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Ricardo Cortez in 'Ten Cents a Dance,' with Barbara Stanwyck. No matter how unthankful the role, whether hero or heel – or, not infrequently, a combination of both – Cortez left his bedroom-eyed, mellifluous-voiced imprint in his pre-Production Code talkies. Besides Barbara Stanwyck, during the 1920s and 1930s Cortez made love to and/or life difficult for, a whole array of leading ladies of that era, including Bebe Daniels, Gloria Swanson, Betty Compson, Betty Bronson, Greta Garbo, Florence Vidor, Claudette Colbert, Mary Astor, Kay Francis, Joan Crawford, Irene Dunne, Joan Blondell, and Loretta Young*. (See previous post: “Ricardo Cortez Q&A: From Latin Lover to Multiethnic Heel.”) Not long after the coming of sound, Ricardo Cortez was mostly relegated to playing subordinate roles to his leading ladies – e.g., Kay Francis, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert – or leads in “bottom half of the double bill” programmers at Warner Bros. or on loan to other studios. Would...

Joel and Ethan Coen movie ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ tops 2014 National Society of Film Critics Awards (Oscar Isaac in ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’) The National Society of Film Critics is the last major U.S.-based critics’ group to announce their annual winners. This year, their top film was Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis, a comedy-drama about a hapless folk singer. Inside Llewyn Davis also earned honors for the directors, star Oscar Isaac, and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel. Additionally, the Coen brothers’ film was the runner-up in the Best Screenplay category. Inside Llewyn Davis is the first movie directed by Joel and Ethan Coen to win the top prize at the National Society of Film Critics Awards. Back in early 2008, whereas most critics’ groups — and the Academy Awards — went for the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, the Nsfc selected instead Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

Alfred Hitchcock silent movies added to Unesco UK Memory of the World Register (photo: Ivor Novello in The Lodger) The nine Alfred Hitchcock-directed silent films recently restored by the British Film Institute have been added to the Unesco UK Memory of the World Register, "a list of documentary heritage which holds cultural significance specific to the UK." The nine Hitchcock movies are the following: The Pleasure Garden (1925), The Ring (1927), Downhill / When Boys Leave Home (1927), The Lodger (1927), Easy Virtue (1928), Champagne (1928), The Farmer’s Wife (1928), The Manxman (1929), and Blackmail (1929) — also released as a talkie, Britain’s first. Only one Hitchcock-directed silent remains lost, The Mountain Eagle / Fear o’ God (1926). Most of those movies have little in common with the suspense thrillers Hitchcock would crank out in Britain and later in Hollywood from the early ’30s on. But a handful of his silents already featured elements and themes that would recur in...

Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell: Studio manufactured romance [See previous post: "Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson Rumors and Gossip = Hard Cash."] In the late ’20s and early ’30s, Fox (not yet 20th Century Fox) used on-screen lovebirds Charles Farrell and (first Best Actress Academy Award winner) Janet Gaynor in a series of romantic melodramas and light comedies. As a box-office incentive of sorts, studio publicists and the fan magazines came up with a Farrell-Gaynor off-screen love affair as well. Never mind the fact that the two were not lovers: Farrell eventually married silent-film actress Virginia Valli; Gaynor, who at one point was attached to Warner Bros. contract player Margaret Lindsay and later became an intimate companion of Broadway star Mary Martin, retired from films after marrying costume designer Adrian. [Photo: Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in Frank Borzage's 7th Heaven.) In the early '30s, in order to both lift the sagging popularity of former superstar Ramon Novarro and boost the rising popularity of new contract player Myrna Loy, MGM manufactured a romance for the couple, then starring in Sam Wood's The Barbarian. Neither Novarro, who was gay and determined to keep his love/sex life under wraps, nor Loy, who was having an affair with (married) producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., was pleased. When it comes to those sorts of rumors, nothing has changed in the last eight or nine decades. Gee, could two performers play love scenes in a movie without actually falling in love with one another? Not according to the tabloids and their "news feeders." Will it help the box-office of their movies? Well, let's say it definitely won't hurt it. (See also: "Hollywood Scandals: Errol Flynn / Roman Polanski / Charles Chaplin.") Recently, Oscar contender Bradley Cooper dismissed rumors that he was dating his Golden Globe-winning and fellow Oscar contender Silver Linings Playbook co-star Jennifer Lawrence. Not that long ago, it was the turn of Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, whose alleged affair was buzzed about right at the time their 2011 romantic comedy Friends with Benefits came out. (The following year, Timberlake married Jessica Biel.) And so on. Privacy concerns: It's all about one's public image Now, one key difference between what we see today and what was published during the Studio Era is that the movie fan magazines weren't tabloids. They generally plugged the studios' products -- i.e., the movies, the stars -- according to the dictates of the studios' own p.r. machines and/or the stars' own publicists. Some stars of yore, much like Jodie Foster at this year's Golden Globes, might claim in interviews that they prized their privacy, but most of those same people gladly discarded that fiercely protected possession when aspects of their personal lives could be used as self-promoting tools. At other times, they quite willingly gave it up when the "private" issue was deemed professionally unthreatening. Examples of the private and public spheres becoming one range from Vilma Banky and Rod La Rocque's Marriage of the Decade in the late '20s to Joan Crawford's various child adoptions. Late in life, the ever-so-private Katharine Hepburn wrote a bestselling book of (conveniently selective) memoirs, while just a few years ago Jodie Foster herself openly talked with More magazine about her role as a mother. In other words: if private matters were/are detrimental to a person's public image, they should remain private. If not, everyone should know about them. In that regard, public figures are truly no different than private ones. Back when the studios controlled access to their players (and had the all-too-willing support of the local police and government officials), it was easy to maintain that sort of balance. ["Studio-Manufactured Love Affairs: Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell" continues on the next page. See link below.] Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven photo: Fox publicity image. This post was originally published at Alt Film Guide (http://www.altfg.com/). Not to be republished without permission.

The BFI's restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's first film, about the tangled love lives of two chorus girls, introduces us to a Hitchcock we didn't know

Until last night no one had seen more than an approximation of Alfred Hitchcock's first film since it made his name 87 years ago. Unveiled at Wilton's Music Hall with a new score by recent Ram graduate Daniel Patrick Cohen, the BFI's restoration of The Pleasure Garden (1925) makes clear that the 26-year-old Hitchcock, as the Sunday Herald's critic Walter Mycroft wrote on its release, "definitely arrived in one stride". Its themes of voyeurism, manipulation, and delusion are instantly familiar from his better-known later work.

Wilton's, itself appealingly unrestored, provided an apt setting. A Victorian venue in Jack-the-Ripper territory, of the kind that was being displaced by cinemas when Hitchcock was working in nearby Blomfield Street, it is also not unlike the Pleasure Garden of the title,...

Claudette Colbert, Alla Nazimova, Marion Davies, Charles Boyer: Cinecon 2011 Thursday September 1 (photo: Alla Nazimova) 7:00 Hollywood Rhythm (1934) 7:10 Welcoming Remarks 7:15 Hollywood Story (1951) 77 min. Richard Conte, Julie Adams, Richard Egan. Dir: William Castle. 8:35 Q & A with Julie Adams 9:10 Blazing Days (1927) 60 min. Fred Humes. Dir: William Wyler. 10:20 In The Sweet Pie And Pie (1941) 18 min 10:40 She Had To Eat (1937) 75 min. Jack Haley, Rochelle Hudson, Eugene Pallette. Friday September 2 9:00 Signing Off (1936) 9:20 Moon Over Her Shoulder (1941) 68 min. Dan Dailey, Lynn Bari, John Sutton, Alan Mowbray. 10:40 The Active Life Of Dolly Of The Dailies (1914) 15 min. Mary Fuller. 10:55 Stronger Than Death (1920) 80 min. Alla Nazimova, Charles Bryant. Dir: Herbert Blaché, Charles Bryant, Robert Z. Leonard. 12:15 Lunch Break 1:45 Open Track (1916) 2:00 On The Night Stage (1915) 60 min. William S. Hart, Rhea Mitchell. Dir: Reginald Barker. 3:15 50 Miles From Broadway (1929) 23 min 3:45 Cinerama Adventure (2002). Dir: David Strohmaier. 5:18 Discussion...

Director Allan Dwan, actor George O'Brien, cinematographer George Webber, East Side, West Side Are you a movie lover in Los Angeles, unable to travel either to Venice or Telluride? Don't despair. L.A. has its own glamorous film festival this weekend. It's called Cinecon, now in its 47th year. What's more: unlike the vast majority of movies screening at the more highly publicized Venice and Telluride — which will shortly be made available at theaters, DVD stores, or online streaming services — most Cinecon movies are nearly impossible to be seen anywhere else. In other words, it's September 1-5 at the Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre at Grauman's Egyptian on Hollywood Boulevard or (quite possibly) never. [Cinecon 2011 Schedule.] This year's Cinecon rarities includes the following: The first Los Angeles area screening in eight decades of Allan Dwan's East Side, West Side (1927), a risque silent drama starring Sunrise's George O'Brien and Virginia Valli, the...

Betty Compson, Clive Brook, Woman to Woman Despite some confusion in various reports, the 1923 melodrama The White Shadow, half of which was recently found at the New Zealand Film Archive, is not Alfred Hitchcock's directorial debut. It isn't Hitchcock's first ever credited effort, either. That honor apparently belongs to Woman to Woman, which came out earlier that same year. The White Shadow, in fact, was a Woman to Woman afterthought. Both movies were directed by Graham Cutts, both were produced by future British film industry stalwarts Victor Saville and Michael Balcon, both were based on works by Michael Morton (the earlier film was taken from a Morton play; the later one from a Morton novel), and both starred Clive Brook and Hollywood import Betty Compson. (Compson plays two parts in both films as well; but whereas in The White Shadow she plays two actual characters, in Woman to Woman...

Emil Jannings in Victor Fleming's The Way of All Flesh The final reel of John Ford’s The Village Blacksmith (1922), featuring Virginia Valli; Best Actor Oscar winner Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh (1927); screen legends Douglas Fairbanks in He Comes Up Smiling (1918), Theda Bara in Cleopatra (1917), and Lon Chaney in The Miracle Man (1919); the early sound, Technicolor musical Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929); and the only color footage of Clara Bow — in Red Hair (1928). All that and more in the Flicker Alley-produced Fragments: Surviving Pieces of Lost Films, a two-hour documentary featuring remaining bits and pieces from "lost films" that will be shown on Turner Classic Movies at 5 p.m. Pt. That's a great chance to look at some rare footage that until quite recently had been available only at places such as the UCLA Film & Television Archives, the Library of Congress, or [...]...