Another BFI restoration masterpiece, The Epic of Everest is a tribute to both documentary film-making and human endeavor. Made at a time when the world sorely needed an example of heroism that didn't involve the protracted, wholesale slaughter of 20-year-olds, the film documents the third attempt of a British climbing expedition to scale Everest.

It takes for effing ever for the team to even get to the base of the mountain, because they're trekking through parts of Tibet only a handful of white dudes have ever been. This is involves lots and lots of yaks and lots and lots of porters, a veritable wagon train of supplies and gear for a small group to attempt to reach the summit.

I realize that by 1924, cameras had gotten slightly less bulky, but honestly, how lightweight could they have been?! The camera gets within telephoto-lens distance of the final attempt to ascend, giving us (90 years later) a breathtaking, humbling, devastating view of four or five men (dots) making their way up a snowy pass.

It was on this trip that explorers George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine disappeared within 800 (vertical) feet of the summit. Mallory's body was eventually found in 1999, but Irvine's has not yet been recovered.

Like South (1920), this documentary is both tragic and awe-inspiring, with gorgeous imagery you won't soon forget.

Two men independently meet and fall in love with the same woman one day on the the London Underground. She, Nell (Elissa Landi), is a sales clerk at an accessories booth, and returns the affections of the subway guard Bill (Brian Aherne), but rebuffs roughneck power plant worker, Burt (Cyril McLaglen).

Burt is not the kind of guy who likes to be turned down. He contrives to get Bill in hot water with Nell by asking the woman with whom he has been having a fling to pretend to have been assaulted by Bill in an alcove of the station. Kate (Norah Baring) is uneasy about this, but agrees on the promise that Burt will start treating her right and because she is inexplicably and hopelessly in love with him.

I thoroughly enjoyed Underground. Everyone in it seems like regular people. The fight scenes work, all the subway irritations are spot on, and the conflict is nicely set up and thrillingly resolved.

There's only one guy in this whole picture who isn't a jerk, and that's the one who plays the back end of a horse. Under the Lantern is the story of a young girl's descent into prostitution. Else (Lissy Arna) lives with her overbearing, tyrant of a father and is not allowed to go out in the evenings because he things she enjoys fun too much. In spite of this, Else has a boyfriend, Hans (Mathias Wieman), who seems genuinely fond of and concerned about her.

One evening, against her father's wishes (he has actually locked her in her room) Else goes out dancing with Hans, thinking she'll be able to sneak back in before her father finds out. Of course, he comes home early, finds her missing, then locks her out of the house so that she will have to stay out all night. Not knowing where else to turn, and being continually accosted by drunken men, Else goes to Hans's flat, where she meets his roommate and best friend, Max (Paul Heidemann), a trinket salesman and would be vaudevillian. Hans tries to pass off Else as his sister, but Max figures it all out. They all remain friends.

Meanwhile, Else's father has put the cops out looking for her, because she is not yet 21 and therefore belongs to him. The boys and Else have formed a nightclub act involving a dancing horse with a lady trainer. The nightclub owner, Gustave Nevin, casts a leering eye on Else, much to the chagrin of his current girlfriend, who hates Else thereafter.

Things go south after Hans interrupts the nightclub owner's attempted rape of Else, not realizing she was being attacked. The misunderstanding is epic and leads to their estrangement. Else winds up begrudgingly as Nevin's kept woman and enjoys the high life for a short time until he is indicted for fraud and kills himself. It's a quick trip to the streets from there.

This is not an upbeat picture, but it illustrates the particular difficulties women faced at a time and in a place where women's lives were not their own and the code of moral behavior was impossible to flout without dire consequences.

The nicest people in the film are prostitutes and their drunken clientele. Plus Max, the horse's ass. I kept hoping there'd be a way for Else to wind up with him.

She doesn't.

An occasionally beautiful film about a poor fishing family's struggle with poverty and social injustice, Song of the Fisherman was the first social-realist Chinese film.

A fisherman's wife gives birth to twins, a boy (Monkey) and a girl (Kitty), prompting the husband to take a dangerous job at sea to try to make more money. He is never heard from again. To support her family, the wife takes a job for a rich family as nanny for their newborn son, whom she must put above her own children. Indeed, she is forced to leave her sick son one night to care for the rich baby and her child suffers permanent physical and developmental delays as a result.

All three children form a long-lasting friendship even though they are from different classes. The film follows the ever-increasing struggles of the poor family as the livelihood of small fishermen is overtaking by large-scale fishing operations, the very industry the rich boy's family runs. But the rich family has (self-imposed) problems of its own.

It's an uneven picture with moments of poignancy, but I got the sense that pieces of it were missing. The mother was blind all of a sudden, for instance, and I don't remember actually seeing anything about what happened to the father.

At any rate, Wang Renmei was positively luminous as Kitty.

I kept recasting this film with Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper, but it really wasn't necessary. Perhaps I wasn't expecting much after looking this picture up on IMDb and reading the festival program, but I really dug Midnight Madness.

Norma (Jacqueline Logan) is a secretary who lives with her drunken father behind a shooting gallery and has her eyes on her bachelor boss. The boss is only in it for the fun, however, and encourages her to date up a rich South African client, Michael Bream (Clive Brook) so he can learn the location of Bream's new diamond mine. Bream is actually very fond of Norma and on their first date, asks her to marry him. She wonders whether it all isn't a little sudden, but Bream is an "I know you better than you know yourself" kind of guy and persists. Why not, thinks Norma, it's got to be better than the shooting gallery, so they marry.

But first they stop by the office so Norma can give her former boss the news. The boss is baffled, but amused and not a little delighted that she'll be so close to the diamonds. She tells him to forget it, because she's found a meal ticket and she's never going to go second class again. Unfortunately, her new husband has heard this exchange and decides to teach her a lesson by pretending he's not as rich as she thought.

The two of them wind up in a shack at the new claim in the African veldt, with Norma doing a great job of being increasingly less enthused. Bream is equally effective at making it worse for her, knowing that deep down she really cares for him. Their mutual struggle is pretty effective. You kind of get his point that it would be better if she loved him for himself and not his money, but you also get her city girl's dislike of wilderness and giant bugs. Things happen that cause the two to get genuinely closer and everyone does eventually live happily (and poshly) ever after.

Plus there's a lion.

The Parson's Widow is Carl Theodor Dreyer's comic tale of Sofren Ivarson (Einar Rod), a young seminarian recently elected by the members of a small village to be its vicar after theirs has died. It's kind of a good news/bad news situation: on the one hand, having landed a job, the parson is now eligible to marry his girlfriend, Mari (Greta Almroth); on the other hand, this is the kind of town that expects its new paster to marry the widow of its last pastor.

In this case, the widow is Dame Margarete (Hildur Carlberg), a seventy-something presence who has married the new pastor a couple times before. The prospect is not appealing to young Sofren (nor Mari), but after spending time with the widow (and eating her food, drinking her schnaps, and letting her mend his clothes) the man decides to marry her after all. She is only interested in maintaining her home and lifestyle. There is temporary difficulty in convincing Mari that this is a good scheme, but the two kids decide to wait it out. After all, the widow will die some day (with any luck, soon) and Sofren will inherit her many possessions, so they pretend in the short term that Mari is Sofren's sister.

The rest of the film deals with the morality of the situation with great effect. Everyone comes to love Dame Margarete, chiefly because Hildur Carlberg is terrifically good, but also because Sofren overcomes his weaknesses in such a charming way.

I absolutely loved this picture. It was funny, sweet, and sad in all the right proportions.

I am embarrassed to admit that until tonight, I had never seen a Rudolf Valentino picture in its entirely; only sepia-toned clips in histories of film documentaries and such. Neither did I know that The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the movie that catapulted Rudolph Valentino to stardom, was about the Great War, my favorite subject next to old movies, the centenary of which, combined with this blog, will make me insufferable to all who know me between August of this year and November of 2018. 

ANYway. The epic begins in Argentina on the vast cattle ranch of wealthy landowner, Madariaga, who came to the country from Spain as a poor young man to make his fortune, and make it he did. He also made a lot of little mixed-race Madariagas in the village, while his two legitimate daughters live in the manse. Each of these daughters has married a man from another country. The eldest, Elena, married a Frenchman, Marcelo Desnoyers, who skipped out of France to avoid serving in the Franco-Prussian War. Madariaga loves this guy.

The second daughter, Luisa, married a German guy called von Hartrott (a comparatively svelte Alan Hale) and has three bespectacled, crew-cutted Teutonic boys. The von Hartrotts are concerned because Elena is about to have a baby and if it's a boy, Madariaga will deem him the heir. Sure enough, she has a boy and there are sour grapes all around. The boy, Julio (Valentino) grows up to be a spoiled, gorgeous womanizer (like grandpa, except for the loveliness) who can cut a pretty hot Latin rug. 

After the patriarch dies, everyone is surprised to learn that he did not leave his fortune to the favored grandson, but split it evenly between his two daughters, we know not why. This causes the French and the German families to leave Argentina and relocate to their respective native lands. Julio becomes an artist and lives on his mother's money in a studio filled with half-naked models, a male secretary, and a philosophical Russian living above him.

Julio begins an affair with lovely, married Marguerite (Alice Terry, real-life wife of the film's director, Rex Ingram). All of this is complicated by the looming war, which is beginning to interfere with Julio's sex life, making shopping difficult for his father and girlfriend, and really upsetting the upstairs Russian.

The war begins in earnest after the intermission (the film is 2.5 hours long) and we find Desnoyer senior's castle filled with Germans, one of whom is Wallace Beery playing an unpleasant drunk (surprise surprise). Marguerite becomes a nurse and decides to go back to her husband after he is wounded in combat. Julio joins up, which makes his father very proud, and we learn that it is possible for Rudolph Valentino to look Even Hotter with a day's growth of beard.

Valentino really was a beautiful man. When he and Alice Terry are kissing and such, you really get the sense that he knows his way around and that he quite enjoys it. Similarly with the tango. Homina.

The war scenes are compelling and those four horsemen show up a few times and it's really creepy and effective. There is also a great deal of humor in the picture, which was surprising and excellent.

June Mathis, the first female film executive at MGM, was the woman responsible for bringing Valentino to director Ingram's attention. She also wrote the screenplay, cast the film, and had a major role in its production.

All in all, an excellent start to what promises to be yet another memorable festival. 

This poor kid. 

Born in Boston to unwilling parents, Edith Fellows was abandoned by her mother a few months after she was born and moved to North Carolina to live with her father and his mother. Edith displayed an early talent for singing and dancing and was noticed by a "talent scout" who claimed he could get her a screen test in Hollywood for fifty bucks. She and her grandmother took a train to Los Angeles, only to find an empty lot at the address they were given.

Her iron-willed and apparently unpleasant grandmother worked as a housekeeper to make ends meet and settled Edith in with another family to live. The son in that family was a movie extra whom Edith accompanied to the studio, where she was noticed by a director. For real this time. Soon she began appearing in comedy shorts and small parts in larger pictures.

Her big break came in 1935 as Melvyn Douglas's bratty daughter in She Married Her Boss, the girl Claudette Colbert beats some goodness into. Edith's performance was so well-received, that Columbia Pictures signed her to a seven-year contract, the first time a child received such a contract. With roughly 20 pictures already under her belt, Edith began a solid career as a singing child star for Columbia. At home, however, things were pretty bleak. Her grandmother was something of a tyrant who isolated her from people and took complete control of her earnings. In 1936, when Edith was established as a sensation, her mother showed up out of the blue and demanded custody...and money. A long court battle ensued which resulted in Edith having to choose between the mother she'd never met and her grandmother, the devil she knew. She chose the grandmother.

As Edith grew into adulthood, her charm for Columbia began to fade. In 1941, they decided not to renew her contract, because at 18, Edith was too old for children's roles and too short (fully grown at 4' 10") to be a leading lady. When she reached her majority in 1944, Edith tried to recoup some of her earnings from her "guardian" and found that of the $100,000 dollars coming to her, there was only $900 left.

So Edith Fellows turned to the stage. She appeared on Broadway in musicals and comedies, and guest starred on a few television shows. One night in 1958, during a performance at a charity event, she was struck with paralyzing stage fright. A doctor prescribed Librium for the condition, a drug to which she became addicted. A long period of drug dependence and alcohol abuse followed, with Edith working a series of low-paying jobs to make ends meet. She did not perform again until 1979, when a friend of hers in community theater wrote a play based on her life called Dreams Deferred and encouraged her to star it in.

Edith overcame her stage fright by performing in that play and it changed her life. She went off the pills and booze and embarked on a solid career as a guest star on a number of popular television series and TV movies, including Scarecrow & Mrs. King, Cagney & Lacey, and ER. She retired from show business altogether in 1995.

Edith Fellows died at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital, a retirement community for members of the film and television industry, on June 26, 2011 of natural causes. She was 88.

I haven't seen that many of her pictures, but these I have, and these I like:

• She Married Her Boss  (1935)
• Pennies from Heaven  (1936)
• Girls Town (1942)

Okay, Now That's All Folks.

But how cool is that?

It's quite possible that Mel Blanc was my first personal hero. In our household, Warner Bros. cartoons were the main source of information about how movies work, particularly how they work well, through direction (including art and music direction), writing, editing, scene composition, and character development. When I realized that one guy did 90% of the acting, it kind of blew my mind and helped me develop an abiding respect (and an ear) for voice actors thereafter.

Melvin Blank (with a "k") was born in San Francisco to a couple who ran a ladies-wear business, and moved with his family shortly thereafter to Portland, Oregon, where he lived until the mid-1930s. By the time he graduated from high school in 1927, Blanc had already displayed a talent for mimicry and character voices. That awful Woody Woodpecker laugh came from one of Mel's class clown improvisations, for instance, but his post-school career was as a musician in the NBC Radio Orchestra and pit conductor at Portland's Orpheum Theatre.

Blanc married Estelle Rosenbaum in 1933 and the couple hosted a local radio program called "Cobwebs and Nuts," in which Mel provided all the voices (because the management was too cheap to hire more actors). Eventually, the couple moved to Los Angeles where Mel picked up a lot of work as a character actor on a variety of radio programs, not the least of which was as "The Maxwell," Jack Benny's car. He also voiced the first four Woody Woodpecker cartoons (thanks to that horrible horrible laugh) and did some work for Disney Studios, but was soon under exclusive contract to Leon Schlesinger's company, which produced all of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for Warner Bros.

Mel Blanc helped create some of the most famous characters in motion picture and television history: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Marvin Martian, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester Cat, Tweety Bird, Wile E. Coyote, and the Roadrunner, to name a few. By 1960, Blanc had switched to television cartoons, still for Warner Bros. Looney Tunes franchises (The Bugs Bunny Show and its derivatives), but also for Hanna-Barbera classics, such as The Flintstones (Barney Rubble and Dino), The Jetsons (Cosmo Spacely), The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (The Bully Brothers), and Yogi's Gang (Secret Squirrel) among many others.

In 1961, Blanc was nearly killed in a car crash and lay unconscious for weeks in the hospital. He was unresponsive to doctor's questions when they asked how Mel Blanc was feeling, but when they asked after Bugs Bunny or Porky Pig, he answered in the character voice. This went on for days until Mel Blanc finally woke as himself. Perhaps this is an apocryphal tale, but I like it. It's spooky. 

He made a few appearances as a human being in character spots on the Jack Benny program and other shows in the early 1960s, but stuck mainly with cartoon voicing and worked on nearly every popular Saturday morning cartoon up until 1989 -- including a lot of crap (I'm talking to you, Scooby's Laff-A Lympics), but the man enjoyed his work.

And he was so very good at it. If it weren't for Mel Blanc's tremendous talent and influence, we probably would not be enjoying the work of today's best and most versatile voice actors: Hank Azaria, Tom Kenny, Seth MacFarlane, Tress MacNeille, Harry Shearer, and Tara Strong, to name just a few. He raised the bar incredibly high.

Mel Blanc died of heart disease on July 10, 1989, surrounded by his family very much loved and very much missed. 

I don't know why I keep saying I don't like Westerns. Maybe it's the ghost of the Saturday afternoon UHF programming of my youth — the trope of the Indian whoop over gunshots that sang out from any TV program playing in the background on some sit-com; the heavily-drawn and un-ironic American exceptionalism; the dopey stunts and breakaway chairs. And contrary to conventional wisdom, I don't hold The Searchers (1956) in as high esteem as I do Lonesome Dove (1989), the best TV miniseries EVER.

But when asked to recommend action pictures with great central conflicts, I find myself including many a Western:Stagecoach (1939), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966), and of course, always, Seven Samurai (1954).

It has been at least 10 years since I watched Seven Samurai, because let's be honest, at nearly 3 1/2 hours it is a bit of a commitment and I have all those episodes of Parks and Recreation to catch up with. But under the masterful direction of Akira Kurosawa, you don't really notice until the intermission that rather a lot of time has passed and that you're glad for the extended set-up.

Like any good Western, we open on a poor farming community set upon by roaming bandits, who, after looting the town, have promised to come back and steal the grain harvest when it's ready, because terrorizing villages takes a lot of effort and bandits gotta eat. Frustrated, terrified, and without any help from their municipal government, the farmers decide to hire protection in the form of samurai...samurai who are hungry enough to work for food. This undertaking is extremely difficult and risky: farmers are not in the same social caste as samurai, they haven't any money, their situation is not unique in these lawless times, and they are ridiculed by people in the city where they search for hungry warriors.

A good portion of the film is devoted to the assembling of this fighting force, a device that is fairly common now, but was not at the time Kurosawa wrote the picture. Because of the time spent recruiting the team, we come to care a great deal about these samurai and since (spoiler alert) they don't all make it, this film can really get you where you live.

The first to join is Kambei (the great character actor, Takashi Shimura), who becomes the leader; Katsushiro (Isao Kimura), his young disciple and eventual love interest of a farmer's daughter; Gorobei, affable archer; Shichiroji, Kambei's former comrade-in-arms; charming morale builder, Heihachi; crazy-good, stoic swordsman and kind of my favorite, Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi); and wildman caste jumper, farmer's son, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), who follows the samurai jumping around like a cartoon puppy until they accept him.

The rest of the film explores the tentative relationship between the villagers and the samurai, as well as the planning and execution of a battle plan that will require the farmers to step out of their comfort zone. The relationship is further complicated by the love that develops between young Katsushiro and the lovely young farmer's daughter, Shino (Keiko Tsushima). It's a difficult and uncomfortable social interaction that eventually develops into mutual trust, all of it beautifully composed and directed.

A number of skirmishes lead to incidents of great sadness, cunning, and breathtaking cinematography. The bandits are all on horseback while our heroes are all on foot, so there is much running within the village from one fortification to another; all very tense and quite effective. Also, it seems to have rained a lot in 16th-century Japan. But there are also moments of humor and sweetness in this film, not to mention a little bit of cheesecake in the form of Toshiro Mifune in shortie armor.

The final battle is amazing: fast-paced, bloody (you don't see any), and close, all of it in a torrential downpour. I defy you not to cry at least once during the last ten minutes.

Black and white, gorgeous, epic, Seven Samurai is worth every minute of your time.

This post is my contribution to the CMBA Blogathon: Fabulous Films of the 50s. Please take a look at all the excellent entries, covering everything from THE BLOB to SINGIN' IN THE RAIN. The fifties were a strange and magical time.

One of the most sought-after leading men of the 1930s, Herbert Marshall began his acting career as a stage actor and didn't turn to film until he was nearly 40. Marshall was born in London and worked as an accountant before joining the London-Scots Guard to fight in the First World War. He served with (later) fellow actor Ronald Coleman in France and was badly wounded in 1915, resulting in the amputation of his right leg at the right hip.

Herbert Marshall wore a wooden prosthetic for all of his acting career, something very few people knew at the time, because honestly, he hid it well. His acting style was quiet and easy, which enabled him to play both charming romantic heroes as well as calculating villains. By the mid-1940s he was getting decent, if smaller parts and eventually settled into a solid career as a character lead in films and television for another 20 years.

Suave, handsome, sympathetic on screen, Marshall seems to have had a more turbulent personal life -- let's face it, the man was married five times. But what do I know? I would prefer him to have been a decent guy with perhaps a shortish attention span, because I loved him in Trouble in Paradise, so let's just go with that.

Herbert Marshall died of heart failure on January 22, 1966 in Beverly Hills. He was 75 years old.

I've never been much of a fan of Dick Powell the singer, but I really like Dick Powell, the hard-boiled detective. And here he is as Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, the film version of Raymond Chandler's novel, Farewell, My Lovely. Powell was a risky choice for director Edward Dmytryk, who, like everyone else in the world, thought of Powell as a sweet, drippy singer in comic musicals. Studio executives didn't want to take any chances either, and butched up the title from Farewell, My Lovely, to Murder, My Sweet, lest the average moviegoer think they were in for another Goldiggers franchise when they would actually be getting Powell ogling Claire Trevor's shapely leg (without bursting into song) and running around a mental hospital socking people.

But this is, indeed, a murder mystery, so there's dames and thugs and gats and jewels and intrigue. It starts with Philip Marlowe being grilled by police detectives about some murders. The rest of the picture is Marlowe's testimonial flashback that begins in his noir-lit office where he is lamenting his financial situation, when the wonderful Mike Mazurki as Moose Malloy, a Great Ape, shows up fresh out of prison to hire Marlowe to find his girlfriend, Velma, who hasn't written to him for some years.  Moose has money, as well as great height and strength, so Marlowe goes with him to check out Velma's last place of employment. They hit a dead end, but Marlowe gets a lead from the boozy former owner of the clip joint where Velma used to work. So far it looks like Velma is dead, but Marlowe ain't so sure.

When he gets back to his office, he finds a nattily dressed man named Marriott (Douglas Walton), pawing over the papers on his desk. This guy wants to hire Marlowe to help him buy back some stolen jewels for a friend, but at the meeting place, the fancy man is killed and Marlowe is "sapped" unconscious. When he wakes, he finds that someone has taken the payoff money from his pockets, but left him his gun. Cops are called; Marlowe is grilled.

Meanwhile, a lovely young woman comes to his office posing as a reporter to get some dirt on the dead man and the jewels. She turns out to be Ann Grayle (Anne Shirley), the daughter of a wealthy jade collector (Miles Mander), who is married to Helen (Claire Trevor), a woman a couple of decades younger than he. Turns out that Helen was stepping out with Marriott when the very expensive jewels she was wearing at the time were stolen from her. It also turns out that the dead man had been undergoing psychic (not psychiatric) treatment under spiritualist Jules Amthor (Otto Kruger), a guy you know is up to no good.

How are these two cases related? I'll give you a hint: Moose Malloy does some thugging for Dr. Amthor on the side and is responsible for another clobbering Marlowe receives and the wild, drug-induced dream sequence Marlowe experiences while being held hostage and off the trail for several days.

I won't spoil the whole thing, but I will tell you that Marlowe is romanced by both Helen and Ann, is beaten by several people, and is present at a few more murders before the picture ends. Claire Trevor exhibits a coldness she usually never employs, as she usually plays the salt-of-the-earth fallen woman type; this time she just fell. Also, Dick Powell looks good with a few days' beard growth. It stabilizes that wobbly chin.

On a final note, if you want this mystery to retain some mystery, don't look it up in IMDb first, because there's a huge plot giveaway in the credit list.

There is a very warm and thorough biographical sketch of Anne Shirley on IMDb, which I recommend to you, in lieu of my having to gratuitously paraphrase it here. 

Anne Shirley was one of those quiet, excellent child actors who played the younger version of whichever Hollywood actress was actually starring in a picture, or as that star's daughter. If you happen to catch her in anything before 1934 — and there were 31 pictures to choose from — she'd be credited as "Dawn O'Day," one of several stage names she was given as a toddler model. What was wrong with her given name, Dawn Paris, I don't know.

Shirley became a reliable bit player in feature films from the age of four, getting more and more notice as she grew into a beautiful teenager. Although she only appears briefly in the pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck vehicle, The Purchase Price (1932), her performance as a terrified farm girl is arresting. That same year, she played the young Ann Dvorak in Three On a Match, and manages to convey the discontent and fragility that overtake the adult character in her few short scenes.

The actress took the name "Anne Shirley" from the film that made her a star, Anne of Green Gables, changing it legally and professionally when she turned 16. And like good contract players, she made three to six pictures a year, most of them excellent, but in spite of critically successful performances, Anne Shirley never quite reached the level of stardom one would have hoped. Growing tired of the Hollywood grind and with one failed marriage behind her (to handsome John Payne) and one on the rocks (to soon-to-be-blacklisted producer and screenwriter, Adrian Scott) she retired from movies in 1944 at the age of 26.

She did go out with a bang, as it were; her last picture was the film noir classic, Murder, My Sweet, a hell of a high note.

Anne Shirley's third marriage to screenwriter Charles Lederer in 1949 was a happy one that lasted until his death in 1976. She lived the rest of her days in Hollywood as a painter and socialite. She died July 4, 1993 from lung cancer at the age of 75.

Her birthday is this Saturday, so why not screen something like So Big! or any of these others to celebrate?

I had not heard of, or at least didn't recognize, Miles Mander until last year at the 2013 San Francisco Silent Film Festival and caught him in The First Born (1928), Mander wrote the novel and play the film was based on, and also starred in and directed the picture. In it, he plays wealthy, womanizing cad, Sir Hugo Boycott, whose marriage is falling apart due to (he would say) the inability of his wife to produce an heir. It could also be (as she might say) his poor character and selfishness.

And that's just the stamp of the many great Miles Mander characters without character he played so well throughout his career.

Mander was born into a well-to-do family of industrialists in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England. Not interested in following the family business of "industrialist," Mander went off to New Zealand after college (McGill University) and spent his twenties as a sheep farmer with an uncle. During the Great War, he served as an aviator, and upon his return, became a playwright and early film actor.

If that's not romantic and dashing enough for you, his first wife was an Indian princess, a daughter of a Bengali Maharajah, whose sister (another princess, obviously) married Mander's brother, Alan. I have no idea how or why that marriage dissolved, but think it would be a thrilling chapter in the film of this man's life that has yet to be made.

After the success of The First Born, Mander enjoyed a long career playing scheming neer-do-wells  or disgraced British "wot-wot" types in British and American films. I was surprised to learn how many of his movies I'd seen; perhaps you will be too.

Miles Mander died of a heart attack while dining at the Brown Derby restaurant in 1946 at the age of 57. 

Who wouldn't want to see that movie?!