The Strange Fame of Frances Farmer

There is a strange sort of screen fame, where the pitiful fate of an actor is far better known than anything in the artist's filmography. Marie Prevost is one of these, thanks to a misspelled serenade from Nick Lowe; others include Fatty Arbuckle, Wallace Reid, Maria Montez, and Jayne Mansfield.

The queen of this sad category must be Frances Farmer. She made only sixteen films, and most ordinary people haven't seen any of them. Only about three are still known to even the most ardent movie buffs (in descending order of repute, Come and Get It, The Toast of New York and Son of Fury). Her fame was kept alive via a largely bogus "autobiography," a lurid chapter of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon and a wildly inaccurate biography. In this, Frances is in keeping with her company, too. Much of what you hear about these Bad-End Actors isn't true. Fatty Arbuckle was almost certainly innocent of rape; Jayne Mansfield was not decapitated in the car crash that killed her. (And the Ur-Source of much of the bad information is Hollywood Babylon, so much so that you start to wonder if this bilious man got anything right except the crime-scene photographs.) Farmer's brutal fate needed little embellishment, but the legends printed by various writers became the facts. And the "facts" eventually led to a Hollywood biopic, and the finest performance Jessica Lange ever put on film.



Frances as a whole isn't a particularly good movie. It is more of an endurance test than anything else--over two hours of watching a beautiful, sensitive and intelligent woman destroyed by the sorriest collection of gargoyles you ever saw in your life. Roger Ebert's review maintains that no one thing is blamed for Farmer's downfall, but in fact Farmer herself largely gets a pass. She does drink a lot, but sheesh, who can blame her? Her life is one betrayal after another, by Seattle, by her mother, by the studio, by reporters, by Clifford Odets, by her ghastly mother again, by the mental health system, by the local military, by a glory-hound doctor and finally by Ralph Edwards and This Is Your Life. There is a fictional "Harry York" character, played by Sam Shepard, who keeps popping up at times when Farmer or the script seems to need him. The device came in for a lot of criticism, but at least he gives the audience time to breathe before the next catastrophe befalls Farmer.

That this horror show is watchable at all is almost entirely due to Lange, who is believable, charismatic and sympathetic. She takes Farmer from her fiery, idealistic teens to hollowed-out middle age with seamless honesty. The false notes are in the script, never in Lange's characterization. It is quite the tribute to Lange that many scenes are as clear in the Siren's memory as the day she saw the movie, for the first and only time, in 1982. Lange's line deliveries are so perfect. I can still see her, radiantly beautiful at a Hollywood party, and hear her quiet but lacerating riposte to a conniving yellow journalist: "You seem like an intelligent young man. Can't you find a more dignified way of earning a living?"

Few people can sit through Frances more than once, although critic and blogger Kim Morgan recently managed it. It is a shame, though, that the movie advances the central myth about Farmer's life, that she received a lobotomy in a Washington state mental hospital. All available evidence indicates it never happened. Another indelible scene in Frances, almost as horrifying as the lobotomy, has her being gang-raped by soldiers from the local military base. This is also a highly dubious tale. And while the movie does portray her drinking, it elides Farmer's other contribution to her own destruction, amphetamine abuse. (She started taking Benzedrine to keep her figure, which tended to be a bit more corn-fed than even 1930s Hollywood preferred.)

So the Siren, like most people, knew Frances only through the 1982 biopic and the myths it enshrines. Until this month, the Siren had never seen a single Farmer picture. The one thing all sources agree upon, however, is that Come and Get It, the odd little logging epic begun by Howard Hawks and finished by William Wyler, was the best movie Farmer ever made. Jessica Lange has said it was the only film of Farmer's that wasn't a chore for her to sit through. The Siren recently sat through this one herself, and finally saw the real Frances at work. The through-the-years film gave Farmer a chance to play mother and daughter, tramp and trueheart. Everybody says Farmer was a loss to the screen, that she had great potential, but is it true, or just another story?

(Look here for part two of "The Strange Fame of Frances Farmer.")

Do the Contrarian: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

It is a lonely thing, disliking Once Upon a Time in the West. Trawling through the vast store of critics' reviews compiled on IMDB yields approximately five thumbs down. The rest fall all over themselves to call this the greatest Western ever made. The Siren's own husband has already penciled in a date to see it with the kids when they're ready (in about ten years). One of my favorite film writers named his blog after Sergio Leone. (Dennis, please try not to hold it against me.) The film's reputation seems impregnable, and in questioning its greatness the Siren plays an exercise somewhat akin to lobbing a spitball at the Washington Monument. She is resigned to the idea that few, if any, will agree with her piece of contrarianism. She does hope, however, that for the time it takes to read this post, you will at least be able to see the movie through her eyes.

Instead of summarizing the plot, which is widely known and too murky anyway, the Siren will state why she dislikes this movie: It is overlong, badly acted, misogynistic and dull. Dear god is it dull. The movie is often compared to an opera, but the more apt comparison is oratorio--plenty of music, no scenery and no acting. The structure cycles through same, same, one minute of dialogue, gunfight, same.

Then again, Leone's camera doesn't seem to care if we ever get interested or not. Again and again we return to the basic pattern of long shot (flat, sun-bleached, not terribly interesting desert) to close-up (flat, sun-creased, not terribly expressive face), close-up to long shot. It has a sort of lulling rhythm to it, like walking through a gallery and turning your head from portrait to landscape and back again. But like the paintings in the gallery, it just hangs there. Leone is supposed to have choreographed OUTITW's performances to Morricone's pre-written, excellent score, but the tempo doesn't change much even when the music does. Certainly there are references to other filmmakers--better filmmakers--Fred Zinnemann with the opening train station sequence, John Ford with the build-up to the massacre, the funeral sequence borrowed from George Stevens. Some take that as a sign of the movie's greatness, but spotting those only irritates the Siren further, as it reminds her of other movies she could be watching. (She could, for example, watch High Noon AND 3:10 to Yuma in only slightly more than OUTITW's running time.)

Said it before, repeat it here--the grand unifying theme of Western movies is, "who's the man here?" OUTITW gives us two. The first is Charles Bronson. Actors do not usually become stars without some sort of star quality, and Bronson has presence, a great deal of it in fact. But Leone's preference for monumental performances, meaning the actors hold poses for beat after beat after beat while we are supposed to wonder what is happening behind those scrunched-up eyes, is catastrophic for Bronson. The Siren is not kidding when she tells you she prefers Bronson in Death Wish, where at least he gets to move. Here he seems preserved in amber, an actor who manages to overplay his lack of affect. That is its own form of odd accomplishment, but that doesn't make it moving.

The second man, more by dint of blowing Bronson off the screen than the script itself, is Henry Fonda. The Siren often wonders how much of OUTITW's impact, then and now, is due to the stunt casting of Fonda. Holy moly, Wyatt Earp just shot a kid! How could Tom Joad be so mean? But is it surprising that a serious, stage-trained actor with a 40-year career behind him at that point could play a villain? Frank is a figure of pure evil, as such his character arc is more like a straight line, and Fonda's chief virtue is in refraining from the sort of hamminess Anthony Hopkins brought to Hannibal Lecter. Fonda, as always, walks softly. The shock from the against-type casting lasts about 20 minutes, and the movie is, of course, 165 minutes long. You have plenty of time to notice that Frank's villainy is no more fleshed-out or believable than hundreds of others, from Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance to Jack Palance in Shane. The difference is that those villains don't overstay their welcome, mostly popping onstage to punch up the action and heighten the stakes. Here you have to spend a long, long time with Frank, and he never gets any less or any more evil, nor does he get more interesting.

If there is anything the Siren can enjoy about the movie, aside from the deservedly praised opening, it is Jason Robards as Cheyenne. He is so deliciously, cornball hammy he seems to have dropped in from another set. When he is on screen the movie does occasionally lurch to life, as when he pops up in a window, hanging upside-down from a railway car, wearing a marvelous expression somewhere between apprehension and glee. Unfortunately, many of his scenes are played with Claudia Cardinale.

Ah, Cardinale as Jill. Misogyny irritates the Siren, but even more than misogyny she is irritated by those who try to gloss or dismiss the problem, for problem it is. OUTITW puts a woman in the middle of the action, gives her character great thematic importance, and then shows her behaving in ways that simply beggar belief. She's the whore with a heart of gold (heaven help us, and in 1968 yet), but more than that she is all appetite and survival instinct, only minimal brain. Jill is an animal shorn of even the small dignity of an animal's initiative. She spends the movie merely reacting to events. Kidnapped? Guess she better sleep with Frank. Railroad workers need water? fine, and because Cheyenne says so she'll let them pat her backside (one of the most bizarre assertions of workers' rights the Siren has ever heard). Bronson rips her dress? She falls in love with him. Duck? Fine, she'll duck. And whether deliberately or inadvertently, Leone cast an actress who was unable at any point in her screen career to suggest much of an interior life for even a well-written character, as in The Leopard. In Visconti's masterpiece, this most beautiful of actresses can mime the charm of a young girl only by waggling her shoulders a great deal and biting her lower lip at strategic intervals. Here Cardinale mostly holds her head still (thank God for that small favor from Leone's techniques) but reverts again and again to the same lips-slightly-parted stare, as the audience wonders whether false eyelashes and Cleopatra liner were around in the 1880s.

Here the Siren returns to the mystery of talent, and why some actors can project things to the camera that others simply cannot. Garbo, whom Orson Welles flatly called "stupid," could stare into the distance and take the audience on a journey through all the ages of Woman, as we pondered what lay behind that beautiful face. Cardinale's beauty is no less stunning, and yet as she looks into the camera you suspect she is trying to recall whether she left the hot plate on in her trailer. Well, perhaps Garbo could have breathed substance into Jill. But the Siren doubts it.

In his better movies (though the Siren has reservations even about those), Leone choreographs the set-up for violence fully as much or more than the violence itself, such as the justly celebrated final shoot-out in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Siren doesn't mind the lack of realism in this; as she has said before, realism is a style like any other, and an overrated one, at that. But here Leone just does not know when to stop. I will accept two men circling one another for a final confrontation, sizing one another up like dogs and spitting. I will accept them doing it for a longer time than any two armed men probably ever did in the history of the Colt 45. But when they do it for a quarter-hour--and stop for a flashback to boot--it becomes ludicrous. You might as well bring in Russ Tamblyn and George Chakiris and let the characters dance it out. Furthermore, the impact of this, the final confrontation, is lost because this is how ALL the confrontations in the movie have played out. We have been watching menacing poses for two and a half damn hours. A few more just aren't that interesting.

The theme of OUTITW is the bloody track of the railroad, and how it brings the tough-hombre era to an end even as it brings more exploitation. Leone correctly grasps that the idea of space--that, like Huck Finn, you can always light out for the territories--is a big part of our fascination with the push westward. The director's other idea, here as in his Dollars trilogy, is to strip away the myth that out there was something good or noble, and show that greed and violence built the West. He was hardly the first to do that, but he was one of the most thorough. Trouble is, Leone takes every traditional aspect of the Western and, rather than building on it, either mocks it or replaces it with relentless, dour pessimism. So when the end credits roll at long-bloody-last, all you have is a funhouse reversal of Roy Rogers. Once Upon a Time in the West is, finally, as predictable in its darkness as Rogers was in his eternal goody-goodyness.


(This post is offered as part of the Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon sponsored by Jim Emerson at Scanners.)

Arrowsmith (1931)

Arrowsmith (1931) is a fine example of the fact that, auteurism notwithstanding, you can't judge a film by its pedigree. This one, based on Sinclair Lewis's Pulitzer-winning book, had John Ford directing, Sidney Howard writing the screenplay, Samuel Goldwyn producing and a cast that included Ronald Colman, Helen Hayes, Richard Bennett and Myrna Loy. And it's still basically an interesting failure, proof positive that they were making dull Oscar-bait almost as soon as the awards were started.

Reviewers even at the time complained that Colman was, at forty, too old for the title part. That didn't bother the Siren so much, since practically everybody in a old-time Hollywood movie is usually too old for their parts. (The Dead End "Kids"? West Side Story?) Far more serious a drawback is that he was British down to his very garters, and here he is supposed to be an archetypal Midwesterner. As Stephen Murray of Culturedose.net points out here, the actor's chief characteristic was that he was debonair. Ronald Colman was undoubtedly debonair when he was flossing his teeth. Arrowsmith isn't debonair, he needs to be fresh and achingly earnest--someone like Lew Ayres, perhaps.

The movie's biggest problem, however, is that while Howard would do a superb job of compressing a long novel eight years later for Gone with the Wind, here what you get is a bunch of people talk, talk, talking through a series of disjointed scenes. Nobody simply acts in Arrowsmith, not without discussing the ethical and philosophical implications at great length. Yet simple human motivation remains murky. The movie lurches from one plot point to another, never giving you a good bead on Colman's Martin Arrowsmith, a high-minded doctor. He proposes to nurse Helen Hayes the day he meets her, and as if that isn't enough, in the next scene is giving up his dreams of being a medical researcher to be a GP out in the middle of nowhere, because he will need to support her. "You will be back," his mentor tells him, or rather "You veel bee back," as this mentor is Middle European (aren't they all?). And indeed Arrowsmith does come back, after his special serum cures some South Dakotan cows.

Now Arrowsmith is movin' on up, to a deluxe research facility in the sky and some of the best visuals in the movie, courtesy of Ford and cinematographer Ray June. The look of the New York office is superb and Ford, so brilliant with outdoor sequences, here uses Richard Day's sets beautifully. There's a vertigo-inducing shot of the Chrysler Building from the ground up, as Colman and Hayes try to reassure themselves that they feel at home in this vast, bustling city. A short scene later Arrowsmith emerges from the elevator and walks along the grand swoop of the office, the black-and-white constrasts and vastness of the place emphasizing him as one cog in a very, very large machine.

But Arrowsmith doesn't entirely fit in this grand place, as indeed he does not fit precisely anywhere. He develops another serum, this time for humans, and goes down to the British West Indies to test it during a plague outbreak. There is a great deal of talk about the primacy of science over mere human feelings, which in practice means he's going to give the serum to half the islanders, but not the other half. In the movie, this is clearly seen as unsentimental devotion to science and the greater good. Goatdog has a great review of Arrowsmith that includes an excellent discussion of the medical ethics then and now. Even so, a modern viewer, horrified, is likely to recall the Tuskegee experiment. Ironic, because one of the movie's virtues is the character of Oliver Marchand (Clarence Brooks), a black doctor played entirely as a devoted, dignified professional, with no shuffling, "humor" or degrading dialect added.

In her autobiography, Myrna Loy described the way Ford handled her appearance late in the movie, as Arrowsmith is inoculating the natives. You see the islanders lined up as the doctor sees them, just a series of arms one after another, until the camera lights on Loy's fair-skinned arm. The camera follows Arrowsmith's startled gaze up to that gorgeous face, and the attraction is apparent from that moment forward. That's fortunate, because while a good look at Myrna Loy is always most welcome, she has very little to do here. Goatdog also has an excellent exegesis of Loy's brief role as sexual temptation for the saintly doctor. Post-Code re-releases cut her role to almost nothing. I believe the version I saw restored most of her scenes, but you still have to be hip to 1930s innuendo to figure out what passes between her and Arrowsmith.

Ford had made more than 70 movies at this point, but Arrowsmith marks only the very beginning of his greatness. A lot of Ford's preoccupations are already well in place: The loner fighting society, yet searching for a place in it, too. The sacrifice of home comforts for the sake of a larger good. Man vs. Nature. The film seems to grow more visually sophisticated as it progresses, though the Siren has no idea if it was shot in sequence. The superb, Metropolis-like views of New York give way to the the Caribbean island and the most beautifully shot scenes in the movie, as a misty, Defoe-like procession of biers and mourners continually moves past the doorway of Arrowsmith and his wife. Later, there's an extraordinary shot of a doomed Helen Hayes sinking into a cane-back chair to smoke a cigarette, as light slants through a shutter and around her hair. Here Ford is already working out his vocabulary, and despite its many flaws, that is the best reason to see Arrowsmith.

(Cross-posted at NewCritics.)

E. Howard Hunt, 1918-2007

Eugene Bachinski: There's a strange entry in two of the burglars' address books.
Bob Woodward: Yeah?
Bachinski: One says "H.H. at W.H."; the other says "Howard Hunt, W. House".

--from All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)

At Last, the Best of the Best

Dash over to Edward Copeland's place for his wrap-up of the Best/Worst Actress Oscar Survey. It is a huge belated Christmas present to the cinephile community, a big ol' blogger bon-bon box full of things to ponder and argue with. Don't be shy, Mr. Copeland loves comments. The Siren somehow managed to nail the Worst Actresses with more precision than the Best. She got three of the top 10 Worst. Her Best Actress choices barely landed one in the Top Ten, Jane Fonda in Klute. The Siren realizes that as a cinephile she is supposed to find the Oscars teddibly, teddibly dreary, but she really thinks they are an endless source of amusement and always has. She is already impatient for the Best/Worst Actor survey.

One of the best blogs around is run by the estimable Goatdog. Right now he is calling for a 1927 Blogathon for the weekend of March 23-25. The Siren signed up right away, since one of her New Year's resolutions is to see more silent films. What, you may ask, can one blog about with a 1927 theme? Well, Thom at Film of the Year has some suggestions. You can also head over to the completely fabulous Silent Era site and check out their archives for films made in 1927. If you want to participate, just drop Goatdog a line at goatdogsmovies@gmail.com.

Meanwhile, the Siren is still sprucing up the sidebar, adding Check the Fien Print, Film of the Year, Rebel Without a Cause and the great Jim Emerson, even though his format won't let her comment over there. Also added is The Easy Ace, Jeff Kallman's journal of vintage radio. The Siren has been listening to goodies like Double Indemnity as re-enacted by Ida Lupino and Groucho Marx.

Above, from 1927: Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil.

Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951)

When you see Ace in the Hole (and the Siren does hope that is "when"), you will immediately understand why, upon its first release, the movie stiffed colder than Harry Cohn's heart. Austrian-born Billy Wilder always claimed affection for his adopted country, but you would never know it from this very great movie and its portrait of what H.L. Mencken called the species Boobus Americanus. There we are--grasping, foolish, gullible, addicted to lousy food and cheap entertainment, as distractible as a toddler. This film is bitter medicine even in 2007. Send not to know for whom the bile flows--it flows for thee.

Ace in the Hole's Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas at his best) is a big-city reporter, a sharp cookie who's made himself unemployable. When the movie opens he is talking his way into a job in New Mexico, despite his open contempt for the surroundings. "Even for Albuquerque, this is pretty Albuquerque," is his review of the local paper. With a single dissolve, Wilder establishes the passage of a year, and we find Tatum's contempt has turned to desperation. He hasn't found a single story capable of getting him back into large circulation. But while on his way to cover a rattlesnake roundup, Tatum stumbles across a one-stoplight town called Escadero. There, Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) lies trapped by a cave-in after going too far into an Indian burial site. Here's the human-interest story Tatum's been waiting for--if only Minosa will stay buried long enough for the reporter to milk the pathos.

The local contractor believes he can rescue Leo just by shoring up the walls, which would take about 16 hours. Good for Leo, bad for Tatum. With the connivance of the local sheriff, who is up for re-election, Tatum strong-arms the contractor into drilling through the top of the mountain, a process that could take five days. Thus begins the great ghoulish parade of people seeking something out of Leo's plight. Tatum, of course, wants his career back. His sidekick Herbie (Bob Arthur), a callow young photographer, wants to hitch his wagon to Tatum's. Leo's wife Lorraine, played so dense and so hard by Jan Sterling you could use her to pound a piling, wants out of her Escadero existence and away from the sad-sack Leo.

You can read this movie as an attack on tabloid journalism, which it certainly is, but the press isn't the main target. Tatum is a heel, but he does have a conscience, albeit one that kicks him only faintly and too late. None of these characters have pretty motives, but worst of all are the crowds of people who arrive to camp out, buy souvenirs and eat junk food while waiting for a man to be rescued or to die. Wilder includes a beautiful long shot of a train pulling into Escadero after years of passing the whistle-stop by. What pangs trouble the passengers as they jump out, so eager to mill outside a possible tomb that they leap before the train stops moving? The same that trouble millions of reality-TV viewers, that is to say, none. The throngs believe they are just indulging their God-given American right to be entertained.

Wilder didn't much care for the common American, but he dearly loved the common man's lingo. Here he uses the matchless variety of mid-century Americanese like a dimmer switch, taking the movie from bright to dark. The script starts off funny, as Douglas delivers each staccato burst of sarcasm con brio. "I can handle big news and little news. And if there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog," he says. To the Albuquerque paper's editor, Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall), he remarks, "I've done a lot of lying in my time. I've lied to men who wear belts. I've lied to men who wear suspenders. But I'd never be so stupid as to lie to a man who wears both belt and suspenders." Asked if he drinks, Tatum says, "Not a lot. Just frequently."

The one-liners continue, finally climaxing in the biggest laugh of the picture, Jan Sterling to Douglas: "I've met some hard-boiled eggs in my time. But you? You're twenty minutes." The laughs are quieter from that moment, until all smiles cease together, as Leo's chances get smaller. Nobody laughs when, late in the movie, Douglas tells Boot, "I'm on my way back to the top, and if it takes a deal with a crooked sheriff, that's all right with me! And if I have to fancy it up with an Indian curse and a brokenhearted wife for Leo, then that's all right too!"

As scalding as he is, Wilder doesn't leave audiences utterly without hope. A Wilder picture almost always has at least one character who acts as moral grounding--Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity, Arlene Francis in One, Two, Three, Nancy Olson in Sunset Boulevard. You can measure the movie's cynicism by the amount of respect and exposure that character gets. The Apartment, often called bitter, is one of Wilder's most optimistic films, in that the character whose essential decency anchors the movie turns out also to be the protagonist, Jack Lemmon.

In Ace in the Hole, the last good man is the editor Boot. He has about four brief scenes. He may believe in truth, so much so he has his secretary cross-stitch "Tell the Truth" on a sampler, but he is badly outnumbered.

Ace in the Hole is based in part on the real-life story of Floyd Collins. In the movie Tatum talks about the incident, without mentioning Collins' eventual death. No, what's notable to Tatum is the payoff for the reporter on the scene. Listen for Douglas, saying "Pulitzer Prize" the way you hear "Medal of Honor" intoned in a John Wayne movie.

According to Wilder biographer Ed Sikov, the movie also has roots in the even more tragic story of Kathy Fiscus , a three-year-old who fell down a well in 1949. Jockeys showed up, offering to be lowered to rescue her, as did the Philip Morris cigarette midget and some other little people from the circus. This may have sparked Wilder's decision to create the full-scale carnival that springs up next to Leo's mountain prison. See the director's camera come to rest on the trucks delivering the Ferris Wheel and other fairground rides: "The Great S&M Amusement Corp." Sikov notes that head Production Code enforcer Joseph Breen objected to the word "lousy" in the script, but apparently the carnival name flew right over Breen's flat little head.

He didn't work on the script, but we'll let later Wilder collaborator I.A.L. Diamond have the last word, as quoted in Sikov's biography:

Sure, they called it cynical. And then you see thousands and thousands of people turning up at Idlewild airport in New York to watch a plane coming down with bad landing gear. People clog the runway waiting for it to crash--and you ask yourself how cynical Ace in the Hole really was.

Note: This entry is cross-posted at Newcritics, a new outpost for Web criticism that is the brainchild of Tom Watson. The Siren hopes you will visit it frequently.

Venturing Into the Old Dark Sidebar

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For a good after-birthday, start-of-a-new-year project the Siren decided to venture into the sidebar, something she procrastinates about, because Bad Things Happen when the Siren goes into the sidebar. She has many sterling qualities, but coding talent is not among them. Nonetheless, the Blogroll had gotten pretty dusty, what with defunct links and needing new links added, so she cleaned up a bit.

Additions include the intelligent and fascinating Michael Guillen and Andy Horbal. I have also added Gloria, whose comments are one of this blog's best aspects. She has a great site herself, focusing on all things Charles Laughton. Tonio Kruger's eclectic Confessions of a Half-Breed Prince is up too, as is Phil Nugent's No More Mr. Nice Blog, Tuwa's Shanty and Emma's All About My Movies.

In December I had the great pleasure of meeting Tom Watson, Maud Newton and Kathleen Maher of Diary of a Heretic, and I am adding them as well. Maud is primarily a literary critic, but she ventures into all sorts of artistic waters and covers film on occasion, too. This is a great piece on the documentary Jesus Camp. (When you read it, you will see why I would like to meet Maud's sister, too.) Tom Watson is also starting a cultural blog, called newcritics, and the Siren hopes to put in an appearance over there on occasion as well.

Also added is a great blog I discovered by accident, Operator 99's Allure. I had been reading the memoirs of film director Tay Garnett (who was married to none other than Patsy Ruth Miller, and directed One-Way Passage and The Postman Always Rings Twice, among more than 100 films). Garnett wrote of a starlet named Jeanette Loff, who married a producer named Bert Friedlob and died young. I tried to look up more on Loff but found almost nothing worthwhile until I stumbled across this blog. (Here she is, if you want to see her.) It consists of rare picture-postcards of stars both famous and obscure, together with enough trivia to make a film buff's heart go pitter-patter. Check it out, but be warned you will spend at least an hour poring through the archives.

I am sure I am forgetting someone. If I have, please email me and I will add your URL, while I am still feeling brave about venturing into the sidebar thickets.