For the past eight years, I have been trying to explain the sheer joy that is Esther Jane Williams. From the moment I first laid eyes on the champion swimmer-turned-actress in Thrill of a Romance (1945), I was transfixed. As I sighed over her delicious chemistry with Van Johnson and marveled at the film’s Technicolor… Read more »
How do you solve a problem like Maria? That’s the question on many people’s lips in You Were Never Lovelier, a stellar 1942 musical about an American dancer (Fred Astaire) who is mistaken for the secret admirer of Maria Acuña (Rita Hayworth), an Argentinian hotelier’s daughter. As embodied by Hayworth, Maria is a clever and… Read more »
As one of the brightest stars of the 20th century, Josephine Baker wasn’t just a mesmerizing actor or a sublime dancer who could make beautifully goofy faces — she was, and still is, an iconic cultural figure whose powerful presence incurs questions of colonialism, Black womanhood, authorship, and much, much more. In her new book… Read more »
When I think of Harold Lloyd, that dazzling innovator of silent comedy, I don’t think of the iconic image of him dangling on a clock, high above a bustling city street. I don’t think of him racing a horse-drawn wagon until its wheels pop off or clinging to a girder as its moves through the… Read more »
In 1975, Ted Ngoy was working as a gas station attendant when he suddenly noticed the delicious smells coming from a nearby donut shop. Curious, he approached the counter and ordered his very first donut, the glorious pastry instantly reminding him of nom kong, a similar treat from his home country of Cambodia. Just four… Read more »
Like so many others, the exhaustive weight of living and working in a pandemic has really been running me down, especially now that we’re close to the one-year mark of this tragic, seemingly endless moment in time. One of the most important pieces of advice that’s been said during this past year, however, is that… Read more »