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LAST UPDATE October 30, 2025

Fast Reviews:

Actors and Sin – 1952: Written, directed and produced by Ben Hecht. This mini-anthology diptych contains two tales personifying the business-end of acting (and producing) and the emotional toll. A bit like the "Thalia and Melpomene" masks used so often to represent the profession, the extreme of one laughing and one crying shows the breadth of how Hecht presents his two stories.

We get Woman of Sin, a farcical "inside" look at a Hollywood film production that goes to epic lengths to realize the vision of a script of the same name by hitherto unknown writer Daisy Marcher. She has a fast-talking, shape-shifting agent named Orlando Higgens who is able to keep drawing concessions and higher dollar amounts for a contract for the script from Empire Studios who is desperate to nail down the screenplay. A delighted Higgens moves fast to draw out more and more money on the deal, but aside from a single phone conversation Higgens has had with Marcher, he has never met her and is negotiating with a lot of assumptions in his head about what this suddenly mega-successful writer will want.

The script's success itself is pure accident, it was supposed to be sent back to the writer (i.e., rejected) but instead was accidentally placed at Empire Studios where super-producer J.B. Cobb (Alan Reed) saw it in a pile. Though he disclaims the practice of ever bothering to read scripts, he reads this one, and eventually declares"I consider Woman of Sin better than Gone With The Wind by twice! It's not only a great masterpiece of woman psychology and human soul and drama but one of the greatest pieces of box office entertainment we've ever gotten our hands on! ....It's what this country needs, a great story of animal love! ...And in starting this picture, I am fulfilling a dream I've had for twenty-five years of someday giving to the world a cinema masterpiece that will prove once and for all that Hollywood has come of age as a center of art! Woman of Sin is such a masterpiece!"

But as the cameras get ready to roll and the machinery of production moves, we know there's a complication just waiting to be discovered, something only known to a candy-addicted mother (Jody Gilbert), the talent agent (Eddie Albert) and his secretary (Tracey Roberts as "Miss Flannigan") which is that Woman of Sin has been written by a precocious nine-year old girl.

Jenny Hecht is the energetic, highly-intelligent and slightly weird little girl who, when discovered, is quick to understand the legal complications. The kid uses her leverage to force a contract for four more movies, the next to be an ultra-violent pirate movie called Sea of Blood based on a script she's written with a technical advisor who is a tubby little neighborhood boy (Alan Mendez) who we see carrying around toy sail boats.

The now compromised J.B. Cobb hates the script for crazily over-the-top violent Sea of Blood but is still anxious for Woman of Sin, not to mention the legal complications from setting up a movie deal with a minor, and so he will have to produce it plus another three movies in the future from the munchkin scriptwriter.

Tracey Roberts plays the efficient, loyal and very tightly-wound secretary that the super-agent is constantly locking lips with, in fact this segment about movie making seems to imply that, as J.B. Cobb said when praising Woman of Sin as a masterpiece, Hollywood is rife with "animal love." But for our sakes, somehow writer (and director) Ben Hecht is able to make the smarm be only an implied smarm, and the 'animal love' is the goofy domain of rather goofy adults, and the innocent children are where the real energy of Hollywood resides.

The other tale, which is first of the two mini-stories, is the heavy melodrama Actor's Blood with Edward G. Robinson. He plays a "washed up, has been actor" who vanished into obscurity but then rises back up to use his career of long-passed theatre experience to emotionally support his grown up daughter (Marsha Hunt) who is a star on Broadway.

We watch as her career begins to falter and implode as her likewise "real world" relationships do the same. The illusion of value derived from belonging to a "superior" world of art and using art as a protective shield against trouble and troubled relationships can only carry a person so far. Marsha Hunt plays the role of a woman who cannot keep the two separate worlds from colliding.

Hecht shows a dynamic not unlike that of the later Oscar-nominated 1983 The Dresser in which the backstage help makes what happens on the stage, happen. But Hecht's story is also a bit like the problem of the "vorvolaka" in Val Lewton's 1945 Isle of the Dead in which a vampire-like monster doesn't draw blood from a victim, but uses a close relationship to psychically drain the energy of life itself from them.

Actor's Blood can be viewed as a simple tragic tale of the drama behind the drama in theatrical life where career and private life crisscrosses, or it can be a horror film, or a twisted mystery-drama. The worn-out, jaded and hopeless daughter dies by her own hand, and the truth of whether it was suicide or murder has to be explained through the character examination of Eddie Robinson's paternal force. Critics are shown as acid-tongue assassins, but also a kind of priesthood who raise up the spectre of a career as if that is the summation of a person. The confusion between what is a life lived and a life portrayed is given a strange send-off at the end, with a critic saying of self-annihilation through stagecraft as "a lovely piece of old-fashioned mummery."

Criterion classic film releases just ahead

1930 Hell's Angels with Jean Harlow - 4K release – Criterion Coming November 18

1940 His Girl Friday in 4K with Rosiland Russell and Cary Grant – Criterion Coming December 2

4K Captain Blood with Erroll Flynn – Criterion Coming January 20, 2026

The "living Caryatid" Irene Papas

The "living Caryatid" Irene Papas film retrospective at the Greek Film Archive in Athens

Story at Lifo [in Greek - English vis Google Translate]

Fast Reviews:

Ladies Man – 1931: Early "talkie" with a primitive handling of audio and especially the pacing of dialogue but Carol Lombard, kay Francis and a youngish William Powell make it work toward the tragic ending. More about Ladies Man, 1931

Fast Reviews:

Funny Girl – 1968: This film is half of a very, very good musical about early 20th century songstress and comedienne Fanny Brice with Omar Sharif and Barbra Striesand – more about Funny Girl.

CLaudia Cardinale

Claudia Cardinale has died - 1938–2025

"Acclaimed Italian actor Claudia Cardinale, who starred in some of the most celebrated European films of the 1960s and 1970s, has died, AFP reported Tuesday. She was 87." – Associated Press - New York Post

"Claudia Cardinale, star of ‘8½’ and ‘The Leopard,’ dies at 87" – MSN CNN News

"The rebellious diva of Italian cinema" – La Repubblica [Italian]

From her first film Big Deal on Madonna Street by Mario Monicelli to her latest works with young directors, Claudia Cardinale made more than 150 films. Thus, ‘the girl who didn’t want to go into cinema’ became an icon of Italian identity thanks to collaborations with the greatest Italian directors, from Visconti to Fellini, from Comencini to Ferreri, from Leone to Blake Edwards. She also worked for Hollywood, though she fled from it. The list of awards is long as well: from the David di Donatello prizes for Girl with a Suitcase by Valerio Zurlini and The Day of the Owl by Damiano Damiani to the Silver Ribbons, from the Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement at the Berlin Festival in 2002 to the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Festival in 1993..."

"A symbol of Mediterranean beauty and a beloved actress for directors such as Visconti, Fellini, Leone, and Herzog" – La Stampa [Italian]

Fast Review

There's Always A Woman - 1938: Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell are a husband-wife team working from opposite sides on a murder mystery - More about There's Always A Woman

Robert Redford has died - 1936–2025

"Elusive legend of the big screen" – UK The Times

When the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid elevated him from promising leading man to bona fide movie star status, Robert Redford did not celebrate. Rather, he sat down and wrote a list of the three key danger points of his newly minted celebrity.... It was a curiously wary response from an actor who had spent the film shoot terrifying the rest of the cast and crew by insisting that he did his own stunts ... Physically daring but intellectually cautious, he was deeply suspicious of Hollywood and its trappings, by nature distrustful of movie industry exuberance. He was — crucially — a very private person, who kept even his closest collaborators at arm’s length. The screenwriter William Goldman recalled that even on their third film together, All the President’s Men, Redford was still too cagey to give out his home phone number."

A movie star and founder of Sundance – Washington Post

Mr. Redford remained essentially a loner who craved the solitude of his wilderness home in Utah and pushed 120 mph on the open highway in his Porsche..."