"notorious"

If you don’t remember the face of this peerless British player, whose film career spanned from the forties through the eighties, his silky, mellifluous voice will surely be familiar.

Dick Powell: always underrated, and today, perhaps even unknown. While any movie buff worth their salt will certainly remember him, for most anyone else not holding an AARP card, the mention of his name will likely elicit a questioning look.

In early 1949, Alexander Korda, the top movie producer in Britain, had cause for excitement. He was about to bring back a winning combination — director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene — for a thriller that would make history.

It’s sad but true that the bygone film directors we tend to remember are those associated with specific types of films (think Hitchcock for suspense and John Ford for Westerns), while the more versatile players somehow get lost in the fog.

I have always been a huge fan of the late Alan Bates. His profound talent made him a joy to watch in most anything. Still, I’ve often wondered, why wasn’t he a bigger star?  Eventually, I learned it was a matter of choice. He simply preferred to be a working actor.

Back in the day when this was considered fairly uncommon, Maureen O’Hara was the woman who could stand up to John Wayne. Or any other big man who got in her way.

This once-famous name may be unfamiliar to millennials, but even those with the remotest interest in film should discover him and his astounding body of work. Among the top directors who have credited him as a direct influence on their work: Ingmar Bergman (who described him as “the best director in the world”), Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Elia Kazan, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg.

By the age of thirty, Montgomery Clift seemed to have everything: youth, beauty, talent, and the prospect of a lucrative film career with limitless possibilities. Along with his friend and colleague Marlon Brando, Clift was the most visible and gifted of a new generation of movie star who’d been trained in “the Method” at Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio. The Studio’s fundamental goal was to help actors inhabit their characters more fully in order to achieve greater realism and intensity in their performances.

Before Penn and De Niro, before Brando and Dean, there was John Garfield. Virtually forgotten today, he introduced an intense realism to movie acting in the 1940s, born of training and talent. Both later stars would build on what he started. Then, just as Garfield’s career was soaring, he became a victim of the notorious “Red Scare” at the dawn of the fifties. All too quickly, it was over.