Michael often spoke of his father and their book discussions. Isaac Foot would visit London nearly every fortnight, Michael recalled, and they would see each other. Michael rarely spoke of anyone else...
How did Brennan achieve this mythic status, this power over not just audiences but also his fellow actors? Today, the question remains unanswered, and this figure key to understanding the power of Hol...
Like Drums Across the River, Bad Day at Black Rock (January 7, 1955), is a revisionist work—this time examining the seamy side, the racism and thuggery—of postwar America. Brennan, looking much slimme...
Scholars estimate that Boswell spent something like four hundred days in Samuel Johnson’s company. Over a period of three years and ten trips to England, I lived for something like one hundred days wi...
Second only to the royals in Michael’s gallery of good-for-nothings were, of course, the Tories. John Major occupied a special page in Michael’s book of bad ones. The trouble began when Suraj Paul, a...
Richard Avedon photographs Marilyn, her torso covered in feathers (her sexual plumage) and wearing high heels, her left leg bent and brought up to her body so that the leg projects outward horizontall...
I slept on a sofa bed in Michael’s library. Each night before retiring, I would go through a shelf or pile of books (his only filing system) filled with letters and reviews and notes. Every night brou...
Obviously fond of Jill, Paul remembered a time they were all together in a car arguing, and Jill whispered in Paul’s ear, Michael thinks he can win an argument by how loud he shouts.
In one comic scene, Brennan and Cooper share the same bed, with Brennan’s arm, at one point, draped over Cooper’s. It is tempting to see Lillian Hellman’s hand in such scenes, since she was assigned t...
Michael had an aching need to show the world what Jill had not been able to display herself, much as Thomas Carlyle had done for his late wife Jane and H. G. Wells had done for his Jane after she died...
Walter Brennan spent virtually his entire life making motion pictures, perfecting a persona, and embodying a range of characters that he began to observe and imitate during his earliest days on the do...
Michael and Jill were connoisseurs of personality, transcending politics. They loved Randolph Churchill, who ran two losing campaigns against Michael in Plymouth and they adored Benjamin Disraeli, Mrs...
Michael had been an all-day walker for much of his life, but at eighty-seven, the rises robbed him of air and he had to stop frequently to tell his anecdotes. Yet he was still taking buses and clatter...
Never meant to be more than a B picture entertainment produced on the Universal International backlot and at the Iverson Ranch (a five-hundred-acre family property often used for location shoots), it...
I went to this party for Francis Wheen’s book [on Marx]. I went and sat on a chair—at these places I can’t stand up and so I sat there and a woman came up to me—I gather from the Telegraph. It was jus...
That was how I met Mrs. Thatcher, Michael said. It must have been 1976, just before she was elected leader of the Conservative Party. Michael had just given a speech: I went up to look at it, and ther...
I think Walter Brennan was the greatest example of a personality that I’ve ever used. . . . When I was in trouble, I called on Brennan. He always came through. —HOWARD HAWKS IN CONVERSATION WITH JOSEP...
It was rare for Walter Brennan to express more than satisfaction at work well done. But Three Godfathers (March 6, 1936) was something special. With its combination of an unusual director, Richard Bol...
By the time he was six, Walter was luring tramps and other unsavory characters home with the promise of a meal. He loved to hear their tall tales. A year later, imitating an Irish neighbor, he began c...
By 1950, Brennan was settling into a schedule that saw him making three films a year, giving him more time on his ranch and with a new business he started in Joseph, a 487-seat movie theater that open...
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