Distractions, Distractions--and the Warner Archive

Mike Hammer must've spent hours marvelling over his wall-mounted, reel-to-reel answering machine in Kiss Me Deadly (1955)! I've been distracted as well, though not by gadgets. Seems I've spent the last few weeks in a big comic book mood and have neglected my blogging. I'm patiently waiting for the weather to cool down, the days to get shorter, and my attention span to grow longer as Fall--Florida has a Fall, of sorts--comes and Summer (and hurricane season) finally goes away.

I'm quite enamored with the Warner Brothers. Archive! I'm quite pleased that they've released The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, which is an entry in my beloved Husbands and Wives Detectives genre, and it gives me hope to think that they'll give the "Fast" series the same treatment. They've also been introducing me to several films I've never heard of. That, coupled with their frequent sales has been great.

Okay, I promise to get back into the swing of things and get those posts that've been sitting in virtual storage...

Hepburn: The Power of Four

As soon as I saw these four statuettes standing side by side, I knew who their owner was... Katharine Hepburn, of course. These four symbols of career triumph--though meaning seemingly little to Kate--are on display at the Smithsonian. Her first Oscar, won for 1933's Morning Glory, is located on the far right. It's constructed of tin-plated bronze, whereas begininng in 1945, the Oscar was made of Britannia, a (mostly) tin alloy. Like the beat-up looking Holy Grail in that Indiana Jones movie, that first award is the one that holds the most fascination and the fact that it's all timeworn drives home the realization that it's the real thing. It was thought lost in the September 1938 New England Hurricane, but was later found intact. This Oscar had...adventures.

Whether one agrees with the movies Kate won her Oscars for--and I could and will go on about it in the future--it's still a staggering sight to see those Academy Awards all lined in a row.

Getting Down to Business

In most of the northern hemisphere, Summer is coming to an end. But not here in South Florida, where it's 93 degrees Fahrenheit (or 34 Celsius or thereabouts) all of this changiness made me I realize that I've neglected Hollywood Dreamland for too long. This thought occurred to me when Patricia Neal died and I didn't write a single word in tribute to one of my favorite "dames." So I've put my other blog of '60s and '70s stuff on indefinite hiatus. I'd love to be able to continue two blogs at once but I just don't have it in me to do so. One or the other will invariably suffer, and so the Summer fling has come to a conclusion...for now. In the meantime, I will redouble my efforts at engaging your attention and hopefully entertaining those who stumble here. I'll have a new longwinded post next week, after the Labor Day weekend debauchery.

More Scrubbing Bubbles

Never let it be said that we at HD don't honor requests. That is, we received our first (sort of) request this past week in Fluff..or Stuff?, which had Claudette "Sign of the Cross" Colbert as its main attraction. We're cleaning out the archive with the remaining bath photos we could find: Myrna Loy and another Colbert. I'm not certain which movie the Myrna pic came from. I haven't seen any of her pre-Code films!


However, we have seen Sign of the Cross, which your blogger saw once upon a long ago when AMC--then known as American Movie Classics, now known as "A Million Commercials" or "A Million Cuts." AMC's demise, at least as a relevant classic movie channel, is the single saddest event of our classic-film-loving life. There are young people who love vintage films who cannot conceive of AMC ever being *the* source for amazing-quality, commercial-free movies. The world I grew up in is most definitely not the world I "inherited." Shame.

Crushing cultural depression aside, Sign of the Cross was an eye-popping experience. Not only was it downright erotic and sensual, it was the first pre-Code movie I ever saw. The context of such explicit material being shown within a 1930s movie is what makes it so titilating, not necessarily what's being shown, or better yet, implied.