Dance Break: "A Lot in Common"

Fred Astaire and Joan Leslie tapping up a sweet storm 75 years ago in The Sky's The Limit (1943). Just because. 

Happy Alan Jay Lerner Centennial!

by Nathaniel R

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Jay Lerner, one of the most crucial figures in the American songbook. The lyricist, librettist, and screenwriter was born in New York City. That's where he first made his mark, too, on Broadway with his first big hit Brigadoon in 1947. Soon he went Hollywood, working on original movie musicals as well as transfers of his famous work from the stage, and garnering 7 Oscar nominations and 3 wins (for his screenplays to Gigi and An American in Paris, and songwriting for"Gigi"). His career ended with The Little Prince (1974) but at the time of his death in 1986 he was working on a musical adaptation of My Man Godfrey and had started work on Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, though his only efforts are in the song "Masquerade" (uncredited).

Earlier this summer I had the opportunity to moderate a screening of My Fair Lady (1964) and my guest was Amy Asch who co-edited/annotated the book you see to your left here. So for fun today I thought I'd share a handful of favorite lyrics from his vast repertoire. 

You can sing along as you read...

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50 Kristins for Kristin's 50th

by Jorge Molina

Today, Tony, Emmy and Grammy-winner (that’s right, she only needs an Oscar to EGOT; get on it, Hollywood) and human ray of sunshine Kristin Chenoweth turns 50 years old. To honor her career, her legacy, and that impossibly high pitch matched only by her charisma, let’s take a look at 50 roles and appearances that she has gifted the world in almost three decades of work, in no particular order:

1) Her Broadway debut in an adaptation of Moliére’s Scapin as Hyacinth in 1996. 

2 & 3) Her two most iconic Broadway roles: A featured Tony-winning turn as Sally in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in 1999, and the Best Actress Tony-nominated performance as Glinda, the Good Witch in the world phenomenon that was Wicked in 2003.

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The Furniture: Mattes, Moons and Mountains in For Whom the Bell Tolls

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Sam Wood directing Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper in 1943's top picture

It can seem kind of crazy that For Whom the Bell Tolls was the top box office hit of 1943. The star power of Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper played into it, of course. So did the fact that it was an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s popular and recent novel. And there’s the obvious appeal of Cooper fighting a bunch of Fascists, a year and a half after America’s entry into World War Two.

The thing is, he doesn’t actually do all that much fighting. No one in the film does. It’s mostly a contemplative interlude on the fringes of the Spanish Civil War, a brutal vacation with a band of hardened guerrillas, a doomed love story built from trauma and consummated on the high rocks. It’s 165 minutes of memory, frustration and stasis.

It also wound up with nine Oscar nominations, including both cinematography and art direction. And the collaboration between cinematographer Ray Rennahan and the design team of Hans Dreier, Haldane Douglas and Bertram C. Granger is really the highlight of the film, even against the life-giving energy of Katina Paxinou’s Oscar-winning performance...

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Bergman Centennial: Death and "The Seventh Seal"

by Chris Feil

The Seventh Seal begins with some of the most enigmatic and iconic imagery of Ingmar Bergman’s career. Which is saying something considering the auteur’s filmography is composed almost entirely of meditative frames. Here Max von Sydow's post-Crusades knight Antonious Block is visited by a black cloaked Death and the two take part in a literal and intellectual game of chess. It’s a grave way to start a film, one that still endures for its thematic impact and how it establishes the rest of its stark narrative as spiritually timeless.

Named for the passage in the Book of Revelation marking the final opening of the apocalyptic scrolls and the resulting period of silence in heaven, the film lives in that quiet Godlessness...

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