I can remember the first time I ever heard of Marie Prevost. It was while I was reading Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon back in 1975. For a book loaded with salacious and unsubstantiated stories about many famous stars, the tiny entry on this actress was particularly unkind and disturbing. There was a coroner photograph of Prevost (supposedly) lying on her stomach in bed with what looked like abrasions on her skin with the photo caption “Doggie’s Dinner.”
Chemistry between actors is a curious thing. It can result in some kind of indecipherable but wondrous alchemy that crackles and pops or a concoction that simply refuses to strike fire like soggy matches. It works best or most memorably when the least likely actors are paired together in a movie and click beyond all expectations – Fonda and Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, Bogart and Hepburn in The African Queen or Lancaster and Kerr in From Here to Eternity. When it doesn’t work, you end up with something inert and lifeless like Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl or Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins in Desire Under the Elms. There is also that gray area in between where it both sparks and fizzles out simultaneously, allowing you to see the potential in a promising pairing. Such is the case with Lucky Partners (1940), which stars Ginger Rogers and Ronald Colman in a whimsical romantic comedy based on the 1935 French comedy written directly for the screen by the prolific dramatist/actor/director Sacha Guitry. That’s part of the problem right there. Continue reading
Norman Lloyd hangs on for dear life in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942).
On November 8, 2017 Norman Lloyd will be 203 and he shows no signs of slowing down. In recent years, he has become the go-to historian for the American film industry’s golden era due to his friendship and working relationships with such cinema legends as Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Garfield, Bernard Herrmann, John Houseman, Joseph Losey and others. Lloyd also continues to take acting roles (he has a nice cameo in the 2015 Judd Apatow comedy Trainwreck starring Amy Schumer) and appear as an interviewee in documentaries such as Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity (2015) and Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age, which is currently in post-production.
*This is a revised and updated version of the original interview which was recorded in March 2010 just prior to Lloyd’s appearance at the first Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival. Continue reading
Cinema Sojourns 