Classic Film Posting

Against popular belief I do watch movies without Jimmy Stewart in them. Follows from @mykingdomforablog

[chaptertwo-thepacnw]

the blue gardenia, fritz lang |1953|

[jimmy-stewarts]

The Lady Vanishes (1938) is truly a movie of all time. It’s a comedy, it’s a locked room train mystery, it’s a romance, it’s a spy thriller, it’s Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood and Dame May Whitty absolutely eating every line delivery, it’s a thinly veiled allegory for the powder keg that is Europe in the early days of World War II and Britain’s willful blindness to the threat of fascism and how systematic denials of obvious evil only prolong and inflate the inevitable threat but in the face of true unerring courage and conviction in justice can be ultimately overcome if only one refuses to go softly. There’s two probably gay British guys utterly obsessed with cricket. The pacifist is shot dead. It has the funniest use of a baggage cart scene known to man. It’s the film that ultimately got Hitchcock to Hollywood. The shoot out scene is so realistic just trust me

[citizenscreen]

James Mason, Eva Marie Saint, and Cary Grant at Mount Rushmore filming Hitchcock’s NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959).

[exhaustmanifold]

Happy Birthday to Eva Marie Saint who turns 102 today (4th July)!

[acecroft]

Rear Window (1954) dir. Alfred Hitchcock

[summertimenoir]

Favorite movies watched in 2025 (rewatch): Rear Window (1954)

We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.

[clintseastwood]

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944) dir. Frank Capra

[charitydingle]

Arsenic and Old Lace 1944, dir. Frank Capra

[vintage-every-day]

[random-brushstrokes]

Adele Balkan - Costume sketch for Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963)

[womansfilm]

Mrs. Miniver (1942)

[jimmy-stewarts]

I love Turner Classic Movies. I love that they have preserved a century of filmmaking, I love that they air them on TV, I love that they do their research. I love that they do segments before and after the films explaining the intricate history behind them or notable developments in the craft or sometimes just fun anecdotes about a scene or actor. I love that they have guests of all different voices on, I love that they theme entire nights and weeks and months around a certain topic or director or actor. I love that they allow their guests to select a run of films and explain what they mean to them and why they find them compelling or fun or important or what makes them in conversation with each other. I love that TCM promotes archiving art and loving art of all sorts, and I love that they don't air ads during their films. I love that, when they do play ads in between features, they stylize them. I love watching good films, great films, mediocre films, horrible-bad-who-would-ever-make-this films. I specifically love watching them on TCM, because the experience is better when you know His Kind of Woman (1951) was reshot three times with three different actors playing the antagonist and lost as much money as it cost to make

[bm2ab]

Arrivals & Departures . (20 May 1908 – 02 July 1997) . James Maitland Stewart 

James Maitland Stewart was an American actor and military aviator. Known for his distinctive drawl and everyman screen persona, Stewart's film career spanned 80 films from 1935 to 1991. With the strong morality he portrayed both on and off the screen, he epitomized the "American ideal" in the mid-twentieth century. In 1999, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked him third on its list of the greatest American male actors. He received numerous honors including the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1980, the Kennedy Center Honor in 1983, as well as the Academy Honorary Award and Presidential Medal of Freedom, both in 1985.

Born and raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Stewart started acting while at Princeton University. After graduating, he began a career as a stage actor making his Broadway debut in the play Carry Nation (1932). He landed his first supporting role in The Murder Man (1935) and had his breakthrough in Frank Capra's ensemble comedy You Can't Take It with You (1938). Stewart went on to receive the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in the George Cukor romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story (1940). His other Oscar-nominated roles were in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Harvey (1950) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

Stewart played darker, more morally ambiguous characters in movies directed by Anthony Mann, including Winchester '73 (1950), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), and The Naked Spur (1953), and by Alfred Hitchcock in Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958). Stewart also starred in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), and The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) as well as the Western films How the West Was Won (1962), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

With his private pilot's skills, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II seeking combat duty and rose to be deputy commanding officer of the 2nd Bombardment Wing and commanding the 703d Bombardment Squadron from 1941 to 1947. He later transferred to the Air Force Reserve, and held various command positions until his retirement in 1968 as a brigadier general. Stewart remained unmarried until his 40s and was dubbed "The Great American Bachelor" by the press. In 1949, he married former model Gloria Hatrick McLean. They had twin daughters, and he adopted her two sons from her previous marriage. The marriage lasted until Gloria's death in 1994. Stewart died of a pulmonary embolism three years later.

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Them: How's life going?

Me:

[gregorypeck-blog]

Roman Holiday: The Mouth of Truth

When it came time for me to put my hand in the Mouth of Truth, I said to the director “Willy, how would it be if I put my hand in there and pull it out like that (hand tucked into the sleeve).” He said, “That is the corniest thing I’ve ever heard! But go ahead and do it.”

Audrey was so caught up in the moment, that she just went BONKERS! And that was total, total spontaneity.

-Gregory Peck on the scene in Roman Holiday, The Mouth of Truth

[yvain]

When we speak of the body in relation to the Gothic, we tend to focus on the destructive and the disruptive. We speak of mutilation, desecration and annihilation. However, there is one aspect of the Gothic which usually goes unnoticed—the act of preservation. After all, Gothicism is associated with the past—and what is the past if not a repository of the memories of lost time? Be it an ancestral curse, a ruined mansion, a familial secret, a demented aristocrat, or a decayed body in a closet, the Gothic always preserves. It may be seen as a form of taxidermy: the taxidermy of the spatial, the temporal, the psychological, and the corporeal.

Subarna Mondal, “‘Did he smile his work to see?’—Gothicism, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and the art of taxidermy”

Penny Dreadful S1E5 “Closer than Sisters” / Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock) / Stoker (2013, Park Chan-wook) / Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964, Robert Aldrich)

[noctumsolis]

Maybe film would be better if everyone who wants to become a director were expected to first produce a silent film. Without intertitles. A film where the only tool they have is the moving picture.

Maybe then they'd learn to make films where WE CAN SEE.