TOP 100 ACTOR SITES
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| Philip French's screen legends No. 78: Donna Reed 1921-86Every Hollywood studio had its girl-next-door under contract in the 1930s and 40s, a pretty, wholesome, reliable future homemaker, usually a small-town girl from the midwest. The most perfect of them all was Donna Reed, brought up on a farm Iowa, 5ft 7in, brunette and exuding an unaffected purity. She was spotted by an MGM scout in a student show at Los Angeles City College, where she was in secretarial school. The studio changed her name from Donne Belle Mullinger to Donna Reed and cast her in a succession of lightweight films including Shadow of the Thin Man with William Powell and Myrna Loy and Babes on Broadway with Rooney and Garland. By 1944, with the help of the MGM publicity department, a US battalion in Europe voted her "the girl we'd most like to come home to".She came into her own as the war ended when she had two of her most celebrated roles, in films made by veteran directors returning to Hollywood after years away working on military film projects – John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945) and Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). In Ford's picture, one of the great films about World War Two, she played a naval nurse selflessly tending injured and dying soldiers and sailors during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. There's no sequence in Ford's work more poignant than the one where she's the dinner guest of an officers' mess just before the fall of Corregidor. In It's a Wonderful Life she was the beautiful girl-next-door who marries James Stewart and shares his troubles. Neither film was a great success at the time, both films are now classics, with Capra's regarded as a complex inspirational work, the greatest of all Christmas entertainments and a film for all seasons. In the film she had four children by her lifelong husband. In real life she had four children from the second of three marriages.Reed made some decent pictures after that, all genre movies, before moving on to become the ideal Eisenhower-era wife in a long-running TV sitcom, The Donna Reed Show, and briefly taking over the role of Miss Ellie from Barbara Bel Geddes in Dallas. But by then she'd made her third major movie, Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity (1953). In a 1950s New Yorker cartoon in the 1950s, a laidback Hollywood producer addresses a pair of louche screenwriters thus: "The way I see it, he's a regular guy and she's the pretty kid next door. As the movie starts he's got a monkey on his back and she's just out on parole." This just about sums up her role as the classy prostitute in love with Montgomery Clift's doomed soldier in Hawaii on the eve of Pearl Harbor, who wants to get back to her small home town in Iowa. It brought her an Oscar as best supporting actress.Reed on her "34B-24-34" past "Forty pictures I was in and all I can remember is 'What kind of bra will you be wearing today, honey?'"Hedda Hopper The vicious gossip columnist campaigned for Ginger Rogers to be cast in It's a Wonderful Life. After Reed got the role, Hopper relentlessly attacked the film and its director.Lt Beulah Greenwald Watcher The nurse on whom Reed's role in They Were Expendable was based, sued MGM (and was awarded $290,000 by a Missouri court) for "cheapening her character" by suggesting the hero and heroine had slept together.Essential DVDs The Picture of Dorian Gray, They Were Expendable, It's a Wonderful Life, From Here to Eternity.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Film Weekly goes on The Road with Viggo Mortensen This week's edition goes on a journey with The Road star Viggo Mortensen, hangs on for lift-off at the Bafta Orange Rising Star nominations, flies Up in the Air with George Clooney and comes down to Earth with a thump with Crude, a documentary about the true price of oil.Viggo Mortensen stars as The Man, journeying with his son south in search of safety and humanity, in John Hillcoat's film of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road. The actor tells Jason Solomons how he prepared for the role (Tarkovsky movies were in the mix) and pays tribute to his young co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee.Jason was also at the announcement of this year's Bafta Orange Rising Star nominations, which features a very strong lineup: Jesse Eisenberg of Zombieland and Adventureland fame, About a Boy and Skins' Nicholas Hoult, Carey Mulligan who made a brilliant breakthrough in An Education, Tahar Rahim of Un Prophéte, and Kristen Stewart of the Twilight saga. Noel Clarke, who won the award last year, shares what the prize meant for him, and nominee Nicholas Hoult, who sports an American accent, fake tan and a very fluffy jumper in the widely-praised A Single Man, reveals how he landed his role in Tom Ford's directorial debut only two weeks before shooting started.Peter Bradshaw then joins Jason to review some of this week's key releases: Jason Reitman's smart, stylish and enjoyable corporate comedy Up in the Air with George Clooney, Hirokazu Kore-eda's beautiful Japanese family drama Still Walking and the cockney geezer chamber opera 44 Inch Chest, starring Ray Winstone, John Hurt and Ian McShane.Finally, Jason speaks to documentary-maker Joe Berlinger about his film Crude, which deftly assembles the complex stories surrounding oil pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon and how the local communities mounted their legal challenge against the mighty American oil giant Chevron.Jason SolomonsPeter BradshawJason Phipps guardian.co.uk |
You review: The Book of Eli Did the post-apocalyptic, religiously themed multiplex-filler deliver you into appreciative satisfaction – or leave you doubting your faith in cinema?Along comes the second post-apocalyptic tale to hit UK cinemas in the last month, and the critics have got this one pegged as the poor relation of John Hillcoat's The Road, which arrived first and is likely to stand the test of time rather better. Despite some excellent cinematography and a stylish, sepia-toned vision of America in the wake of nuclear devastation, The Book of Eli is hampered by faith-based sermonising and at least two ham-fisted final act twists, which most viewers will have spotted coming a mile off.The Hughes brothers, of Menace II Society and From Hell fame, are in charge here, with Denzel Washington as Eli, a powerful desert warrior on a journey to the west coast with a not-so-mysterious tome in his possession. The landscape he must travel through is populated by the dregs of civilisation: a wild, wild west inhabited by cannibals and murderers, who our hero ably dispatches with consummate martial arts expertise. After approaching a makeshift settlement in the hope of finding fresh water, Eli is captured by the avaricious Carnegie (Gary Oldman), the rickety old town's self-appointed leader, who attempts to take the book, which he believes will give him great power."Traditionally, when a major studio released a big, pompous science-fiction film, someone enterprising (usually Roger Corman) got out a leaner, meaner, funnier version of the same idea," writes Empire's Kim Newman. "Rollerball was trumped by Death Race 2000 and Jurassic Park had less hungry genetically engineered dinosaurs than Carnosaur. This Hughes brothers comeback ought to be the Corman version of The Road, but carries over too much of the deadening respectability of the higher-profile picture."Mad Max 2 with Thought for the Day thrown in. There's some ace post-holocaust action, but you can't help feel you were invited to a party with fizzy pop and cream cake and got suckered into a sermon instead.""The Hughes brothers intend this doomily pompous multiplex-filler as a futuristic western, but its feet are firmly planted in a big bucket of po-faced messianic cement," writes the Telegraph's Tim Robey. "You wonder what Washington saw in it, but then the same could be said of everything he's made lately with Tony Scott. Gary Oldman, who plays a small-town tyrant with an eye on Denzel's bestseller, does 'wearily authoritative baddy' as if pressing a switch." "The film metamorphises into a po-faced religious tract, interspersing elaborate action scenes with long-winded sermons about faith," writes our own Andrew Pulver. "Despite the impressively atmospheric opening sequences, the Hugheses allow their film to lurch into inspirational-literature territory – and it ends up dissipating the brooding, cryptic atmosphere of its opening scenes."Perhaps unsurprisingly, American critics are more positive in their assessments. "The Hughes brothers have a vivid way with imagery here, as in their earlier films," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "The film looks and feels good, and Washington's performance is the more uncanny the more we think back over it. The ending is 'flawed,' as we critics like to say, but it's so magnificently, shamelessly, implausibly flawed that (a) it breaks apart from the movie and has a life of its own, or (b) at least it avoids being predictable."The Book of Eli sets itself up as an enjoyable Mad Max meets I Am Legend romp, but the disappointing nature of its central maguffin – can you tell what it is yet? – undermines the delicious air of intrigue and uncertainty which permeates the early scenes. Oldman has form playing off-kilter villains, but he manages to be both workmanlike and hammy – not an easy combination to pull off – and certainly not one that makes for comfortable viewing.There's an enjoyable interlude featuring Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour as a pair of suspiciously hospitable cannibals, but the constantly preachy tone tends to grate after a while, and nothing in the self-important, supposedly revelatory denouement makes up for having been fed so much irredeemably inexplicable hokum.Have you seen The Book of Eli? If so, was it a gripping yarn or the celluloid equivalent of a trashy novel?Denzel WashingtonBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
A Prophet: 'An electrifying tale of survival against the odds' Jacques Audiard's muscular, confident prison drama is the first real masterpiece of the decade, says Xan Brooks guardian.co.uk |
Mamma Mia! ABBAWORLD theme park opens in London LONDON (AP) -- Is it possible to have too much ABBA?... hosted.ap.org |