By Ray Bennett
In 1981 when he was 62, Howard Keel’s days as the star of great Hollywood musicals were long gone. He was living in Oklahoma with his third wife Judy when he received a phone call. ‘I was pretty much washed up in Hollywood by the late Seventies,’ he told me. ‘We were packed ready to head off to retirement in Colorado.’ Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
The Ringwood Music and Dramatic Society production of the hit Broadway musical ‘The Addams Family’ this week is the latest in a long run of versions of the original one-panel cartoon series created by cartoonist Charles Addams that first appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 1938 and ran for years.
The tales of a wealthy family who are not aware that their macabre tastes are unusual spawned a hit 1960s television series that has remained a cult favourite, sequels and specials, two feature films and the successful Broadway musical that will be staged by the RMDS at The Barn, Ringwood School, April 10-13. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Lauren Bacall was wrapping up the pre-Broadway run of ‘Applause’, the stage musical based on the feature film ‘All About Eve’, at Detroit’s Fisher Theatre in February 1970.
After the final curtain in a nearby club rented for the night, my Windsor Star colleague Ron Base and I sat in a booth enjoying the free food and booze waiting for our promised interview with Bacall for a freelance story in The Toronto Telegram and another for our own paper. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Lesley-Anne Down, who turns 70 today, was a stark contrast to Patrick Swayze, her co-star in the hit 1985 U.S. Civil War miniseries ‘North and South’. In interviews for Canadian TV Guide, the enormously likeable but very intense young American actor told me back then, ‘The only thing that will make my career last is if I always deliver one hundred percent.’ The English actress, famous for the 1970s British series ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’, confirmed the actor’s high energy and drive drily: ‘Oh, very, yes.’ Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – ‘Hill Street Blues’, the American cop show that was a hit for most of the Eighties, had one of the best casts in television. Of them, James B. Sikking had probably the toughest job playing jut-jawed, pipe-smokimg Howard Hunter, commander of Hill Street’s Emergency Action Team.
Sikking, who turns 90 today, understood that Hunter was a cardboard character used mostly on the show to seque from one scene to another. ‘He’s what I call a coat holder,’ he told me. ‘He’s holding somebody else’s coat while they’re doing the scene. He’s mad as a hatter but from his point of view he’s absolutely correct.’ Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Oscar-winning actor Gregory Peck was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln, who was born 215 years ago today. In 1982, he fulfilled a dream when he portrayed the U.S. president in the TV mini-series ‘The Blue and the Gray’ and his comments then reverberate in today’s political climate in America.
‘I have admired Abraham Lincoln since I was a boy,’ he told me. ‘I learned the Gettysburg Address when I was 12 and recited it in school. I first read Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln” in university at Berkeley and I was totally absorbed by it.’
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – ‘Rollerball’, Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison’s only film set in the future, also is his most action-packed and violent and it was inspired by an experience at a National Hockey League (NHL) game. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – ‘What do you do?’ asked Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. ‘I make movies,’ said Norman Jewison. The former U.S. attorney general, brother of a slain American president, and the Canadian director ,who was building a successful career in Hollywood making studio feature films with big stars, met by chance in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1967. Continue reading
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – ’It kinda scares me,’ Norman Jewison said when I asked him in 2011 about the digital revolution in movies and the future of cinema. ‘Everything I see today is so mixed with violence and action. It’s moving so fast that I don’t know how significant the story is. When I was growing up, film was the literature of my generation. All of a sudden, I can see something else happening. It started with the video cameras and the fact that anybody can make a film now. The quality is good enough. It’s not very artistic. The video image, the television image, is different from film. I don’t think that matters to this generation.’ Continue reading
Marlon Brando: the man behind the myth
LONDON – The myth surrounding Marlon Brando, who was born 100 years ago today, has centred not only on his brilliant acting in films such as ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (with Vivien Leigh above), ‘On the Waterfront’, ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ but also his eccentric ways and latterly immense girth.
It’s instructive to recall what he was like as a young man when he burst into worldwide fame on stage and screen. When he made his first movie – ‘The Men’ (below left) in 1950, a story about disabled war veterans – Brando spent six weeks living in a hospital ward of paraplegic soldiers. Determined to recreate their reality on film, he shared their lives and won their confidence. Continue reading →