Carole
Lombard, subject of a seven-film retrospective beginning Tuesday at the
Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago, was the most effervescent
of the '30s movie sex goddesses. She was a sleek, lissome blond with a
wicked smile and flashing eyes, and though usually dressed and coifed to
the nines, she was never above giving her male lover-combatants a
scathing wisecrack, a rough shove or even a swift kick.
Without the Depression, the former Jane Alice Peters of Ft. Wayne, Ind., might not have made it to the top. But the '30s brought a newer, more adult movie queen to the fore, and Lombard, like Claudette Colbert and Greta Garbo, was a beneficiary.
Without the Depression, the former Jane Alice Peters of Ft. Wayne, Ind., might not have made it to the top. But the '30s brought a newer, more adult movie queen to the fore, and Lombard, like Claudette Colbert and Greta Garbo, was a beneficiary.
Lombard's
forte was screwball comedy (the title of the Film Center's series is
"Siren of Screwball"). These romantic comedys were set among the very
rich, where, the characters acted wild, screwy and rambunctious.
Lombard-whose specialty was headstrong, reckless rich vamps or
lower-class climbers-empitomized them all.
"No Man of Her Own," the 1932 comedy that starts the series (6 p.m. Tuesday), isn't really much of a movie. It's a silly romance in which a Manhattan cardsharp falls for a librarian and sees the light. The script is negligible, the characters are cutesy, the direction-by Wesley Ruggles-is only serviceable.
But it's an essential Lombard film, because it's her one screen pairing with her eventual husband Clark Gable (gambler to her librarian). To call their scenes electric is putting it mildly. For the first 10 minutes of their screen courtship here-when Gable spies her at a magazine stand, pursues her into the library and then waylays her at one bookshelf after another-the stars literally seem besotted with each other (and probably were). This is screen chemistry with a vengeance.
"Twentieth Century" (6 p.m. Jan. 6) is one of six 1934 Lombard films. But it's the key one, the movie that set her image and made her career.
Playing Lily Garland (nee Mildred Plotka), Broadway ingenue turned Hollywood glamor queen, Lombard seized the screwball crown, holding her own against the '30s most formidable ham, John Barrymore. Barrymore, in his wild prime, plays egomaniacal producer Oscar Jaffe, determined at all costs to wrest his erstwhile star back from Movieland while on a coast-to-coast race on the famous luxury train, the Twentieth Century Limited.
Wordmasters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur adapted their own play, and the roaring, pell-mell, brilliantly sustained pace comes from ace director Howard Hawks-who also deserves full credit for helping Lombard's new image. When one argument scene with Barrymore dragged in rehearsal, Hawks asked Lombard what she'd do in the same situation. "I'd kick him!" she snarled. "Well, go ahead and kick him," Hawks told her, and a screwball legend was born.
- Cinematographers don't always get their due, but they do in "Visions of Light" Saturday and Sunday at the Music Box, 3733 N.
This warmly knowledgeable and glitteringly illustrated history of the craft was directed by Arnold Glassman, Stuart Samuels and Todd McCarthy, and written by McCarthy, then Variety's lead film critic.
McCarthy interviewed dozens of luminaries for the film, ranging from Golden Age masters (film noir legend John Alton) to the generations after them ("Prince of Darkness" Gordon Willis, Conrad Hall, William Fraker). Present-day cinematographers include Allen Daviau ("E.T.") and Spike Lee's right-hand man, Ernest Dickerson, who opens the film with his boyhood recollections of watching the David Lean-Freddie Young "Oliver Twist."
The film glows with lustrous pictures. More important, it takes us inside and backstage, to explain how those images were crafted-and to celebrate the artists who lit them, and who, at their best, deserve the appellation "painters of light."
"No Man of Her Own," the 1932 comedy that starts the series (6 p.m. Tuesday), isn't really much of a movie. It's a silly romance in which a Manhattan cardsharp falls for a librarian and sees the light. The script is negligible, the characters are cutesy, the direction-by Wesley Ruggles-is only serviceable.
But it's an essential Lombard film, because it's her one screen pairing with her eventual husband Clark Gable (gambler to her librarian). To call their scenes electric is putting it mildly. For the first 10 minutes of their screen courtship here-when Gable spies her at a magazine stand, pursues her into the library and then waylays her at one bookshelf after another-the stars literally seem besotted with each other (and probably were). This is screen chemistry with a vengeance.
"Twentieth Century" (6 p.m. Jan. 6) is one of six 1934 Lombard films. But it's the key one, the movie that set her image and made her career.
Playing Lily Garland (nee Mildred Plotka), Broadway ingenue turned Hollywood glamor queen, Lombard seized the screwball crown, holding her own against the '30s most formidable ham, John Barrymore. Barrymore, in his wild prime, plays egomaniacal producer Oscar Jaffe, determined at all costs to wrest his erstwhile star back from Movieland while on a coast-to-coast race on the famous luxury train, the Twentieth Century Limited.
Wordmasters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur adapted their own play, and the roaring, pell-mell, brilliantly sustained pace comes from ace director Howard Hawks-who also deserves full credit for helping Lombard's new image. When one argument scene with Barrymore dragged in rehearsal, Hawks asked Lombard what she'd do in the same situation. "I'd kick him!" she snarled. "Well, go ahead and kick him," Hawks told her, and a screwball legend was born.
- Cinematographers don't always get their due, but they do in "Visions of Light" Saturday and Sunday at the Music Box, 3733 N.
This warmly knowledgeable and glitteringly illustrated history of the craft was directed by Arnold Glassman, Stuart Samuels and Todd McCarthy, and written by McCarthy, then Variety's lead film critic.
McCarthy interviewed dozens of luminaries for the film, ranging from Golden Age masters (film noir legend John Alton) to the generations after them ("Prince of Darkness" Gordon Willis, Conrad Hall, William Fraker). Present-day cinematographers include Allen Daviau ("E.T.") and Spike Lee's right-hand man, Ernest Dickerson, who opens the film with his boyhood recollections of watching the David Lean-Freddie Young "Oliver Twist."
The film glows with lustrous pictures. More important, it takes us inside and backstage, to explain how those images were crafted-and to celebrate the artists who lit them, and who, at their best, deserve the appellation "painters of light."
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