TOP 100 ACTOR SITES
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| Roy Greenslade: Bogart movie clip - that's the press, baby This movie scene from 1952 is only 90 seconds long, and there's no especially topical reason for my running it today, but it might lift the spirits as we contemplate another tough year for newspapers.The plot of Deadline - USA revolves around the fact that a New York paper, The Day, is to be sold off to a commercial rival within three days. Its editor, played by Humphrey Bogart, seems ready to bow out tamely when one of his reporters is badly beaten up by a racketeer's gang.The editor then uses the final issues of his paper to crusade against the gangster. How many of us would love to speak Bogart's lines as he gives the nod to publish and be damned? "That's the press, baby, the press, and there's nothing you can do about it, nothing."Factual point, courtesy of Wikipedia: The Day is loosely based on a New York title, The Sun, which closed in 1950 and was edited by Benjamin Day.Factual point two, courtesy of Charlie Burgess: There is a US paper - in New London, Connecticut - called The Day. It sells 34,000 a day and once used a terrific marketing slogan: The Day. Don't start yours without it.NewspapersRoy Greensladeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Buckle up! Kid films getting better at safety CHICAGO (AP) -- Characters in children's movies are wising up about personal safety, increasingly using seat belts, bike helmets and crosswalks, but many still aren't ideal role models, a government study found.... hosted.ap.org |
Model 'married to dodge army duty' ISRAEL'S military has a new target in its sights, Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli, Sky News reports. news.com.au |
Maguire bags Bilbo role in The Hobbit AMERICAN actor Tobey Maguire will star in The Hobbit after quitting the Spider-Man franchise. news.com.au |
Anita Ekberg | Philip French's screen legends No 81: Anita EkbergSociologists and cultural historians agree that the 1950s was the decade in which the United States fetishised the breast. Jane Russell, for whom Howard Hughes had devised a special bra in the mid-40s, truly came into her own, and she was joined by Marilyn Monroe for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1953, the year Playboy was launched. In 1952, Anita Ekberg was a Look magazine cover girl; by January 1956, she was on the cover of Life.Born in Malmö, the sixth of a blue-collar worker's eight children, Ekberg was voted Miss Sweden (her official vital statistics were 39-22-36) and went to America in 1951 for the Miss Universe competition. She didn't win and she spoke little English, but she got a movie contract with Universal, and though she took little interest in the dramatic coaching they offered, she found herself in demand for minor roles at other studios, for pin-up photographs to adorn lads mags and subsequently to appear on TV shows (Ed Murrow's Person to Person among them). In 1955, Time magazine published its notorious report on "Sin and Sweden", and this voluptuous, publicity-seeking Swedish blonde with her succession of celebrity lovers came to represent the new, liberated Scandinavian sexuality.Ekberg made a couple of Hollywood films with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (both involving Frank Tashlin who'd written bosom gags for pictures featuring Russell and Monroe and later directed Jayne Mansfield's best-known pictures) and another couple in Britain. But it was in Italy that she found acting fame playing the devious Hélène Kuragin, unfaithful wife of Pierre (Henry Fonda) in King Vidor's War and Peace (1956), shot in Rome's Cinecittà .She returned there to appear as the visiting film star Sylvia in La dolce vita, which opened 50 years ago next month and made her an enduring legend, most famously for her celebrated scene with Marcello Mastroianni in the Trevi Fountain. Her only truly memorable role thereafter was Fellini's segment of the portmanteau comedy Boccaccio '70 (1962) where she plays a 20ft version of herself with cleavage as deep as the Grand Canyon, stepping down off a hoarding advertising milk to terrify a Roman prude.Fellini was to give her a couple of walk-on roles as herself, but from the 60s onwards she began to ignore her weight, balloon out (42-27-38 by 1982), and appear in rapidly forgotten Italian films, giving occasional rather sour interviews. But not before featuring with the first Bond girl Ursula Andress opposite Dean Martin in a slack Robert Aldrich western with the suggestive title 4 for Texas (1963), and she became an honorary Bond Girl the same year by way of From Russia With Love. In Fleming's novel, Bond shoots an assassin as he flees via a secret escape hatch in an enormous poster of Monroe in Niagara. In the film, he's killed as he appears through Ekberg's mouth in a giant ad for Call Me Bwana. "She should have kept her mouth shut," Connery quips.Ekberg on Fellini "It was I who made Fellini, not the other way around."Ekberg on Sweden "How can I know who's prime minister or in government in Sweden? It's been 40 years since I moved abroad."Ekberg on her embonpoint "I'm very proud of my breasts, as every woman should be. It's not cellular obesity, it's womanliness."Essential DVDs Hollywood or Bust, War and Peace, La dolce vita, Boccaccio '70,Next: Henry Fondaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |