Thankful for... Deborah Lipp

This year for our "thankful for" column we're mixing it up a bit and interviewing our team to share our gratitude for them. I first met DEBORAH LIPP through a mutual obsession with Mad Men. I'm proud to call her a friend and had the pleasure of attending her wedding several years back.

Deborah has a busy life (new books out!) so we dont see her around these parts much but she began popping in on occasion way back in 2012. As a James Bond fan she's written about her 007 favourite 007 films (and lots of other Bond posts). She's also wondered if Notorious is Hitchcock's only feminist film and since she loves romoms she's sung the praises of several here including Kissing Jessica Stein, Moonstruck, and and Four Weddings and a Funeral. She most recently popped in to review the final Daniel Craig Bond film No Time To Die.

Our short interview follows...

When did you first fall in love with the movies?

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1946: Martha Vickers in "The Big Sleep"

Each month before the Smackdown event, suggested options for an alternate ballot in Best Supporting Actress... 

by Nick Taylor

How is it I've ended up watching three Bogie & Bacall collaborations in reverse chronological order while celebrating the Smackdown years? At least this means that their pairings have only grown more rewarding, rather than less. I’d probably rank To Have and Have Not ever so slightly above The Big Sleep, but boy is it a twisty, entertaining film, making real cinema out of Raymond Chandler’s novel without sanding away his cynical wit and venom (This write-up is based on the 1946 version of the film, rather than the substantially reorganized and shorter 1945 cut). The Big Sleep also boasts the only real instance in any of these films of a supporting performer truly overshadowing the star couple for sheer charisma and watchability. That actress is Martha Vickers, in the role of Lauren Bacall’s drug-addicted, nymphomaniac sister Carmen Sternwood. If it’s one thing for Moorehead to walk away with a barely-there film like Dark Passage, it’s an entirely different feat to watch Vickers’ intense, dangerous, but visibly curtailed supporting turn swipe the whole movie out from under Bogie and Bacall at very nearly the top of their game. 

Before getting into Vickers’ performance, it’s worth sharing a bit of Hollywood history that explains why Vickers is in less of the film than one might be expecting...

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Best of the "Whodunnit?" Genre (Part Two)

by Eurocheese

If you missed part one, we're celebreating the whodunnit subgenre since Knives Out is out soon. Last time we listed rules of the genre (not all mystery and investigation films are whodunnits) and sang the praises of Gosford Park and The Thin Man. Now let's continue the list,

6. The Big Sleep
Bogie was bound to show up on this list (spoiler: he will again), and what better way to do it than next to his leading lady Lauren Bacall in her (arguable) career-best role...

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Beauty Break: Stars on the Phone

A key "on this day" we forgot this morning. March 7th was the date, way back in 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell got his patent for the telephone. So let's gawk at sexy photos of movie stars with telephones. It's really the only appropriate way to celebrate because who talks on the telephone anymore? Movie stars don't employ them much in photoshoots anymore either. 

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A Star is Risen!

For Easter weekend, here's Kyle Stevens author of Mike Nichols: Sex, Language and the Reinvention of Psychological Realism". You can read more about our team members here.

Stars are our larger-than-life figures. We worship them. We tell stories about them and fancy ourselves made in their images. In fact, bona fide movie star celebrity dates all the way back to 1909, when Carl Laemmle (who would later co-found Universal Studios) placed false notices of the tragic death of “the Biograph girl” in a street car accident. When it was revealed that she was alive and well, the nation rejoiced and everyone cesuddenly knew the name of Florence Lawrence. In this way, Hollywood stardom has always had not just a religious flavor but a Christian Messianic one at that.

Over the next century, countless stars have profited from the love of the resurrection narrative. Remember the elation when Barbra Streisand announced to the world that Lauren Bacall wasn’t in the tomb but gorgeous and talented and right there on-screen? And it was just two years ago that Matthew’s McConaissance brought him Oscar glory.  

What are your favorite movie star resurrection stories?