Ted Donaldson, Joan Blondell, Peggy Ann Garner, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Joan Blondell Q&A Pt.2: Joan Blondell-Dick Powell-June Allyson Triangle, Lost Raunchy Pre-Coder Convention City My favorite Joan Blondell performance is her Aunt Sissy in Elia Kazan's 20th Century-Fox drama A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). How did she get that role? What was it like for her to work with Kazan, Peggy Ann Garner, Dorothy McGuire, James Dunn? What did the film do for her career? And how in the world could she not have received an Academy Award nomination? (Especially considering that James Dunn won in the supporting category.) Did Fox push Dunn while ignoring Blondell? A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a beautiful movie, and certainly Aunt Sissy is one of Joan's best performances. According to the sources I use in the book, a Fox contract was delivered to her...
- 8/25/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Joan Blondell: Q&A with Biographer Matthew Kennedy Pt.1 What did Joan Blondell have to say about the musicals she made for Busby Berkeley? What about Ruby Keeler, James Cagney, and her other fellow contract players? Did she get along with them? [Photo: Joan Blondell in Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933.] Joan said, not surprisingly, that those musicals were tough. There was extra rehearsal needed for production numbers, and Berkeley was very demanding. But she always spoke well of her fellow contract players. Or at least most of them. She and Keeler were friendly, and they had a happy reunion in New York in the early 1970s when they were both appearing on Broadway. Cagney she adored and admired, and maybe fell in love with. But they were not romantic off screen, only on. She was particularly close to Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Glenda Farrell, her costar in several low-budget comedies at Warners. She and [MGM contract player] Judy Garland...
- 8/25/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, Dames Joan Blondell has always been a favorite of mine, much like fellow wisecracking 1930s Warner Bros. players Aline MacMahon and Glenda Farrell. The fact that Blondell never became a top star says more about audiences — who preferred, say, Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney — than about Blondell's screen presence and acting abilities. As part of its "Summer Under the Stars" film series, Turner Classic Movies is currently showing no less than 16 Joan Blondell movies today, including the TCM premiere of the 1968 crime drama Kona Coast. Directed by Lamont Johnson, Kona Coast stars Richard Boone and the capable Vera Miles. Blondell has a supporting role — one of two dozen from 1950 (For Heaven's Sake) to 1981 (The Woman Inside, released two years after Blondell's death from leukemia). [Joan Blondell Movie Schedule.] Unfortunately, TCM isn't showing the super-rare (apparently due to rights issues) The Blue Veil, Curtis Bernhardt's 1951 melodrama that earned Blondell her...
- 8/24/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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