania, at the age of 15. She performed in Oscar Hammerstein I's Victoria Theatre in 1911, although her performance was panned, mainly for her song choices. By age 17, she was a headliner. One of her earliest hits was "Cohen Owes Me $97". Belle Baker on the sheet music cover of Nick Clesi's 1916 hit "I'm Sorry I Made You Cry"

Baker first introduced the song "Eli, Eli" to the American public. The song was originally written by a Jewish songwriter only known by the name Schindler for Baker's role as a child in a play. In the play, the mother is crucified and Baker sings the first line in English ("G-d, oh G-d, why has thou forsaken me?"). Gentiles at the time believed that this was a sung version of a Jewish prayer. However, Baker later clarified this, and it became one of the most popular tunes of the time. The song was later covered by John McCormack, John Steel and Dorothy Jardon.

In 1926, Baker became the lead in a play called Betsy. In this play, Baker played the oldest daughter of a Jewish family named the Kitzels. The mother (portrayed by Pauline Hoffman) wouldn't let any of her children get married until Betsy (played by Baker) got married. Legend has it that the story desperately needed a Baker song, and so she called Irving Berlin for help. Baker introduced his hit song Blue Skies in Betsy. The song was such a hit that she played it for twenty-four encores on opening night. Blue Skies would later become immortalized by Al Jolson's performance of it in the first ever talkie movie, The Jazz Singer.

TO BE CONTINUED...

BING CROSBY - THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS: PART 5

AN HONOR FOR JAMES EARL JONES

The historic Cort Theatre has been renamed the James Earl Jones Theatre, honoring the legendary actor’s 64-year Broadway career. Jones made his Broadway debut in 1958 and remains celebrated in theater, film, and television. The $47 million renovation marks a significant tribute to his legendary talent as an actor...

MY FAVORITES: THREE BEST POLITCAL MOVIES

 I won't coment on who is running for president today or who I am going to support. If I wanted to be political, I would start another blog. Here is a look at what I think are the three best classic Hollywood poltical movies...

1. Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939)

Have you watched it lately? You should. (And by “you,” we mean every sentient being on Capitol Hill.) Frank Capra’s classic is still the granddaddy of America’s small-d democratic, participatory ideals. And James Stewart’s portrayal of a small-town nobody and his quixotic battle against self-dealing politicians still claims pride of place as Hollywood’s most stirring, convincing and timeless reminder that the Constitution is a sacred trust that all American citizens — and their representatives — have responsibility for bearing.

2. All the President’s Men (1976)

For many viewers — especially the untold number who became reporters after being inspired by it — this flawlessly crafted Watergate procedural is a journalism movie. But in the process of untangling the skein of lies, malfeasance and coverups that defined the scandal, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) wind up exposing the seamy underside of partisan realpolitik, and underline the crucial role of a free press in holding leaders accountable. Bonus points for featuring Jason Robards as history’s best big-screen Ben Bradlee.

3. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

The 1960s and ’70s produced their share of great paranoid thrillers, but this one proved shockingly prescient, not only regarding the era of assassinations that immediately followed its release, but of today, when foreign influence on our elections poses a credible and escalating threat. Masterfully directed by John Frankenheimer and featuring Frank Sinatra’s finest acting performance, this hallucinatory masterpiece still manages to be darkly funny and queasily discomfiting in equal measure. (Which unfortunately can’t be said of Jonathan Demme’s forgettable 2004 remake.)

Whether your political leanings, you can not complain about our politicans if you don't vote. Go out there and VOTE!

MEMORIES OF SOME LIKE IT HOT

When Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon first put on the female makeup and costumes for "Some Like It Hot" (1959), , they walked around the Goldwyn Studios lot to see if they could "pass" as women. Then they tried using mirrors in public ladies rooms to fix their makeup, and when none of the women using it complained, they knew they could be convincing as women. There is a scene on the train recreating this moment.

Lemmon got along with Marilyn Monroe and forgave her eccentricities. He believed Marilyn simply couldn't go in front of the camera until she was absolutely ready. "She knew she was limited and goddamned well knew what was right for Marilyn," he said. "She wasn't about to do anything else." He also said that although she may not have been the greatest actor or singer or comedienne, she used more of her talent, brought more of her gifts to the screen than anyone he ever knew.

Lemmon wrote that the first sneak preview had a bad reaction with many audience walkouts. Many studio personnel and agents offered advice to Billy Wilder on what scenes to reshoot, add and cut. Lemmon asked Wilder what he was going to do. Wilder responded: "Why, nothing. This is a very funny movie and I believe in it just as it is. Maybe this is the wrong neighborhood in which to have shown it. At any rate, I don't panic over one preview. It's a hell of a movie." Wilder held the next preview in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, and the audience stood up and cheered.

Many years after the film's release, a movie reviewer asked Curtis why his Josephine was so much more feminine than Lemmon's Daphne. A laughing Curtis explained that he was so scared to be playing a woman (or a man pretending to be one) that his tightly wound body language could be read as demure and shy, traditionally feminine traits, whereas Lemmon, who was completely unbothered, and "ran out of his dressing room screaming like the Queen of the May," kept much more of his masculine body language...

PHOTOS OF THE DAY: ANOTHER CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD HALLOWEEN

 Another year - and another look at some of the great classic Hollywood Halloween costumes. Halloween really is my favorite holiday of the year. Classic Hollywood has been celebrating the holidays for decades!

Charlie Chaplin

Doris Day

Elvis Presley & Jeanne Carmen

Joan Crawford & Douglas Fairbanks Jr

Nancy Carroll

Marion Davies

Prior Classic Hollywood Halloweens:

2021

2019

2014

2012

RIP: TERI GARR

Teri Garr, offbeat comic actress of ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘Tootsie,’ has died. She was 79.

Garr died Tuesday of multiple sclerosis “surrounded by family and friends,” said publicist Heidi Schaeffer. Garr battled other health problems in recent years and underwent an operation in January 2007 to repair an aneurysm.

Admirers took to social media in her honor, with writer-director Paul Feig calling her “truly one of my comedy heroes. I couldn’t have loved her more” and screenwriter Cinco Paul saying: “Never the star, but always shining. She made everything she was in better.”

The actor, who was sometimes credited as Terri, Terry or Terry Ann during her long career, seemed destined for show business from her childhood.

Her father was Eddie Garr, a well-known vaudeville comedian; her mother was Phyllis Lind, one of the original high-kicking Rockettes at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Their daughter began dance lessons at 6 and by 14 was dancing with the San Francisco and Los Angeles ballet companies.

She was 16 when she joined the road company of “West Side Story” in Los Angeles, and as early as 1963 she began appearing in bit parts in films.

She recalled in a 1988 interview how she won the “West Side Story” role. After being dropped from her first audition, she returned a day later in different clothes and was accepted.

From there, the blonde, statuesque Garr found steady work dancing in movies, and she appeared in the chorus of nine Presley films, including “Viva Las Vegas,” “Roustabout” and “Clambake.”

Her big film break came as Gene Hackman’s girlfriend in 1974’s Francis Ford Coppola thriller “The Conversation.” That led to an interview with Mel Brooks, who said he would hire her for the role of Gene Wilder’s German lab assistant in 1974’s “Young Frankenstein” — if she could speak with a German accent.

“Cher had this German woman, Renata, making wigs, so I got the accent from her,” Garr once recalled.

The film established her as a talented comedy performer, with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael proclaiming her “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.”

Her big smile and off-center appeal helped land her roles in “Oh God!” opposite George Burns and John Denver, “Mr. Mom” (as Michael Keaton’s wife) and “Tootsie” in which she played the girlfriend who loses Dustin Hoffman to Jessica Lange and learns that he has dressed up as a woman to revive his career. (She also lost the supporting actress Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards to Lange.)

Although best known for comedy, Garr showed in such films as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “The Black Stallion” and “The Escape Artist” that she could handle drama equally well.

“I would like to play ‘Norma Rae’ and ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ but I never got the chance,” she once said, adding she had become typecast as a comic actor.

It was also during those years that Garr began to feel “a little beeping or ticking” in her right leg. It began in 1983 and eventually spread to her right arm as well, but she felt she could live with it. By 1999 the symptoms had become so severe that she consulted a doctor. The diagnosis: multiple sclerosis.

For three years Garr didn’t reveal her illness.

“I was afraid that I wouldn’t get work,” she explained in a 2003 interview. “People hear MS and think, ‘Oh, my God, the person has two days to live.’”

After going public, she became a spokeswoman for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, making humorous speeches to gatherings in the U.S. and Canada.

“You have to find your center and roll with the punches because that’s a hard thing to do: to have people pity you,” she commented in 2005. “Just trying to explain to people that I’m OK is tiresome.”

She also continued to act, appearing on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” “Greetings From Tucson,” “Life With Bonnie” and other TV shows. She also had a brief recurring role on “Friends” in the 1990s as Lisa Kudrow’s mother. After several failed romances, Garr married contractor John O’Neill in 1993. They adopted a daughter, Molly, before divorcing in 1996.

In her 2005 autobiography, “Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood,” Garr explained her decision not to discuss her age.“My mother taught me that showbiz people never tell their real ages. She never revealed hers or my father’s,” she wrote. She retired from acting in 2011. Garr is survived by her daughter, Molly O’Neil, and a grandson, Tyryn.

THE RETIREMENT OF ARTIE SHAW

In 1949 bandleader Artie Shaw, the so-called "King of the Clarinet" who had rocketed to fame at the end of the 1930s on the strength of hits like "Begin the Beguine," had been off the jazz scene for a couple of years, for any number of reasons—he was more interested in playing classical music, there was a recording ban on by the musicians' union, and the economic climate for big bands was turning frosty. But, as was the case several times throughout his career, Shaw started a new band- partly out of artistic restlessness, and partly out of financial need.
"Everybody liked it but the people"

Shaw tapped young, bop-influenced writers like Tadd Dameron and Gene Roland, and put together an outstanding saxophone section that included Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. They toured throughout the autumn and early winter, and at the end of the year Shaw took them into the studio for several marathon sessions that constitute the whole of their recorded legacy.

Shortly afterwards, Shaw dissolved the orchestra. "I had a really great band in 1949 — one of the finest bands I've ever led," he told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1985. "The musicians, man for man, the arrangements, everything. I had the best arrangers in the world writing for me. And everybody liked it but the people, as the gag goes."
Shaw goes longhair

Ironically enough, Shaw had considered abandoning jazz not long before putting the big band together. "There is more to music than ‘Stardust,'" he told Downbeat, and throughout much of 1949 he devoted himself to playing classical music—tagged by media wags in those days as "longhair"—with several city symphonies and doing some recordings for Columbia as well. In April he brought a large classical orchestra into New York's Bop City, drawing a huge but ultimately bored and indifferent audience.

Shaw's forays into classical music would have a profound effect upon his playing on the jazz records he made between 1949 and 1954. "My entire concept of what a clarinet could sound like changed," he later said. "It got pure, and a little more refined. Instead of a vibrato, I tried to get a ripple."
"George Shearing with a clarinet"

From 1950 to 1953 Shaw waxed a series of commercially successful but artistically indifferent records for the Decca label. In the autumn of 1953 he formed a new version of his 1940s small-group the Gramercy Five, partly to perform for money that would help pay off his tax bill, and partly because he wanted to have a go at serious jazz again. The new Gramercy Five, actually a sextet, had a modern, cool-jazz kind of sound; one critic called it "George Shearing with a clarinet." The group's performances in New York City got great reviews from the critics, and in 1954 Shaw took the band into the studio on several occasions. Over the next 50 years he'd often refer to these Gramercy Five recordings as the best he ever did.

Shaw broke up his Gramercy Five ensemble in 1954 and played a few desultory gigs with as part of an all-star jazz tour before putting down his clarinet and retiring from the music scene. He lived another 50 years, but he never recorded or performed in public again. (Shaw did organize a new big band in the 1980s and occasionally conducted it, but he did not play clarinet; that role was assigned to the orchestra's general front man, Dick Johnson.) His 1949-54 recordings stand as the final, brilliant chapter of a musical legacy that Shaw referred to as "a good-sized chunk of durable Americana."

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