[Above: Jennifer Jones publicity photo promoting Duel in the Sun, 1946 film from David O Selznick.
Jennifer Jones
Jennifer Jones was born Phylis Lee Isley in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on March 2, 1919, and died Thursday, December 17, 2009 at her home in Malibu, California at the age of 90. She was the daughter of Phil and Flora Mae Isley, a couple who managed a traveling theatre troupe which toured the Midwest of the United States. Raised chiefly in Oklahoma, her parents wanted her to enter law school, she however convinced them to send her to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in 1938. A year later she had married the actor Robert Walker, and the pair pursued acting roles in the city, with success coming for Walker in speaking parts in radio program while she earned fees in fashion modeling.
David O. Selznick heard her reading for a part in the Rose Franken play Claudia, and though she failed to secure a role in the production, Selznick nonetheless called her back and eventually signed her to a seven-year contract and changed her name to Jennifer Jones.
Robert Walker and Jones traveled to California and with Selznick's influence she was shortly given the lead role as Bernadette Soubirous in the film The Song of Bernadette (1943) directed by Henry King. She received an Academy Award in 1945 for the role. Soon thereafter Jones and Walker divorced as they had been separated since 1943. In 1949 Jones married to David O. Selznick.
Jones is often given high marks for her two comedy efforts: as a plumber's daughter in Cluny Brown for Ernst Lubitsch in 1946, and for her part as the scheming Mrs. Gwendolen Chelm, a phony British diplomat's wife in Beat the Devil, a 1953 film from John Huston which also featured Humphrey Bogart and Gina Lollobrigida.
She appeared in many big-budget Hollywood films, and with David O. Selznick personally managing her career she was able to have the pick of the most publicized and most important film properties that he controlled. She played one of her most famous parts opposite Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun, a 1946 film that was intended to be a kind of cowboy 'Gone With the Wind,' with she and Peck in a tumultuous love story that delved in interracial issues.
Altogether Jones had five Academy Award nominations: The Song of Bernadette Bernadette (1943) as Soubirous; Since You Went Away (1944) as Jane Deborah Hilton; Love Letters (1945) as Singleton/Victoria Morland; Duel in the Sun (1946) as Pearl Chavez; Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1954), as Dr. Han Suyin.
After Selznick's death in 1965, Jones rarely appeared in films, the most notable exception being her brief part as Fred Astaire's dancing partner in The Towering Inferno (1974). In 1971 she had married wealthy art collector Norton Simon, and she participated in building his art collection which eventually became the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. After his death in 1993, she continued as Trustee Emeritusat the museum.
From the New York Times obituary from December 17, 2009: “After that first big role (Song of Bernadette Bernadette), there was a kind of stage fright,” Ms. Jones said in 1981. She told another interviewer:
“When you’re young, you’re full of hope and dreams. Later you begin to wonder. I did ‘The Song of Bernadette’ without knowing what was going on half the time.”
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[Below: Jennifer Jones from Love Letters, 1945.] 
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Written material is Copyright ©1992-2008 Erik Weems. All Rights and lefts reserved.
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Lon, Lon, Lon : Chaney from Laugh Clown Laugh (1928)
Kay, Carole, Kay, Carole: Kay Francis and Carole Landis at Landis' marriage to Army Air Corps captain named Thomas Wallace in 1943. The fellow in the middle is apparently a chaplain. Image from the google "Life Magazine" archive.
Orson, Orson, Orson. From Mr. Arkadin 1955 (AKA Confidential Report)
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What We're Watching
The Man Who Came to Dinner
This isn't really a holiday film, though all the trappings of Christmas are wrapped around it: snow-laden streets, ice skating, Christmas Trees and gift giving.
Instead it is a showpiece of one-liners (many vicious) and the humor of a upper middle class midwestern family with cultural ambitions getting saddled with visiting radio celebrity Sheridan Whiteside when he busts a hip on their iced-over steps.
Actor Monty Woolley mostly badgers and yells at them during the course of 112 minutes of barbed-wit and over-the-top theatrics from the troupe of actors supporting Woolley: Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Billie Burke, Grant Mitchell and Jimmy Durante. Written by Julius and Philip Epstein from the Moss Hart and George Kaufman play, the tale is unevenly carried over to the screen, and the cast is uneven in delivering the minimal story.
It seems to be the lineage of the material that affects these actors. Most of the cast is projecting to the far seats of a theatre, loudly and dramatically exploding their lines in front of the camera. This movie set mainly features the interior front entrance of a house and an enormous staircase going to an unseen second floor, this stage-left and stage-right set being a kind of bleachers for the two-room arena in the center where Whiteside issues his bombardment of vitriol. Example:
”My great-aunt Jennifer ate a whole box of candy every day of her life; she lived to be 102, and when she had been dead three days, she looked better than you do now”
The exceptions to the pyrotechnics are Bette Davis and Mary Wilkes (as the put upon Nurse Preen who literally runs from the room after each sonic assault from Woolley). These two instead play right to the cameras, which adds that much more contrast to everyone else (especially Ann Sheridan, Durante and Woolley) who shoot all their cannons at once whenever they have the center of the stage.
Also on screen is the midwest families live-in aunt, Harriet Stanley (played by Ruth Vivian in her only onscreen movie role) who has a perfect and quiet speaking diction, and a secret which gives Whiteside the leverage he needs when he is about to finally be evicted by force by the long-suffering owner of the home (Grant Mitchell).
It is a very entertaining film because of the quality of the writing, and certainly with this cast you will always be seeing something interesting happening on screen. Actor Richard Travis as the play writing newsman Bert Jefferson is handsome and grins a lot, but seems under-rehearsed or simply boring as the "love interest" for Bette Davis. I would have liked to have seen Nurse Preen go berserk and give Whiteside what he richly deserves, but instead Whiteside is triumphant in the end, encased in sentiment and a mischievous goodwill that makes this movie a kind of holiday film after all.
Erik 12/21/2009
Mark Vieira, author of several tomes on classic Hollywood, has been very busy lately. His The Making of Some Like It Hot
written with it's star Tony Curtis is now available from John Wiley Publishing. And Vieira's followup to his Dreams Made Real: Irving Thalberg and the Rise of M-G-M will come out on November 15, 2009: Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince from University of California Press. Vieira is also the guest curator for an exhibit on Thalberg which is being shown at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills. Below is an image from the exhibit.
LATEST FEATURES
Barbara Stanwyck 1921 - 1990
A page about the American Actress. Includes information about the October release of the collected first set from her 1960-61 television series onto DVD.
Remastered Colbert Cleopatra Disk
Universal has remastered the 1934 DeMille version of Cleopatra, which has been the model for imitation in Hollywood Cleopatra's ever since.
Irving Thalberg 1899-1936
A review of the new Mark Vieira book on Thalberg, "Dreams Made Real: Irving Thalberg and the Rise of M-G-M"
Deborah Kerr 1921 - 2007
The actress, best known for films like From Here To Eternity and The King and I, has passed away. She had six Oscar nominations over the years, and received an honorary Oscar in 1993.
A whole page with Obituary notations, media files, pictures and a short essay is here.
LIST OF FILM REVIEW TITLES:
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NEWS
• Dec 28, 2009
Just a FYI Note: TCM will be showing the Billy Wilder 1943 war drama Five Graves to Cairo on January 4, 2010. Many Wilder films regularly rotate on theTCM schedule, but not this. Another rare inclusion is the 1934 Sternberg film The Scarlet Empress on Wednesday Jan 6 at 8:00 PM. Also: There's a mini Kay Francis marathon of 6 films on Wednesday, Jan 13th. On Jan 28th there's a five film set of the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby "Road" Pictures.
• Dec 15, 2009
Brief bio about the great American silent film actor Lon Chaney
• Dec 1, 2009
The red-haired favorite of John Ford, John Wayne and many film fans: Maureen O'Hara
• Dec 1, 2009
Recent article at the Los Angeles Times looks beyond the usual "best of" list for the classic year of Hollywood's "Golden Age" : 1939. 1939 Redux.
• July 22, 2009
Why is Nikke Finke, Online Blogger, making Hollywood hold its head and groan? More
• May 18, 2009
A biography of Carla Laemmle, best-known for appearing in Dracula with Lugosi in 1931, and also for being the niece of Carl Laemmle who ran Universal in its early years, the new book title "Among the Rugged Peaks: An Intimate Biography" is now out. It is written by Rick Atkins. More
• April 24, 2009
A new Barbara Stanwyck 256 page bio is now out. It is written by serial celebrity bio-writer Jane Ellen Wayne. More
• January 6, 2009
Variety lists top films of 2008
Not much of a surprise here, though seeing the gross on the George Lucas/Steven Spielberg Indiana Jones IV shows that had 2008 been slightly different, for example without Chris Nolan's Dark Knight coming out, it would be called the year of "Indy" instead of the year of "the Bat" more
• December 12, 2008
Actress Nina Foch has passed away at age 84 She started off in Hollywood  appearing in Wagon Wheels West (1943) and then with Bela Lugosi appearing in The Return of the Vampire (1944).
more
• December 10, 2008
20th Century Fox releases a DVD box set of 12 films by Murnau and Borzage Two directors who worked in he silent and early talkie era are featured in a deluxe set containing a documentary and many films never available before on VHS or DVD. The most well known of the included titles is Murnau's famous "Sunrise" in which a farmer must contend with himself, his city mistress, and the young wife he is being urged to drown (shades of "An American Tragedy").
more
• November 7, 2008
The Universal Legacy Series continues with a 2-disk package for Vertigo Although  it is sometimes touted as "noir" it is really just a most unusual Hitchcock film and in a more personal mode than most of his films. Kim Novak is the dopplegangered victim/criminal and James Stewart the detective with a dangerous fear of heights.
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• October 22, 2008
Orson Welles, Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh TOUCH OF EVIL 50th Anniversary 2-disk  set This much touted noir film from 1958 is released to DVD with three versions: the original 1958 "Mancini" version, the 1976 108-minute "Keller" version, and the 1998 re-cut "Orson Welles' Memo" version.
more
• October 13, 2008
New Mark A. Vieira Book "Hollywood Dreams  Made Real: Irving Thalberg and the Rise of M-G-M" from Abrams Books A new 260 page hardback exploring MGM and Thalberg's role as producer and architect of the MGM production system.
more
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