Bill Paxton would have been 69 years old today. As a lover of both films and eccentric Texans, I still miss Bill Paxton.
Today’s scene that I love comes from Twister and it features Bill Paxton showing off some wonderful chemistry with Helen Hunt. One of the great things about Bill Paxton is that he was equally at home in both big blockbusters like Twister and Titanic and low-budget indies like Near Dark. He was an artist who also happened to be a star.
Today, we celebrate the birthday of Henry Fonda!
Fonda was born 119 years ago today and, over the course of his long career, he was often cast in role the epitomized everything great about America. It’s rare to find a Henry Fonda film in which he played an out-and-out villain, though he did just that in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. (Leone, in fact, cast Fonda as the evil Frank because he knew audiences would be shocked to see Fonda coldly gunning down settlers and their families.)
One of Fonda’s finest films was 1943’s The Ox-Bow Incident, in which he played a cowboy who finds himself drafted into joining a posse that ends up hanging three men for the crime of murder and cattle rustling. The members of the posse (including seven of whom voted against hanging the men) later learn that the men were innocent. In today’s scene that I love, Henry Fonda reads aloud the letter that one of the men wrote to his wife shortly before he was hung. This was one of Fonda’s most heartfelt and powerful performances.
On this date in 1905, the great actor Joseph Cotten was born in Petersburg, Virginia. A longtime friend and collaborator of Orson Welles, Cotten was one of the most dependable leading men of the 40s and 50s, an actor with the charisma of star and the talent of an artist.
Today’s scene that I love comes from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 masterpiece, Shadow of a Doubt, and it features Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten. Wright plays Charlie. Cotten plays her beloved uncle, who is also named Charlie and who might very well be a serial killer. In this scene, Uncle Charlie drags his niece to a seedy bar, where he confesses that, as she earlier deduced, he is a suspect in a murder investigation. With a mixture of charm and intimidating, Charlie tries to convince his niece to keep his secret to herself.
Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to director Robert Zemeckis!
Today’s scene that I love comes from Zemeckis’s 1980 comedy, Used Cars! In this scene, used car salesman Gerrit Graham interrupts a televised presidential address so that he can demonstrate the best way to deal with inflation.
(Of course, he does the demonstration at a rival used car lot.)
Jack Warden watches as his cars blow up while Graham’s boss (Kurt Russell) tries to keep his business partner (Deborah Harmon) from noticing what is happening on the television.
“That price is too high!”
On this date, 38 years ago, Top Gun was released and the movie changed forever.
From the opening shot, Top Gun captured the attention of audiences who understood that, though the film’s script may have been full of cliches and though the movie was basically just a remake of the old service moves of the late 30s and 40s, it didn’t matter because jets are freaking cool.
And that opening scene is today’s scene that I love!
Happy Top Gun Day!
On this date, 117 years ago, Katharine Hepburn was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She would go one to become a cultural icon, a performer who survived being labeled box office to poison to eventually become one of our most acclaimed actresses. Hepburn was a total of four acting Oscars over the course of her career, a record that has yet to be topped.
Today’s scene that I love comes from 1940’s The Philadelphia Story and it features Katharine Hepburn acting opposite another one of my favorite performers, the great James Stewart.
Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to one of my favorite character actors, Nicky Katt!
In 1993’s Dazed and Confused, Katt had a small but pivotal role as Clint. Clint is the guy who loves his car, drinking beer, smoking weed, and beating up people. Mike (played by Adam Goldberg) runs afoul of Nick at the end of the year party and later decides that he has no choice but to fight back. Needless to say, Clint is the better fighter of the two but at least Mike got one good punch in!
(For a while, there was talk of a Dazed and Confused sequel, in which Clint would have turned his life around and become both a born again Christian, and a respected member of the community while Mike would still be obsessing about their brief fight in 1976,)
Fred Astaire was born 125 years ago, on this date, in Omaha, Nebraska.
Today’s scene that I love comes from 1951’s Royal Wedding. Just consider that Astaire was in his fifties when he performed this scene.
Today would have been the 88th birthday of the great British actor, Albert Finney!
And today’s scene that I love features Albert Finney in the role of history’s most famous miser. In 1970’s Scrooge, Finney played the title role and, early on, his worldview was perfectly captured by a song called I Hate People. Finny was only 34 when he played Ebenezer Scrooge but he does a wonderful job of bringing the character to life and he’s just as convincing when he’s being good as he is when he’s being bad. Finney is the main reason why Scrooge is my personal favorite of all of the versions of A Christmas Carol.
Filmed in 1945, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City was one of the first films to be made about life under the Nazis. Uniquely, it was a film made by and starring the people who had actually experienced, firsthand, the occupation of Rome by the Germans and much of the film was based on their real-life experiences. The majority of the cast was made up of nonprofessionals and, largely because the city’s once-impressive studios and sound stages had been destroyed during the war, the film was shot on location, on the streets where many of the events depicted had actually occurred.
Rome, Open City follows a diverse group of characters who are all involved with the Resistance. When the film begins, it appears that the pregnant Pina (Anna Magnani) is meant to be the main character. However, in a scene that was considered quite shocking for the time, Pina is shot in the streets by the Nazis while chasing after a truck that is carrying away her fiancé. The scene captures both the casual brutality of the Nazis and the reality of living under an occupation. It’s a scene that reminds the viewer that evil is not sentimental, evil does not care that you are pregnant or that you’re planning on getting married, and that the forces of evil will do anything — including shooting an unarmed woman in the street — to maintain power.
The priest who tries to help Pina was based on Giuseppe Morosini, who was a member of the Italian Resistance and who was executed in 1944, shortly before the Nazis fled Rome and left the city to the Allies. Originally, Rossellini planned to make a documentary about Morosini’s life. When that project struggled to get off the ground, he instead incorporated Morosini’s story into Open City.
Through the Shattered Lens 