"1950"

Who are you calling “Diva?”   In real life, wrangling with a diva is a blood-boiling lesson in the perils of the high-maintenance personality. On film, though, there is an undeniable deliciousness to watching the diva — at a safe distance.   Divas are so cutting, so presumptuous, so brash, brassy, demanding, withering, larger than life, full of themselves, and they chew through scenery with cast iron teeth. And, in what might just be a law of nature, it often takes a diva to play a diva. 

It all started with the hardboiled detective fiction which exploded onto the American popular culture way back in the roaring twenties. This new genre portrayed America’s evolving urban landscape as vividly as the Western genre did the rural frontier.

 One of the major pleasures and sources of eye candy the movies provide are fantasy spaces of which dreams are made. For anyone who lives for their monthly issue of Dwell, or who forwards photo compilations of delicious décor, on-screen interiors offer a form of fun several notches up from catalogue shopping.  Whether these movies were shot on sound stages, or on existing locations dressed up for their close-up, they perform the task of drawing us into the world of the story, and making us forget about the tedious limitations of reality. If you could choose any movie interior to move into, which one would it be? 

How do you make a legendary film in a few weeks’ time, all with a budget that would make even the most miserly studio head giddily twirl his mustache? Ask Sidney Lumet. Unquestionably, “12 Angry Men” (1957) is one of the finest films of the 1950s, with three Oscar nominations to its credit; but even so, the project had a skin-tight budget, (only $350,000 - a paltry sum for a film, even then). This forced first-time feature director Lumet to bob and weave to finish on-time and on-cost. So how did he pull it off? This tense film follows the contentious deliberations of twelve men, packed into a sweltering jury room, as they decide the fate of a youth accused of murdering his father. Lumet made the most of the confining premise by filming 93 of the 96 minutes on the same cramped 16 x 24 foot set. Even this solo venue was a cheap collection of sticks that Henry Fonda (AKA Juror 8) famously complained “looked like shit”, comparing it unfavorably to the lavish Hitchcock soundstages he’d just stepped off of when filming “The Wrong Man.”

Did you know the famous phrase, "you can't have your cake and eat it too" is really supposed to be "you can't eat your cake and have it too" (makes much more sense that way, doesn't it)?   What other quotes (perhaps these from your favorite films) do you get jumbled up? Test them out and see how well you really know your favorite phrasings.