Fashion Spotlight: Howard Greer

After graduating the University of Nebraska in 1916, Howard Greer was sketching for the House of Lucille in both the New York and Chicago offices. He served in the Army, which took him to France where he also worked for British designer Molyneux and avant-garde French designer Paul Poiret as well as designed for theater. Greer came back to America in 1921. His first commission was creating costumes for the Greenwich Vintage Follies in New York. Soon Hollywood called and Famous Players Lasky Studios hired Greer as chief designer. He stayed in the costume department even after Players Lasky merged with Paramount Studios. A few years into the consolidation, Greer left Paramount to open his own custom couture business until his retirement in 1962. He continued to create women's gowns for film as well as dressing actresses like Katharine Hepburn, Gloria Swanson, and Greta Garbo. Greer is best remembered for "Bringing Up Baby" and "My Favorite Wife." He was also best known for being Edith's Head mentor. He passed away in 1974.

Katharine Hepburn in
"Bringing Up Baby" (1938)

#FridayShort Hollywood Canteen with Dinah Shore and Lana Turner

#WomanEmpowermentWednesday 9 Times When Barbara Stanwyck Breathed Lady Power

"Double Indemnity" (1944)

"The Lady Eve" (1941)

"Ball of Fire" (1941)

"Baby Face" (1933)

"Remember the Night" (1940)

"Shopworn" (1932)

Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

"Lady of Burlesque" (1943)

"Stella Dallas" (1937)

#ManCrushMonday #MemorableSupportingActor Walter Brennan

Walter Brennan was always meant for show business. At 15, he started in vaudeville until life intervened. He served in the U.S. Army as a private in the 101st Field Artillery Regiment in France for two years, worked as a financial reporter in Boston and planned to move to Guatemala to grow pineapples but only got as far as Los Angeles. Once on the West Coast, Brennan took extra work at Universal in the '20s and by 1935, he worked up to supporting actor thanks to Howard Hawks in "Barbary Coast." He made his best known for "To Have and Have Not" (1944), "The Westerner" (1940), and "Red River" (1948). Brennan would be one of the three male supporting actors to win three Oscars, winning for "Come and Get It" (1936), "Kentucky" (1938), and "The Westerner" (1940). He would appear in more than 230 films and TV, living a long life until 1974 when Brennan died of emphysema. 

Portrayals of Mental Illness/Trauma in Film: Bette Davis as Charlotte Vale in "Now Voyager" (1942)

Bette Davis wasn't initially interested in the role of Charlotte Vale in the film adaptation of Olive Higgins Prouty's "Now Voyager." Norma Shearer and Irene Dunne were approached, Ginger Rogers was given the actual source material by Producer Hal Wallis. But Davis was already neck-deep in running The Hollywood Canteen and her film career and all of her work in the World War 2 effort. Wallis appealed to her philanthropic side, advising "that female audiences needed romantic dramas to distract them from the reality of their lives" and once Davis was in, she was all in. She read the material and became involved in the wardrobe with designer Orry-Kelly.

Charlotte Vale was an unwanted child to a rich family of three boys and her mother emotionally and verbally abused her for her whole life until believed to be close to a nervous breakdown. Psychiatrist Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains) is brought in thanks to one of her sister-in-laws and insists that she enter his sanitarium. After some time in Jaquith's care, a newly transformed and confident Charlotte goes on a cruise instead of going back to the Vale mansion right away. While on the ship she meets an unhappily married man (Paul Henreid) who is being kept to his vows by an equally abusive wife who keeps him from a daughter she does not love and keeps him from his dream career. There is instant attraction and with the confidence she gets from her time away and by Jerry's love, however fleeting, she finally stands up to her mother. The awful woman dies of a heart attack hours later and Charlotte is so distraught, she goes back into the sanitarium. Once there, fate intervenes again.

Between the book and movie, the themes of psychoanalysis and mental health was one of the first for the films in the 1940s which was radical for the time. "Throughout history, violence and loss have sometimes driven women mad. Psychiatry has been generally complicit in this process. Today, a woman like Ethel Small who enters the system at least has a chance that she might have be asked 'What happened to you?' rather than 'What's wrong with you?' In certain places, she might even be referred to a specialist who has experience working with trauma survivors. But in the 1930s, a woman beaten by her husband and mourning her children would not have been considered a trauma survivor." (Penney, Strasnsy. The Lives They Left Behind. 2009.) ""Now Voyager" is unique in that it understands the links between Charlotte's mental duress and her mother's abuse above all else; furthermore, it shows the possibility of overcoming traumas, not being consumed by them." (""Now Voyager": 75th Anniversary Appreciation")

#FridayShort Jane Wyman Interview (1949)

#WomanEmpowermentWednesday Lillian Hellman

• Earned $50 a week as a reader at Metro-Goldwyn Mayer
• Member of League American Writers, the Screen Writers Guild, and National Institute of Arts and Letters
• One of the 88 public figures to sign "An Open Letter to American Liberals" protesting Leon Trotsky's defense against the Soviet Union 
• Testified in front of the House Un-American Activities and consistently claimed the Fifth ammendment
• Was "a most casual member" of the Communist Party
• Actively Supported the International Brigades who joined the anti-Franco side of the Spanish Civil War
• Refused a contract from Columbia because she found the loyalty clause an infringement on her rights of free speech and to sign a statement that Hellman was never involved with the Communist Party which would hurt her romantic relationship with active Communist with Dashiell Hammet
• With Earnest Hemingway hosted a dinner to raise money for anti-Nazi French prisoners
• Returned to Hollywood in 1934 to become a screenwriter for Goldwyn Pictures at $2,500 a week
• Wrote an editorial in Screen Writer mocking the House Un-American Activities for denying employment to anyone who refused to answer questions by the house and allowing producers to be intimidated
• Helped form and fund Contemporary Historians, Inc. with Dorothy Parker and Archibald MacLeish to demonstrate support for the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil Wars

#ManCrushMonday #MenBeingCivilBadAsses Norman Foster and "Navajo" (1952)

Norman Foster already had a successful career before "Navajo" (1952). He had written and directed 7 out of the 9 "Mr. Moto" movies and many others until directing and writing the working title of "The Voice of the Wind." What became "Navajo" chronicled a seven-year-old boy who resents the white man but especially when it becomes law for all the boys to go to school. When he tries to sell his pocketknife for food when all the children is supposed to be in school, Son of the Hunter goes on the run when he is discovered by The White Counselor and Billy, a Ute guide, in the marketplace.

Most of the film was filmed on the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona, Canyon de Chelly, Death Canyon and the trading post Chinlee. It was in Chinlee where the film was screened first as part of an American Red Cross fundraising drive. The production cost itself remains a mystery. Contemporary sources say $24,220 and a total of $51,000 at the end of post-production, but other sources quote $100,000. 

Navajo Doctor Harry Tschopik, Jr. reviewed the film in Screen stating that "the film makes no pretense at documenting Navajo culture in its entirety, although details of Navajo belief, custom, and history are introduced in a casual, realistic manner whenever they are pertinent to the plot." It won the top award at the Edinburg Film Festival and won twenty-six national awards. For all of the mixed reviews, the film was nominated for two Academy Awards for Documentary Feature and Virgil E. Miller won for Best Black and White Cinematography. A.W. at The New York Times called it a compassionate study and "an indirect plea for understanding -- on both sides -- [with] no preachment. It is basically [...] an unusual, truly picturesque and convincing look."