April & May 2016 Viewing: Garland, Brunettes, and Secrets

How I feel by the end of May....

April and May are busy months in my neck of the woods. While my tweeps are gathering at the annual TCM Film Festival, I am readying students for state testing and our end of the year drama production. May sees me furiously grading papers to meet deadlines and calling or meeting with parents about kiddos who may not make it to the next grade unless assignments get turned in. For the most part, I am on island far away from Tinseltown and its movies, but even the hardest worker is entitled to a brief respite. Here are a few of the movies I caught.

Post covers: Pigskin Parade (1936), For Me and My Gal (1942), Little Nellie Kelly (1940), Presenting Lily Mars (1943), Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1955), The Secret Garden (1949)

2016 Liebster Award

A little late, but I finally made it to the Liebster Ball to accept my awards.

Thank you to Ginie from Wonderful World of Cinema and Christina Wehner for the kind nominations. In turn I would like to nominate the following blogs:

• Back to Golden Days
• Define Dancing
• Sister Celluloid

If you decide to join the ball, you will need to:

• Nominate up to 11 blogs for the award
• Give the bloggers you nominated 11 questions to answer
• Answer 11 questions asked by the blogger who nominated you
• Share 11 details about yourself (optional - one Liebster required it, the other did not)

Questions for the bloggers I nominated can be found here. 

Reel Infatuation: Dennis Riordan

This post is part of the Reel Infatuation Blogathon hosted by Font and Frock and Silver Screenings. To read about more cinematic crushes, click here. 

The Task

*To share a crush you have on a character 

*The difficult part of this task was picking a character as opposed to an actor crush. (Sorry, Cary!)

My Reel Infatuation

Blame it on the political season, but my crush goes to a character who has strong convictions yet can listen to the other side of the story and--gasp!--change his course of action if it benefits the whole.

Brian Aherne's Dennis Riordan in Beloved Enemy (1936)

People Will Talk (1951)

This post is part of the Order in the Court! Blogathon hosted by Theresa at CineMaven's Essays from the Couch and Lesley at Second Sight Cinema. To read more judicial posts, click here.

The Task

To write about a classic film that brings the audience into the courtroom.


The Film

People Will Talk (1951) is the first movie Joseph L. Mankiewicz took on following his Academy Award-winning film, All About Eve (1950). The film is based on a 1934 German play written by Curt Goetz, which was later made into a German film, Frauenarzt Dr. Pratorius (1950). According to film critics, Mankiewicz maintained that People Will Talk was a response to an unpleasant medical experience although parallels have been made between Praetorius' hearing and the House Un-American Acts Committee (HUAC) hearings, which resulted in the blacklisting of hundreds of Hollywood artists.  

Dancing Legs Quiz ~ June 2016 Edition

Take a look at the following partial pictures. Each pair belongs to a dancer whose birthday is this month. Name the dancer. Then give yourself a bonus point if you can name the movie.

1)

2)

3)

4)

Good luck!