No blogging yesterday. I was watching movies, nineteen of them to be exact, although to be fair, sixteen of them were made between 1888 and 1905 and consisted mostly of a single shot of passing traffic in places like Leeds Bridge and Jamaica Street, Glasgow. The briefest of these movies was two seconds—Roundhay Garden Scene. Filmed in 1888 by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, it's the earliest surviving film, shot on a strip of paper shown at 10 frames per second.
You want to see it?
You want to see it again?
Just 27 years later, the same amount of time that has passed since Motorola introduced the first mobile phone, D.W. Griffith would be making three-hour epics for millions of paying customers.
But more about that in November.
Poll results are in. Last week I asked you to choose your favorite Carole Lombard performance from between four movies. The winner, no surprise, was My Man Godfrey, one of the great screwball comedies of the 1930s.
Is it my favorite? Well, that's the question. Because while I can guarantee you Carole Lombard will win a Katie-Bar-The-Door award as the best actress of some given year, I'm not promising it will be for My Man Godfrey. But it could be—you don't know. Stay tuned to see how this plays out.
The final tallies: My Man Godfrey 18; To Be Or Not To Be 7; Twentieth Century 4; and Nothing Sacred 0.
This is what makes blogging all worthwhile: our good friend Who Am Us of the blog Who Am Us Anyway (check it out here) wrote in the comment section of "Carole Lombard In The Public Domain" that "Believe or no, this was my first-ever viewing of My Man Godfrey." To introduce someone to a classic movie—well, for a blogger, it doesn't get any better than that.
That he also had the same reaction to My Man Godfrey that I did, that's just icing on the cake:
And ahh, Gail Patrick as Cornelia—have you written about her before? Must check ... dang! The search button produces results in the amount of zero! Well, I'm a Gail fan starting tonight ...
That's the phenomenon known as "the hotter younger sister," which the fine, fine folks at Bright Lights After Dark wrote about at some length last year. As they so eloquently put it, "damn is she hot!"
Amen, brother.
Born Margaret LaVelle Fitzpatrick in Birmingham, Alabama, Patrick was the dean of women at Howard College and was studying law at the University of Alabama when she entered a nationwide contest for a part in a Paramount film. She didn't win, but she was offered a film contract and moved to Hollywood.
Appropriate to a blog currently covering 1932-33, Patrick made her film debut in the 1932 film If I Had A Million, starring Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton and George Raft. She typically played arrogant socialites and femme fatales and is best known for three comedic roles—Carole Lombard's scheming sister in My Man Godfrey, a haughty wannabe actress who clashes with Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn in Stage Door and Cary Grant's not-so-favored bride in My Favorite Wife.
Patrick appeared in sixty-two movies between 1932 and 1948.
She abandoned acting when she married her third husband, literary agent Cornwell Jackson. One of Jackson's clients was mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner who created the fictional defense lawyer Perry Mason. Patrick (credited now as Gail Patrick Jackson) obtained the rights to Perry Mason and for nine seasons produced one of the most successful television series in American history.
Patrick died of leukemia in 1980 at the age of sixty-nine.
I'm putting the finishing touches on the essay about the best actor (drama) of 1932-33. It's going to clock in under 2000 words, reasonable compared to the 12,000 word insanity that was the Marx Brothers.
Unfortunately, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I have to attend a funeral tomorrow. That's three in one year (to go along with one wedding). I feel like I'm making a macabre sequel to an old Hugh Grant movie. But it means I won't be posting the best actor essay until Saturday.
In the meantime, it occurs to me that two of the Carole Lombard movies you're voting on in the current Monkey poll are in the public domain and thought I'd post them here. They are—
My Man Godfrey:
and Nothing Sacred. Just to set your mind at ease, that's not colorization—Nothing Sacred was released in Technicolor.
The latest poll results are in. "Of the five movies the Marx Brothers made at Paramount Pictures, which have you seen?" Thirty-one of you responded, with 28 saying you had seen Duck Soup, 25 Horse Feathers and Monkey Business and 21 Animal Crackers and The Cocoanuts.
Three admitted "I have not seen any of these movies!" which I choose to interpret as meaning three lucky souls still have a chance to experience their first Marx Brothers movie—or at least their first Marx Brothers movie from the Paramount Pictures era. Do you remember your first Marx Brothers movie? I do. Monkey Business on PBS one Saturday afternoon, initially because my parents insisted, but soon enough because it was so much fun to watch. And the first one in a theater? A midnight showing of Animal Crackers when I was a teenager.
As for the new poll? It's Carole Lombard's birthday. "Of these classic Carole Lombard performances, which is your favorite?" Your choices: 1) Twentieth Century 2) My Man Godfrey 3) Nothing Sacred 4) To Be Or Not To Be. As always, vote in the poll at the top right-hand side of the page.
Thingy of the blog Pondering Life wondered aloud yesterday when Carole Lombard will crash this party, which prompted a bit of research on my part. Turns out she could have crashed this party at pretty much any time. Did you know she made her first movie in 1921 at the age of 13? I didn't anyway, but she did, a small part as a tomboy under her birth name, Jane Peters, in a silent romance/caper flick called A Perfect Crime.
That's Jane Peters there on her knees.
Lombard made 78 movies before her untimely death in 1942 at the age of 34. At least four of those movies will require special attention: Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century, which along with Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, gave us the screwball comedy; My Man Godfrey, Lombard's only Oscar nomination, and arguably William Powell's finest role; Nothing Sacred, another screwball classic co-starring Fredric March; and her last film, Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be, which personally, I think is Lombard's best performance.
Funny you mention Carole Lombard in this entry -- because she's in "My Best Girl." She plays a "flirty blonde salesgirl" who's spurned by Buddy Rogers.
At the time this was made, Lombard was age 18, coming off the 1926 automobile accident that caused some minor facial injury and derailed her budding career as a Fox starlet. This was made either before she signed with Mack Sennett or very early in her tenure there; not many people (even most Lombard biographers) are aware of this because she was unbilled.
I did not know that, but I'm glad now I do. See, this is why I write this blog, to find out what I don't know. I've reposted one of the stills she mentions here. Head on over to her site to see the rest.
I'll be writing about Carole Lombard quite a bit in the future. Here's a photo to whet your appetite:
No blogging yesterday. I was watching movies, nineteen of them to be exact, although to be fair, sixteen of them were made between 1888 and 1905 and consisted mostly of a single shot of passing traffic in places like Leeds Bridge and Jamaica Street, Glasgow. The briefest of these movies was two seconds—Roundhay Garden Scene. Filmed in 1888 by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, it's the earliest surviving film, shot on a strip of paper shown at 10 frames per second.
The final tallies: My Man Godfrey 18; To Be Or Not To Be 7; Twentieth Century 4; and Nothing Sacred 0.
