We figured it was time to have a place to talk about Steve’s latest video subjects that do not have an UMR page.
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We figured it was time to have a place to talk about Steve’s latest video subjects that do not have an UMR page.
Having only ever received one acting award and no nominations according to IMDB Constance Bennett attracted no Master attention either, unlike her sister Joan who does feature in The Master’s 1983 Book that Eats Actors
Accordingly one would have thought that to even things up Bruce would have profiled the neglected Constance but not a bit of it so that to date only Joan Bennett has received Cogerson and Hirschhorn love.
Yet Constance was not only one of the top actresses of the 20s and 30s but for a while during the early 30s was the HIGHEST PAID ACTRESS in Hollywood and very popular as well. Thank goodness therefore for the arrival of your video to bring a bit of fairness and balance to contemporary recognition of the achievements of both parts of the Sister Act!
Actually I, like the Big Two, have been as guilty of ignoring Constance’s career so your video has been a revelation to me, and a fine one at that to the extent of a 98.0% rating.
Jean Seberg died tragically at the age of 40 in 1979 and the cause of death was listed as PROBABLE suicide. Her husband at the time insisted that she was driven to suicide by years of hounding by J Edgar Hoover and the FBI for supporting civil rights activities for which she [like Jane Fonda for a time] was blacklisted. President Richard Nixon is said to have personally kept tabs on her activities via Hoover.
Despite its brevity your Seberg video is packed with visual goodies and is well worth a 97.5 % rating in my book. Best POSTERS for me are (1) foreign language one for Looters (2) the entire set for Macho Callahan (3) Kill (4) foreign language one for Time out for Love (5) 2nd one for Moment to Moment (6) the entire set for Backfire (7) 2nd one for In French Style (8) foreign language one for Dead of Summer (9) two for Lilith (10) The Assassination (11) the complete set for Bonjour Tristesse and (12) the entire set for Breathless.
My pick of the STILLS are (1) the opening [harmless] bed scene (2) two great ones for Saint Myrna – my miscast Richard’s worse ever performance in my opinion (3) Paint Your Wagon (4) with Warren Beatty (5) two for Airport – I especially liked the one with Burt (6) Tree Girl [was Stewart Granger hiding up there?] and (7) with great French heartthrob Jean-Paul Belmondo – he idolised Bogie.
I never like to end my comments on a negative note but unfortunately (1) IMDB credits Jean with 0 acting awards and just 2 noms (2) she has so far attracted no Work Horse love and (3) she is not the only thespian whose lifetime’s work has been shredded in the fabled modern 1983 version of HP Lovecraft’s 1920s Necronomicon textbook of terror –
“[Jean Seberg] had an intriguing all-American look, but her acting was only partially effective in European pictures and never convincing in American ones.”
[“The horror! The horror.” – Apocalypse Now 1979]
Hey Bob….good thoughts on Steve’s video and Seberg’s career. Pretty sure she is one of Joel’s subjects….I left my book on my desk at work…..I feel so lonely without it…..it is going to be a long weekend…..lol. Good stuff.
HI BRUCE
That was Joel I was quoting in my Seberg post. Whilst he didn’t think much of her as an actress he was sorry for her because of the tragedies in her life.
Hi Bob, many thanks for reviewing and rating my Jean Seberg video, appreciate the added info and quotes. Glad you enjoyed the picture gallery.
From what I’ve read Seberg was chosen out of 18,000 hopefuls to play Joan of Arc in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan, a neighbor entered her into the $150,000 talent search according to wikipedia.
From the photos I’ve seen she looked stunning as ‘The Maid of Orleans’, burnt at the stake at the age of 19 by the ‘orrible English [wink] . Anyway the film wasn’t successful, both the film and Seberg received poor notices, well it was her first ever film and first time in front of the cameras.
Was a huge fan of Marlon Brando, since seeing his screen debut in the movie The Men (1950). As a teenager, Seberg wrote to Brando and invited him to stay with her parents in Iowa. She met him years later and Brando asked her to renew the invitation. (IMDB)
She was 40 when she commited suicide (an overdose), according to IMDB – “On every subsequent anniversary of her daughter Nina’s death, Jean attempted suicide. In 1978, she somehow survived an attempt, throwing herself under a train on the Paris Metro.”
One film scored 10 out of 10 from my sources – À bout de souffle aka Breathless. Two more scored 9 out of 10 – Airport and The Mouse That Roared.
Breathless tops the charts at IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.
Seberg on her first movie – “I have two memories of Saint Joan. The first was being burned at the stake. The second was being burned at the stake by the critics. The latter hurt more. I was scared like a rabbit and it showed on the screen. It was not a good experience at all. I started where most actresses end up.”
HI STEVE I always look forward to your feedbacks to my posts as you usually have something new too impart to me so thanks for your Seberg response.
I was glad to see that you rated Breathless your No 1 movie as it is regarded as a classic that ushered in what was called the “New Wave” of the European cinema in its day.
I saw the Richard Gere 1983 remake and it was poor by comparison with the Seberg/Belmondo version. Both WH and IMDB give Gere’s version just a 58% rating though I think Tarantino liked it. Jean was in Hollywood blockbusters such as Airport and Paint Your Wagon but I think that critics would regard 1960s Breathless as her finest hour artistically.
Sometimes I feel sorry for guys like you and WH who painstakingly assemble a fine selection of ratings for the movies that you include in your offerings to us only to have the likes of The Master cut a scythe through everything with a mere few caustic lines such as those in his 1983 book that give Jean the thumbs-down as an actress.
Anyway enjoy the rest of your weekend. I certainly intend to – I’ve just recorded for late-evening viewing a TV rerun of Charlie Bill’s classic western The Fastest Gun Alive (1956)
Steve’s latest video on Pier Angeli has been added to this page. Our thoughts on her movie career and his video.
“Apparently she broke James Dean heart when she married another fella. Makes you wonder if Dean would have lived longer if they would have stayed together. I have not seen many of her movies at all. My sole Pier Angeli seen is Battle of the Bulge. At least it has a spot in the Top 5. I would like to see both of her Newman movies…though Newman was not happy with The Silver C. at all. Nice video. Voted up and shared at UMR.”
Pier Angeli’s Hollywood career was confined largely to the 1950s and during the 1960s and 1970s she worked mainly in foreign language/European films where she often went under the name of Anna Maria Pierangeli, her birth name as your video mentions and indeed you include posters of her using that name. Possibly her most noticed and successful film in her post-Hollywood heyday was the 1962 The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah opposite Stewart Granger whose own Hollywood career was in decline.
During her Tinseltown days she had romances with Legends James Dean*** and Brando and was engaged to their fellow-Great young Kirk Douglas for a time around 1953 [according to HIM in his autobiography thus possibly qualifying Pier’s opening quote in your video]. She died tragically at the age of 39 in 1971 of allegedly an accidental barbiturates overdose. She has never enjoyed an entry in Joel Hirschhorn’s 1983 book or a Cogerson page and IMDB lists just 2 acting awards and 2 nominations for her so this video by you is a rare historical tribute to her and deserves a 97.5% from me.
My pick of the POSTERS are – 1/Octaman – a Cthulhu like creature 2/foreign language one for Silver Chalice 3/White Slave Ship 4/1st one for Sombrero 5/The Vintage 6/entire set for Sodom and Gomorrah 7/raunchy first one for Flame and the Flesh 8/Teresa /9 both for Tomorrow is Too Late 10/foreign language one for Battle of Bulgeand 11/ both for Somebody up There Likes Me. McQueen had an uncredited role in that 1956 Newman flick and historians reckon it was that lowly status that engendered Steve’s obsession with getting billing over Paul.
Best STILLS for me are: ***1/Pier with Dean 2/ lobby card Silver Chalice 3/ 2 of Pier with Newman 4/with Granger in Light Touch and Sodom and Gomorrah 5/lobby card Flame and Flesh 6/with YOUR idol in the flop Joel Makes Three, though with Singin in Rain out that year Gene was at career pinnacle 7/with Kaye & chimp 8/the balloon pose and 9/with “beau” Kirk. Overall “Voted Up!”
Hi Bob, thanks for the review, rating and info, much appreciated.
Glad you liked the posters, stills and lobby cards.
Pier Angeli I was mostly familiar with from her role as Telly Savalas’ love interest in Battle of the Bulge, one of my favorite war films.
The Silver Chalice is one of Hollywood’s worst rated historical films and Paul Newman was embarrassed to talk about it, but it does have interesting production design and worth watching for the visuals alone. Ditto The Land of the Pharaohs and The Egyptian, expensive films, great to look at but critics and audiences blew a raspberry at them.
No 10s in Angeli’s filmography but Someone Up There Likes Me scored 9 from one source. There are three 8 out of 10s – Battle of the Bulge, The Angry Silence and The Story of Three Loves.
Top rated at IMDB is The Angry Silence. Someone Up There tops at RT.
Angeli on James Dean – “He wanted me to love him unconditionally, but Jimmy was not able to love someone else in return . . . it was the troubled boy that wanted to be loved very badly. I loved Jimmy as I have loved no one else in my life, but I could not give him the enormous amount that he needed. Loving Jimmy was something that could empty a person.”
Next up an American beauty with Swedish, German and English ancestry, and a tragic suicide.
HI STEVE Thanks for your response to my Pier Angeli post, and for your additional information and quote.
I have never seen Battle of the Bulge nor do I wish to because as I’ve said before I find most war films quite boring. The sort of exceptions would be Paths of Glory and King and Country which were really courtroom dramas with war as almost incidental.
You’re right about Newman’s embarrassment about The Silver Chalice. In fact when the film was broadcast on television in 1966, he took out an advertisement in a Hollywood trade paper apologising for his performance, and requesting people not to watch the film. This backfired, and the broadcast received unusually high ratings.
Also the film was quite popular with audiences at the time of its release in 1954 and Bruce quotes an adjusted worldwide gross for it of around $240 million, which reflects strong audience participation, but it cost a packet to make so probably did no better than break even financially at least on original run.
Newman called it “the worst motion picture produced in the 1950s” but you are quite right about the visuals as it is credited with having “unusual semiabstract settings and decor in a striking departure from the normal practice of the day for Hollywood Biblical epics.”
Bob, Bruce has box office info no other website has, something he and WoC should be proud of. I only knew of ‘The Silver Chalice’ domestic box office which wasn’t impressive. I wrongly assumed the rest of the world wasn’t much more than that.
But historical epics do work better ‘overseas’, especially Europe. Steve Reeves Hercules was supposedly a massive worldwide hit in 1959 and kickstarted the sword and sandal genre in Europe which segued into hundreds of Spaghetti westerns.
Hey Bob. Newman might not have liked The Silver Chalice…but it is the movie that many first noticed Newman. A necessary step for his stardom. Good points from the both of you guys.
“Do I dream or do I doubt,
Do mine eyes deceive me?
Are things what they seem,
Or are visions about?”
I’ve actually sucked Mr Artwork into a discussion about such a banal movies topic as money! For years now I’ve been singing WH’s praises for his comprehensive provision of box office stats- so as the saying goes STEVE where have you been all my life?
It’s difficult if not impossible to relate adjusted movie grosses based on ticket sales to profit and loss in a company’s ledgers but for Silver Chalice Wiki quotes us a production budget of $4.5 million [big for its day –The Great Mumbler’s Sayonara allegedly cost just $2 million to make according to the figure I saw quoted back in 1957 with Lana’s blockbuster hit Peyton Place the same year reportedly costing between$1.8 and 2.2 million to produce the same year] and Wiki suggests that the return to Warners in rentals worldwide for Silver Chalice was just $4.2 million against that $4.5 million budget.
I don’t take Wiki’s figures as definitive but WH may have the studio ledger income figures for Silver Chalice in the documents that he brought back from his trip to Warner Bros a few years ago. However to production budget figures and rental returns would have to be added on the one hand the cost of publicity, prints, stills etc and on the other hand any additional income from for example TV sales and I don’t know if WH’s material would show that extra stuff.
I doubt if Silver Chalice ever made a packet but sometimes later income at inflated prices gives an initial flop movie an ultimate NOTIONAL profit when set against lower ACTUAL costs and some accountants claim that Liz’s Cleo actually went into a notional profit due to inflated additional income in later years. Anyhow I’m looking forward to today’s video from Mr Artwork!
STEVE
I made a slight mess of the Pink Panther table in my last post so I reproduce it duly corrected. Again Bruce’s is 1st set of figures and IMDB’s 2nd set
1964 A Shot in the Dark-80%/75%
1963 Pink Panther-76%/72%
1975 Return of the Pink Panther-75%/71%
1976 Pink Panther Strikes Again-75%/72%
1978 Revenge of the Pink Panther-70%/67%
1982 Trail of the Pink Panther-45%/49%
Apologies