Jake Gyllenhaal out for lunch with friends in Hollywood, on 4th January 2012
Jake Gyllenhaal showing off his 'Lumberjack Look' while lunching with friends in Hollywood. Gyllenhaal is beard-ly recognizable with his new scruffy look. The actor was spotted in grabbing sushi with some friends.
New additions of Jake Gyllenhaal attending 'Love & Other Drugs' Press Conference in New York City
Jake Gyllenhaal out for coffee with Friends in Venice, CA on 1st January 2012
"She & Him" with M. Ward & Zooey Deschanel
Still of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in "50/50" directed by Jonathan Levine
I have known Joe Gordon-Levitt for going on 12 years. We first met in the summer of 2000 while doing a tiny movie called Manic, where we bonded over a mutual appreciation for Harry Nilsson and Nina Simone and I have been lucky enough to call him one of my dearest friends ever since. When we did 500 Days of Summer 8 years later, we spent every lunch hour dancing to Marvin Gaye in the hair and make up trailer; we had loads of fun. I hope to do a thousand more movies with him because he's simply the best. But in the meantime, we made a little New Year's duet for all of you! The original by Nancy Wilson. ENJOY!
John Garfield and Lana Turner as Frank and Cora in a promotional still of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946)
In his retrospective narration, Frank remembers how fatal his decision to stay became. Cora, the quintessential femme fatale, sneaks into Frank's room later in the evening to talk about their future on her own terms. The lovers plan to murder the woman's unloved husband - and it is the unfaithful wife Cora who plants the idea of murder into Frank's head so that they can be together. The ambitious, yet soul-less seductress argues that with her husband dead, she would inherit the financial security of the restaurant:
Cora: Frank, do you love me?
Cora and Nick enjoy an idyllic week together. They frolic at night in the surreal surf and enjoy romantic trysting with the breathing room given them by Nick's absence:
"It was the happiest I'd ever spent in my life. I wouldn't let myself think. And Cora wouldn't even discuss what was going to happen when Nick came home. All I cared about was her being happy. And as for me, I felt as if I was riding on a cloud". However, when Nick is being driven home, Frank has only one option. He hurriedly packs and leaves and becomes a vagabond once more: "After a couple of weeks in L.A., I-I sunk low enough to hang around the wholesale market where they bought a lot of their stuff, hoping I, I'd run into her. I just couldn't get her out of my mind".
Obsessed and drawn back by the memory of angel-faced Cora, Frank locates Nick's car at the Los Angeles market, and with only a half-hearted protest, he is convinced to return with Nick to Twin Oaks. In the cafe, Cora is stunned to see Frank re-appear: "Frank: Have you been thinkin' about me, Cora?" -Cora: "I couldn't forget ya that quick".
"For the first time in his life he has done the decent thing... protecting the Warden’s reputation and saving Kay from a jail term. This is clearly of comfort to him as he is led to the chair. The sub-text is that none of this would have been possible without the inspiration and influence of Warden Long, whose ethical approach was no doubt modelled on the man who wrote the screenplay, Lewis E Lawes, Warden of Sing Sing.
Is it any better than the original? Marginally. It’s fast paced (just 76 minutes) and Garfield’s brashness and quick-fire gangsterisms perhaps top Spencer Tracy’s, and Sheridan’s Kay is more believable than Bette Davis the first time around". Source: www.prisonmovies.net
"Garfield was on voluntary suspension from Warner Bros. because of dissatisfaction with roles the studio was offering him (usually criminals or prison inmates) when he was sent the script for "Castle on the Hudson". His reported response when offered one more prison saga was, "Parole me!" It was director-screenwriter-producer Robert Rossen, a friend of Garfield's, who persuaded him to take on Spencer Tracy's old role. Garfield agreed to do the film provided the studio would not change the original ending, which had Tommy going to the electric chair to cover for the girlfriend, who had shot and killed a treacherous lawyer. When the film opened, The New York Times began its review by joking, "This is merely a routine notice that Mr. John Garfield, formerly of the Group Theatre, who was recently sentenced to a term in Warner Bros. Pictures, is still in prison."
"Garfield had some trepidation about succeeding the highly regarded Tracy -and, indeed, some critics accused the younger actor of borrowing from both Tracy and James Cagney in his performance. When the film is viewed today, however, it's easy to see that Garfield made the role his own. In later describing his preparation for the climactic execution scene, he explained how he used his Method training to make the experience seem real: "Naturally I hadn't ever been to the chair before, so it required a little imagination to go back into my past and find the emotion I needed... When I got onstage for the first performance of Awake and Sing (his first major stage role with the Group Theatre), it felt like the electric chair... and that feeling is what I was remembering when the movie cameras were grinding." Source: www.tcm.com
In his analysis of the Cagney persona, Harvard intellectual Lincoln Kirstein wrote, "No one expresses more in terms of pictorial action, the delights of violence, the overtones of a semi-conscious sadism, the tendency towards destruction, towards anarchy, which is the basis of American sex appeal". Cagney had become a big star, but the poor Irish kid from the Lower East Side never forgot where he had come from. Taking note of this, Communist screenwriter John Bright was going to put him in with some folks who could use the star's new altruism for their benefit. The involvement with the radicals came back to haunt Cagney in 1940 when he testified before Martin Dies' then kinder, gentler convening of the HUAC in Washington. With his career at stake, Cagney disowned his former friends and claimed that as a kid growing up in a poor neighborhood, he just wanted to help those who were on the bottom. "What the hell did I know about the ebb and flow of political movements?" he cried.
Poster of "Out of The Fog" starring Ida Lupino and John Garfield (1941) directed by Anatole Litvak
Goff (John Garfield) is dazzling Stella (Ida Lupino) with his ill-gotten wealth. After introducing Stella to several ritzy clubs, he conspires to take her to Havana's more decadent hot spots -shades of Clifford Odets' aborted anti-Batista play.
To "The Boston Daily Record", John Garfield enthused: "The film has something important to say. It shows how men such as I portray are kicked around until they eventually turn against society, adopting the fascist idea of seizing what they want". The casting for the plum role of fascistic gangster Goff became intense. Though James Cagney was discussed for the role, director Anatole Litvak had favored George Raft.
Howard Barnes felt that "Out of the Fog" was "a work of genuine distinction" and said Garfield gave "what is unquestionably his greatest screen portrayal as the petty hoodlum who turns gentle people into killers." Garfield is frightening and he imbues the thug character with chilling mood swings. -"The Left Side of the Screen: Communist and Left-Wing Ideology in Hollywood, 1929-2009" by Bob Herzberg (2011)
John Garfield as Charley Davis in "Body and Soul" (1947) directed by Robert Rossen
Nora Zehetner as Phoebe in "Mad Men" episode "Christmas Comes But Once a Year" (2010)
Mad Men actress Nora Zehetner (who appears as Phoebe in season 4) will play a rookie female detective on "Common Law", while former Lost star Sonya Walger will appear as the therapist assigned to Travis (Ealy) and Wes (Kole). Originally planned to premiere on January 26, the show will now air in mid-2012, according to Deadline. Source: www.digitalspy.co.uk
Homefront Collection (This Is the Army / Thank Your Lucky Stars / Hollywood Canteen): Highlights include Humphrey Bogart being out-tough-guyed by S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall and singers ranging from the gifted (Dinah Shore, Dennis Morgan) to the good sports (Errol Flynn, John Garfield). And Bette Davis' witty, wry, jitterbuggin rendition of They Either Too Young or Too Old by Arthur Schwartz and Frank Loesser is "the cherry on top" (Clive Hirschhorn, The Hollywood Musical).
Hollywood Canteen (1944): At ease, soldiers, as real-life canteen co-founders Bette Davis and John Garfield plus dozens more luminaries - from Jack Benny to Barbara Stanwyck to Roy Rogers and Trigger - dazzle the troops and modern fans in “a great big scrambled vaudeville show with enough talent to have made a dozen fine movies" (Howard Barnes, New York Herald Tribune).
Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle "Santa Claus", Natalie Wood as Susan Walker and Maureen O'Hara as Doris Walker in "Miracle on 34th Street" (1947) directed by George Seaton
John Garfield as Albert Schmid (tripping over a Christmas tree) and Eleanor Parker as Ruth Hartley in "Pride of the Marines" (1945) directed by Delmer Daves
Dane Clark was one of the few actors to remain friendly with Garfield through the years, as both men had much in common. Clark had grown up in Brooklyn, had boxed some, had tried unsuccessfully to get into the Group Theatre in the 1930s, and had come to Hollywood on a whim. There were stories that Warner Bros. hired Clark by in 1942 just in case Garfield gave the studio trouble.
Eleanor Parker received the first of her three Best Actress Oscar nominations playing a prisoner in "Caged" (1950), for which she won the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival. She was also nominated the next year playing the cop's wife who shared a secret with the neighborhood abortionist in William Wyler's "Detective Story" (1951). Her third and last Oscar nod came for "Interrupted Melody" (1955), playing an opera singer struck down by polio.
Parker could easily have been nominated that same year for her portrayal of Frank Sinatra's faux crippled wife in Otto Preminger's brooding masterpiece "The Man with the Golden Arm" (1955) adapted from the novel by Nelson Algren.
Dane Clark said both he and Garfield fell in love with Eleanor Parker during filming "Pride of the Marines", but the love did not translate into anything more physical than flirting.
John Garfield with Maria Montez
John Garfield landed a second loan-out, this time to RKO, to film the espionage thriller "The Fallen Sparrow". He wasn't the first choice for the part, James Cagney, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott had all been offered it first.
The film's political standpoint, while ambiguous, appealed to him: Garfield plays John McKittrick, an Irish-American Loyalist who returns to New York City after fighting in the Spanish Civil War only to discover that his best friend, Louie, has been murdered. Louie, like McKittrick (or "Kit") was an American fighting the good fight against the fascists in Spain. Kit is haunted by memories of tortures in a fascist prison, and he believes that the main torturer, a limping man, is still after him.
Kit hooks up with Toni Donne (Maureen O'Hara), a dubious member of royalty who may or may not be reeling Kit right into a lair of film noir proportions - the film moves along well and remains an early example of noir with Garfield in a Philip Marlowe-type role.
John Garfield kissing Maureen O'Hara in "The Fallen Sparrow" (1943) directed by Richard Wallace
"One of the small ways in which I was able to contribute to the war effort was by promoting war bonds. Sometime between making 'This Land Is Mine' my last film with Charles Laughton, and 'The Fallen Sparrow' with John Garfield (my shortest leading man, outspoken and a real sweetheart), Fox sent me to an evening dinner engagement in Texas to sell war bonds. Errol Flynn was scheduled to speak that night, and he was seated on the dais next to me. He was very poised. Errol leaned toward me and and began whispering lewd propositions out of the corner of his mouth, it was crude and ugly stuff and not the slightest bit erotic, which I would expected from this legendary Casanova. Clearly he had to be drunk if he really thought I'd ever be part of a seedy Errol Flynn sex orgy. He was treating me like a Hollywood whore, like a little sex doll from the back streets". -'Tis Herself: An Autobiography' by Maureen O'Hara & John Nicoletti (2005)
Maureen O'Hara arriving to testify in the Confidential trial, accompanied, from left, by Deputy Dist. Atty. William Ritzi, Guy Ward (O'Hara's personal attorney), and O'Hara's brothers James FitzSimons and Charles FitzSimons.
Actress Maureen O'Hara successfully sued the "Confidential" magazine for a story in the March 1957 issue falsely accusing her of having sex in the balcony of Hollywood's Grauman's Chinese Theatre. As she recounted in her 2004 autobiography "Tis Herself" her passport proved that she was in Spain on the date alleged by Confidential. Her lawsuit and large settlement were instrumental in the decline of the magazine. "Everybody reads it but they say the cook brought it into the house”, said Humphrey Bogart. Groucho Marx responded to an article about him in the magazine with his famous letter -originally printed in his book 'The Groucho Letters' (1967) "If you don't stop printing scandalous articles about me, I'll be forced to cancel my subscription." Confidential magazine inspired the film "L.A. Confidential", based on James Ellroy's novel "L.A. Confidential".
"Just as Hitchcock had his fantasies about icy blondes, so John Ford dreamt of hotblooded Irish redheads. But his relationship with O'Hara was immensely complicated. He adored her, yet knew he couldn't have her. He was too old for her and understood she didn't want a romantic relationship. The more she and Ford battled with each other, the more he loved and resented her. For her part, she was often mystified by the abrupt shifts in his mood. Only gradually did she come to realise that he was obsessed with her and couldn't control his feelings. When he got drunk, he would write incoherent love letters to her, then accuse her a short time later of betraying him or lying about him. One day, she discovered that he had broken into her home and gone through her belongings". Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
When the studio cast Ida Lupino opposite Errol Flynn in "Escape Me Never" (1947), she was elated. She had met Flynn and his first wife Lill Damita in Palm Springs in 1936. At Warners, Ida, Flynn and Raoul Walsh formed an elite triumvirate dedicated to fun. Each had a nickname: Ida was "Little Scout"; Flynn was "The Baron"; and Walsh was "Uncle." The charismatic Flynn charmed everyone. "There was a wonderful exhilaration being around Errol. You became as bold and as wild as he was." The story was a light, rather creaky plot about an English girl in love in turnof-the-century Venice.
Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker in "Escape Me Never" (1947) directed by Peter Godfrey
