Pocketful of Miracles, from a Damon Runyan story, did not fare well with reviewers; their savaging of it convinced Frank Capra, its director, to retire from filmmaking. It is overlong, opulent and inflated, in the reigning Hollywood style of its day. Everyone agrees that its Great Depression fairy tale about Dave the Dude and Apple […]
Tag Archives: Bette Davis
A curio, the Hollywood film version of W. Somerset Maugham’s story and play The Letter previous to the famous 1940 version that William Wyler brilliantly directed draws attention on two grounds: pre-code, it retains Maugham’s ironical resolution of the plot; it stars Jeanne Eagels, a legendary American stage actress who made nine films beginning in […]
Well, belatedly I’ve seen it: the first Hollywood film to address openly and directly McCarthyism and the postwar reactionary atmosphere engendering hysteria and fear in the U.S.; (as far as I know) the first Hollywood film to use the term “civil liberties”; the first Hollywood film to ask the pertinent question, “What would Thomas Jefferson […]
In the late fifties, Hollywood glamourpuss Lana Turner, once the “sweater girl” and “the girl next door,” became embroiled in a scandal involving the stabbing death of boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, an enforcer for gangster Mickey Cohen, presumably by Turner’s 15-year-old daughter. An inquest determined the motive as self-defense, but rumors arose that the girl, who […]
Bette Davis would have been Oscar-nominated for her magnificent, deeply moving performance as young French governess Henriette Deluzy-Desportes had William Wyler’s The Letter, in which Davis acts even more brilliantly, not come out the same year and closer to year’s end. Based on an actual scandal involving rumored adultery, a woman’s violent death and her […]
Dennis Grunes 