"1950"

Henry Fonda once confided that the characters he played on-screen bore little resemblance to himself.  Rather, they were who he’d like to be, if he could.

Judy Garland, born Frances Gumm in 1922, once quipped, “Behind every cloud is a cloud.”

Westerns seem like an endangered species these days. With the studios depending more and more on international distribution and formula entertainment that can cross all those borders, the verdict is that the Western just doesn’t travel well.

Stewart’s innate capacity to project a sympathetic, universal vulnerability, and when called upon, the strength of ordinary men doing extraordinary things, made him an actor we could all hold to our hearts — and did.

In the roughly eighty outsize years he actually had on this earth, writer/director John Huston seems to have lived several lives and lifetimes. Those who remember him best for his occasional acting forays (most memorably as Noah Cross in “Chinatown”) should also explore Huston’s indelible work behind the camera.

James Byron Dean, born in Indiana in 1931, was the comet that crashed to earth, throwing it off its rotation when he showed up on America’s movie screens in the mid-1950s. Then, he crashed in a far more earthbound way when, on September 30, 1955, his Porsche collided into another car at a rural California intersection, killing him and the friend traveling with him.

She was born Ruth Elizabeth Davis in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1908, and was, by her own admission, a Yankee.

Cities are like people, in that some periods represent career peaks, and there are plenty of examples of golden ages to go around: Paris in the 1920s, Los Angeles in the 1940s, and New York in the 1950s all brim with romance in the popular imagination. But no scene was quite as explosive in sheer energy and style as London was in the 1960s. A nation finally emerging from Blitz mentality and the rationing of World War II, England was primed for a major cultural earthquake, thanks to the crumbling of centuries-old social constriction, and the emergence of the Baby Boomers's youth culture. And when that earthquake, or “youthquake,” came, it was the movies that registered its shockwaves. “Swinging” London was its epicenter, as bands like The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and the Kinks created a danceable soundtrack for the era, and pioneering hair stylist Vidal Sassoon snipped girls’ hair into a bob, perfect for bouncing along to the beat (and of course, boys’ hair grew down past their collars). 

Humphrey Bogart was once asked if he had any difficulty putting aside his tough image to play a romantic leading man in “Casablanca” (1942). He said it was easy. “It helps,” Bogie said, “if you’re looking into the eyes of Ingrid Bergman.”