Movie Quote of the Month Archive:

June, 2008

"By today's standards, the old stars weren't paid very much--three, four or five thousand dollars a week, and they almost never got a share of a movie's profits. But these wage slaves were well looked after. The studio functioned for them as business manager, publicist, doctor; as excercise room, sexual playpen, and probably a lot else. There's little reason to think that the stars picked up many checks. The smart ones invested in land or art and became rich. Yet, the system of paternalistic domination was enraging to many...However unhappy, the stars who put up with the indignities and stayed in harness accomplished a lot, and gave moviegoers enormous pleasure, and who's to say that our pleasure doesn't matter as much as their independence?"

--David Denby, "Fallen Idols" in the October 22, 2007 The New Yorker

May, 2008

"When you sit down in a dark theater, it is always with the hope that whay you see will be that unknown movie that you carry in your heart, that movie you want to see more than anything in life, a movie that will speak to you."

--Director Randa Haines (Children of a Lesser God) in Private Screenings: Insiders Share a Century of Great Movie Moments, published by the American Film Institute in 1995.

April, 2008

"Are you much of a film buff?"

"Oh, I love film. D.W.Griffith. Hitchcock. William Wellman. I mean, should I go on? I know my movies."

--Keith Richards, interviewed by Clark Collis in the April 11, 2008 Entertainment Weekly

March, 2008

"The silent era has never ceased to surprise me. Just when I felt I have seen everything, a film comes from left field that upsets all my assumptions. Sometimes, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy will act like an alcoholic's cure, and after a couple of days, you may see so many boring films you feel you never want to look at another frame. But, persevere, and you will inevitably see something so extraordinary that you faith will be renewed and your enthusiasm increased."

--Kevin Brownlow, in his introduction to the superb new book Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture by Peter Kobel and the Library of Congress.

February, 2008

The most prominent woman (in this 2007's films) was Katherine Heigel, round bellied from her drunken rumpus in Knocked Up, a film that under the cover of its filthy patter marked a dismal retreat, cranking back the cause of women--not so much thier social or sexual status as their raison d'être--to a stage so primitive that Hollywood sought to outgrow it decades ago. Carole Lombard would have taken one sip of a film like that and tipped it down the sink.

--Anthony Lane in the January 14, 2008, New Yorker

January, 2008

“There are more Zampanos in the world than bicycle thieves, and the story of man who discovers his neighbor is just as important and as real as the story of a strike.”

Federico Fellini defending his desertion of Neo-Realistic subjects and Marxist reform philosophies in La Strada, his tale of a circus strongman, quoted in La Strada by Peter Bonadanella and Manuela Gieri.

November, 2007

...And no doubt the cutting can cover up what mistakes I've made in continuity (which worry Lucienne, my script girl, to death). Too much care, no door left open to chance, and poetry, which is difficult enough to trap, will certainly be frightened away. Whereas a little improvisation makes it come a bit nearer. To find trees where there are none, or something where it shouldn't be, such as a hat off a head in one shot but on again in the next, are, as it were, cracks in the wall through which poetry can penetrate. Those who notice such spelling mistakes are the real illiterates and cannot be moved by fantasy, anyhow. Such details have no importance.

--Jean Cocteau in The Diary of a Film (La Belle et La Bête).

October, 2007

"My goal was to make the Beast so human, so likeable, so superior to man that his transformation into Prince Charming would be for Belle, a terrible disappointment, and would oblige her to accept a marriage of reason."

--Jean Cocteau on La Belle et La Bête (Beauty and the Beast)

September, 2007

"It is almost impossible to get anything over to the producers when the issues already raised (as if they were the main issues) have dealt with a phrase or triviality. How, for example, can you raise the question of a seduction scene that colors a whole drama even though it is not shown in actuality while the censor is thinking only about the elimination of the word, 'lousy.' and is not in the least sensitive to the fact that the audience is compelled to do its own dirty thinking on inferences that if cannot escape."

--Censor Alice Ames Winter complains (accurately) that the Hays Office censors are missing the big picture during the Pre-Code era, quoted in Lea Jacobs The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942.

August, 2007

All over the city projectors are rolling and screens are flickering into life. In cinemas across Chicago, couples fall in and out of love, kids see their first murder, their first sex scene, insomniacs stare at 2 am features with glazed eyes, cowboys chase dreams, kings still reign; portals to other world gape wide. Each cinema is a world unto itself; from movie palaces to parks, every venue is an experience as unique as the film shown. This is a city of home away from homes, places of respite or horror where, for a few hours time, you can be someone else and live another life. This is Chicago--the city that never closes its eyes for fear of missing the next big scene.

--Brenna Ehrlich in the Fall Winter 06/07 Northwestern University Day for Night program guide.

July, 2007

"Sure, DVDs have changed things, but I believe in my heart that repertory programming will never die...At the end of the day, regardless of how great your flat screen tv is, or how great your Blue-ray discs are, you want to see movies with a community of people, to go out and make a night of it."

IFC Center Programmer Harris Dew, quoted in the June 15, 2007 New York Sun

June, 2007:

Last month, we outlined a new benevolent organization that we are sponsoring, to be known as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Movie Audiences. Since then, the following additional film atrocities have been brought to our attention, and requests that the Society take appropriate and drastic action:

Comedy drams in which the neglected wife, by the simple expedient of donning a blonde wig and a adopting a French accent, so thoroughly disguises herself that her own husband fails to recognize her and tries to engage in a new affaire d'amour to his subsequent chagrin; Ugly duckling themes in which the homely little heroine after one lone trip to a beauty parlor emerges looking like a delirious combination of Cleopatra, Helen of Troy and Miss America; Comedy scenes in which the ultimate height of subtle wit is attained by dropping half a quart of ice cream down the back of a lady's evening gown; and long winded subtitles whose linguistic mazes would make even a cross-word puzzle addict take it to the tall timber in utter defeat.

--Pictures Magazine, June 1926 (Well, audiences no longer have to read title cards...)

May, 2007:

"Who wants to see realism? People in the West! There's always some bright aspect, even to a poor man's life. I'm saying that there should be humour in a film. These art filmmakers think humor is a sin, it's a cardinal sin for a person to laugh in an auditorium, according to them. What's wrong with a person having a bit of enjoyment in the theatre?"

--Manmohan Desai (director Amar Akbar Anthony and Parvarish) quoted in Manmohan Desai Films: Enchantment of the Mind by Connie Hahan.

April, 2007:

"By a Waterfall" in Footlight Parade is “the most staggering water ballet in the history of liquid…neither taste nor logic was a factor by any means in this interminable series of simpering half-naked women, wearing silly rubber bathing caps meant to represent hair, gamboling through an astounding variety of aquacade formations, all in a sequence ostensibly taking place on the stage of a movie theater.”

--Richard Barrios in A Song in the Dark

March, 2007:

I once asked Akira Kurosawa why he had chose to frame a shot in Ran in a particular way. His answer was that if he'd panned the camera one inch to the left, the Sony factory would be sitting there exposed. If he'd panned an inch to the right, we would see the airport--neither of which belongs in a period movie.

--Sidney Lumet in Making Movies

February, 2007:

“Whenever Westerners don’t understand something, they simply think it’s Zen.” ---Yasujiro Ozu

January, 2007:

“ Maybe our own time is too informal for great comedy; (Jacques) Tati was one of the last, lucky artists to operate on the Wildean principle that anarchy is best practiced within the confines of codified behavior.”—Anthony Lane.

December, 2006:

"If you give an actor a long rope, he can take you to town. Because we just love the camera, and we love the audience and we love watching ourselves and we love going into all sorts of drama, and unless somebody actually stops us, we just carry on."

--Hindi film superstar Amitabh Bachchan in the January, 2006 Filmfare Magazine.

November, 2006:

“Sometimes I saw the same film four or five times within a month and could still not recount the story line correctly because, at one moment or another, the swelling of the music, a chase through the night, the actress’s tears, would intoxicate me, make me lose track of what was going on, carry me away from the rest of the movie.”

--François Truffaut quoted in French Cinema From Its Beginnings to the Present by Rémi Fournier Lanzoni

October, 2006:

“I began to note differences of style in the films made by different directors. It was a new stage in my development. I followed the work of Griffith with intense interest. The marvel of marvels was the close up. I have never changed my opinion about this. Certain close-ups of Lillian Gish, of Mary Pickford, and of Greta Garbo are imprinted on my memory for life. The enlargement enables us to delight in the texture of the skin, and a slight quivering of the lips tells us something about the inward life of the idealized woman. I am ready to bear with the most tedious film if it gives me a close up of an actress I like. And in my passion for the close up I have sometimes inserted perfectly irrelevant sequences in my films simply because they allowed me scope for a really good one.”

--Jean Renoir in My Life and My Films

September, 2006:

Janet Leigh's autobiography, There Really Was a Hollywood, is a highly entertaining account, particularly of her early moviemaking years. In this passage, she discovers that 19 year old Jeanette Morrison (she refers to herself in the 3rd person before she becomes Janet Leigh) who has never really thought about being an actress until asked to audition for MGM because Norma Shearer saw her photo, and nobody could say no to Norma Shearer, finds out she is going to co-star with her childhood idol Van Johnson in The Romance of Rosy Ridge:

"Then level heads (not hers) took command. She had to get to wardrobe immediately, if not sooner. All of her costumes had to be made and be ready to ship in two weeks. The company would locate in Santa Cruz for three months of exterior shooting and then return to the studio and complete the interiors. Hairpieces had to--

"Jeanette had sunk back down in the chair and had started to sob again.

" 'For Pete's sake, now what's the matter?'

" 'I c-can't go. I can't d-d-do the picture.'

" 'In heaven's name, why?'

" I can't afford to stay in a hotel or pay tr-train fare.'

"She wailed even more violentsly. They gazed at her in utter disbelief, completely dumbfounded. How could she be this innocent, this naive? Her reaction on the onset about the test should have given them a clue. She really was Lissy Anne MacBean.

"Soothingly, lovingly, they all tried to explain at once. The studio paid for transportation for location trips. The studio paid for housing when on location. She would even receive a daily allowance for food, a per diem, it was called. And the studio would provide a round trip ticket for Stan (her husband) as well. Now did she think she could get her fanny over to wardrobe?"

August, 2006:

"He (James Dean) was more than a friend, I think of him as a teacher. We did two films together that took about a year of our lives. He only made three movies in all. We did Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. I was 19. He was 24. It wasn't like we went out and drank beers together or got high or raced cars. We talked about acting. When he died, it destroyed me, because I totally had this belief that people fulfill their destiny. I couldn't understand why James Dean had died so young. He had only been in three movies. He wanted to direct movies. It destroyed my whole concept of destiny and life for years. It still bothers me. I miss him."

--Dennis Hopper interviewed by Terry Gross, from her book, All I Did Was Ask.

July, 2006:

"When I first visited George Eastman House as the guest of George Pratt, I timorously asked if I might be allowed to view a few films. George was too scared of his boss to make the request on my behalf, but when I plucked up the courage to face the infamous James Card, he looked at the screening schedule and summarily cancelled all promised screenings for that week, and allowed me free access to any silent films I might wish to see. That is the way it used to be with many archives. If the curator liked you, there was nothing he or she would not do. If your personality was unappealing, you might just as well look for a new calling in life."

--Anthony Slide in Silent Players, his dishy biographical memoir of selected of silent film actors, most of whom he knew personally.

June, 2006:

"Mabel Normand belonged to the first generation of film actors, the very young men and women who felt their way throught the craft of screena acting helped by the tutelage of directors like Griffith, Ince or Sennett. Frustrated by the anonymity of Biograph and other companies' presentations, they had no compass to orient themselves in the storms of moviegoers curiosity and adulation. They had no predecessors from whose experience they could benefit. This was more difficult for the women, in an age not far past the Victorian. There were, of course, stars of the theater, like Sarah Bernhardt or Eva Tanguay, but they still subsisted at 'ground level,' their greasepaint and sweat palpable to the audience. The idea of screen gods or goddesses existing in the world of shadows and specters...was totally new--giant luminescent faces beaming down upon the great unwashed. Were these people real? In days long before television, at the dawn of radio, only the newspapers could feed the rapacious appetite of fans for the 'true facts' behind the idols of the screen. And the newspapers, then as now, were cannibals."

--Simon Louvish, musing on why so many early movie stars were touched by scandal, in his book about the Sennett studio, Keystone.

May, 2006:

"Not bad for a kid from Brooklyn Heights whose psychologist parents raised him in a house full of live-in patients. 'I grew up in an environment where nearly everybody around me was clinically insane,' says (Akiva) Goldsman, 43, of his childhood. 'It was a lot like Hollywood, except back then the insane people couldn't fire me.'"

--Benjamin Svetkey quoting Oscar-winning scriptwriter Akiva Goldsman in the April 28/May 5 Entertainment Weekly

April, 2006:

"I think I disappointed Hitchcock. I didn't fit his image of the ideal blonde. In my opinion, he was well aware that he'd made a mistake in choosing me, and he decided to go along with that mistake. It's as if he had wanted to put himself in the skin of the James Stewart character, who discovers Judy when he's hoping to find Madeleine and doesn't...Hitchcock was hoping to find in me a Grace Kelly-like blonde, which wasn't the case, all along hoping he could change my nature. As a result there's this resistance on the screen."

--Kim Novak, discussing Vertigo in 1997 as quoted in Le Monde, from Jean Pierre Dufreigne's Hitchcock Style

March, 2006:

"Storytelling is the purpose of costume design. As Adrian, MGM's head of costume design from 1928 to 1942, whose design innovations made fashion history and propelled him to become cinema's first commercially successful costume designer, so declared in 1930 when he said, 'One could line up all the gowns and tell the screen story.'"

--Drake Stutesman in the essay "Storytelling: Marlene Dietrich's face and John Fredericks' Hats" in Fashioning Film Stars, edited by Rachel Moseley.

February, 2006:

One remembers a handbag, a key in the palm of the hand, a crime reflected in a pair of glasses, a windmill with the sails turning the wrong way. One no longer remembers why Janet Leigh stopped at the Bates Motel, nor does one remember the story of Notorious. Neither Ingrid Bergman nor Cary Grant, but only a bottle of wine. This does not happen with Griffith or Welles or me. Hitchcock was really the master of the universe. He had a control over the audience that nobody else has ever had. Through objects.

--Jean-Luc Godard (Histoires du Cinema) quoted in Jean Pierre Dufreigne's Hitchcock Style

January, 2006:

"In an interview that accompanies the Koyaanisqatsi DVD, (Philip) Glass provides his own eloquent definition of the film-music art: he calls it 'observing accurately the distance between the image and the music.' In other words, instead of trying to make image and music serve the same ends, you play one against the other, letting the disparity become an emotional experience in itself."

--from "Sound and Vision" by Alex Ross in the June 27, 2005 New Yorker.

December, 2005:

“I think that if you don’t like the films of Sam Fuller, then you just don’t like cinema. Or, at least you don’t understand it. Sure, Sam’s movies are blunt, pulpy, occasionally crude, lacking any sense of delicacy or subtlety. But those aren’t shortcomings. They’re simply reflections of his temperament, his journalistic training and his sense of urgency…There’s a great deal of sophistication in Sam’s movies, but it’s all at the service of rendering emotion. When you appreciate a Fuller film, what you’re responding to is cinema at its very essence. Motion as emotion. Sam’s pictures move convulsively, violently. Just like life when it’s being lived with real passion”

--Martin Scorsese’s introduction to Sam Fuller’s autobiography Film is a Battleground.

November, 2005:

"Of course there must be subtleties in filmmaking. Just make sure you make them obvious."

--Billy Wilder, quoted in Rosemarie Jarski's Hollywood Wit.

October, 2005:

"At one point, Hepburn--whom some wags in town had by then dubbed 'Katharine of Arrogance'--suggested that she play both roles. (Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots) ' But, if you played both queens,' asked John Carradine, a favorite Ford player who had a supporting role in the film, 'how would you know which one to upstage?' Hepburn found nothing amusing about the comment at the time. Years later, she roared with laughter telling it."

--A. Scott Berg on John Ford's casting of Mary of Scotland (1936) in his memoir Kate Remembered

September, 2005:

"In spite of the cosmopolitan veneer, it's the kind of movie where Arlene Dahl, looking out her hotel window at New York, says, 'This is where I belong,' and you know right away she is unredeemable; where June Allyson, given money by her husband to buy an evening gown, buys an outdoor barbeque instead, complete with chef's hats for the whole family; and Lauren Bacall, looking misty-eyed at her says, 'What an idiotic, wonderful thing to do!' Though Bacall, you're sure, wouldn't be found dead in a chef's hat, she has certainly learned how to deliver this sort of line: with an appropriately wistful inflection."

--James Harvey, discussing Woman's World (1954) in his book Movie Love in the Fifties.

August, 2005:

In his review of The Birds, François Truffaut bemoaned the praise heaped on films like Bridge on the River Kwai “scenes set inside offices alternating with discussions between old fogies and some action scenes usually filmed by another crew. Rubbish , traps for fools, Oscar machines….what an injustice there is in the generally bad reception. I am so disappointed that no critic admired the basic premise of the film ‘Birds attack people.’”

July, 2005:

"Taking up a Hobby: Ideally, of course, this should be something evil, such as drug taking (Gary Oldman in Leon) lair-building (various) and torture (everyone). Alternatively, it is good to try to incorporate a harmless hobby into one's work. Bad guys are keen pet lovers, for instance, with snakes, sharks and piranhas always a popular choice. The Batman series, in particular, would never have been possible without the contribution of demented cat, penguin, riddle and coin-tossing hobbyists, among others."

--Leo Benedictus muses on the qualities of the perfect cinematic supervillain in the 06.24.05 edition of The Guardian. Which brings up another unanswered question. Where do megalomaniacs recruit their henchmen, and what do the underlings get out of these doomed, one-sided relationships?

June, 2005:

Giants like these (Independence Day, Godzilla, Pearl Harbor, the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies) continue to stalk through the multiplexes, shaking gold from the heavens with their thunderous, THX Certified footsteps; but inside their high-definition, digitized craniums their tiny brains are dead.

--Louis Menand on the state of the cinema blockbuster in the February 7, 2005 New Yorker.

May, 2005:

"A star is someone you don't mind spending two hours in the cinema with, even if the film is bad."

Director Claude Lelouch, quoted in Hollywood Wit by Rosemarie Jarski.

April, 2005:

"Of all the things written about (Orson) Welles over the years, I lean toward the view of Gore Vidal, who wrote that Welles, 'was a miracle of empathy and he knew all the gradations of despair that the oyster experienced as it slid down his gullet. But the romantic genius aims not for perfection in his art but for poignant glamour in his ruin.'"

--Scott Eyman in his review of Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios by Clinton Heylin

March, 2005:

The very breadth and longevity of (John) Wayne's career has become impossible to achieve ever since the original star system died forty years ago. Fewer and fewer movies are made, the audience therefore unable to attain the familiarity of repeated exposure that personality stars used to have (which explains why so many of today's stars began with the weekly intimacy of the TV series, from Clint Eastwood to Tom Hanks). While a contemporary star is lucky to have two pictures released in a year, audiences of the thirties or forties could see Cagney, Bogart, Gable or Tracy on giant screens four, five or even six times a year."

--Peter Bogdanovich in Who the Hell's in It. Who the Devil Made It? Bogdanovich's previous book, had detailed, thoughtful interviews with studio era directors. His recent "movie stars I have known" essay collection is considerably more self-serving and not nearly as interesting as his previous one.

February, 2005:

“But from the very first film Keaton released as a star, once his association with Arbuckle was ended, was breath-takingly, an explosion of style. To sit through dozens and dozens of short comedies of the period and then to come upon “One Week” is to see the one thing no man ever sees: a garden at the moment of blooming.”

--Walter Kerr in The Silent Clowns

January, 2005:

American films used to be an advertisement for life in the states--there was a sophistication, depth, the allure of a cool, complex manner. Now, most big studio films aren't interested in America, preferring to depict an invented, imagined world, or one filled with easily recognizable plot devices. "Our movies no longer reflect our culture," said a top studio executive who did not wish to be identified. "They have become gross, distorted exaggertions. And I think America is growing into those exaggerated images. My fear is that it's the tail wagging the dog--we write the part and then we play the part."

Lynn Hirschberg in the November 14, 2004 New York Times Magazine, an issue on globalization and the movies.

December, 2004:

Entertainment is not, as we often think, a full-scale flight from our problems, not a means of forgetting them completely, but rather a rearrangement of our problems into shapes which tame them, which disperse them to the margins of our attention.

--Michael Wood, America in the Movies

November, 2004:

"Writing for films is just like doing crossword puzzles, except that to do crossword puzzles you have to have a certain knowledge of words."

--Dorothy Parker, quoted in Jeanette MacDonald, Hollywood Diva by Edward Baron Turk

October, 2004:

"If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood; if they had been any better I should not have come."

--Raymond Chandler, quoted in Rosemarie Jarski's Hollywood Wit.

September, 2004:

"I do get offers. But they're nothing to run for...It would be a strictly professional decision. If someone comes to me with an agreeable subject, I'll take it up as just another assignment. What's the big deal? What would an Indian be doing in a Hollywood film? We're the wrong color. I'm not interested in playing a stereotype. They visualize Indians as newspaper vendors, taxi drivers, Patel motel owners or ananchronistic Maharajas indulging in lascivious pleasures with spears in their hands. Sorry, not interested."

--Amitabh Bachchan, India's greatest movie star and living legend, on going Hollywood, quoted on Indiatimes.com/filmfare

August, 2004:

In 1991 I was on a month-long solo tour of the U.K. and spent my off days in the seaside town of Whitstable. One wintry afternoon I was out walking on the beach with my tour manager, when we spotted a lone spectral figure with a dog coming towards us out of the mist. "That's Peter Cushing," whispered my companion. "He lives in a house down the beach." As a longtime horror film aficionado, I could scarcely contain my delight, and walked up and introduced myself. "Mr. Cushing, I'm a huge fan of your work." He graciously shook my hand, then fixed his penetrating gaze on me: "And where do you hail from, young man?" "I live in New York City," I replied. "Ahhh, New York! Dr. Frankenstein smiled diabolically. "They have marvelous electricity there!"

--A letter from Gary Lucas, published in the March 10 (I think!) Village Voice

July, 2004:

"It is depressing to read a list of movies and realize that you missed all of them, but it is just as disappointing to discover that you have seen every one. You want to know that there are still a few truffles left in the box."

--Louis Menand on year-end "ten best" lists in the January 12, 2004 New Yorker

June, 2004:

"Ensconced in a doll's house, Scott becomes even more irrational, claiming that he is becoming 'more monstrous in my domination of Louise.' Although distressed about her husband, Louise's reaction is as much about frustration as pity...Whilst feeling powerless to alter Scott's fate, Louise is empowered to pursue her own existence, knowing that she cannot be challenged. She leaves the house one day, and the cat terrorises Scott in his tiny living room. Following a struggle of lounge dimensions, the cat is instrumental in making Scott run towards the cellar, whereupon Louise returns, the door opens and the draught blows Scott to a prison below stairs. Louise assumes that Scott has been eaten by the cat. The cat purrs contentedly, perhaps even conspiratorially. The man of the house is gone."

--Paul Wells, describing a plot turn in The Incredible Shrinking Man in his essay "The Invisible Man: Shrinking Masculinity in the 1950s Science Fiction B Movie", reprinted in You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men edited by Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim.

May, 2004:

Metropolis is the ur-text of the technological urban machine, complete with compartmentalized social structures, layers of transportation, surveillance and communications and an organic flow of energy linking its various sectors. The eroticized chaos of the narrative and the destructive force of the femme fatale are likewise emblematic of a modern mythology conjoining power, politics, sexuality and technology.

Catherine Russell in a review of Metropolis in the Winter 2003 Cineaste.

April, 2004:

"To my mind, Jimmy was just as talented as Marlon (Brando) with the critical difference that he was also a lot more self-disciplined. He was a pro from the bottom up. Brando was selfish, he never thought of anyone but Numero Uno. It wasn't that way with Jimmy at all. When you'd do a scene with him, he knew he needed you in that scene with him, or else he was going to look a little crazy talking to himself. Marlon, on the other hand, always wanted to talk to himself. When you think about it, he's the one who really should have done Harvey."

--Alex Nicol, who was in the Actor's Studio with Brando and in two 1950s films with James Stewart, quoted in James Stewart by Donald Dewey.

March, 2004:

"The spectacle was grotesque. Jolson minces, rolls his eyes, claps his hands, swivels his knees and does bird whistles until you scream for Mammy. He is unbearable. He beats you with a stick until you like him, and then the unspeakable moment comes when you have to admit that you do, sort of."

--Mick LaSalle on Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer in his book Dangerous Men.

February, 2004:

Joan Crawford brought her Schiaparellis back to Hollywood and threw them like a gauntlet at Adrian, who made their linebacker shoulders and lavish embellishment his own trademarks, and those of nearly every sinewy, flat-hipped, chain-smoking, man-eating, social-climbing, scarlet-clawed screen temptress of the thirties.

--"Mother of Invention" an essay about Elsa Schiaparelli in the October 23, 2003 New Yorker.

January, 2004:

I recently watched (A Dog's Life) for the first time in fifteen years and was stunned that so much of what I remembered as "Chaplin," the scenes I think of as the essence of his work as the Tramp spread throughout his short films, were all in this one movie. There he is stealing a hot dog through a hole in a fence; rolling back and forth under the fence to escape the cop who's seen him; devouring muffins from a plate whenever the food stand owner turns his back, even for a millisecond; always eating dust in the race from the bench to the employment office windows as openings are posted first at one and then the other. I saw A Dog's Life when I was about ten, and this last sequence, with its exasperating dreamlike inevitability, spoke to a basic anxiety in me. I think of the sequence whenever I stand in lines, at the grocery store, the airport, wherever, because it enables me to nurse my low expectations with better grace.

--from Comedy is a Man in Trouble by Alan Dale

December, 2003:

"Fame may be fleeting, but worldwide recognition for that pleated skirt once prompted Travilla to wisecrack, 'When I die, don't have me cremated, have me pleated.'"

--The designer of the white halter neck dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch reflects on his most famous creation, quoted in Hollywood Costume Design by Travilla by Maureen Reilly.

November, 2003:

"Zeta-Jones is merely ravishing, but Clooney owns the film. Ordinarily best at sardonic, man's man confidence, he strides through Intolerable Cruelty with fantastic screwball zest. To see Clooney tenderize, season, grill and serve this ham hock of a role is to see an old-fashioned virtuoso in perpetual motion. His restless artillery of double-takes, baffled winces, fake smiles, stunned glares, tongue-on-teeth inspections, and zealous line readings might make up the ripest lead perf in a Hollywood film since Cary Grant's in Arsenic and Old Lace."

--Michael Atkinson in the October 8 Village Voice

October, 2003:

I think that Bringing Up Baby's failure upon its initial release (it lost $365,000 for RKO) indicates that it isn't just ...older members of the audience who find the aggressive heroine subversive. The younger popular audience did as well, and it is one of the few examples of a fluffy comedy achieving the kind of controlled unease that we usually only get from more ambitious works of art."

--Alan Dale in Comedy is a Man in Trouble

August (and September!) 2003:

All in all, Pirates of the Caribbean is the best spectacle of the summer: the absence of pomp is a relief, the warmth of the comedy is a pleasure. The screenwriter Terry Rossio can perhaps be forgiven for saying (in the press notes), "We wanted it to be a very classic, Jane Austen-style, bodice ripping romance." (Rossio is probably thinking of Austen's most famous work, Pride and Pimpernel.)

--David Denby in the July 28, 2003, New Yorker

July, 2003:

Watching Gallardo triumph as a matador, Dona Sol tosses him a ring in the shape of a serpent that had belonged to Cleopatra, then lures him to her home so they can be alone when she writhes like a boa constrictor. Just as success and the crowd's worship deceived him about what really has value, so now does a conniving vixen. He succumbs to Dona Sol, devouring her with a long, cannibalistic, and very hot kiss. Hovering close to Dona Sol's bare shoulders as she strums a harp, we see him struggling to quell desire, then yielding to it, becoming as powerless to restrain himself as a provoked bull in the ring. He's all animal, deliciously savage. As Jeanine Basinger writes in Silent Stars, Valentino "conveys a passion that is slightly kinky, with a touch of rape and sadism." Turn on the air conditioning.

--Emily W. Lieder in her spellbinding new biography of Rudolph Valentino, Dark Lover. In her meticulously researched and lively, if somewhat purple prose, Valentino comes alive as in no other book.

June, 2003:

In short, this is a study of friendship--the most widespread of human transactions, far more common than love, but treated by the movies with comparative disdain. We get heaps of children and teen-agers becoming friends on film, but adults tend to be shovelled, with indecent haste, into enmity and lust. Is that why we are so heartened, even as love is snapped off at the root, by the final companionable line of Casablanca?

--Anthony Lane reviewing Man on the Train in the May 12, 2003 New Yorker

May, 2003:

Silent comedies can appeal to even the youngest viewers, he (John Flowers, who teaches psychology and film at Chapman University in Orange County) says, "because they're far more physical. You either laugh or you don't. You don't have to explain much. They are literally seeing it for what it is. As soon as a kid develops a sense of what's contemporary, it knocks out the middle ground of older films, because those are too much like what they watch now, but not as good. Silents work because they are totally different from what they watch now."

As one of my son's classmates put it after watching Keaton's One Week: "All the jokes in movies we see now are kind of the same. These were all different."

--Randy Lewis, "Can't Beat Buster, Can't Top the Tramp" in the April 17, 2003 Los Angeles Times.

April, 2003:

The reformed or redeemed prostitute is a sentimental idea, but one need only compare Red Dust to Pretty Woman (1990) or Mighty Aphrodite (1995) to see how much more intelligent and gritty is the social Darwinism of the thirties than that of the nineties. In Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts' character, for all her working girl credentials, is a creature of a fairy tale, not the streets, and she has no real competition for the hero's affection. Harlow's Vantine, hanging around the rubber plantation as if she were still loitering in a brothel off-hours, reminds us where a lot of our wisetalk originates. She also reminds us how hard working girls work, at one point sloughing off the inconveniences of the accomodations with, "Guess I'm not used to sleeping nights anyway." Her stamina (so poignant given how fragile a hold on real life hers proved to be) is a point in her favor."

--Maria DiBattista in Fast-Talking Dames

March, 2003

"...we treasure the offcuts of Bond, and not the whole, the gems prized free from their settings; when it comes to Goldfinger, I like Oddjob's killer frisbee of a hat, I like the laser beam that eats it way towards Connery's crotch, and some of us can even stomach his golfing gear, but I can catch that film on TV, go out to make a sandwich, and walk back in for my favorite sequence without feeling a spasm of loss. When North by Northwest comes on, however, I have to stay with it, and to hell with lunch."

--Anthony Lane, "Mondo Bond" in the November 4, 2002 New Yorker

February, 2003

"I was totally immersed in the Italian films. For me, it was these Latin women, their smoldering power--Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Anna Magnani. There's something so extraordinary about their intense eyes, their hair, the way they moved. When I saw Loren in Boy on a Dolphin, she sang this little song in Greek, Sagapo... I can remember every word. I was in my element. The movies were my church." --Manolo Blahnik in the February 2003 Vogue.

and,

"Mournful was the girl not invited to lurch around the gymnasium--renamed the Spring Serenade or the Apple Blossom Romp, decorated with Kleenex flowers, lit with blue spotlights. Round you would go, to the strains of an eight-piece band in a faint odor of running shoes and sweat, clutching and being clutched by a clammy-handed youth reeking of Old Spice.You'd be wearing, of course, the dress, and along with your accessory The Date, you'd get photographed in it by the dour snapster laid on for the occasion. Why did you never look like Audrey Hepburn in such pictures, but instead like some juvenile delinquent out of Police Gazette? --Margaret Atwood in the December 2002 Vogue.

January 2003:

"His greatest ambition was 'to get out' (of Ft. Wayne, Indiana). The movies of the nineteen-thirties taught him about penthouse life and the quainter locutions of the gentry. He fanned the flames of his escapist fantasies with his mother's back issues of Vogue. Ethyl Blass was a dressmaker and the widow of a travelling hardware salesman. The mother who sews seems to be a folk archetype, particularly in stories of rags to riches. (Wallis Simpson had one. So did Eva Peron.) Her selfless needlework provides her child's--her changeling's--first noble disguise."

--"Noblesse de Robe" a profile of Bill Blass by Judity Thurman in the September 9, 2002 New Yorker.

December 2002:

"Deitch speaks of his love of silent film--'a fascinating form of literature with words and pictures, just like comics!'"

--Underground graphic artist Kim Deitch, quoted in the October 16, 2002 Village Voice review (by R. C. Baker) of his fantasia on the early days of motion picture animation, Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

November 2002:

"Let me tell you about Florida politicians. I make them, I make them out of whole cloth, just like a tailor makes a suit. I get their name in the newspaper. I get them some publicity and I get their name on the ballot. Then, after the election, we count the votes, and if they don't turn out right, we recount them again until they do"

--Edward G. Robinson to Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo

September 2002:

"The whole history of the big studios is a graveyard of stars who got out of control. And the stars had to be completely destroyed with bad pictures so that the exhibitors and the public would accept their obliteration and so that no other studios could reconstitute them. (Joe Schenck) started on Keaton with The General--lousy publicity. I was in Hollywood in 1927--nobody heard of it. Talkies coming in...Why don't these slobs (people like Anita Loos) write the truly tragic fact that talkies killed Keaton? I don't think that father love, wifely support, complete sobriety, the backing of the Schenck and MGM could have reconciled the public to the shock of Buster's pure, austere face combined with the growl of an angry giant."

Louise Brooks in a letter to Keaton biographer Tom Dardis, reprinted in the April 1998 issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

September 2002:

One of the questions most frequently asked is: What does a director consider to be of first importance? I too, before I learned not to ask too many questions, asked Marshall Neilan, one of the most prominent in his day, what he considered the most important part of directing. Without a moment's hesitation he answered, "Getting someone to let you direct."

and,

One who praises as great art only that which has become popular and about which there can no longer be any dispute is qualified to discuss art only with a child.

--Josef von Sternberg in his autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry

August 2002:

"It's time to become a myth."

--Designer Diane Von Furstenberg on the subject of turning 40

June/July 2002

Few experiences were as thrilling as that of holding in my hands not prints, but original drawings--sheet after sheet of tracing paper, thick with easily smudged charcoal or graphite--used to build Rear Window's courtyard, or 42nd Street's backdrops, or Holly Golightly's town house apartment. At one level it allowed me to enter the minds of the men and women who created these enviroments, to study their choices, to glimpse them at work, as it were. But there was something else about these exquisite drawings, each dated a few weeks before the start of shooting, and signed-off by the art department head--a haunting feeling that one had entered the time and space in which those classic films were still yet to be made, when no one could know that the places they had just drawn up in detail would turn out to live forever in the imagination.

--James Sanders in the Afterward and Acknowledgements to Celluloid Skyline

May 2002

CC: What goes through your mind when you see this picture (of you dancing with Sabrina)?

BW: Well, I forgot that I was showing her how to do it, because she did it very well herself. She was guiding ME, I wasn't guiding her. And, I thought that I was at the ball, I was in a restaurant dancing with her...I was completely forgetful, and then I thought,"Oh my God, the camera! Where would the camera be?"

CC: So, it's like what we talked about earlier in these interviews. You wrote these movies, really, to live all these different lives, to experience the things you weren't able to in real life. And here you are, dancing with your own character, played by Audrey Hepburn. Until, of course, Bogart steps in and actually does the scene.

BW: He does the scene...and I say, "Oh, that's not as good as mine."

from Cameron Crowe's Conversations with Wilder

April 2002

"These cartoons were never made for children, nor were they made for adults. They were made for me." --Chuck Jones, quoted posthumously in the March 8, 2002 Entertainment Weekly

March 2002

What, finally, are movie stars for? Maybe to prove that Desire, writ large up there, is probably the best we'll ever get of Wisdom. To show us how, happier, we might've looked. To make us pay such major money for mere Junior Mints. Stars are meant to keep us from going to bed at 8 p.m., sobbing. Movie stars "stand for us" when we know we were born kneeling and will die crawling on our bellies like reptiles. Movie stars are what we tithe to, wank to, dress like, wish for, doubt would really like us. They are what we would all die for, given the slightest chance..."

--Alan Gurganus in "When I Was Engaged to Ava Gardner" in the Winter 2002 Oxford American "Southern Movie Issue" (which I recommend highly).

February 2002

"(Designer Yves) St. Laurent was nowhere near as radical as the first woman who bought an old rayon dress in a thrift shop and wore it out on the town."-- Lynn Yaeger in the January 22, 2002 Village Voice

(And I bet she did it because she wanted to look like Joan Crawford--moviediva)

January 2002

"You have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies. (Being able to talk about movies with someone--to share the giddy high excitement you feel--is enough for a friendship.) Our emotions rise to meet the force coming from the screen, and they go on rising throughout our movie-going lives. When this happens in a popular art form--when it's an art experience that we discover for ourselves--it is sometimes disparaged as fannishness. But there's something there that goes deeper than connoisseurship or taste. It's a fusion of art and love."--Pauline Kael in Movie Love, quoted in the September 17, 2001 New Yorker article by David Denby.

December, 2001

"I was nineteen. I had walked into the office to meet Lucas for Star Wars. I read the scene with Harrison. I bought the ticket to ride and rode it to the end. Had I known the film was going to make that loud a noise, I would have dressed better and refused to wear that insane hair."--Carrie Fisher in the December, 2001 Vogue