Jake Gyllenhaal out with niece Ramona in New York City on 12th November 2011

Jake Gyllenhaal out with niece Ramona in New York City on 12th November 2011

"Jake Gyllenhaal took his niece Ramona Sarsgaard out for a special afternoon in NYC on Saturday. The 5-year-old put safety first wearing a helmet to wheel around town on her scooter, though the twosome ended up taking a taxi home after lunch. Uncle Jake may be playing babysitter while Ramona's parents, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, are overseas. Maggie Gyllenhaal with Peter Sarsgaard at the Armani Hotel Opening in Milan.

Maggie and Peter attended the opening of the Armani Hotel in Milan on Thursday, 10th November 2011.

It hasn't all been sweet family time for Jake in the city, since he's stepped out for red carpets here and there and he was reportedly spotted chatting up the lingerie models after the Victoria's Secret runway show this week". Source: www.popsugar.com

Jake Gyllenhaal is in talks for Nat Faxon's "The Way, Way Back"

Jake Gyllenhaal attending the premiere of "Take Shelter" on 2nd November 2011 in NY

"All the way back in 2007, producer Paul Young brought a script by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash ("The Descendants") to Shawn Levy entitled "The Way Back" (though it now seems to be called "The Way, Way Back"). Anyway, he immediately took a shine to it, commited to direct and Fox Searchlight gave it a greenlight. But this was just before the WGA strike of 2007 and with no guarantee they could finish it before the work stoppage, the project stalled. Once the dust cleared, Mandate Pictures scooped it up and in 2009, Tom Bezucha ("The Family Stone," "Monte Carlo") became attached with a shoot to take place later that year. But for whatever reason, that never happened either. Now two years later, the project is in the hands of producer Kevin Walsh, and in Variety's recent profile, they reveal the project is still happening with none other than Jake Gyllenhaal in talks for the lead role". Source: www.variety.com

Jake Gyllenhaal attending Fall Harvest Dinner with Chef Gabrielle Hamilton to Benefit Edible Schoolyard NYC

"Of course, no word yet on when the long-developing project will actually get rolling, and it likely depends on a star like Gyllenhaal coming on board to get the wheels moving. But Faxon and Rash know patience. "The Descendants" began rolling as far back as 2006 before making it to the big screen this year. Just a reminder that even though a project may fall in the background, development keeps happening". Source: blogs.indiewire.com

"ThePlaylist provides a brief synopsis of the story, telling us that it follows “a teenage boy, who over the course of an extraordinary summer forms a friendship that gives him the strength to stand up to his bullying stepfather and reconnect with his mother.” For some reason — possibly because I was thinking about my love of this film the other day — I’m getting a Stand by Me vibe here.

Meanwhile, based purely on his age, Gyllenhaal can’t play anybody other than the stepfather — unless they want to take a Walk Hard approach, which I wouldn’t be entirely apprehensive about. Heck, Faxon even had a small part in that film". Source: thefilmstage.com

John Garfield: truthful, naïve and dead-on honest (symbol of the American Dream)

John Garfield and Ann Sheridan in "Castle on the Hudson" (1940) directed by Anatole Litvak

CASTLE ON THE HUDSON, a remake of the 1933 Warner Bros. film "20,000 Years in Sing Sing", which had starred Spencer Tracy. John Garfield described the film to reporter Frederick Woltman as a story about "a wise guy who goes to the electric chair for a woman." Garfield didn't like the script and only agreed to do the film under two conditions: 1) that the studio retain the original ending, wherein Tommy goes to the electric chair for a murder he did not commit, and 2) a bonus of $10,000.

John Garfield and Ida Lupino as George Leach and Ruth Webster in "The Sea Wolf" (1941)

George Leach is a determined optimist in "The Sea Wolf". "You gotta fight, you can't quit," he tells Lupino at one point. "It's something in me that tells me I gotta keep on fighting, that tells me there is something for people like us." Leach keeps on fighting and, in a memorably chilling climax, finds an escape for himself and Ruth (Ida Lupino) while both Knox and Robinson go down with the ship.

There was something sensually languid about John Garfield, an inner force that suggested he could be a demon in bed. Which other male stars of that period project such sexual charisma? Certainly not Jimmy Stewart, nor James Cagney nor Humphrey Bogart (whose screen characters probably wore a shoulder holster to bed).

John Garfield was sensitive, and his vulnerability, as an actor, set him apart from the rest of the pack. Men may have wanted to emulate him. Women flocked to him. First and foremost, this was the main pitfall of his overnight success. Life imitated art, with every woman imagining she was Priscilla Lane and Garfield was Mickey Borden. "After he did Four Daughters every extra girl on the lot was dying to seduce him," contract director Vincent Sherman recalled.

"And he did not yet know how to handle success. He was hot and heavy and they just came along, one after the other." At first it was just the extras and the hit players and the coatcheck girls and the waitresses. Later his array of would-be suitors and conquests would include co-stars and cinematic sex symbols.

Lana Turner and John Garfield in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946) directed by Tay Garnett

"Mr. Garfield reflects to the life the crude and confused young hobo who stumbles aimlessly into a fatal trap. Miss Turner is remarkably effective as the cheap and uncertain blonde who has a pathetic ambition to "be somebody". "The Postman" appears no more than a melodramatic tale, another involved demonstration that crime does not pay. But the artistry of writers and actors have made it much more than that; it is, indeed, a sincere comprehension of an American tragedy". -Review by Bosley Crowther (May 3, 1946)

John Berry ran into John Garfield in London and tried to convince the actor to move to Europe until the [anti-communist] fever broke. Garfield wouldn't do it. "He was a deep American guy, a kid from New York," Berry said. "As John Garfield he was a big symbol of the American dream, and to deny that and act in Europe was to turn his back on America."

He was undeniably charming. He imposed guilt on himself. And if pressed, he really had a hard time maintaining a lie. -"He was truthful, naïve and dead-on honest", theatrical producer Robert Whitehead said of John Garfield.

John Garfield and Shelley Winters as Nick Robey and Peggy Dobbs in "He Ran All The Way" (1951)

Nick (Garfield) inadvertently kills a payroll guard during the heist. He's forced to take it on the lam and hides out in the apartment of the Dobbs family. Of course he falls for the daughter, Peg (Shelley Winters). Both of them are emotionally needy misfits looking for love. Nick hopes to make a break for it with her on his arm and talks her into finding him a getaway car. When the car arrives it's too late for Nick; he ends up in the gutter with a bullet in his belly, courtesy of Peg. The film is a sad but fitting end to Garfield's screen career.

Shelley Winters proved to be a challenge for both Garfield and Berry. In her autobiography Shelley Winters says she can't recall whether she had an affair with him or not. Berry thought it unlikely: "I remember he went up to her dressing room once and they had a loud argument about one of the scenes; you could hear them both yelling. She was often not prepared." -"He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield" by Robert Nott (2004)

Poster from "They Made Me a Criminal" (1939), starring John Garfield and Ann Sheridan

-You weren't in very much of "They Made Me a Criminal", but you were given billing over Gloria Dickson, the real female lead.

-Ann Sheridan: I just had one scene with John Garfield. Busby Berkeley, who I loved, directed it. I once did a musical test for "Desert Song" that Buz directed, with John Boles. Anyway, John Garfield was a dear man. He was like the little guy who brought the apple for the teacher, and here I was, this hussy with the fuzzy hair and the décolletage dress. I was supposed to kiss John, but Buz said: "Hold on until I say cut, just keep kissing him".

Well of course, he wouldn't say it, and I had John around the neck and on the floor - he was absolutely red.

-Garfield didn't come on like the hip young rebel he seemed on the screen?

-Ann Sheridan: Oh no, not at all. I didn't think so, anyway.

John Garfield, Ida Lupino and Edward G. Robinson in "The Sea Wolf" (1941) directed by Michael Curtiz

John Garfield and Ida Lupino as Goff and Stella in "Out of the Fog" (1941) directed by Anatole Litvak

-"He was wonderful and I loved him. He and I were like brother and sister", Ida Lupino said of John Garfield in 1983.

"Killer Tomatoes: Fifteen Tough Film Dames" by Ray Hagen and Laura Wagner (2004)

Happy Anniversary, Robert Ryan!

Happy Anniversary, Robert Ryan (born Robert Bushnell Ryan, 11 November 1909, Chicago, Illinois - 11 July 1973, New York City, USA)

Robert Ryan and Barbara Stanwyck in "Clash By Night" (1952) directed by Fritz Lang

Robert Ryan with actress Marsha Hunt and Robert Tunks


Robert Ryan playing his last role Larry Slade in "The Iceman Cometh" (1973) directed by John Frankenheimer

‎"He Ran All The Way": John Garfield's last film

John Garfield and Shelley Winters as Nick Robey and Peggy Dobbs in "He Ran All the Way" (1951) directed by John Berry -Full Movie-


The uptight and dumb smalltime thief Nick Robey and his partner and only friend Al Molin robber US$ 10,000.00 from a man, but the heist goes wrong. Al Molin is killed by a policeman and Nick shots him deadly in the spine. He hides out in a public swimming pool and meets the lonely spinster Peggy Dobbs in the water. Nick uses Peggy to lie low and leave the plunge. He offers a ride in a taxi to her and she invites him to enter in her apartment, where she introduces her family to him. When Nick discovers that he killed the cop, he decides to use Peggy's apartment as hideout to wait the police manhunt cool down, forcing the family to lodge him. When Nick finds that Peggy loves him, he invites her to leave the town with him and asks her to buy a used runaway car. However, the paranoid Nick cannot trust anybody and believes Peggy has betrayed him.

Noir Malaise in ‘Detour’ (1945) and 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' (1946)

Critics’ Picks: ‘Detour’: A.O. Scott reviews the low-budget 1945 film noir “Detour” directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, starring Ann Savage and Tom Neal Source: video.nytimes.com

"The typical tramp resurfaces in the 1940s as an iconoclastic anti-hero; he is an embittered drifter whose comic potential has been rewritten and recast in the more tragic, self-destructive personae of John Garfield (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946) and Tom Neal (Detour, 1945).

Claudia Drake and Tom Neal as Sue and Al in "Detour" (1945) directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

John Garfield and Lana Turner as Frank Chambers and Cora Smith in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946)

The source of this transformation of the forward-looking, romantic persona of the tramp into a reflective, resentful outcast is a phenomenon known as film noir.

"Film noir" remains a somewhat contested concept. Everyone agrees as to its literal meaning, which is "black film." But film historians disagree as to its status as a cinematic phenomenon.

Critics such as James Damico and Foster Hirsch consider it a genre with conventional plots involving murder, crime, and detection, and character types such as hard-boiled heroes and femmes fatales. Raymond Durgnat and Robert Porfirio map film noir into a family tree of thematic concerns, including sexual pathology (the Clytemnestra plot), psychopathic behavior, alienation and loneliness, existential choice, meaninglessness, purposelessness, the absurd, infernal urban landscapes, and other "unhealthy" subjects.

As Borde and Chaumeton suggest, film noir deliberately violates orientations, expectations, and conventions in order to produce "a specific malaise" in the viewer.

Detour's credit sequence consists of a reverse tracking shot of an empty desert highway that rapidly recedes from the camera (mounted on the rear end of a car). This sequence succinctly characterizes noir's inversion of the traditional iconography of the road and reverses the meaning of that iconography: in Detour the road lies behind us, not in front of us; the road is associated with a past that is being fled rather than with a present or a future to which the film and/or the film's characters look forward. The credit sequence reveals a space that closes off rather than opens up possibilities.

Detour and Postman rely on a flashback structure employing voice-over narration. Like most flashbacks, the flashback narration in these two films is, like the films' roads, "closed." It does not go forward but backward. But the tone of the narrations differs.

The first-person commentary of the central characters possesses none of the authority or omniscience associated with more "classical" or traditional flashbacks.

However, in Detour, the narration is not narrativized. It is "set" in a diner in Nevada, but it is addressed to an undramatized figure (the viewer) and is told mentally rather than verbally; that is, Roberts "thinks" the narration but does not speak it out loud.

More dramatically, in Postman the audience knows neither to whom the hero is speaking the narration nor from where that voice comes (until the last scene, if then). We do not see Garfield telling the story and can only presume that it is being told, under sentence of death, from his prison cell at the end of the film.

The narration of Postman is peppered with Garfield's "guesses" and plagued with self-doubt and hesitation.

Caught up in the heroine's and his own confused desires and intents, he doesn't exactly know what happened or why. His narration does not serve the function of clarification or explanation but more that of a murky self-justification.

In Detour, the narration is similarly driven by a compulsion to justify what has happened in terms of outdated, pre-Christian notions of destiny and fate. As explanation, the hero's commentary fails to convince — a problem of which even the hero seems quite aware. Most importantly, in film noir the narration is regularly limited to the constricted consciousness of an untrustworthy narrator".
Source: www.brightlightsfilm.com

One of the oddest stories surrounding "Detour"'s transition to screen involves actor John Garfield, who reportedly urged Warner Brothers to acquire the property for him (with Ida Lupino playing Vera, and Ann Sheridan as Al's N.Y. girlfriend Sue).

Ann Sheridan and John Garfield as Kay Manners and Tommy Gordon in "Castle on the Hudson" (1940) directed by Anatole Litvak

Ida Lupino and John Garfield as Stella Goodwin and Harold Goff in "Out of the Fog (1941) directed by Anatole Litvak

Warner offered PRC's president (and "Detour" credited producer) Leon Fromkess $25.000 for the rights, but Fromkess declined -he was taken aback with Ann Savage and he immediately offered her a five-year contract.

Ann Savage and Tom Neal made three movies together at Columbia Pictures before filming "Detour". PRC re-teamed them for "Detour" to exploit the publicity and press buildup they had been given in 1943 and 1944.

-"Savage detours: the life and work of Ann Savage" by Lisa Morton, Kent Adamson, Guy Maddin (2009)

While setting up to film a hitchhiking scene, a passing car tried to pick up Ann Savage (made up to look dirty and disheveled), causing laughter in the rest of the crew.

German filmmaker Wim Wenders called Ann Savage's performance as Vera "30 years ahead of it's time".

TCM Fanatics - (TCM Original) Film Noir videoclip

TCM Fanatics - (TCM Original) Film Noir
Writer Eddie Muller leads a dedicated band of Film Noir enthusiasts (Alan K. Rode, Kim Morgan, Joan Renner, etc.) in this latest edition of TCM's Fanatics profiles.