For the Love of Film

oldhollywood:

Michael Caine in Get Carter (1971, dir. Mike Hodges)

“I was in a club somewhere in the West End just after Get Carter was released and the gangster I’d based Jack Carter on - not that he ever knew it - came up to me and said, “I saw that Get Carter, Michael.” Uh-oh, I thought, but I kept a dead straight face and I said, “Did you?” and he went on, “Biggest load of crap I’ve ever seen.” “Really?” I said, looking for the exit. “What makes you think that?” And he said, “Michael, you weren’t married, you didn’t have any kids and you had no responsibilities. You don’t understand why we do things. Me, with no special skills, I had to hold on to a wife and kids.”

And I thought - no special skills? He’d only killed about five people - not that he’d ever been charged with anything, but everyone knew…and I said, “Oh blimey, you’re right. That was a terrible mistake.” I completely agreed with everything he said. You don’t want to argue with someone like that. 

Violence has consequences and you don’t often see that in movies. It’s a sort of pornography: people are struck time and time again and the next time they appear they just sport a small Band-aid, not even a black eye or missing teeth. If you were a real victim of the violence you see in films, you would be in hospital or dead. In Get Carter you see the effect of one whack, although we never cut to the gore.”

-Michael Caine, The Elephant to Hollywood

oldhollywood:

The undersea ‘Realm of Glass’ set from The Thief of Bagdad (1924, dir. Raoul Walsh) Art direction by William Cameron Menzies.

To prepare the set for the underwater world, a family of artisans spent three months hand-blowing the required glass pieces.

(via)

oldhollywood:

Marlon Brando applying his make-up on the set of On the Waterfront (1954, dir. Elia Kazan)

“[In On the Waterfront] there was a scene in a taxicab, where I turn to my brother, who’s come to turn me over to the gangsters, and I lament to him that he never looked after me, he never gave me a chance, that I could have been a contender, I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum…It was very moving. And people often spoke about that, ‘Oh, my God, what a wonderful scene, Marlon, blah blah blah blah blah.’

It wasn’t wonderful at all. The situation was wonderful. Everybody feels like he could have been a contender, he could have been somebody, everybody feels as though he’s partly bum, some part of him. He is not fulfilled and he could have done better, he could have been better. Everybody feels a sense of loss about something. So that was what touched people. It wasn’t the scene itself. There are other scenes where you’ll find actors being expert, but since the audience can’t clearly identify with them, they just pass unnoticed. Wonderful scenes never get mentioned, only those scenes that affect people.”

-Brando, quoted in Lawrence Grobel’s Conversations with Brando (1993)

classicfilmheroines:

Natalie Wood circa 1961

Image Source: Flickr

oldhollywood:

The Blackguard (1925, dir. Graham Cutts) Art direction & screenplay by Alfred Hitchcock, who also served as assistant director.

“For all actors know that truly natural acting is rejected by the audience. Although people are better equipped to judge acting than any other art, the hypocrisy of ‘sincerity’ prevents them from admitting that they too are always acting some part of their own invention. To be a successful actor, then, it is necessary to add some eccentricities and mystery to naturalness so that the audience can admire and puzzle over something different from itself.”

-Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (photo via Kobal Collection, c. 1929)

(Source: oldhollywood)

classicfilmheroines:

Ava Gardner ironing her pyjamas in 1950

Image Source: LiveJournal

Ramon Novarro & Norma Shearer in The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927, dir. Ernst Lubitsch)

(Source: oldhollywood)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

“Film operates on a level much closer to music and to painting than to the printed word, and, of course, movies present the opportunity to convey complex concepts and abstractions without the traditional reliance on words. I think that 2001, like music, succeeds in short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience and is able to cut directly through to areas of emotional comprehension. In two hours and twenty minutes of film there are only forty minutes of dialogue.

I think one of the areas where 2001 succeeds is in stimulating thoughts about man’s destiny and role in the universe in the minds of people who in the normal course of their lives would never have considered such matters. Here again, you’ve got the resemblance to music; an Alabama truck driver, whose views in every other respect would be extremely narrow, is able to listen to a Beatles record on the same level of appreciation and perception as a young Cambridge intellectual, because their emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects. The common bond is their subconscious emotional reaction; and I think that a film which can communicate on this level can have a more profound spectrum of impact than any form of traditional verbal communication.

The problem with movies is that since the talkies the film industry has historically been conservative and word-oriented. The three-act play has been the model. It’s time to abandon the conventional view of the movie as an extension of the three-act play.”

-Kubrick, quoted in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (1970)

(Source: oldhollywood)

classicfilmheroines:

Tallulah Bankhead in the London stage production of The Dancers (1923)

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons