Spoilers throughout for the 1944 film Laura. At a swanky cocktail party in New York City, glamorous advertising executive Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) artfully rebuffs pretty playboy Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price) when he begins flirting with her the minute she catches his eye. You can hardly blame Shelby – with her impeccably coiffed curls, simple… Read more »
Leave Her to Heaven (1945) is one of the odder mainstream American films I’ve seen from the 1940s. Its plot involves the archetypes and interest in the dark side of humanity that are trademarks of film noir, but boasts colorful cinematography that feels like it belongs in a 1950s melodrama. The pacing isn’t even, but… Read more »
The American studio films of the 1940s represent a great period for truly evocative and audacious uses of color: the lost art of three-strip Technicolor (which can’t be recreated today in exactly the same way — it’s now gone with the original film stock) tinted the world in bold and vivid hues. And yet, even… Read more »
Guest post by Emma Kearney. Gene Tierney worked at Twentieth Century Fox between 1940 and 1955, most notably in the film noirs Laura and Leave Her to Heaven. In these roles, she played two poles of the femme fatale trope: the New York dame who isn’t really all that fatal and the housewife who really… Read more »
There’s always been something about cinephilia, particularly that classic form of cinephilia (well known to many us) which fetishizes old Hollywood films, that strikes me as a little bit morbid. Films capture a series of moves and gestures that remain permanent — the movies always stay the same, though our reactions change almost invariably with… Read more »