Tag Archives: Shelley Winters

In Their Own Words: Actors on Film Flops and Disappointments

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Nobody sets out to make a bad movie. Why would they? Not only is it a colossal waste of money but it will remain on the permanent record of everyone associated with it. Still, there are factors that no one can control and sometimes an actor makes a movie with the best intentions that the critics hate, audiences avoid like the plague or conflicts during production doom it to failure.  Here are 15 well documented examples including Marlon Brando (A Countess from Hong Kong), Shelley Winters (Knickerbocker Holiday), Richard Widmark (Slattery’s Hurricane), Beverly Garland (Swamp Women and Stark Fear), Bruce Dern (The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant), Ava Gardner (The Bible…In the Beginning), Christopher Plummer (The Royal Hunt of the Sun), Ida Lupino (The Hard Way), Tony Curtis (Son of Ali Baba), Sally Kellerman (Reform School Girl), Ernest Borgnine (The Devil’s Rain), Raquel Welch (Myra Breckinridge), Warren Oates (Chandler), Joan Shawlee (Prehistoric Women) and Vincent Price (Green Hell).

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Pressbooks: Classic Movie Marketing Promotion

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Among the many movie collectibles on the marketplace, pressbooks were studio publicity tools that were created for the theatre exhibitors. Though rarely seen by the public except by film collectors, these specialized publications were chock full of alternate poster art for their specific film as well as behind-the-scenes stories on the production, cast and crew. Best of all were the promotional tips for theatre managers on how to pack their theatres with excited fans. Some of these tips could probably get you arrested and sometimes you had to wonder if the pressbook writers were drunk or just testing the gullibility of the exhibitors.

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The Birthplace of Jazz

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How’s this for a dynamite screen team – Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong? They appear together and separately in New Orleans (1947), a fictitious love story set during the end of the Golden Age of jazz circa 1917 – the year Storyville ceased to be the Crescent City’s hot spot.

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Sucker Play

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After purposely avoiding it for years due to its terrible reputation, my curiosity finally got the best of me when TCM aired Tentacles (Italian title: Tentacoli, 1977) earlier in 2022, and I finally watched it from start to finish. One of several ill-conceived and pathetic attempts to cash in on the box office success of Jaws, the Italian produced Tentacles is a perversely entertaining nature run amok thriller that stands out from the other killer shark imitations like Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976) and Tintorera: Killer Shark! (1977) by substituting a more elusive title menace – a giant octopus.

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Down and Out in Chicago

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At the end of the 1949 Nicholas Ray film, Knock on Any Door, juvenile delinquent Nick Romano, played by John Derek, is sentenced to die in the electric chair for killing a cop, despite the attempts of his attorney, Andrew Morton (Humphrey Bogart), to save him. The story didn’t end there, however, and African-American novelist Willard Motley wrote a sequel to his original 1947 bestseller in 1958 entitled Let No Man Write My Epitaph. It was adapted to the screen under that same title in 1960 and focused more on the ghetto drug problem than urban gang violence although the latter is still an omnipresent concern.

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A Train Wreck Called Poor Pretty Eddie

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Poor Pretty EddieSometimes a movie goes so horribly wrong in so many ways that it ends up working on an entirely different level in spite of itself. Such is the case with Poor Pretty Eddie (1975), which is also known as Black Vengeance, Heartbreak Motel and Redneck County Rape, clear indications that this is a movie with a confusing production and distribution history. A sleazy exploitation thriller with artistic pretensions, the film manages to be offensive, crude and inept in equal measure while still succeeding as a compulsive viewing experience for connoisseurs of fringe cinema who think they’ve seen everything.   Continue reading →

CINEMATEK in Brussels – Enter The Sacred Film Shrine

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Photography by Wouter Spitters

Photography by Wouter Spitters

Prior to traveling to Brussels, Belgium this past November, I put some serious research time into identifying the key sights and activities I wanted to see and do while visiting. Apart from the essentials like a walk through “The Grand Place” and a visit to the Magritte Museum, there are plenty of offbeat detours like the incredibly cluttered but charming Musee de Jouet (a vast collection of toys from the past) and the Musee des Instruments de Musique, housed in a former 1899 department store in the art nouveau style. If you are a fan of Belgium beers, you will be in heaven here (visit A La Morte Subite and Delirium Tremens Cafe for starters) and your choices of various cuisines will be endless though you may be tempted to try the local specialty – mussels & frites – at least once unless you have an aversion to shellfish and french fries. And if you a film lover, particularly one interested in repertory programming, you will be amazed at what you find for Brussels has a thriving movie culture with even more “classic cinema” viewing options than nearby Amsterdam (less than 3 hours by train), another mecca for cinephiles which we visited a few days before.     Continue reading →