About a month ago, I emailed Adam Ross and asked him if he’d let me do one of his Friday Screen Test interviews at his blog, DVD Panache. He graciously agreed to allow me to promote myself via personal movie history confession. The interview is up now; I’ve pasted an excerpt after the jump, as companion to the above video. You can read the full thing here. Also: I’d like to note that I just laughed out loud reading the quote that makes up the entirety of the “About Me” section of Adam’s blog: “I think it would be fun to run a [blog].” –C.F. Kane.
Why didn’t Cyd Charisse––who died in Los Angeles on Tuesday at the age of 86––ever fully become the Ginger Rogers to Gene Kelly’s Fred Astaire? To compare Charisse directly to Rogers would be unfair; the former was an athletic show-stopper who regularly held down solos seemingly designed to draw attention to their own difficulty, while the latter’s dance career revolved around the uneviable task of making Fred Astaire’s choreography seem spontaneous and easy. And Charisse also made movies with Astaire––The Band Wagon and Silk Stockings offered two of her biggest roles––but her chemistry with the big baller of ballroom and tap dance was virtually nonexistant. The impossibly leggy, mildly exotic, confident almost to the point of camp Charisse added counterpoint nuance to Kelly’s weird barrel-chested blue-collar ballet. It never felt like it was a perfect pairing, and that was maybe what was exciting about it: as a partner and as a choreographer, Kelly knew how to use and play off their incongruities.
Film Threat “celebrates” Breast Cancer Awareness Month by counting down the Fifty Best Breasts in Movie History — and yes, that’s 25 actresses, two apiece. At MediaBistroLA, Kate Coe bristles that “pre-code films are largely ignored, with the exception of Mae West,” and that’s a fair point; choosing West over, say, Clara Bow is like passing over a sorority sister for her salty, disreputable great aunt.
Unfortunately (and somewhat surprisingly), there’s not yet a web portal dedicated the preservation of early cinema necklines. In fact, my Google search for “pre-code cleavage” turned up just one result, a message board comment declaring that Zita Johann’s “pre-code cleavage, however lacking in volume, was absolutely the hottest thing of the Castle Films silent 8mm era.” I also came across a discussion on a Turner Classic Movies message board thread on “plunging cleavage,” recommending Joan Blondell and Jean Harlow in just about everything. As commenter MovieJoe79 puts it about the latter, “she never wore a bra, so you can catch a real eyeful on occasion!”
Below the jump, you’ll find my picks for a few classic pre-code cleavage uses. Because in the end, we are all twelve year-old boys. Some of us were just born in 1918.
