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Based on Elijah Wald’s hour-by-hour countdown Dylan Goes Electric!, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is a quirky, engaging and (thankfully) never reverential biopic that tracks the journey of Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) from acoustic folk to rock amplification. Its main concern is music and mimesis: to showcase Chalamet performing the Dylan songbook with a fidelity to the original beyond the vocal range of the lip-synching Larry Parks in The Jolson Story (1946) or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).

The imitations are all, as it were, pitch perfect, but they tend to submerge the political dimension to Dylan’s decision to crank up the volume at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. The gesture was not about electricity but autonomy, the desire of the artist to free himself from the restrictive meters and themes of an agit-prop folk tradition. Heard retrospectively, “It Ain’t Me Babe” is no longer just...

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Ron Masak, the familiar character actor who as Cabot Cove Sheriff Mort Metzger was the beneficiary of Jessica Fletcher’s crime-solving prowess on the last eight seasons of Murder, She Wrote, has died. He was 86.

Masak died Thursday of natural causes at a hospital in Thousand Oaks, his granddaughter Kaylie Defilippis told The Hollywood Reporter.

The Chicago native appeared six times on Police Story, five times on Bewitched and four times on Webster and also showed up on everything from The Flying Nun, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, Ironside and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Magnum, P.I., The Rockford FIles, Columbo, Falcon Crest and Cold Case during his six-decade career.

In February 1960, the everyman actor portrayed a harmonica-playing soldier on “The Purple Testament,” the 19th episode of The Twilight Zone, and had a turn as a nutty Dracula-like count on...

John Huston plays every narrative card in the deck for the difficult task of expressing the great doctor’s insights into psychoanalysis. His actors personalize the concepts of neurosis, etc., investing us in Sigmund’s search for answers in long-ago Vienna. The fascination has multiple levels: in investigating the nature of ‘hysteria’ Dr. Sigmund Freud finds that he shares to a degree the same mental aberrations, as does his mentor. Actor Montgomery Clift was fighting numerous personal demons at the time, and Huston’s directing methods were described by some as cruel. Superb production values and Jerry Goldsmith’s music score enhance the experience. The scan on view is Huston’s director’s cut, not Universal’s shorter original release version.

Freud

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1962 / B&w / 2:35 widescreen / 141 min. / Street Date November 20, 2021 / Freud: The Secret Passion / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Montgomery Clift, Susannah York, Larry Parks, Susan Kohner,...

Nita Bieber, a onetime dancer and actress who appeared with the Three Stooges in Rhythm and Weep, with Judy Garland in Summer Stock and with Tony Curtis in The Prince Who Was a Thief, has died. She was 92.

Bieber died Monday in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, her son, Rocky, told The Hollywood Reporter.

A graduate of Hollywood High, Bieber also appeared as a dancer in The Jolson Story (1946), starring Larry Parks, and worked alongside the Bowery Boys in News Hounds (1947), with Jackie Cooper and Jackie Coogan in Kilroy Was Here (1947) and with Hedy Lamarr in A Lady Without Passport ...

Nita Bieber, a onetime dancer and actress who appeared with the Three Stooges in Rhythm and Weep, with Judy Garland in Summer Stock and with Tony Curtis in The Prince Who Was a Thief, has died. She was 92.

Bieber died Monday in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, her son, Rocky, told The Hollywood Reporter.

A graduate of Hollywood High, Bieber also appeared as a dancer in The Jolson Story (1946), starring Larry Parks, and worked alongside the Bowery Boys in News Hounds (1947), with Jackie Cooper and Jackie Coogan in Kilroy Was Here (1947) and with Hedy Lamarr in A Lady Without Passport ...

Among this year’s leading Oscar contenders for Best Actor is Emmy winner Rami Malek (“Mr. Robot”) for his star turn as the late Freddie Mercury, the legendary lead vocalist of the rock band Queen, in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Should Malek reap an Oscar bid, he will mark the 12th leading man to date recognized for his portrayal of a real-life musician.

First to achieve this feat was James Cagney, nominated for his lively depiction of Broadway composer and performer George M. Cohan in “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (1942). On Oscar night, Cagney was triumphant, scoring the lone Oscar of his storied career.

Later in the decade, a pair of actors earned recognition for portraying real-life musicians, the first being Cornel Wilde, up for his performance as Polish pianist Frederic Chopin in “A Song to Remember” (1945). The following year, Larry Parks was a nominee for portraying singer and actor Al Jolson in “The Jolson Story...

Dalida screens as part of the 26th Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival On Saturday, November 4 at 9:30 Pm at Landmark’s Plaza Frontenac Cinemas. Click Here for ticket information. It screens again at the same venue on Sunday, November 5 at 2:30 Pm. Click Here for ticket information

We in the states have enjoyed biographies since the start of cinema, particularly those focusing in on popular stars. And of the show-biz bios, those of singers seem to attract film goers. In the late 1940’s Larry Parks was a sensation in The Jolson Story, so much so that he stepped in for Al in a sequel Jolson Sings Again. In more recent years Bobby Darrin’s life inspired Beyond The Sea and Jamie Foxx nabbed an Oscar as Mr. Charles in Ray. Surely this same genre has been done in other countries, say…France. Just 10 years ago Marion Cotillard snagged...

22 March 1951: Larry Parks is the first Hollywood figure to admit to House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities Committee that he had once been a member of the Communist party

Washington

Larry Parks, star of the Al Jolson films, said to-day that he expected ten words he uttered to-day to end his Hollywood career. The words were “I was a Communist party member from 1941 to 1945.”

He is the first Hollywood figure to admit that he had been a member of the party. He made the admission before the House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities Committee.

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Fred Astaire ca. 1935. Fred Astaire movies: Dancing in the dark, on the ceiling on TCM Aug. 5, '15, is Fred Astaire Day on Turner Classic Movies, as TCM continues with its “Summer Under the Stars” series. Just don't expect any rare Astaire movies, as the actor-singer-dancer's star vehicles – mostly Rko or MGM productions – have been TCM staples since the early days of the cable channel in the mid-'90s. True, Fred Astaire was also featured in smaller, lesser-known fare like Byron Chudnow's The Amazing Dobermans (1976) and Yves Boisset's The Purple Taxi / Un taxi mauve (1977), but neither one can be found on the TCM schedule. (See TCM's Fred Astaire movie schedule further below.) Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals Some fans never tire of watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing together. With these particular fans in mind, TCM is showing – for the nth time – nine Astaire-Rogers musicals of the '30s,...

Top box office movies of 2013: If you make original, quality films… (photo: Sandra Bullock has two movies among the top 15 box office hits of 2013; Bullock is seen here in ‘The Heat,’ with Melissa McCarthy) (See previous post: “2013 Box Office Record? History is Remade If a Few ‘Minor Details’ Ignored.”) As further evidence that moviegoers want original, quality entertainment, below you’ll find a list of the top 15 movies at the domestic box office in 2013 — nine of which are sequels or reboots (ten if you include Oz the Great and Powerful), and more than half of which are 3D releases. Disney and Warner Bros. were the two top studios in 2013. Disney has five movies among the top 15; Warners has three. With the exception of the sleeper blockbuster Gravity, which, however dumbed down, targeted a more mature audience, every single one of the titles below were aimed either at teenagers/very,...

Observer film critic Philip French explores the dreamlike qualities of the cinema

From early in the 20th century, cinemas became prominent features of the urban landscape and later, in the form of drive-ins, of the American countryside. As the late John Updike observed in his poem Movie House:

No windows intrude real light

Into this temple of shades, and the size of it,

The size of the great rear wall measures

The breadth of the dreams we have there.

It dwarfs the village bank,

Out looms the town hall,

And even in its decline

Makes the bright-ceilinged supermarket seem mean.

Very soon cinemas began to appear in the films themselves, as dream palaces to escape the world, trysting places for lovers, temporary refuges for fugitives, secret rendezvous for spies, or just places in which to work, most suggestively as that key cultural figure, the projectionist.

Gangster John Dillinger was ambushed...

2016 movie still trailing Michael Moore, Al Gore 2016 Obama's America, Dinesh D'Souza and John Sullivan's anti-Obama documentary, has surpassed the concert movie Katy Perry: Part of Me to become the second highest-grossing non-fiction film released in North America in 2012. By Sunday evening, D'Souza and Sullivan's right-wing doc -- current cume according to the web site Box Office Mojo stands at an estimated $27.66 million (as of Wed., September 13) -- should have also surpassed the nature doc Chimpanzee ($28.97 million) to become the year's top documentary in the United States and Canada. Worldwide, 2016 -- a 100% domestic sleeper hit like, say, the Tyler Perry movies (which have no audience overseas) -- remains behind both Chimpanzee (another domestic-only release) and Katy Perry: Part of Me. (Please scroll down for more details about the box-office performances of non-fiction films worldwide both in 2012 and "all-time.") As per numerous box-office reports, as the sixth biggest non-fiction film ever (or rather,...

(John Huston, 1962, Transition Digital Media, 12)

John Huston originally commissioned a screenplay about Sigmund Freud from Jean-Paul Sartre. It proved overlong and unwieldy and the ultimate film came closer to one of the respectful Warner Bros biopics of great men on which both Huston and the film's German-born producer, Wolfgang Reinhardt, had worked in the 1930s. Set in Vienna in the 1880s, it's about what Huston in his prologue portentously describes as "Freud's descent into a region almost as black as hell itself, man's unconscious and how he let in light". In his penultimate screen appearance, a troubled but generally impressive Montgomery Clift plays the young neurologist who challenges the medical establishment, moving from hypnosis towards psychoanalysis and developing his revolutionary theories, most especially about infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex.

Susannah York and David McCallum play two key patients, with the long-blacklisted Larry Parks as Freud's friend Joseph Breuer.

Actor and singer known for her role as the Sinatra-chasing taxi driver Brunhilde Esterhazy in On the Town

The most famous role played by the all-round entertainer Betty Garrett, who has died aged 91, was Brunhilde Esterhazy, the taxi driver in Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's musical On the Town (1949). In the film, she introduces herself to a shy sailor played by Frank Sinatra and asks him: "Why don't you come up to my place?" She is soon vigorously chasing him around her cab, rejecting any of his suggestions about what to see in New York with the rapid retort: "My place!"

In Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), Garrett had pursued Sinatra with equal zeal, assuring him by singing It's Fate, Baby, It's Fate. She also panted after Red Skelton in Neptune's Daughter (1949), begging him not to leave her apartment with the song Baby, It's Cold Outside.

Actress/singer Betty Garrett has died at the age of 91.

The star passed away on Saturday, a day after she was admitted to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles with heart problems.

Garrett began her career in the 1930s and established herself as a star with a stint in Broadway play Call Me Mister.

The stage performance led her to Hollywood, where she landed roles as Frank Sinatra's love interest in 1949's movie musicals Take Me Out to the Ballgame and On the Town.

But her screen ambitions were cut short after her husband, actor Larry Parks, was blacklisted by Hollywood's top executives for his early membership in the Communist Party.

Garrett managed to revive her career a few years later and starred in 1955 musical My Sister Eileen, and eventually moved into the TV industry, appearing in popular 1970s series All in the Family and Laverne and Shirley.

More recently, she made a cameo in Ted Danson's sitcom Becker, a performance which landed her an Emmy nomination in 2003.

She is survived by her two sons, composer Garrett Parks and actor Andrew Parks.

I was saddened to learn this morning that Betty Garrett, the great star of stage, screen, and TV, passed away yesterday at the age of 94 after suffering an aortic aneurysm.

Garrett was one of those rare people — like, say, Jack Valenti — who happened to be a witness to and/or participant in a remarkably high number of historic events of the 20th century. She was a member of Orson Welles’s famed Mercury Theatre company, and was with him on the night that he shook up America with his infamous radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” (1938); she was Frank Sinatra’s leading lady in two of the earliest great M-g-m musical-comedies, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (1949) and “On the Town” (1949); her career was greatly hurt by the Hollywood Red Scare after her husband, the Oscar nominated actor Larry Parks, refused to name names before the House Committee...

Comedic stage and screen actress Betty Garrett passed away Saturday at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center due to an aortic aneurysm. She was 91. Betty was best known for her roles in the musicals On The Town and Take Me Out to the Ballgame, as well as her television work on All in the Family and Laverne & Shirley. She starred onscreen opposite movie legends Frank Sinatra and Red Skelton. The "Baby, It's Cold Outside" singer was blacklisted in Hollywood after her husband, actor Larry Parks, testified about his involvement with the Communist party in 1951. Recently, Betty had been performing one-woman shows and teaching musical-comedy at Theatre West, the North Hollywood nonprofit theater she...