News

Femme fatale Audrey Totter: Film noir actress and MGM leading lady dead at 95 (photo: Audrey Totter ca. 1947) Audrey Totter, film noir femme fatale and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player best remembered for the mystery crime drama Lady in the Lake and, at Rko, the hard-hitting boxing drama The Set-Up, died after suffering a stroke and congestive heart failure on Thursday, December 12, 2013, at West Hills Hospital in Los Angeles County. Reportedly a resident at the Motion Picture and Television Home in Woodland Hills, Audrey Totter would have turned 96 on Dec. 20. Born in Joliet, Illinois, Audrey Totter began her show business career on radio. She landed an MGM contract in the mid-’40s, playing bit roles in several of the studio’s productions, e.g., the Clark Gable-Greer Garson pairing Adventure (1945), the Hedy Lamarr-Robert Walker-June Allyson threesome Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945), and, as an adventurous hitchhiker riding with John Garfield,...

In conjunction with the LUMIÈRE publication of the free downloadable e-book "Allan Dwan: A Dossier," we present a new video series, An Allan Dwan Serial. The serial is a continuous selection of clips from the career of the one and only Allan Dwan, an engineering director whose broad filmography connects in beautiful and unexpected ways.

<- previous entry | next entry -> 

Download "Allan Dwan: A Dossier" to read Alfonso Crespo's piece (in Spanish) on Woman They Almost Lynched.

See Woman They Almost Lynched on film at New York's Museum of Modern Art on June 24, 2013 at 4:30pm, or on June 25, 2013 at 8:00pm. There will be an introduction by myself for the screening on June 25th.

Above: Calendar Girl (1947) / Pearl of the South Pacific (1955) / Frontier Marshal (1939)

Last October, my co-editor David Phelps and I released our first self-published e-book out into the world. It was entitled William A. Wellman: A Dossier, and after the somewhat life-changing experience we had discovering Wellman's films during his Film Forum retrospective, we were happy to have discovered a format that would allow us to curate, create, and share an anthology of criticism centered on Wellman's work.

After the release, David and I found ourselves contemplating what to do next, and our thoughts soon brought us back to a night when we screened Allan Dwan's Cattle Queen of Montana (1954), a Western unlike any Western we had seen. A movie that on paper is a simple genre exercise about a vengeful woman trying to regain her land and cattle but in practice is about how different people and events fill...