Jan Spears
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Posts posted by Jan Spears
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In the weekend Wall Street Journal, designer Zac Posen was asked the following:
The most stylish fictional character is:
Joan Crawford's in "Humoresque." That scene when she's on the beach. . . she's so elegant. I grew up watching the classics.
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I saw the movie on Sunday.
By and large, I loved it. I thought it would have been ideal if Patty Jenkins could have sustained the wonderful blend of action, heart and humor that characterized the first three-fourths of the movie for the movie's entire length. But, once Ares revealed himself to Diana, I thought the movie lost a little bit of altitude. I found my interest declining in direct proportion to each new special effect. Only Steve's sacrifice and Diana's recommitment to her original sense of purpose held my interest during the final sequence. (And I thought David Thewlis as Ares was far more interesting quietly puncturing Diana's illusions than he was bellowing at the top of his lungs.)
That being said, it's hard to find fault with such a winning movie. Someone wrote upthread that much of the movie felt like it came from older genres you would see on TCM and I agree. There were nods to the classic war films, screwball comedies and even serials that kids would have gone to see at theaters in the 30s and 40s. I didn't feel like the movie was too long and, in any event, I don't know what you could cut before the Diana vs. Ares battle. I felt that the movie needed every single scene to say its piece. For instance, the scene where Steve teaches Diana to dance (or sway) might seem like a throwaway at first viewing. But it really added to the power of Diana and Steve's story and its bittersweet ending.
Loved the cast although, to this day, I still think of Robin Wright as Kelly Capwell on Santa Barbara.
I would give the movie an A- instead of an A just because the big confrontation at the end was far less interesting than everything else that came before it.
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3 hours ago, enoughcats said:
Makes the congealed salad of the 50's look good, well, not good, but not so bad.
Love the first photo and wish they'd done the Lemon Pie, they would have liked it.
The comments to the Jezebel cooking segment were interesting. It's very possible that bananas have changed to such an extent since 1928 that it's impossible lo these nearly 90 years later to recreate what Joan's "French Banana Salad" would have tasted like back then.
I've tried Joan's meatloaf recipe and it is great.
I love the photo as well, especially how the crew members are "dressed up" for a day's shoot at the studio.
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1928 studio publicity photo from the set of Our Dancing Daughters, which was Joan's first really big smash as a top-billed performer:
http://www.joancrawfordbest.com/20sset17may1.htm
(Co-star Johnny Mack Brown, who was often paired with Crawford during this period, is to Crawford's left.)
Also from 1928, Joan's recipe for her "nourishing" French Banana Salad (first item):
http://www.joancrawfordbest.com/r.htm#French
And the enterprising team from Jezebel attempt to make Joan's French Banana Salad:
http://jezebel.com/we-made-joan-crawfords-nourishing-french-banana-salad-a-1789006250
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1 hour ago, Maverick said:
The new Fallon is--not great. Kinda awful, actually. Fallon is a hard role to cast (as the producers found out in the original) and maybe no one could do justice to Pamela Sue Martin but they could have come a lot closer than this. Hopefully she'll be the first Carrington child recast. Oh, and where's Jeff?
As I wrote upthread, Pamela Sue Martin brought an elusive quality to the character of Fallon. You could never quite pin down Martin's Fallon. (And Maverick -- you are absolutely correct that Fallon was a hard character to recast.)
I think Jeff Colby (Sam Adegoke) starts at 1:41 in the trailer.
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I thought they were straining too hard for camp in the trailer. The camp always felt organic on the original series whereas this came across as everyone overdoing it.
Definitely missed the original theme song (although that may appear in the actual series.) Also, The new Carrington mansion lacks the stately quality of the Carrington mansion on Dynasty or the Colby mansion on The Colby's. Sammy Joe for Sammi Jo? He has a lot to live up to! I'm not sure about the new take on Krystle. Based on what was in the trailer, it moves the character a fair distance from the established character of Krystle Carrington.
Will watch but the trailer reminded me of The Charlie's Angels reboot from a few seasons past in which they got the tone all wrong.
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On 8/27/2016 at 4:42 PM, vb68 said:
I remember always waiting for one because it had to happen, right? But I don't think it ever did. Such a pity.
I would have also liked to see Joan Collins do a scene with Stanwyck just to try to gauge the chemistry. But I don't think they ever did one either. I could tell Stanywick liked John James, but I don't think it showed on screen that she supposedly didn't like Tracy Scoggins.
I'd also like to add the while I always enjoyed Katherine Ross in movies, especially in The Graduate, it was obvious she was a bad fit and uncomfortable on The Colbys . I wonder if it is a coincidence that I don't think she tried to continue a TV career after that.
Maybe I'm misremembering this but I think Stanwyck and Evans did have a scene together in the Fall of 1985 when the Colbys came to Denver. It was at the party at the Carrington mansion but I think it was 'Rita as Krystle' who played the scene with Constance Colby (Stanwyck).
Joan Collins famously refused to appear on The Colby's because she thought the launch of the spin-off diluted the main show and led to the ratings drop in Season 6. I do think Spelling&co. launched the spin-off one year too late but that wasn't the main reason why the mother show declined. In my opinion, more important factors were the unsatisfactory resolution of the Moldavian Massacre cliffhanger (only Ali Macgraw and Billy Campbell's characters died), the Krystle-Rita mess that went on forever, the lingering Moldavian storylines and characters, and -- yes -- Joan Collins' salary strike which caused her to miss the first episode of the season.
We never got Collins-Stanwyck but we did get Beacham-Stanwyck which was one of the best things about The Colby's.
Katharine Ross was miscast as Francesca and it didn't help that Stephanie Beacham gave a performance in overdrive as Sable. Also, it didn't help Ross that the character of Francesca, as written, was a much more vacillating and morally ambiguous character than Krystle was on Dynasty. In the hands of another actress, Francesca could have been a fascinating anti-heroine. As it played out, though, "Frankie" was kind of a dead weight in the Sable-Jason-Francesca-Zach quartet.
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15 hours ago, caracas1914 said:
Actually Joan divorced Douglas Fairbanks back in 1933, arguably when she was still at the peak of her box office career.
Here are Crawford's rankings in the annual Quigley's Top Money Making Stars poll (which began in 1932) of theater owners:
1932 -- 3rd
1933 -- 10th
1934 -- 6th
1935 -- 5th
1936 -- 7th
1937 -- 16th
This was the period Crawford referred to as, "like drifting on a high tide". But then came the infamous 'Box Office Poison' article in 1938 and, thereafter, Crawford never appeared in the exhibitors' poll again during her time at MGM. (She would reappear in the Top 25 in 1947 after the walloping success of Mildred Pierce.)
FYI -- Bette Davis first appeared in the Top 15 of the poll in 1939 and stayed in the Top 15 every year between 1939-1946.
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18 hours ago, caracas1914 said:
The irony of that situation is that by then most of the viewing audience would have had no frigging idea who she was. Of all the great stars of the 30's she seemed to have dimmed the most as far as public consciousness.
It is interesting to compare the respective post-MGM fates of Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. They both retired at roughly the same time; Shearer in 1942 and Garbo sometime in 1942-43. But, from there, their fates diverged wildly. Garbo's legendary self-imposed silence and reclusiveness played directly into her existing image and only served to magnify her fame a thousand fold. Shearer, while still active in Hollywood social circles for years afterwards (she discovered Janet Leigh and Robert Evans) also declined interview requests after retiring. That worked against her because people forgot about her fairly rapidly. It didn't help either that, unlike Garbo, her best films were made during the pre-Code/early talkie period (1929-1934) and were infrequently revived in revival theaters or shown on television in later years. It has only been with the advent of the DVD that she's developed something of a cult following for her pre-Code dramas.
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7 hours ago, caracas1914 said:
Now if you want to depict a real life pathetic Norma Desmond end SL I think Norma Shearer would have been a prime candidate, much more so than Bette or even Joan.
She couldn't relate to her professor son (only having met her grandchildren once) , in all seriousness thought she couldn't' even go to the movies in the 80's because of the paparazzi that would mob her , and ended up calling her second husband Irving.
Norma's end was very sad. She also wrote a letter to MGM executives demanding that reaction shots of her watching Clark Gable performing a musical number in the 1974 tribute to the MGM musical, That's Entertainment!, be cut because she thought the shots made her, "look like an extra." The clips of her stayed in the movie, which went on to be a huge hit.
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17 hours ago, newyawk said:
I am wondering if some of the shoe sizes, etc were "trimmed down" and fed to Photoplay adjusted by the studio to maintain a certain delicate, feminine image of their stars.
Yes. I would be careful about treating any of these measurements as actual truth. Photoplay and the studios would have worked hand-in-hand to present the most idealized image possible of the female stars. I actually think some of the heights are a little suspect. I would put Crawford at closer to 5'3" and Norma Shearer at 5'2". (In her very interesting commentary track for the DVD release of The Best of Everything (1959), Rona Jaffe, who wrote the book on which the movie was based, estimated that Crawford was no taller than 5'0"!!!)
Kay Francis was considered a "giant" back in the 30s but, if you believe these measurements, she was only 5'7". But I guess next to all these very petite women, Francis would have been seen as unusually tall.
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On 4/19/2017 at 4:40 AM, GreekGeek said:
It's been mentioned in the episode threads that Bette is continually surrounded by people while Joan is alone or only with Mamacita. But Joan often refers to friends we don't see. She said that Loretta Young and Barbara Stanwyck turned down the Miriam role in HHSC because they're her friends. Did they actually turn down the role out of loyalty to Joan, or did they not want to do it for some other reason?
Probably some of both. Contrary to how the mini-series is depicting Crawford as friendless, Crawford and Stanwyck were great friends until Crawford's death (as were her old MGM pals Myrna Loy and Roz Russell.) There was odd blood between Crawford and Young during the 30s not least because they were both involved with Clark Gable during that decade. (Young's "adopted" daughter was really her out-of-wedlock daughter with Gable.) But, after Crawford moved to New York permanently, she used a condo in a building owned by Young whenever she (Crawford) was working in or visiting LA.
Friendship may have played a part in these actresses turning down Hush, Hush . . . Sweet Charlotte. But keep in mind too that not all of the actresses from Hollywood's Golden Age (the 30s-40s-50s) wanted to appear in the Grand Guignol/horror hags genre. Crawford and Davis were very fond of it and they remain to this day the two actresses most closely associated with the genre. There were others, though, who preferred not to work or to work in television (i.e Stanwyck in The Big Valley) rather than subvert their glamorous images from their glory days.
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1 hour ago, psychoticstate said:
I didn't think about it until I read your post, @theatremouse, but this program is really doing a terrible disservice to Joan Crawford.
I feel like they've overcompensated for how Mommie Dearest (the book and the movie) depicted Crawford by portraying her as this sad sack. But Crawford was never that even up to the end of her life. She was tremendously resilient and, if you had asked her toward the end whether it had been a good life or not, I think she would have replied that yes, it had been in large part. I don't think she would have claimed that she had done everything to perfection, particularly regarding her first three marriages and her two eldest children. (Crawford admitted at the end that she had expected too much from Christina and Christopher, which is a different thing than outright abuse.) But I think she would have taken pride in knowing that she had pulled herself out of abject poverty and become one of the greatest movie stars in Hollywood history.
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On 4/15/2017 at 3:13 PM, JudyObscure said:
It's that speech that makes me think she wasn't really too old for the part. In it Joan could be beautiful but still have a little bit of that "been rode hard and put away wet," look.
She definitely sells it and makes you forget that she's at least 10 years too old for the part.
Here's Joan's opening scene from Flamingo Road after she's been left behind by the carnival:
I love her dialogue with Zachary Scott:
Field: "What are you doing here?"
Lane: "Gettin' up a parade -- you're just in time."
Crawford would reprise the song she's "singing" -- "If I Could Be with You" -- later in the movie at the "roadhouse" (a.k.a. the bordello).
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On 4/13/2017 at 2:24 PM, txhorns79 said:
In reality, she sold the house in the mid-50s, so the entire setting is just invented for the series. But yeah, it seems kind of ridiculous for someone to be constantly complaining about money while living in their luxurious Beverly Hills mansion. Even a movie star knows how to economize.
I think the secondary story about the house serves a purpose even though the timeline is off. (Crawford had sold the Brentwood house by the time Baby Jane started filming.) For someone like Crawford, who worked her entire adult life to be the 'Ultimate Movie Star', making any concessions to financial reality in terms of downsizing or economizing would have been seen (by her) an admission of weakness and defeat. Whether it was intentional or not, this part of the story drives home the point that Crawford was always 'Joan Crawford' and 'Joan Crawford' always presented an image of how a movie star should live -- even if she couldn't afford it.
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If you want a story that actually fits the "feud" theme, I would recommend Buster Keaton and his first-wife Natalie Talmadge (one of the silent film era Talmadges).
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4 hours ago, psychoticstate said:
Gilbert reportedly punched Mayer and Mayer allegedly got his revenge by ruining Gilbert's talking picture career by futzing with the sound, making Gilbert appear to have a high pitched voice. (I've watched some of Gilbert's talking performances and he wasn't high pitched, at least not any more so than anyone else of that period thanks to the early sound recording equipment.)
I think what really hurt Gilbert was his first full-length talking picture, His Glorious Night (1929), which had been insufficiently modified from a silent movie script. In particular, the love scenes were in the overemphatic manner of a silent movie and provoked laughter and derision from 1929 audiences. (These scenes were famously parodied in 1952's Singin' in the Rain.)
I've always admired Garbo for insisting that Gilbert be cast opposite her in Queen Christina (1933) despite Mayer's vehement objections. (Garbo had cast approval so she could overrule Mayer.) As Garbo and Gilbert's fellow silent movie star Colleen Moore noted, "Garbo had a long memory. She remembered all the times he had helped her career."
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7 hours ago, Arynm said:
From what I read Joan actually liked to be called "Billie." That's what her brother called her and what her first husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr. called her. She also didn't really like Joan when it was picked for her and preferred that people pronounce it Jo-anne. I think she got over that fairly quickly
Her father-in-law, Doug Sr., also referred to her affectionately as "Billie".
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An excellent summary of the 'Ladies of the Grand Guignol' (a.k.a. 'Horror Hags) genre:
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3 hours ago, TigerLynx said:
I wonder if they will do anything else with Bette or Joan in other seasons. They both clashed with other people besides each other, and Bette was very vocal about some of them.
I don't think there's a big enough audience for it (the way there is for Crawford-Davis) but they could do Davis and Miriam Hopkins:
https://classicmoviesdigest.blogspot.com/2010/06/bette-vs-miriam-bout-of-divas-meow.html
More on Davis-Hopkins (most relevant content is at the end):
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Carrying this over from the 'Hagsploitation' thread:
"(And there are also a few others confused in there, too, like Katherine Hepburn offering not much help to a book proposal aiming to set the record straight after Mommie Dearest, but expressing her sympathies with Joan.)"
You can find the letters to Joan Crawford here, including the Katharine Hepburn letter to one of Crawford's younger daughters in 1979:
http://www.joancrawfordbest.com/m.htm
In Hepburn's defense, I don't think she and Crawford were ever anything more than passing acquaintances during that period when their respective stays at MGM overlapped (1940-1943) so I doubt she had much in the way of anecdotes with which to rebut Christina Crawford's story. If you read the 1995 letter Hepburn wrote, though, she did say that she never bought Christina's story.
Barbara Stanwyck's letter to the daughter (also from 1979) is a great read and shows that Stanwyck held Crawford in high esteem.
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On 3/19/2017 at 7:12 PM, Jan Spears said:
I rewatched Flamingo Road (1949) with Crawford, Sydney Greenstreet and Zachary Scott (Crawford's co-star in Mildred Pierce) this weekend.
That being said, Crawford is great during the first half, especially when she meets Scott at night in her carnival tent and she gives her speech about being tired of life as a carnival dancer.
I re-rewatched Flamingo Road tonight. Crawford's speech in the carnival tent gets me every time. When Zachary Scott's Field(ing) ask Crawford's character, Lane, what she did in the carnival, at first Lane responds with a list of the tacky roles she performed. But then she slips into a more meaningful key and says:
"But most of the time I was just a little tired and dirty . . .
Sick of moldy tents and one-night stands and greasy food . . .
Sick of having people look at me like I was cheap."
Crawford really sells that speech. You have to wonder how much of it was acting and how much it was Crawford drawing on Lucille who lived in the back of a laundry as a young girl and Billie the showgirl who travelled from New York to Chicago to Detroit in her pre-MGM days.
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Carrying this over from the 'And the Winner Is . . .' thread . . .
CARACAS1914 wrote: "While it seems like a minor point, but was George Cukor really such a good friend of Joan's up to the 60's?"
Actually, yes -- they remained fast friends until Crawford's death. Cukor read a tribute to Crawford at the Beverly Hills memorial service, which was also printed in the New York Times:
http://www.joancrawfordbest.com/cukortribute.htm
You can also read examples of their correspondence during the 70s which illustrate their friendship:
http://www.joancrawfordbest.com/letters.htm
(Look for January 14, 1970, October 15, 1973, and August 13, 1974.)
On the whole, I'm enjoying Feud immensely. But one thing I think it's doing poorly is portraying Crawford as being virtually friendless. That's not true. Crawford remained fast friends with Myrna Loy, Roz Russell and Barbara Stanwyck until her last breath. Younger actresses like Ann Blyth and Diane Baker also spoke warmly about her even after she died, when it was easy to take pot shots at Crawford.
enoughcats wrote: "The chapter in that book titled "The Muse" has breathtaking photos of Joan Crawford. She was so much more than later photographs showed."
I own that book and the photos are indeed stunning. Of all of Hurrell's subjects in the 20s/30s/40s, Crawford holds the record for the most distinct sittings -- 33, each one comprised of hundreds of photographs. (Norma Shearer comes in right behind her with 32 sittings.) In fact, when Hurrell was under contract to MGM, Crawford would wait until the male stars (who didn't usually want to spend a lot of time being photographed) finished their sittings with Hurrell to go play golf or tennis and Crawford would use the remaining sitting time to have Hurrell take more photos of her. You can call that abnormal vanity. But you can also call it self-discipline.
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2 hours ago, holly4755 said:
I thought Joan didn't have to work after he last marriage, that guy was rich, wasn't he?
2 hours ago, ennui said:Maybe she didn't need to work, but wanted to work? The tv series implies that Joan was strapped for cash (doing her own yardwork, getting fans to work around the house), as was Bette. They both had children and houses to support.
Al Steele did leave Crawford a fair amount of money when he died in 1959. But, the estate taxes ate up a large part of the inheritance. Also, Crawford and Steele had undertaken the very expensive renovation of the New York apartment. All of this left Crawford with a major cash flow problem in 1959. In part, that's why she took the supporting part (her first in over 30 years) in The Best of Everything.
Regarding Garbo and her drift into retirement, one other factor that may have played into her thinking was how Mayer brought in Greer Garson and Hedy Lamarr in the late-1930s. In essence, Mayer divided the Garbo persona in two and hired two different actresses to fill each half: Garson to do the heavy lifting on the "prestige" parts that Garbo had been doing and Lamarr to fill the glamorous, "exotic" European role that had been a big part of Garbo's image in the 20s and 30s.
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TCM: The Greatest Movie Channel
in Movies
Some people just have "it" -- an intangible quality that the camera picks up. I was watching Night Nurse last night and Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell and Clark Gable practically leap off the screen.