Almost There: Myrna Loy in "The Best Years of Our Lives"

by Cláudio Alves

The 19th Academy Awards were, in some regard, a celebration of the war's end, a reckoning with its immediate consequences. We can see it in the embrace of European cinema, an industry rising from the ashes, with nods for films like the Italian Neorealist Rome, Open City, and the French poetry of Children of Paradise. American cinema, America itself, was also still reeling from its hard-won victory. The scars were fresh and bloody when William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives won the Best Picture Oscar. The production portrays the lives of three military men returning home after the war's end, traumatized and still recovering, adapting back to civilian life. It was the perfect champion for these postwar Oscars.

Nevertheless, not even the picture's awards success could spell away some of its performers' chronic bad luck when it came to movie awards. After decades as one of Hollywood's greatest stars, Myrna Loy still couldn't get herself an Oscar nomination…

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Beauty Break: Born on New Year's Day

No "showbiz history" today but, as with Christmas, how strange would it be to have your birthday fall directly on a holiday. Some of you know out there. Do tell in the comments. It must be especially weird to be a New Year's Day baby since people pack so much importance on to this day as a fresh start. And here comes a long a baby with a literal fresh start on everyone's collective fresh start day. 

Here are a dozen showbiz beauties born on this day...

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Gene Tierney @ 100: "Laura"

by Nathaniel R

Dear reader, we had such fun doing the Montgomery Clift Centennial that we want to do more of them. Of course not every movie star inspires the same passion in cinephiles, nor has a cooperatively small enough filmography to be completist about. For instance I put out the feelers on Gene Tierney, who made 37 films in her career, and received only 2 volunteers. And herewith a confession: I, myself, despite my love of Old Hollywood, was unfamiliar. I had seen only two of her movies and so long ago that I had next to no recollection. So I queued up her most famous picture, Laura (1944), which I'd somehow never seen even when I was a uncool kid in the horrific "colorizing" days of pop culture who relished seeing old black and white movies... 

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Susan Hayward in "My Foolish Heart"

SUSAN HAYWARD CENTENNIAL WEEK

by Timothy Brayton

Yesterday, Eric did an extraordinary job of tackling Susan Hayward's performance in I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), which I think a lot of us might agree was her all-time best performance. Today, I'd like to offer up what I consider to be her most Susan Haywardiest performance: as the good girl-turned-wretched alcoholic in 1949's My Foolish Heart, the film that netted Hayward the second of her five Oscar nominations.

It's a story tailored with laser focus on letting the lead actress show off Everything with a capital "E"...

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New Year's Babies. Start Fresh!

I was an illustration major at university and one era we studied repeatedly was "The Golden Age". For illustrators that was roughly the 1900s through the 1940s. One of the the most sentimental traditions of this time was JC Leyendecker's 'New Years Babies' covers. The babies were always white and cutesy but weren't always "happy" and sometimes politics entered the picture. Here is the 1917 painting to your left a full one hundred years ago wherein there's a scary hole where Europe should be. This diapered cherub is not at all sure he wants to arrive into this  (World War I was raging and would not end for another 23 months.)

The New Year's Baby tradition reminds us that whatever may be ending or happening, there are always opportunities for fresh starts. 2016 was a shit show but maybe a whole lot of really cool human beings that will one day be giants of the arts, world peace, human rights, or whatnot were born? Who knows what New Years Babies joining the world today future generations will worship the way society currently obsesses over, say, Meryl Streep or Ryan Gosling or [Insert Name Here].

HEREWITH A RANDOM COLLECTION OF MOVIE/TV RELATED NEW YEARS BABIES BY YEAR...

1879 - EM Forster, gay literary giant whose books made for delicious cinema (Howard's End, Maurice, A Room With a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread, A Passage to India)
1891 Charles Bickford, 3 time supporting actor Oscar nominee...

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