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The Paleface

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1948 / 91 min.

Starring Bob Hope, Jane Russell

Cinematography by Ray Rennahan

Directed by Norman Z. McLeod

In 1934 Al Christie directed Going Spanish, a 19 minute farce billed as “An Educational Musical Comedy.” The movie is notable only for the film debut of Bob Hope whose wisecracks about the movie’s incompetence provoked Christie to cancel the comedian’s contract. Another filmmaker made his mark with the irascible producer too—Norman Z. McLeod got his feet wet working as title cartoonist for a series of silent films known as Christie’s Comedies. Pretty soon McLeod would be dealing with funny men in the flesh; W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye and Hope himself. He would direct—and with those particular artists, “manage” might be a more appropriate term—some of the greatest comedies to emerge from the studio system.

McLeod’s technique, a hands-off approach that was the opposite of showy,...

In conjunction with the LUMIÈRE publication of the free downloadable e-book "Allan Dwan: A Dossier," we present a new video series, An Allan Dwan Serial. The serial is a continuous selection of clips from the career of the one and only Allan Dwan, an engineering director whose broad filmography connects in beautiful and unexpected ways.

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Download "Allan Dwan: A Dossier" to read Fernando F. Croce's piece on Montana Belle.

News.

Did you see David Lynch's teaser on Vine? The real announcement is here: he'll be dropping a new album, The Big Dream, on July 16th. Watch the album trailer above and listen to the new track, "I'm Waiting Here", below:

Lars von Trier will be taking a new approach to promoting his new (two part!) film, Nymphomaniac:

"Using a structure known from literature Nymphomaniac consists of chapters, encapsulating both Volume I and Volume II and during the next eight months, starting from June and like domino pieces counting down to the release, small bites of these chapters will be published exclusively by a community of selected newspapers around the world.

Each chapter teaser is defined by a headline, a still and a short narrative that playfully unveils the multilayered universe of Nymphomaniac with which Lars von Trier wants to introduce a new film genre: Digressionism."

We've said it once,...

Above: Calendar Girl (1947) / Pearl of the South Pacific (1955) / Frontier Marshal (1939)

Last October, my co-editor David Phelps and I released our first self-published e-book out into the world. It was entitled William A. Wellman: A Dossier, and after the somewhat life-changing experience we had discovering Wellman's films during his Film Forum retrospective, we were happy to have discovered a format that would allow us to curate, create, and share an anthology of criticism centered on Wellman's work.

After the release, David and I found ourselves contemplating what to do next, and our thoughts soon brought us back to a night when we screened Allan Dwan's Cattle Queen of Montana (1954), a Western unlike any Western we had seen. A movie that on paper is a simple genre exercise about a vengeful woman trying to regain her land and cattle but in practice is about how different people and events fill...

Voluptuous star of The Outlaw and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

The actor Jane Russell, who has died aged 89, was among the most desired women of the 20th century. She had great erotic force and great likability. Russell made just over 20 films, but only a handful of those are remembered: her first film, The Outlaw (1943); the comedy western The Paleface (1948), with Bob Hope; and the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), co-starring Marilyn Monroe.

The Outlaw, produced by Howard Hughes, was famously promoted with a series of publicity stills showing Russell lying in the hay, and bending down to pick up bales. The experience made her savvy about the vulgarity of the film industry. Her breasts were less covered and more fetishised, lit, photographed, designed and dreamed about than any woman's in the cinema had been until that time. Hughes even designed a special bra for her to wear in the film (although she...

Iconic actress Jane Russell died Monday in her Santa Maria home due to respiratory problems. She was 89 at the time of her passing.

Jane Russell came to prominence in the late 40s and early 50s, reigning as one of America's most popular sex symbols of that time. She appeared in such hit movies as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Double Dynamite, and Montana Belle. Here last performance onscreen was in the television show Hunter. She had continued singing and working for various causes in the weeks leading up to her death.

During her film career, Jane Russell founded Waif, the Women's Adoption International Fund to facilitate U.S. adoptions of foreign orphans.

Jane Russell is survived by three grown children, a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law. She also had six grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren at the time of her death.

A service will be held to honor Jane Russell at Pacific Christian Church in Santa Maria,...

Fans everywhere mourn the loss of Jane Russell, who passed away today at the age of 89. Ms. Russell, famous for her roles in the 1940's and 1950's in classics such as The Outlaw (1941) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), was discovered by Howard Hughes at the age of 19.

Russell's first film, Hughes' The Outlaw, took years to achieve a wide release. It was filmed in 1941 and took ages to get past the censors, due mostly to the manner in which Jane Russell was filmed. With FIlmChat in 2009, when asked about how this affected her, as a young girl, a new actress, and a devout Christian, Ms. Russell said that, "It was a big fuss! But it was all about some cleavage. Today they are doing cleavage in the back!" She also said that the early controversy got her accustomed to being assertive with the press.

Russell had a great film career that...