THE BOX OFFICE STARS: 1947

The year 1947 marked great prosperity for the States in their 2nd year of post war relaxation. Audiences were flocking back to the movies, and they were going to see Bing Crosby movies. He was the number one star again. Here are the top ten movie stars of 1947...

TOP BOX OFFICE STARS - 1947

1. BING CROSBY
2. BETTY GRABLE
3. INGRID BERGMAN
4. GARY COOPER
5. HUMPHREY BOGART
6. BOB HOPE
7. CLARK GABLE
8. GREGORY PECK
9. CLAUDETTE COLBERT
10. ALAN LADD

THE BOX OFFICE STARS: 1946

By 1946, World War II was over, and America was getting back to normal. A part of being normal was going back to the movies. The year 1946 was one of the biggest years of movie audience attendance on record. Continuing his streak as the number one star, Bing Crosby continues his reign as the king of the box office in 1946.

Here are the box office champs of 1946:

1 Bing Crosby
2 Ingrid Bergman
3 Van Johnson
4 Gary Cooper
5 Bob Hope
6 Humphrey Bogart
7 Greer Garson
8 Margaret O?Brien
9 Betty Grable
10 Roy Rogers

HIGHEST GROSSING FILMS: THE 1940s

TOP FILMS OF 1940s 
(unadjusted domestic gross totals)

1. Bambi (1942)
2. Pinocchio (1940)
3. Fantasia (1940)
4. Song of the South (1946)
5. Mom and Dad (1945)

6. Samson and Delilah (1949)
7. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
8. The Bells of St. Mary's (1945)
9. This Is the Army (1943)
10. Duel in the Sun (1946)

11. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)
12. Sergeant York (1941)
13. Going My Way (1944)
14. Forever Amber (1947)
15. Mrs. Miniver (1942)

16. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
17. Battleground (1949)
18. Random Harvest (1942)
19. The Snake Pit (1948)
20.  The Lost Weekend (1945)

BORN ON THIS DAY: MICHAEL CURTIZ

For some reason, I find it funny that the director of 1954’s White Christmas was actually born on Christmas Eve. Through Curtiz career he directed many of the greatest movies ever put on film. Curtiz was born Kertész Kaminer Manó to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary (then Austria-Hungary) on December 24, 1886. Curtiz loved to tell stories and he claimed he had been a member of the Hungarian fencing team at the 1912 Olympic Games. In reality, Curtiz had a conventional middle-class upbringing; he studied at Markoszy University and the Royal Academy of Theater and Art, Budapest, before beginning his career as an actor and director as Mihály Kertész at the National Hungarian Theater in 1912.

Details of his early experience as a director are sparse, and it is not clear what part he may have played in the direction of several early films, but he is known to have directed at least one film in Hungary before spending six months in 1913 at the Nordisk studio in Denmark honing his craft. While in Denmark, Curtiz worked as the assistant director for August Blom on Denmark's first multi-reel feature film, Atlantis. On the outbreak of World War I, he briefly served in the artillery of the Austro-Hungarian Army, but he had returned to film-making by 1915. In that or the following year he married for the first time, to actress Lucy Doraine. The couple divorced in 1923. Curtiz left Hungary when the film industry was nationalized in 1919, during the brief Hungarian Soviet Republic, and soon settled in Vienna. He made at least 21 films for Sascha Films, among them the Biblical epics Sodom und Gomorrha (1922) and Die Sklavenkönigin (1924). The latter, released in the US as Moon of Israel, caught the attention of Jack Warner, who hired Curtiz for his own studio with the intention of having him direct a similar film for Warner Brothers, Noah's Ark, eventually produced in 1928. When he left for the United States, he left behind at least one illegitimate son and one illegitimate daughter.

Curtiz arrived in the United States in 1926 (according to some sources on the fourth of July, but according to others in June). He took the anglicized name "Michael Curtiz". He had a lengthy and prolific Hollywood career, with directing credits on over 100 films in many film genres. During the 1930s, he was often credited on four films in a single year, although he was not always the sole director on these projects. In the pre-Code period, Curtiz directed such films as Mystery of the Wax Museum, Doctor X (both shot in two-strip Technicolor), and The Kennel Murder Case. In the mid-1930s, he began the successful cycle of adventure films starring Errol Flynn that included Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Dodge City, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), The Sea Hawk and Santa Fe Trail (1940).

Prime examples of his work in the 1940s are The Sea Wolf (1941), Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945). During this period he also directed the pro-Soviet propaganda film Mission to Moscow (1943), which was commissioned at the request of president Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to aid the wartime effort. Other Curtiz efforts included Four Daughters (1938), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Life With Father (1947), Young Man with a Horn and The Breaking Point (1950).

While Curtiz himself had escaped Europe before the rise of Nazism, other members of his family were not as lucky. His sister's family was sent to Auschwitz, where her husband died. Curtiz paid part of his own salary into the European Film Fund; a benevolent association which helped European refugees in the film business establish themselves in the U.S.

In the late 1940s, he made a new agreement with Warners under which the studio and his own production company were to share the costs and profits of his subsequent films. These films did poorly, however, whether as part of the changes in the film industry in this period or because Curtiz "had no skills in shaping the entirety of a picture". Either way, as Curtiz himself said, "You are only appreciated so far as you carry the dough into the box office. They throw you into gutter next day". The long partnership between director and studio descended into a bitter court battle.

After his relationship with Warners broke down, Curtiz continued to direct on a freelance basis from 1954 onwards and he made many films for Paramount from White Christmas (1954), starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye to King Creole (1958), starring Elvis Presley. His final film, The Comancheros, was released six months before his death from cancer on April 10, 1962, aged 75…

PHOTOS OF THE DAY: CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD AND THE OSCAR

The Oscar ceremony of today is much different than the classic ceremonies of the past. Hollywood was so much different in the classic days. Movie stars were true legends, and the Oscars was THE event of the year. Here are some memories of those classic days...

LUISE RAINER, 1937



INGRID BERGMAN, 1944



GARY COOPER AND BING CROSBY, 1944

AUDREY HEPBURN, 1953



GRACE KELLY AND CLARK GABLE, 1954



JOANNE WOODWARD AND PAUL NEWMAN, 1958



THE YEAR IN MOVIES: 1942

It is hard to believe that the year 1942 was 70 years ago. 1942 saw the country in its first full year in the war. Bing Crosby recorded "White Christmas" for the first time, and everyone was dancing to the sounds of the big bands. It was a tough year for society but a great year for movies and Hollywood...



Best Picture-winning Casablanca (1942), based on the play Everybody Comes to Rick's and set in 1941 war-time Morocco, premiered in New York. Its studio, Warner Bros., capitalized on the war-time events occurring (the Allied landings in N. Africa that mentioned the city). Altogether, its director Michael Curtiz made over 40 films in the decade of the 30s, and over 150 films in his entire career, from the silent era to the early 1960s.

Jacques Tourneur's moody and intelligent Cat People (1942), producer Val Lewton's first film at RKO, influenced future film-makers by showing how subtle and suggestive horror could be effectively generated.

The first of numerous Hollywood films to take up the U.S. cause of World War II was Wake Island (1942). It was Hollywood's first major World War II film, starring Brian Donlevy, William Bendix, and Robert Preston. The war film was followed by other morale-boosting feature films such as Flying Tigers.

Black actor Paul Robeson, who had starred in Show Boat (1936), said he wouldn't make any more films until there were better roles for blacks. His last film was Tales of Manhattan (1942).

Tweety Bird, originally pink-colored, debuted in Tale of Two Kitties, a spoof on the popular comedy team of Abbott and Costello. Tweety Bird's first cartoon appearance with lisping cat Sylvester was in Tweetie Pie (1947) -- it won an Oscar for animator Friz Freleng. This was the first Warner Brothers cartoon to win an Oscar!

During a War Bond promotional tour, 33 year-old popular star and actress Carole Lombard, Clark Gable's wife, was killed in a plane crash near Las Vegas, Nevada on January 16, 1942.

A fire in Boston's Cocoanut Grove nightclub took the life of 50 year-old B-western movie star Buck Jones after he sustained injuries. 492 individuals were victims of the deadly blaze.

Orson Welles directed his second motion picture, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), noted for dialogue that was realistically spoken.

The Hollywood Canteen was founded (by Bette Davis, John Garfield, and others) and opened its doors on Cahuenga Blvd. in greater Los Angeles (Hollywood) in the fall of 1942, to provide free entertainment (food, dancing, etc.) to servicemen by those in the industry. It operated for just over three years as a morale booster, during the war years, and was the impetus for the Warners' film Hollywood Canteen (1944), featuring lots of stars in cameo roles.

Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy teamed up for the first time in MGM's Woman of the Year (1942). It was the first of nine films in which Tracy and Hepburn starred together, stretching out a period of 25 years until their final film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences commenced with an award category for Best Documentary - Short Subject, won for the first time (in the 1942 awards ceremony) by the Canadian production Churchill's Island (1941).

Lena Horne was the first African-American woman to sign a long-term contract with a major studio (MGM) as a specialty performer, meaning that she was initially cast in parts and subplots (usually separate singing scenes) that could be edited out for showings in Southern theaters.



Warner Bros' nostalgic, shamelessly-patriotic, entertaining black and white musical biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) was released. It was the first time that a living US President (FDR in this case, played by Jack Young) was portrayed in a motion picture. For the first time in his entire career, James Cagney attended the premiere for one of his films - when it had its world premiere on Memorial Day, 1942 on Broadway. Rather than tickets for its opening night premiere, the studio sold war bonds and reportedly raised over $5 million for the war effort. It became the second highest grossing box-office hit of the year for Warners (after Desperate Journey (1942)). Cagney won his sole career Oscar, and became the first Best Actor Oscar winner to take home the Oscar for an appearance in a film musical, in his role as American music entertainer George M. Cohan. The film was one of the first computer-colorized films released by entrepreneur Ted Turner in 1985 (on George M. Cohan's alleged birthday July 4th - naturally!).

The war years had a distinct influence on Hollywood. The Office of War Information (OWI) stated that film makers should consider seven questions before producing a movie, including this one: "Will this picture help to win the war?" The War Production Board imposed a $5,000 limit on set construction. Wartime cloth restrictions were imposed, prohibiting cuffed trousers and pleats. Klieg-lit Hollywood premieres were prohibited. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hollywood turned out numerous anti-Japanese films, some of them quite racist, such as Fox's Little Tokyo, U.S.A.,which dealt with the controversial subject of Japanese internment. The OWI then cracked down on the artistic license of Hollywood beginning in 1943. The Office of Censorship prohibited the export of films that showed racial discrimination, depicted Americans as single-handedly winning the war, or painted our allies as imperialists.

And that was the year in movies 1942...