#FridayShort MGM Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer "Twenty Years After" 1944 Promotional Short for MGM's 20th Anniversary

#SayTheirNames #SilentEdition Helen Holmes

Helen Holmes was supposedly reacquainted with Mabel Normand while on a trip to Los Angeles in 1911 after having known each other in New York on the modeling and Broadway scene. The already successful stage actress, along with her widowed mother and siblings, had moved to California to take care of her brother who was dying of tuberculosis. The Holmeses ended up losing their life savings in a property in Death Valley by the Colorado River and Normand recommended Holmes for a bit part at Keystone. Helen only made a few appearances in Keystone films until late 1913 when her lack of glamorous beauty relegated her to secondary roles and she left for Kalem Studios where she would appear in more than thirty shorts in her first two years alone.

Holmes's first starring role was in her own "thrill-a-minute" serial "The Hazard of Helen" which began in November 1914 and ran until February 24, 1917. She would do most of her own stunts from leaping onto runaway trains or chasing after train robbers without any help from the male hero. In December 1918's Motion Picture Magazine, Helen was the second out of the five popular actresses of the year even beating out Mabel Normand. She would soon married Kalem head J.P. McGowan and the married couple would end up leaving Kalem for Thomas H. Ince Productions and Universal Pictures. Helen would continue to perform in theater throughout her film career.

In 1915 they would form Signal Film Productions to make their own adventure films and until early 1917, they made a dozen successful films although with plenty of financial and distribution problems. Helen wouldn't appear in another film until 1919's "The Fatal Fortune." In addition to making only one film a year, she would produce and star in the serial "The Tiger Band" (1920) made by Warner Brothers. Holmes would pair with Jack Hoxie in several Westerns in the mid-1920s as her popularity waned, going back to the stage in 1925 until her last appearance ten years later. She married stuntman Lloyd A. Saunders and retired from both film and stage. The both of them would train animals for the movies and Helen ran an antique shop out of her San Fernando home. She passed away of heart failure at her house in Burbank on July 8, 1950. 

Remake This: Detour (1945)

Variety described Edward G. Ulmer's "Detour" as "fall[ing] short of being a sleeper because of a flat ending and its low-budgeted production mountings." With its short running time of 68 minutes, it was shown alongside a live stage show featuring the Slim Gaillard Trio, Benny Rubin, the Buddy Rich Orchestra, and Nick and Vicki Collins. But the Orpheum only made $24,000 was made after the transit strike the past week. Once "Detour" premiered nationwide, the B-picture ended up making $1,000,000 at the box office given its maximum budget of $100,000, almost barely making it into the top 100 of 1945. Reviews were lukewarm, Variety calling the performances as "uniformly good" with "equally good direction and dialogue."

Matthew Schoenaerts as Al Roberts

Alice Braga as Vera

#FridayShort 1938 Warner Brothers Bloopers

#WomenDoingAwesomeThingsWednesday Fredi Washington

"You see I'm a mighty proud gal, and I can't for the life of me find any valid reason why anyone should lie about their origin, or anything else for that matter. Frankly, I do not ascribe to the stupid theory of white supremacy and try to hide the fact that I am a Negro for economic or any other reasons. If I do, I would be agreeing to be a Negro makes me inferior and that I have swallowed whole hog all of the propaganda dished out by our fascist-minded white citizens. 

 

"I don't want to pass because I can't stand insincerities and shams. I am just as much Negro as any of the others identified with the race."

"I have never tried to pass for white and never had any desire, I am proud of my race. In 'Imitation of Life', I was showing how a girl might feel under the circumstances but I am not showing how I felt." 

"I am an American citizen and by God, we all have inalienable rights and wherever those rights are tampered with, there is nothing left to do but fight...and I fight. How many people do you think there are in this country who do not have mixed blood? There's very few, if any. What makes us who we are, are our culture and experience. No matter how white I look, on the inside I feel black. There are many whites who are mixed blood, but still go by white. Why such a big deal if I go as Negro? Because people can't believe that I am proud to be a Negro and not white. To prove I don't buy white superiority, I chose to be a Negro."

• One of the founding members of the Negro Actor's Guild of America in 1936 in New York
• Served as executive director and secretary of the Negro Actors Guild and supervised welfare work on guild membership
• Showcased other black artists as the entertainment editor for the African-American publication "The People's Voice"
• Wrote an opinion piece over her concerns for broadcasting opportunities for black actors and actresses working in radio
• Worked with the NAACP's president Walter White to address issues facing black people in America
• Helped cast black ensembles for the 1952 revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess as well as its movie and "Carmen Jones" (1953)
• Served as administrative secretary for the Joint Committee of Actors Equity and Theater League

Portrayals of Mental Illness/Trauma in Film: James Cagney in "White Heat" (1949)

Screenwriters Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts were offered the idea of adapting the Denver Mint robbery of 1922, but they were not 100% inspired by this prompt Warner Brothers bought from Paramount script girl Virginia Kellogg. "We said, "We don't want to do this. It's simply a bank robbery, it's ordinary, conventional, banal." They said, "What would you like to do?" We said, "We'd like to do Ma Barker and have the gangster with a mother complex and play it against Freudian implications that she's driving him to do these things and he's driving himself to self-destruction. Play it like a Greek tragedy." They said, " Fellas . . . ?" We said "Believe us, this will work. And there's only one man who can play this and make the rafters rock. That is Jimmy Cagney." (Obituary: Ivan Goff | The Independent)

Cagney had just won the Academy Award for "Yankee Doodle Dandy" (1942) and a month later announced that he was leaving Warner Brothers a second time. "Movies should be entertaining, not blood baths," he said on one of his last days at Warners, "I'm sick of carrying a gun and beating up women." His brother, actor and producer William Cagney, and himself would establish Cagney Productions through United Artists producing "Johnny Come Lately" (1943) and "Blood on the Sun" (1945). But by 1949, the company had poor returns from both films and found themselves in a legal dispute with the Samuel Goldwyn Studio over a rental agreement. Goff and Roberts's casting suggestion was only met with horror from Warner Brothers, but the idea of Cagney's "tough guy" comeback was too great for either party to ignore.

Soon after taking the role, Cagney came to Hoff and Roberts's office and laid on the couch asking what they were planning to do. "The writers explained that this time they were going for something completely different; not just to show the gangster as a figure of evil, but to show why and where the damage came from. "Well, it sounds interesting. Sounds like it will be fun to play... Whatever you say, fellas."" (Feature: The James Cagney season | Film | The Guardian) Even some of his closest friends added to the script. Frank McHugh would write the film's opening scene where Cody and his gang rob a mail train in the Sierra Nevada mountains, Humphrey Bogart adding to many "after hours" revision sessions as well.

Director Raoul Walsh gave Cagney plenty of room for improvisation as well as on set suggestions. It's still debated who had come up with the idea for Cody to climb into his mother's lap "and sit there; being soothed during one of his psychotic episodes" which Goff would later describe as "something awfully personal" to startled audiences. Walsh was the one to suggest for Cagney to fall from his chair during one of his debilitating headaches then firing off a round from his .45. But the scene in the prison mess hall where Cody is serving three years for a train job and finds out his mother has died, is all Cagney.

"My father had a saloon at Eighty-first Street and First Avenue, just a little place," Cagney explained to Rolling Stone Magazine's Timothy White in 1981, "and he was known as the 'two for one' bartender meaning that he drank two for every one he served. Not a wise way to make a living. In those days, my father thought he had something going simply by running the place, but he was wrong, unfortunately. He was a bookkeeper originally -- that was the irony of it. He also liked to play the horses and ran through a lot of what little money we had. He died in 1918 after a quick bout of the flu. His alcoholism had weakened him to where the bug took him like that." When asked how Cody comes up with making that loud noise in the mess hall, Cagney attributed it mostly to the memory of his own father in his alcoholic fits.