Gene Tierney @ 100: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

by Cláudio Alves

In fiction, love is more powerful and heartfelt when it's impossible. Be it the doomed lovers in Shakespeare's tragedies or Keira Knightley and James McAvoy separated by war and a child's lies in Atonement, we, as spectators, are predisposed to find beauty in the loves that cannot be. Death is a common way to enshrine romance in the perfection of upended passion. Like flowers plucked and dried, kept in the pages of a book, the love that's cut short by the Grim Reaper's blade can preserve its appearance. If it weren't for that, such amorous glories would do like their floral brethren, rotting away with time until dropping into the earth, a mushy decaying mess.

In 1947's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, starring Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney, this dynamic between love and premature demise is both perpetuated and upended. Death facilitates and limits passion, making it harder to consummate but also more eternal than mundane existence. In Joseph L. Mankiewicz's movie, the transience of life is no obstacle for romance, quite the contrary…

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Encore - The 1987 Discussion

by Nathaniel R

Before we move on to the final push for 2020 and a special trivia-filled overview of where the Supporting Actress Smackdown has been over the years (we know how y'all love stats), here's one last push for the 1987 Discussion with the rising busy actor Ato Essandoh, former TFE member and now author Manuel Betancourt (seriously buy his book "Judy at Carnegie Hall" - it's a perfect stocking stuffer gift!), and the critics Kathia Woods and Naveen Kumar. Listen in at the bottom of the post on on iTunes

Index (1 hour and 15 minutes)
00:01 Meeting the Panel
04:30 Throw Momma from the Train
19:00 The zeitgeist impact of Fatal Attraction in 1987 and Glenn Close's brilliance
37:15 Disability drama Gaby and the Old Hollywood actresses of Whales of August
53:30 Moonstruck has aged beautifully. And why Olympia Dukakis won
1:06:00 Final 1987 Recommendations from our panel and Role-Switcheroos

Other pieces on 1987

• 1987 Vintage -An overview of what was hot that year
• Baby Boom
• Carmen Maura in Law of Desire
• Cher, She ruled the world in '87
• Child acting in '87, an unusually Oscar-calibre bunch
• Cinematography Nominees
• Costume Design Nominees
• The Dead, John Huston's Swansong
• Faye Dunaway in Barfly
• Karen Allen in The Glass Menagerie
• The Last Emperor's Forbidden City
• The Living Daylights, unpopular Bond
• Maurice, James Ivory's misunderstood gem
• Moonstruck, over and over
• Robocop, a discussion
• Sally Kirkland's historic Oscar campaign
• Supporting Actress Profiles
• Supporting Actress Smackdown
• Vanessa Redgrave in Prick Up Your Ears
• Veronica Cartwright in The Witches of Eastwick

Fatal Attraction, Moonstruck and More

Review: Dolly Parton's Christmas on the Square

by Christopher James

When someone tells you who they are, believe them. If the title Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square didn’t already clue you in as to whether you are within the target audience for the film, the opening minutes do. After credits play over the kitschiest of Christmas landscapes, Dolly Parton appears as the world’s comfiest homeless person in full hair and makeup. Her beautiful voice launches into an original song/life lesson that prompts the entire town to break out into a highly choreographed dance routine. This all takes place, you guessed it, in the titular Square. Over the next 98 minutes, Dolly Parton’s Christmas of the Square continues to deliver exactly what it promised you upfront. With __ original songs throughout, Christine Baranski doing a drag version of her gay Twitter persona and Dolly Parton as the chicest homeless person around, Christmas on the Square is Parton’s Citizen Kane...

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Gene Tierney @ 100: Leave Her To Heaven

by Jason Adams

The surface of the lake is calm -- almost, but not quite, like a mirror. It's a clinical aquamarine color, not much different from Gene Tierney's own eyes. Not that we can see her eyes -- she's just put on her sunglasses. They too act as mirrors -- dark mirrors, reflecting darkness. Ellen Berent Harland (Tierney) watches as the annoying little "cripple" Danny (Darryl Hickman) breaks the sheen of the lake's surface, as if slipping through into some unseen Wonderland -- they say repeatedly the water is warm, so warm, so very warm, but it looks to us cold, ice cold, and indeed the actor Hickman got pneumonia from the filming of this, Leave Her to Heaven's most infamous scene.

But then that's a sense that suffuses all of John M. Stahl's 1945 technicolor Noir masterpiece -- the feeling that something that sounds warm and inviting on its surface might actually be hiding an icy purgatory of horrors just beneath...

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The Best Costumes of 1987

by Cláudio Alves

Before we say goodbye to 1987, our final "year of the month" to coincide with the Smackdown events, we must look at one final Oscar category: the Best Costume Design race. It was a stellar line-up, dominated by films set during the first half of the 20th century, whose designs spanned from epic opulence to modest realism. The nominees were…

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