I have loved Lillian Gish from the very first moment I saw her photograph in our family's aged coffee table book about "the movies." We're talking pre-school, so that makes her, hands down, the longest crush of my life.

The first full-length picture I saw her in that was not a clip in an anthology, or montage in a tribute was The Birth of a Nation (1915), that famous discomfiting picture, which everyone seems to want to show and discuss, but which isn't nearly as good as Broken Blossoms (1919), a film that is just as racist and disturbing. 

Miss Gish has always been the transcendent figure in these early troubling narratives.

Lillian Gish was born in Springfield, Ohio, to a drunken philanderer and an actress, Mary Robinson McConnell. Lillian and her sister, Dorothy, performed on the stage with their mother, who had only turned to acting in order to support her family after her husband abandoned them. Mrs. Gish also ran a candy store next to the Majestic Theater in East St. Louis, Illinois, where they had relocated to be near Lillian's aunt and uncle. After the theater burned down in 1912, the family moved to New York and there befriended a young actress named Gladys Smith, who worked with some guy called D.W. Griffith at the Biograph Studios. Gladys (better known as Mary Pickford) introduced the girls to Mr. Griffith, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Lillian and Dorothy Gish spent their early years at Biograph as extras and in short films. By 1915, Lillian's talent and (comparative) naturalness on screen made her a star; Dorothy would eventually become one of the screen's best-loved comediennes. Throughout the Teens and for most of the Twenties, Lillian Gish became known as "The First Lady of the Silent Screen," but wasn't much interested in working in film once sound was introduced: "I never approved of talkies. Silent movies were well on their way to developing an entirely new art form. It was not just pantomine, but something wonderfully expressive." And back to the stage she went for the next couple of decades.

But she did return to film every so often, and when she did, Lillian Gish made a huge impression. For her role as the mother of two crazy mixed up cowboys in the dopey Western soap opera, Duel in the Sun (1946), Gish got (and lost) her only Academy Award nomination. She should have got and won one for The Wind, but who am I? 

For a slight, angelic-looking person, Lillian Gish has always conveyed a determination and strength that belied her deceptively frail physique. In real life she was a workhorse: conservative, very private, and not a little anti-Semitic. She never married, believing marriage was a business, like acting, and she had no intention of having two jobs. The job she picked netted her millions, which she bequeathed at her death to establish The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, for “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.” Spike Lee won it last year.

Lillian Gish died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on February 27, 1993. She was 99 years old.

I will love her until the day I die.

Robert Benchley: A Biography, 
By Nathaniel Benchley, McGraw-Hill, 1955

I've schlepped around the same 20 boxes of books I've half read since 1989 and have been steadfast in my refusal to part with any of them. I finally steeled myself to sort through and divest myself of any book that doesn't fit on current bookshelves, because once again, I bought a copy of something I already owned but didn't realize it and enough's enough.

In every case but one, it was an easy call to get rid of one or even both* duplicates. The exception was Robert Benchley's My Ten Years in a Quandary  and How They Grew, because I forgot I had it in hardcover when I bought the paperback and I'm not giving up the ability to carry it with me everywhere now that I know I can.

People who like humorists remember Benchley as either Dorothy Parker's friend and co-regular at the Algonquin Round Table, or as one of the early essayists and critics for the fledgling magazine, The New Yorker. Classic movie buffs remember him an occasional actor (Foreign Correspondent, 1940; Three Girls About Town, 1941), and writer/actor in about 50 Depression-Era short subject comedies (Your Technocracy and Mine, 1933; How to Sleep, 1935). 

Robert Benchley was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1889, the grandchild of Henry Wetherby Benchley, one of the founders of the Republican Party and Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts in the mid 1850s. Robert's beloved elder brother, Edmund, was killed in the Spanish-American War, leaving behind a wealthy fiancee, who payed for Robert's education at the posh Phillips-Exeter Academy and Harvard University. Benchley became a popular editor and contributor to the Harvard Lampoon and performed in productions of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, both of which associations forged lasting connections throughout his career.

After a short and unsuccessful stint as a reporter, Benchley found his footing as a writer and theater critic at Vanity Fair, where he met and befriended Dorothy Parker and Robert E. Sherwood, the three of them taking long lunches at the Algonquin Hotel while management was away. When management returned, however, Parker was fired and Benchley quit in solidarity. 

Thus began a period of freelance reviewing for Life magazine, screenwriting for Jesse Lasky silents, and writing and performing in short sketch films for Universal, MGM, and Paramount (The Treasurer's Report, being the most famous). By the late 1920s, after contributing for The New Yorker for a number of years, he joined the publication as its theater critic. He continued to write and perform in radio and films until his death on November 21, 1945 from a cerebral hemorrhage (and cirrhosis of the liver). He was only 56 years old. 

Robert Benchley's son, Nathaniel (with Gertrude Darling, his wife of 31 years), also became a writer (The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming), as did Nathaniel's son, Peter, who wrote the Jaws franchise.

So while we're on the subject:

Flowers for Algernon,
By Daniel Keyes, Bantam, 1970







Made into the film Charly (1968), for which Cliff Robertson won an Academy Award for Best Actor.

For a handsome, talented guy, Cliff Robertson made a long, long line of forgettable pictures, punctuated by a pretty decent one every decade or so. From what I understand, his appearances on early television drama series -- Playhouse 90,  Celebrity Playhouse, Chrysler Theater and the like -- were very good; he earned an Emmy in 1966 for one of his TV performances.

Unfortunately for Robertson, my first exposure to him was in the film Obsession, a dopey, Vertigo-ish Brian DePalma picture that did nothing for me (or Genevieve Bujold), but that I watched a bunch of times anyway on early HBO. Turns out it was kind of his "thing" to play slightly unstable, nerve-wracked leads, a fact confirmed by my next seeing him in The Twilight Zone  as the jumpy ventriloquist in "The Dummy," one of the scariest episodes ever.* I remember him least fondly as Joan Crawford's love interest in the creepy May-October romance, Autumn Leaves (1956), where he plays a mentally unstable hotty to Joan's middle-aged spinster.**

Cliff Robertson was born in San Diego, California, into a bit of money. His parents divorced when he was a year old and his mother died a year later of peritonitis at the age of 21. Robertson was raised by his maternal grandmother and rarely saw his father, who was something of a ladies' man and spendthrift. After graduating from high school in 1941, Robertson joined the Merchant Marine and served the Second World War in that service. He attended (but did not finish) Antioch College to study journalism, which was his profession for a short time, until the dean suggested he try acting.

The handsome young ex-marine moved to New York to study at the Actor's Studio, earning roles in statewide and national touring productions of popular plays, and eventually making his Broadway debut in 1953.

His first film role was in Josh Logan's Picnic (1955), which should have propelled him into meatier film appearances. Instead, he became a very successful and acclaimed television actor, showing up every so often in a film about the military (he was President Kennedy's choice to star in PT 109, for instance), but then there's Gidget , so who knows?

In the 1970s, Robertson got in a surprising bit of professional blacklisting, when he blew the whistle on a Columbia Pictures executive after discovering that the exec had been forging Robertson's name on studio checks. Turns out the guy had embezzled tens of thousands of dollars, so he was fired and fined. But Robertson was given the cold-shoulder professionally for four years.

Along the way, Robertson was married and divorced twice and became a certified private pilot. Not that one has to do with the other; I just think those two things are interesting. He owned and flew a bunch of planes, including some WWII fighters and entered balloon races and stuff. Wikipedia says he was flying a Beechcraft private plane over the Twin Towers the morning of the 9/11 attack, which is scary for obvious reasons, but also that he was 78 years old at the time, which seems a little risky to me.

Cliff Robertson died of natural causes a day after his 88th birthday on September 10, 2011.

* Bwwooaah. Hate those dummies; they're worse than clowns. 
** Eeeeeoogh. Speaking of clowns...

Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, 
By Leonard Maltin, Plume, 1987 

I can only imagine what was in the drinking water in Kansas City, Missouri, at the turn of the last century, but somehow that town was the stomping ground for some of the most influential and important animators in film history: Walt Disney was barely in his twenties when he started his own company, Laugh-O-Gram Studio, and hired cartoonists Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, Ub Iwerks, and Isadore "Friz" Freleng, to produce animated shorts for local theaters.

The popularity of his creations (if not the studio, which went bankrupt within a year), sent Disney and Iwerks to Hollywood to complete the weird live-action/animated short subjects called the "Alice Comedies," and develop the more enduring cash cow that would be Mickey Mouse. Harman, Ising, and Freleng stayed behind to found their own short-lived studio, creating their own Mickey-like character Bosko, a happy-go-lucky Negro boy. Their cartoon was one of the first to synchronize speech and music with animation and was quickly picked up by Leon Schlesinger, producer of what would become Warner Bros. Animation classic series, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. 

While Harman & Ising were making money for Schlesinger, Freleng went to New York to work on the animated version of the sublime Krazy Kat comic strip, eventually coming round to Warner Bros. to be replace Harman & Ising who had quit Schlesinger over contract disputes.* Freleng became the head director and developed the first fully-defined character, Porky Pig, in 1935. He in turn left Warner Bros. for an unhappy two-year stint with the animation studios of MGM (because those cartoons were stupid), then came back to Warner's to stay in 1939. 

Thus began the Golden Age of movie cartoons, particularly for Warner Bros. Some of the finest, funniest, sharpest shorts were created under the direction of Friz Freleng and his fellow animator/directors, Bob Clampett, Robert McKimson, and Chuck Jones. Freleng introduced or retooled such beloved characters as Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam (whom he was said to resemble), Tweety Bird, and Sylvester Cat, and went on to win four Academy Awards for the studio. 

Freleng was also responsible for Speedy Gonzales, a cringeworthy character developed in the mid-1950s and a precursor to the less clever, less-deftly animated creations of the DePatie-Freleng Enterprises (DFE), which he co-created with Dave DePatie around the time the Warner Bros. animation studios folded in 1963. You can thank DePatie-Freleng for the Ant and the Aardvark series, The Barkleys (a cartoon based on All in the Family ...only with dogs), and most famously and profitably, The Pink Panther.  DFE made cartoons until 1981, when it was bought by Marvel Comics Group and renamed Marvel Productions. 

And that, Jimmy, is where Transformers comes from.

Eventually (and inevitably) the Disney Conglomeration bought Marvel Entertainment in 2009, so here we are back at square one and the drinking water in Kansas City.

Throughout the 1980s, Freleng did very well for himself as an executive producer of various Looney Tunes-related vehicles and revivals. He retired from Warner Bros. in 1986, handing the reins to his former secretary, Kathleen Helppie-Shipley, who has quietly become the longest-serving producer of the franchise, second only to its creator, Leon Schlesinger. 

Friz Freleng died of natural causes on May 26, 1995 at the age of 88.

He did great things.

The first actress to use "bloody" in a British film, Wendy Hiller was primarily a stage actress performing modern roles to great acclaim in London's West End and on Broadway. She attracted the attention of George Bernard Shaw in the early 1930s and became one of his favorite actresses of the time. Shaw cast her in revival productions of his plays, Pygmalion, Major Barbara, and Saint Joan during that period, and insisted she play the part of Eliza in the film production of Pygmalion in 1938. That role would earn Hiller the first of several Academy Award nominations.

There is quite a nice biography of her on IMDb that I won't even try to paraphrase; you should just read it.  Instead, I will reminisce, because I first became aware of Wendy Hiller that magical year of my movie memory, 1974, when anthology and nostalgic ensemble pictures seemed all the rage. She played the wizened old Princess Dragomiroff in Murder on the Orient Express, and I remember being instantly drawn to her overbite and twinkling eyes, thinking this is probably SOMEbody. I'm sure she'll correct me, but I recall that my sister told me at the time that Wendy Hiller had played the original Eliza Doolittle in the movie that became the musical, My Fair Lady and (probably) that she was Shaw's favorite actress -- because my sister was that kind of 11-year-old -- but we'd never seen her in any other picture.

Not until Separate Tables turned up on The Movie Loft (Channel 38) or something some years later, and it clicked: wow, Wendy Hiller was somebody. But British movies seldom turned up on television then and I didn't get to see her early work until decades later. Thankfully, now you can access most of her films streaming or on DVD. If you are so inclined to roll back the years on Princess Dragomiroff, I recommend the wonderful Powell & Pressburger film, I Know Where I'm Going, a peculiar, beautifully acted romance set in the Hebrides with lots of wind and sea and rocks and my pal, Roger Livesey. 

Wendy Hiller was a tremendous actress and by all accounts, a down-to-earth, untheatrical, generous professional. She was married to British playwright Ronald Gow for nearly sixty years until his death in 1993. Hiller retired from acting that same year and spent her remaining days at her home in Buckinghamshire, where she died on May 14, 2003 of natural causes at the age of 90.

I've always had a love/ hate relationship with I Love Lucy and the subsequent Lucy franchises (though mostly hate with those), but never, ever, have I felt anything but love and admiration for Lucille Ball. Her movies weren't that great and her acting wasn't particularly versatile, but her timing and comic intelligence were unparalleled. 

Born in Jamestown, NY to a telephone lineman father and concert pianist mother, Lucille  led a peripatetic life with her family, moving from state to state because of her father's job. When typhoid fever took him in 1915, her mother remarried into a strict family and left the children with step-grandparents who did not show young Lucille much affection, encouragement, or joy. Her maternal grandfather, however, was a devotee of theater and encouraged the girl to participate in plays and express herself. Lucille's grandfather, an eccentric socialist, also persuaded her in 1936 to register to vote as a Communist, a gesture of affection that kind of kicked her in the butt some years later.

Ball started off in New York as a model for Hattie Carnegie and a cigarette girl for Chesterfield cigarettes. After being fired from a few shows and road companies, Ball went to Hollywood for a short stint as a Goldwyn Girl, then moved there permanently in 1933 as a contract player for RKO. At that studio, she appeared in a few Astaire-Rogers films, which led to a breakout performance in one of my favorite pictures, Stage Door (1937).

From there it was wacky showgirls and nightclub singers, starring in not-so-great movies meant as vehicles for more prominent male stars, like Bob Hope and Red Skelton. During the 1940s, she made memorable dramatic and comedic radio appearances, including starring in her own popular show, My Favorite Husband opposite Richard Denning. Lucille Ball made the shrewd career move to transfer her radio success to the fledgling medium of television, using her popular radio program as a leaping off point. She insisted that her husband, Desi Arnaz, play her TV husband on the renamed show I Love Lucy.

And we all know how that turned out. She got rich and famous, both as a performer and producer, and deservedly so. Before Angela Lansbury gave all her old Hollywood pals roles on Murder, She Wrote, Lucille Ball often worked with writers, producers, musicians, and fellow actors from radio. She remained a major presence on television until the mid-1970s, when changing appetites diminished the popularity of her shows and the shows produced by her studio, Lucille Ball Productions. Thereafter, she appeared on awards shows, variety shows, and specials throughout the 1980s. 

In 1989, Lucille Ball underwent an aortic replacement surgery that ultimately failed. Her heart ruptured while she was in recovery and on April 26, 1989, Lucille Ball died at the age of 77.

Sorry, David Niven. 

It's impossible not to love William Powell. I don't care if you've never even seen him in a film -- just look at him. Doesn't he seem like a nice guy? A smart guy? A guy you want in your corner?

This is not always the case with an only child, which he was, born in Pittsburgh, PA, to Horatio Powell, an accountant, and Nettie Brady. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but William was a sucker for theater from his boyhood. His mother claimed that William made speeches soon after he could talk and would imitate the performances he saw at Pittsburgh's Bijou Theater, which he went to with alarming frequency.

When he was a teenager, Powell moved with his family to Kansas City, MO, where he finished high school and attending the University of Kansas for about a week. He then took off to Manhattan to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. For the next decade or so, William Powell was a bit player in vaudeville, a featured player on the road in a melodrama, and a regular performer on the New York stage, appearing in about 200 plays.

He first appeared in film as the villain to John Barrymore's Sherlock Holmes in 1921, which set him up in silent pictures as the heavy or society scoundrel. The advent of sound diversified Powell's roles into more sympathetic and romantic leads. Thank goodness, because I don't think I could have done without any of the 14 pictures he made with Myrna Loy, the woman of my dreams. Well, maybe The Great Ziegfeld...

Powell was married three times and amicably divorced twice. The first time to actress Eileen Wilson (1915-1930), the mother of his only child, television writer, William David Powell*; the second, more famously and for a much shorter time, to Carole Lombard (1931-1933). That divorce went so well, he later starred with Lombard (at his insistence, in fact) in My Man Godfrey, a performance which earned the both of them Academy Award nominations. 

There's a joke in there somewhere.

Powell (also famously) dated Jean Harlow for two years and the couple were engaged at the time of her tragic death from kidney failure at age 26 in 1937. Powell had her interred in a multicolored marble mausoleum at Forest Lawn in Glendale, expecting to join her there. However, he met third wife, Diana Lewis (see Cry Havoc!) in 1940, married her three weeks later, and remained married to Lewis until his death in 1984. 

Powell was diagnosed in 1937 with rectal cancer, a secret he kept for many decades. At the time, it was said that his break from acting was due to a stomach ailment, but Powell was undergoing a new-ish radiation treatment, and made a complete recovery. He worked continuously until the mid-1950s, then gracefully retired to the desert with Diana Lewis. 

William Powell lived to the age of 91, by all accounts a happy man with many friends.

A Terrible Liar,
By Hume Cronyn, Key Porter Books, 1991

Born in London, Ontario, to a well-placed family in the city, Hume Cronyn was sent to boarding school at age six and ultimately studied law at McGill University in Montreal. Partway through college, he switched majors to drama and went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Oh, and he was a good enough featherweight boxer to become part of Canada's Olympic boxing team in 1932.

Cronyn was more of a stage guy than a film guy, but managed to rack up a pretty respectable list of character roles in pictures over the course of 50 years. Famously married to Jessica Tandy, with whom he equally famously worked on stage and screen for a half century until her death in 1994, Cronyn later married children's author Susan Cooper when he was in his mid-eighties; they were together for seven years until his death in 2003.

In pictures he was sweet, small, not great with accents, but sympathetic and compelling. He was also one of the very few famous people I've ever met in real life. I was working a fundraiser* in Manhattan for the nonprofit group spearheaded by Sister Helen Prejean, whose book, Dead Man Walking, had just been made into a film. Who should come in, but Hume Cronyn, wearing an enormous furry (possibly actual fur) coat, but it was winter, so that wasn't like an Edward Gorey thing. I actually got tongue-tied and sputtered something idiotic at him about Lifeboat, ignoring anything he might have done for the past 50 years. He was lovely and gracious, but quickly and rightly moved on.

Embarrassing.

Ah well. Happy birthday, Hume Cronyn, one day late. It's been a long time since I thought about The Parallax View, so that's what I'll probably watch today.

Let that be a lesson to us all. 

All of you know Eugene Pallette, I'm certain of it, but you may not ever put the name to the face. Inevitably, he's in a movie with Franklin Pangborn or Edward Arnold, and if you're like me, you'll occasionally reach for his name and come up with one of theirs, knowing it's wrong. One guy's too skinny and the other too mean.

Just to be clear, Pallette is the large, deep-voiced uncle, father, friar, or corrupt politician in any one of roughly 240 motion pictures made between 1913 and 1946; the massive sweetheart of a guy who sounds like he's gargling rocks.

Pallette was born in Kansas and attended a military academy in Indiana. He spent six years in stock theater in the early years of the last century, then became a film actor in the fledgling moving picture industry in southern California. By the end of 1914, he had appeared in 50 short films (mostly Westerns) as a rangy second lead. As he gained more and more weight, his career shifted to comic character roles for the Hal Roach Studios, and with the advent of sound (and weighing in at roughly 300 pounds), Pallette's distinctive voice and comic timing propelled him into character actor stardom (if that's a thing).

Pallette worked steadily until the mid-1940s, when his right-wing paranoia over impending nuclear annihilation compelled him to set up a survivalist compound in rural Oregon. 

After a couple of years, however, and with no sign of Armageddon on the horizon, Pallette moved back to Hollywood, but did not return to films. Eugene Pallette died of cancer on September 3, 1954 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 65 years old.

Glenda Farrell, the fast-talking, wisecracking blonde of early Warner Bros. films, was born in Enid, Oklahoma, probably in 1901. Some sources cite 1904, but if the U.S. Census is to be believed, Ms. Farrell's publicity people probably encouraged the misconception.

But what's three years? Whether she started acting at 7 or 10 as (what else?) Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Glenda Farrell knew what she wanted and worked very hard to get it. She preferred stage work to movies, but appeared in several silent films in uncredited parts before making a name for herself on Broadway. Her success in theatre led to a contract with Warner Brothers anyway, and Farrell became the studio's go-to gun moll, girl reporter, and smart-aleck best friend; second leads, but sturdy ones. She was often paired with pal Joan Blondell in the early 30s, but also supported the likes of Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, and Kay Francis.

She is probably best known as the eponymous star of the Torchy Blane series, an agreeable B series about a plucky reporter who'd do anything to get a story. But Farrell grew tired of being typecast and took fewer roles on the screen, preferring the range of opportunity Broadway offered.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Farrell's screen appearances were primarily on television. In 1963 she won an Emmy for her recurring role on Ben Casey, and took the occasional role in film up until 1970, the year before her death. Even though several sources claim that Glenda Farrell was not a smoker -- and even though there's many an excellent photo out there of Glenda Farrell spectacularly posed with a cigarette -- it was lung cancer that took her on May 1, 1971, at age 66 or 70, depending.

She was a joy to watch, particularly in those buddy pictures with Joan Blondell. For a gal who was often shooting three pictures at once in those years, Glenda Farrell seemed to be having an awfully good time.