Barbara Stanwyck (new biography by Victoria Wilson): Steel-True 1907-1940

"My only problem is finding a way to play my fortieth fallen female in a different way from my thirty-ninth." -Barbara Stanwyck

Frank Capra claimed he would marry Barbara Stanwyck if she divorced Fay. “I fell in love with Stanwyck, and had I not been more in love with Lucille Reyburn I would have asked Barbara to marry me after she called it quits with Frank Fay,” Capra would write in 1971, when he and Lucille were about to celebrate their fortieth anniversary. When Barbara, Lucille, and the two Franks were all dead, biographer Joseph McBride would claim Capra and Stanwyck were lovers for nearly two years, that it was Barbara who in the end rejected the director. Without saying outright he was Barbara’s lover, Capra would admit he was very close to her, that their relationship was both important and rewarding: “I wish I could tell you more about it, but I can’t, I shouldn’t, and I won’t, but she was delightful.”

Barbara never admitted to any affair. Sentiments aside, a liaison stretching into the fall of 1931 seems unlikely. Frank Capra and Lucille were a sane presence, symbols of moderation and rationality for whom all-night drinking and gambling were unthinkable. Fay, Capra, Barbara, and Lu saw a good deal of each other and of Jack Gilbert. Barbara learned that if acting onstage is a matter of mannerism, screen acting is done with the eyes. “Mr. Capra taught me that. I mean, sure, it’s nice to say very nice dialogue, if you can get it. But great movie acting… Watch the eyes.” “She can give out that burst of emotion,” Capra would recall decades later. “She played parts that were a little tougher, yet at the same time you could sense that this girl could suffer from her toughness.” -"Stanwyck" (2001) by Axel Madsen

Rumors circulated for years and persist today about her marriage to Robert Taylor, and that it may have been manufactured as something as a “lavender marriage” by the studio system to quell talk about the sexualities of both Stanwyck and Taylor. Clearly, it would be very difficult to say for certain whether or not this was the case, especially as so many years have passed. In addition, Stanwyck seemed to be very much in love with Taylor, never remarried, and took his 1969 death extremely hard. In your research, was there anything you found that would lead you to believe that these persistent rumors about their marriage had any truth to them?

Stanwyck and Taylor came together at opposite points in their careers, which most people don’t know. She may have been successful and by that time been around Hollywood for six or so years, but her career was in trouble when she met Taylor. He was the big big star, just exploding into real fame and overwhelmed by it all. If anything, she needed him, for lots of reasons, which I write about in the book. And he needed her – just not as his beard.

The last thing Metro wanted was for Robert Taylor to be married, until they did, and it was not as a cover up for his sexuality. When people read the book they will see in detail how Stanwyck and Taylor came together, and what it did for both people; how it helped both and changed both. Volume Two portrays the shape of the marriage and how and why it ultimately fell apart, which, as in real life, happened over time and grew out of a set of subtle and complicated circumstances – and out of two people changing and changing out of different needs at different stages of their life, and their work.

On November 12, Simon & Schuster will publish A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True (1907-1940), volume 1 of the long-awaited first complete biography of Barbara Stanwyck. 15 years in the making and running a whopping 1,056 pages in length, author Victoria Wilson has created a colossal piece of literature covering the first 33 years of Barbara Stanwyck’s life. Source: backlots.net

Joel McCrea's Anniversary, Post-War Alienation

Happy Anniversary, Joel McCrea! Born: Joel Albert McCrea (November 5, 1905) in South Pasadena, California - Died: October 20, 1990 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California (USA)

Nancy Kelly and Joel McCrea in "He Married His Wife" (1940) directed by Roy Del Ruth

Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea in "Sullivan’s Travels" (1941) directed by Preston Sturges

In a sea of photographers and flashing lightbulbs, Sullivan is greeted in a Kansas City hotel. Over the loud din of the crowd (many of whom are carrying his next project's source, the book: O Brother Where Art Thou? by Sinclair Beckstein - a play on two author's names - John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis), the Girl tells him how happy she is and grateful that he is no longer married or obligated to his alimony-demanding ex-wife. On the commercial airliner returning to Los Angeles, Sullivan assures the Girl that his ex-wife will have to give him a divorce - and he will be set free. -Sullivan: ...Otherwise, it's bigamy, unfaithfulness, alienation of affections, corpus delecti. -The Girl: And then you'll be free. -Sullivan: And then I'll be free. But not for long, I hope.

Joel McCrea stars as an American journalist in London in 1938 who covers the war and discovers an espionage ring and assassination plot. Hitchcock outdid himself with the action-packed set pieces, using all manner of camera trickery and special effects, from a fatal fall from high atop Westminster Cathedral to mysterious goings-on at a windmill in the Netherlands to an inventively staged plane crash. McCrea's impassioned, Edward R. Murrow-esque radio monologue during the London blitz finale even impressed the opposition — Nazi Germany's Joseph Goebbels thought the film "a masterpiece of propaganda." Six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Source: www.afi.com

The Cold War was a primary influence over all aspects of American life from the end of WWII through the collapse of the Soviet Union. The cold war abroad may have been run by the military and the government but cold war ideology at home was most effectively disseminated by psychiatrists and advertisers, groups that depended for their livelihood on their ability to predict and control the actions and desires of their biggest market: housewives. Mary Beth Haralovich has insightfully traced the way advertisers trained and exploited middle-class women consumers, but less attention has been paid to the extraordinary growth and influence of the psychiatric industry during this period. In 1954 and 1955, the number one identified health problem in the United States was ‘emotional disease.’ In 1954, 150,000 adults entered mental hospitals and 700,000 mental patients received hospital care (in comparison, physical disorders accounted for only 600,000 patients). That same year, over a billion dollars was spent for the care of people diagnosed as mentally ill. In 1955, the year minor tranquillizers first became available outside of hospitals, 75 per cent of patients were being treated in hospital settings, over half a million people, compared to 150,000 in 1980. And although the wide availability of tranquillizers meant that hospital stays decreased by the late 1950s, there were still over a quarter of a million people employed in the industry, and hospitals continued into the late 1950s to report staff shortages. Over half of the patients in these hospitals were women, the majority married.

Like the advertising industry, the mental health industry depended on its ability to convince people that their happiness and well-being required the consumption of the industry’s products. Warren’s work supports Chesler’s contention throughout "Women and Madness" that women were often diagnosed as mentally ill because of their perceived ‘sex role alienation.’ Several of these expatients were rehospitalized by their husbands primarily because they had refused to function properly ‘domestically’. Indeed, the husbands who readmitted their wives ‘expressed significantly lower expectations for the total human functioning of their wives. They were willing to tolerate extremely childlike dependent behaviour in them as long as the dishes were washed.’ These studies suggest specific ways in which post-war women’s anxieties were socially constructed as ‘mental illnesses’ in a manner that served both corporate America and the cold war nuclear family ideal. -"Small Screen, Big Ideas" (2002) by Janet Thumim

Jake Gyllenhaal in talks to play boxer in "Southpaw"

Jake Gyllenhaal in Talks to Star in Former Eminem Boxing Movie ‘Southpaw’ (Exclusive)

Fresh off an acclaimed performance in the thriller “Prisoners,” Jake Gyllenhaal is in talks to star in the boxing drama “Southpaw,” which Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”) is directing for the Weinstein Company, multiple individuals familiar with the project have told TheWrap.

Eminem was once attached to star in the movie, which serves as proof that Hollywood can’t keep a good project down.

A fighter of a film, “Southpaw” was originally sold as a pitch to DreamWorks. The studio hired “Sons of Anarchy” creator Kurt Sutter to write the script. When DreamWorks tapped out, MGM swooped in planning to distribute through Sony, though the film was eventually put into turnaround, which is where the Weinstein Company rescued it.

If the deal gets signed, Gyllenhaal will play a left-handed prizefighter who wins a title but suffers a tragedy soon after and must put his life back together to earn the respect of his young daughter. While the film is set against the backdrop of the boxing ring, Fuqua previously told the Los Angeles Times that “the heart of the movie is about a man learning to be a father.” “Southpaw” is expected to start production next year. Source: www.thewrap.com

Matt Damon, Identities & Noirish Subjectivity

"Rounders" (1998): Matt Damon's first lead following the success of "Good Will Hunting," "Rounders" was mostly ignored on its debut, but has evolved into something of a cult hit over the years. The actor plays Mike, a poker whiz who's promised his girlfriend (Gretchen Mol) that he'll give the game up and focus on his law school studies. But when his no-good best pal Worm (Edward Norton) is released from prison, he's dragged back into gambling to save his pal from the sinister Russian mobster Teddy KGB (a ludicrously enjoyably over-the-top John Malkovich), the same man who ended Mike's career years earlier.

While it's beloved most by poker fans (it's probably the best depiction of the game to date), the film in general is firmly entertaining -- director John Dahl gives a terrific noirish tinge to the film, the script is zingy, and most of the performances -- Norton and John Turturro in particular -- are excellent.

“The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999): It would have been just too easy for Matt Damon to trade in on his matinee idol good looks and collect paychecks for action movies and rom-coms. Instead, he pushes himself to physically disappear into his psychologically complex roles, using physical characteristics -- a paunch, a crew cut or a pair of horn-rimmed glasses -- as his entry into such enigmatic characters. His glasses are the totem of Tom the imposter in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” the transformative role as the insidious grifter that announced Damon as a serious thesp, no vain pretty boy. He’s made a practice of playing characters in identity crisis (“Good Will Hunting,” ‘Bourne,’ “The Informant!”) and ‘Ripley,’ was one of the first times he displayed his true virtuosity in embodying this conundrum.

Damon’s most indelible characters are always striving to achieve some station in life that is almost impossible for them to gain, and Tom Ripley is the ultimate showcase for his ability to display the many emotional states of such nuanced, complicated people. He is simultaneously dorky, naive, seductive, hopeless, creepy and terrifying in Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel; the different emotions effortlessly cascading across his face.

“The Departed" (2006): While far from Scorsese's best work, "The Departed" remains a well-crafted, hugely enjoyable pulp crime flick, that certainly improves on its subject matter, the Hong Kong film "Infernal Affairs." The film's chock-full of pleasures and Damon's performance, while not the most immediate, is the one that lingers long afterwards. Simply put, he's astounding, the best he's ever been, and looking back now, it's astonishing that he was overlooked in awards season in favor of co-star Mark Wahlberg.

Damon effortlessly portrays the self-loathing and turmoil that comes from living a false life without any of the histrionics of his co-lead, Leonardo DiCaprio. The elevator scene at the end, in which Damon switches on a dime from self-righteous bravado to pathetically pleading to be put out of his misery by his captor, is a masterclass in screen acting.

“The Good Shepherd” (2006): Told through the prism of the founding of the CIA, Damon plays Edward Wilson, an agent of the newly founded organization whose work takes him around the world and has him bear witness to operations most Americans could and would never know about.

But the film is as much about the machinations of the wheelings and dealings of the spy agency as the personal sacrifice Damon must make as a person and in his relationships (particularly to his wife played by Angelina Jolie). As William Hurt’s character points out, the agents spend their lives looking over their shoulders for "pennies" in compensation. Wilson is forced to choose between his country and his family and the cold realization is that such a choice can’t be made because selecting one means losing the other. Damon here is a revelation, coldly embodying a spy who at work and at home can’t give away the roiling emotion beneath his poker-faced facade. It’s a stirring turn in a film that that was largely misunderstood.

Matt Damon and Mark Whitacre attend "The Informant!" New York premiere on September 15, 2009 in New York City.

“The Informant!” (2009): Damon has never been funnier than as Mark Whitacre, the delusional whistleblower who broke open a price-fixing scheme at his lysine-producing company, under the illusion that he was a top secret spy. “The Informant!” establishes Whitacre as someone who thinks there are prizes for “being the good guy,” oblivious to the reality around him. Steven Soderbergh’s tone is mostly amused farce, as if the delicate balance of real-world big business and the cartoonish sight of overweight Midwestern rube Whitacre is always threatening to topple.

Credit to Damon’s overlooked performance, a wonder of tics and mannerisms of surprising depth, capturing a damaged psyche while keeping him in the realm of believable folksiness.

“True Grit” (2010): It's not the showiest or even the most nuanced character in the Coen Brothers' rapturous "True Grit" remake, but Damon's dickish Texas Ranger LeBoeuf still manages to be an indelible oddball. Between his typically Texan self-aggrandizing (this writer was born and raised in the state, so this especially rung true), the marble-mouthed cadence that he adopts after he's partially bitten off his tongue, and his combination of heroic tendencies and borderline cowardice, Damon makes the role totally unforgettable. Source: blogs.indiewire.com

"Basically, everyone is a victim of corporate crime before they finish breakfast," Whitacre tells an FBI agent (Scott Bakula), who says, "That's not a business meeting, that's a crime scene." Soderbergh wanted The Informant! to go down the rabbit hole of Whitacre's mystifying mind. As Damon embodies him, he seems the sunniest symbol of corporate America and middle America: smart, pleasant, undemonstrative, with a supportive wife (Melanie Lynskey) and two kids. But we get the earliest glimpses of Mark's gift for fooling people, and perhaps himself, in the movie's voiceover, in which Mark wanders blithely into logical cul-de-sacs and exotic trivia: The whole movie is Mark's brainscan. It's shot and acted in a bland style that, you only eventually realize, is deeply askew, and darkly, corrosively satirical. What game, exactly, is Whitacre playing? Whose side is he on? How much of what he, or the film, says is true? Source: www.time.com

Part V - Identities in Film Noir (Film Noir and Subjectivity by Christophe Gelly): Sarah Kozloff insists on the predominance of the narrators’ voice-over comment as an authority to which the film narration must be referred. However, it is also possible to interpret these character discourses as narrations competing with the framing narrative voice. These multiple voices demonstrate the instability of the narrative pattern. In demanding that viewers ascribe voice-over narration to several separate narrative agencies, the variability of the “subject” to which the voice-over attaches is foregrounded. As well as these multiple voices, Kozloff identifies a “most unusual rhetoric strategy” in the “narrator’s habit of addressing comments to the characters, as if he were off to the side, watching every move they make and reacting with teasing questions, or advice to which they are oblivious.”

This technique further blurs the voice-over status as within and/or without the story, and it points to the film’s reflexivity, and – as Kozloff notes – shows the narration to be conscious of its own artificial, unrealistic nature. She argues that the identification between voice-over and the viewer through various “humanizing” devices (narrator’s voice-over comments, addresses to the characters on screen) may mimic what viewers themselves may very well feel towards the story. Yet the transgressively unstable status of this voice-over, both homodiegetic and heterodiegetic, further enhances the subjective riddle it represents for the reader. The concept of subjectivity as individual is problematized in film noir aesthetics as it cannot help integrating other elements within this identity.

Film noir is always constituted of heterogeneous elements: the subjective expression of a character’s feelings or confession along, however, with a doubt as to the source of these feelings in the enunciation; its aesthetic features present in their original identity but integrated within a commercial frame. Similarly, the modernist literary movement occupies a position that is in-between aesthetic elitism and popular culture. As J.P. Telotte argues, “Neo-noir seem[s] less about a character than about the very mechanisms of character in which we invest so much.” -"A Companion to Film Noir" (2013) by Andrew Spicer & Helen Hanson

Matt Damon: Spooky fun on The Colbert Report with Tom Hanks, Africa film project with Affleck

Video: What Is Matt Damon's Latest Halloween Costume?  

Tom Hanks and Matt Damon in "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)

"Matt Damon and Tom Hanks showed up on The Colbert Report to have some "spooky-time" fun with the audience. Matt was dressed in his trench best as Private Ryan since the "planned" segment about inexpensive Halloween costumes for kids was really a promotional parody for Tom's extensive filmography. Matt relished his cameo in the skit, and even took some time to rib his best friend and new neighbor, Ben Affleck. Get in on the joke with today's PopSugar Rush." Source: www.popsugar.com

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon attending the 28th Santa Barbara International Film Festival, on 25th January 2013

"Warner Bros and Pearl Street Films has set Will Staples to script an untitled big-scale project that will be developed as a directing and starring vehicle for Ben Affleck. The film is set in Africa, where a bunch of mercenaries are hired to kill a warlord who has been victimizing his own people. The film is both an action movie and an examination of the moral ambiguities of how philanthropy and foreign assistance veers into modern-day neocolonialism. It also tracks how involvement in the affairs of foreign countries is always a good deal more complicated than anticipated in the planning stages. These were themes that informed Affleck’s previous film Argo, which won Best Picture for Warner Bros. Affleck, who hatched the idea for the film and pitched it to Staples, will produce with Matt Damon and Jennifer Todd through their Warner Bros-based Pearl Street banner." Source: www.deadline.com

Jake Gyllenhaal: one of the Most Valuable Stars

#1 - ROBERT DOWNEY JR. - THE KING

Can there be any doubt that Robert Downey Jr. should be sitting pretty at the top of this list for two years in a row? He’s the star of two of the top five highest-grossing movies of all time — The Avengers, which brought in $1.5 billion worldwide, and Iron Man 3, which took in $1.2 billion — and unlike other comic-book heroes who could be recast at the drop of a hat (and often are), Downey Jr. is so synonymous with Tony Stark that when he decided not to make any more Iron Man movies for the time being, Marvel basically put the megafranchise on pause in the hopes that he’ll change his mind.

(Whereas Warner Bros. promptly installed Ben Affleck as Batman just as soon as Christian Bale hung up his cowl.) Don’t worry, though: Downey Jr. did decide to sign on for two more Avengers sequels, so he’s hardly done with his most iconic character.

#2 - LEONARDO DICAPRIO - THE STAR WHO STARTED SMILING AGAIN

The fun he had in Django Unchained and Great Gatsby was contagious. For years, Leonardo DiCaprio was out to prove himself as more than just a teen heartthrob. He was a serious man. An actor. The plan worked, as DiCaprio became a favorite of A-list auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and Steven Spielberg, and their collaborations scored dozens of Oscar nominations (and a Best Picture win for The Departed) and a lot of money (Inception earned $825.5 million total worldwide, while The Great Gatsby pulled in $348.8 million around the globe). There was just one thing missing: a smile.

The formerly impish star hit a brick wall with the dour, roundly ignored J. Edgar, and it seemed to spur him to once again show off his more lighthearted side. As Django Unchained’s Calvin Candie, he was both giddily wicked and brutally cruel, and he mounted a full-on, I’m-a-movie-star-dammit charm offensive in Gatsby.

Both films scored at the box office, and early glimpses of his next movie, Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, were highly GIF-able, suggesting DiCaprio at his most hedonistic and appealing. His studio value is second only to Brad Pitt’s, because while DiCaprio is still popcorn-blockbuster-averse, he’s the best way to get audiences into Hollywood’s most expensive adult fare. That’s why in our rankings he lands in second place: He doesn’t have anything lined up past Wall Street, but can do whatever he wants next.

#19 - MATT DAMON - THE STAR WHO SLIPPED

Studios still love him, but Damon struggled at the box office last year. Last year, Matt Damon was ranked sixth on our list, but this year, he tumbled to nineteen. What happened? Some of it simply couldn’t have been helped — in part, he was supplanted by stars in the prime of their franchises, like Jennifer Lawrence — but Damon also hit a rough patch last winter with his fracking movie Promised Land, the lowest-grossing wide-release movie of his career. At an anemic $7 million, this reteam with his Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant, which Damon co-scripted, went nowhere at the box office.

Sadly, Damon’s hoped-for summer smash Elysium didn’t quite restore him: The expensive sci-fi vehicle was unable to crack $100 million at the box office and opened to a lower number than director Neill Blomkamp’s last movie, District 9... despite the fact that District 9 had no stars and Elysium had Damon.

It’s no wonder that rumors recently flew that Damon might be willing to come back to the Bourne franchise; he could use a pick-me-up. Still, Damon is a solid, hard-working star with a high studio rating, and he also has a high likability score, made all the more impressive owing to his potentially polarizing activist work for liberal causes. (Just compare him to Sean Penn, who’s got one of the lowest likability ratings on this list.) As a celebrity, Damon is an unshowy presence who’s hardly blowing up Twitter, but that’s part of what people appreciate about him: Unlike his occasionally polarizing cohort Ben Affleck, Damon really does seem unconcerned with his celebrity status. Let’s just hope that when it comes to the box office, he can right his ship and move up a few places.

#55 - JAKE GYLLENHAAL - THE MODEST MOVIE STAR

Jake Gyllenhaal at the Hollywood Film Awards, on 21st October 2013

Over the short decade-plus that he’s been a recognizable name, Jake Gyllenhaal’s career has gone through several incarnations: from the young star of coming-of-agers like October Sky and Donnie Darko, to the critics’ darling of The Good Girl and Brokeback Mountain, to the would-be action hero of Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time.

But it’s really only in the last few years that Gyllenhaal really seems to have found his place as the lead of modestly budgeted, well-reviewed films like Source Code, End Of Watch and Prisoners. None blew up the box office, but the films were all made at a price and likely turned healthy profits, and it seems that Gyllenhaal can still draw enough of an audience, especially abroad: End Of Watch aside, his films generally perform better internationally, with Prince Of Persia quietly making a quarter of a billion dollars away from American jeering. Gossip editors are more interested in him than studios seem to be (thank you, Taylor Swift!), but within his lower-budget wheelhouse, he has significant value.

His mind-bending doppelganger film Enemy (directed by Prisoners’ Denis Villeneuve) recently had a mixed reception at Toronto, but he also has Nightcrawler coming (a crime thriller that he’s producing and which forced him to bow out of Into the Woods) and Everest, with Josh Brolin. Source: www.vulture.com

Jake Gyllenhaal looks emaciated on the set of "Nightcrawler" (dramatic weight loss)

Jake Gyllenhaal appears visibly emaciated on the set of "Nightcrawler" in Los Angeles, October 21, 2013

"I think [I've lost] probably a little over 20 pounds, something like that," the actor, 32, told PEOPLE Monday on the red carpet at the Hollywood Film Awards, where he looked noticeably thinner as he was honored for his role in Prisoners. While he may look different, his approach hasn't changed as he prepares for Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal said. "It's not different than getting into character for anything. It's more about believing where you are and being present where you are," he said. "Who's to say what the process is? I have a strange one … but I love what I do." Source: www.people.com