Happy Anniversary, Ann Todd!
The Seventh Veil (1945) - British Classic Noir - Full Movie, starring James Mason, Ann Todd, Herbert Lom...The movie begins with Francesca (Ann Todd) in the hospital—mental hospital it’s soon revealed. Recovering from her unsuccessful suicide attempt, she tells her life’s story to psychiatrist Dr. Larsen (Herbert Lom). This is one of those rare films where the psychiatrist doesn’t fall in love with his patient.
She relates going to live with her crippled, pianist guardian, Nicholas, who imperiously turns her piano talents into concert pianist proportions. And she dutifully becomes famous, as a love of music drives her as much as it drives her cousin. Francesca’s first love is an “American” band leader (British actor Hugh McDermott, sans an American accent), but when she informs Nicholas she plans to marry, he decrees otherwise, as he is her guardian until she’s twenty-one. Nicholas commissions him to paint her portrait, which eventually hangs on Nicholas’ wall, รก la Gene Tierney’s portrait in
Laura, Joanne Woodward’s in
Sleuth, Jennifer Jones’ in
Portrait of Jennie.
Source: classicfilmfreak.com
The Passionate Friends (1948) - David Lean David Lean's film adaptation of the H. G. Wells story, starring Ann Todd, Trevor Howard and Claude Rains.
Ann Todd plays Sylvia Leeds Kent in "Sylvia" from "Alfred Hitchcock presents" (19 Jan. 1958)
Sylvia is a young woman who we think is contemplating suicide. Her ex-husband, Peter, married her for money. When he forged a check, her father agreed not to prosecute if he divorced her. Now Sylvia is again in touch with Peter, and wants him back. Peter calls her father and tells him that he will stay out of her life for a price. Sylvia's father tells her about his blackmail scheme, and she tells him that she bought a gun to use on Peter if they did not get back together. She goes to her room alone and is followed by her father, who is worried about her and tries to retrieve the gun.
The original "Rear Window" ("It Had to Be Murder", written by Cornell Woolrich in 1942) had no love story and no additional neighbors for L.B. Jeffries to spy on, and those elements were created by Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes in the 1954 film version. Woolrich enrolled at New York's Columbia University in 1921 where he spent a re1atively undistinguished year, until he was taken ill and was laid up for some weeks. It was during this illness, a
Rear-Window-like confinement involving a gangrenous foot, according to one version of the story, that Woolrich started writing, producing his first novel, the Fitzgerald-esque
Cover Charge, which was published in 1926. The following year a second 'jazz-age' novel,
Children of the Ritz, won a college magazine's literary prize which led to Woolrich landing a job as a Hollywood screenwriter.
Woolrich moved to Hollywood in 1928, to work under contract to First National Pictures, apparently on the script of
Children of the Ritz. Whatever Woolrich did during his stint in Hollywood, he received no screen credits under his own name. Although Woolrich had published six 'jazz-age' novels-party-antics and romances of the beautiful young things on the fringes of American society-between 1926 and 1932, he was unable to establish himself as a 'serious' writer. Perhaps because the 'jazz-age' novel was dead in the water by the nineteen thirties when the depression had begun to take hold, Woolrich was unable to find a publisher for his seventh novel,
I Love You, Paris, so he literally threw away the typescript--and re-invented himself as a pulp writer. -“Writing in the Darkness: The World of Cornell Woolrich” (1999) by Eddie Duggan
Woolrich's biographer Francis M. Nevins describes "Phantom Lady" (1944) as a breakthrough for both Woolrich and Siodmak. It put Woolrich on the map as a source of dark, suspenseful screen stories, and allowed Siodmak to go on to make such noir classics as
The Killers (1946) and
Criss Cross (1949). In his performance as Henderson’s friend Marlowe, Franchot Tone seems hell-bent on one-upping Cook’s manic skin-pounder. Thomas Gomez is more restrained, giving a characteristically solid performance as the good-hearted cop who gets the great lines “I’ll get the murderer sooner or later. It’s always easier when they’re insane.”
Phantom Lady is prime Woolrich. Between 1942 and 1950, 15 Hollywood movies were made from Woolrich’s work. In 1946, his best year for sales, Woolrich earned around $60,000. But as time went on too many of his properties were sold for too little. Woolrich bitterly recalled that Alfred Hitchock paid $600 for the movie rights to
Rear Window. Woolrich’s agent H. N. Swanson sold that story and seven others for $5,000. Woolrich’s first two novels showed the influence of his hero F. Scott Fitzgerald. His second book,
Children of the Ritz (1927), won a $10,000 prize from College Humour magazine. -Ben Terrall (Noir City, Winter 2015)
In
West of Sunset, novelist Stewart O' Nan imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald's final years, which he spent in Hollywood. The book opens in 1937 in North Carolina, where Fitzgerald is "just eking out a living" writing short stories, O'Nan tells NPR's Scott Simon. He is deeply in debt to his agent Harold Ober, O'Nan explains, "but he sees a chance to get out of debt by going to Hollywood and he seizes it." "Having nothing to add, with a view of the whole room, Scott lost himself in stargazing. Right beside Ronald Colman, Spencer Tracy was tucking into a tripledecker club; next to him, her famous lips pursed, Katharine Hepburn blew on a spoonful of tomato soup. Mayer and Cukor were showily spinning an hourglass-shaped cage of dice to see who’d pay. It was much like Cottage, his dining club at Princeton: while the place was open to all, the best tables were tacitly reserved for the chosen. The rest of them were extras." -"West of Sunset" (2014) by Stewart O'Nan
Ann Todd and Trevord Howard in "The Passionate Friends" (1948) directed by David Lean
Wells, H. G. (1866–1946) English novelist now best known for his science-fiction romances, including
The Time Machine (1895),
The Invisible Man (1897),
The War of the Worlds (1898), and
The Passionate Friends: A Novel (1913). Fitzgerald reviewed
God, the Invisible King (1917) for the the Nassau Literary Magazine and in 1917 called
The New Machiavelli (1911) “the greatest English novel of the century” (to Edmund Wilson, 1917). Wells influenced
This Side of Paradise - his novel
The Research Magnificent (1915) was one of the “quest novels” that influenced Amory Blaine, and Rosalind Connage is partly based on Beatrice Normandy from
Tono-Bungay (1909).
When Edmund Wilson read the typescript of
This Side of Paradise in November 1919, he described it as “an exquisite burlesque of Compton Mackenzie with a pastiche of Wells thrown in at the end”. However, Fitzgerald renounced Wells’s influence: “Such a profound and gifted man as John Dos Passos should never enlist in Wells’ faithful but aenemic platoon along with Walpole, Floyd Dell and Mencken’s late victim, Ernest Poole. The only successful Wellsian is Wells. Let us slay Wells, James Joyce and Anatole France that the creation of literature may continue”. Wells’s
Outline of History (1920) was the foundation of Fitzgerald’s “College of One” plan for educating Sheilah Graham. In
F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique, James E. Miller, Jr., sees the change from
This Side of Paradise to
The Great Gatsby as a very conscious change in Fitzgerald’s movement away from H. G. Wells’s technique of “saturation” toward Henry James’s technique of “selection”. Fitzgerald renounced Wells’s influence in his review of John Dos Passos’s
Three Soldiers (1921), and his thinking through to “selection” as an essential aspect of the writer’s craft accounts for his strong criticism of Thomas Wolfe’s work.-"H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life" (1985) by Anthony West
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