The many versions of "Anna and the King of Siam"

by Cláudio Alves

Seventy-five years ago, Anna and the King of Siam premiered in theaters. The film was adapted from a book by the same name, which purported to present a fictionalized, yet historically-based, account of the years spent by Anna Leonowens in the court of King Mongkut of Siam - present-day Thailand - in the 1860s. Novelist Margaret Landon based her work on Leonowens' memoirs, creating a window into an otherworld that dazzled readers and moviegoers of the 1940s. Over the years, the story's popularity persisted, and it has been retold in several different mediums. On the anniversary of its first cinematic adaptation, let's look at the four movie versions from the Oscar-winning costume drama to a forgotten animated catastrophe…

Click to read more ...

Showbiz History: Matt Dillon endures, Reality Bites opens, and Three Billboards peaks

6 random things that happened on this day, February 18th, in showbiz history...

1928 Sonja Henie wins her first of three consecutive gold medals in women's figure skating (a feat that's never been equalled in women's figure skating). Hollywood comes calling in the mid 30s (back when they used to make movie stars of famous athletes -- see also Buster Crabbe, Esther Williams, and Johnny Weismuller) and she headlines several hit films, starring with One in a Million in 1936...

Click to read more ...

Yul Brynner Centennial: "The Ten Commandments"

by Eric Blume

Back in the day, Cecil B. DeMille’s epic The Ten Commandments received an annual Easter airing in network prime-time, much the way The Wizard of Oz and other family classics would be broadcast annually with much fanfare, delivering consistently high ratings each year (remember:  only three network options!).  I feel like I saw The10Cs multiple times when I was a little kid, each year mesmerized by its massive sweep, colossal size, and amazing special effects.

Revisiting the film for the first time as an adult, in honor of Yul Brynner’s Centennial, wowza is it a howler...

Click to read more ...

The Furniture: Yul Brynner Blows Up a Bridge

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

Yul Brynner, who were celebrating this week for his centennial, was in a lot of very expensive movies. His biggest year was 1956, with The King & I, Anastasia and The Ten Commandments - a combined budget of over $20 million. But there were plenty to follow. Studios saw Brynner as a generic racial and ethnic “other,” which got him cast in all sorts of bloated historical, international, orientalist pictures. Which also means, of course, that many of his movies are entirely worthy of consignment to the dustbin of Hollywood history.

Intriguingly, though, he did occasionally work beyond Hollywood. In the late 1960s he joined Orson Welles, Sergei Bondarchuk, Franco Nero and Curd Jürgens in Yugoslavia for The Battle of Neretva. A World War Two Partisan film directed by Veljko Bulajić, a Partisan veteran himself, it ranks as the most expensive production in the history of Yugoslavia - and potentially in Brynner’s career, as some estimates push it into Ten Commandments territory...

Click to read more ...

Showbiz History: Lady Godiva, RMS Titanic, and a Good Girl Gone Bad

15 random things that happened on this day, May 31st, in history as it relates to showbiz...

1279BC Ramasses II becomes Pharoah in ancient egypt. He grows up to look like Yul Brynner in the 1950s. yum. 

1057 Lady Godiva takes a naked ride. 898 years later Maureen O'Hara fills her shoes...er... saddle (she weren't wearing no shoes) in an G-rated wig in Lady Godiva of Coventry (1955)

1790 President George Washington signed the first US copyright act into law...

Click to read more ...