Barbara Kent, December 16, 1907 – October 13, 2011

Barbara Kent: “I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but being an actress was not it.”

—The Sound of Silence, by Michael Ankerich.

Barbara Kent, b. Barbara Cloutman, who passed away a few weeks ago, was one of the last surviving movie stars—Mickey Rooney, ailing and frail, might be the last—who worked in the golden era of silent movies and then made the transition to sound.

She was a reluctant actress, a star whose light shined quite briefly, and then with exquisite sanity, she stepped out of the limelight and into the embrace of private life and marriage.

In 1925 Kent won the Miss Hollywood beauty pageant. Apparently, her parents pushed her to enter the contest. Thus, from the very beginning, Barbara was playing a role she neither sought nor desired. Though she had no acting experience, Universal offered the tiny—she was under five feet tall—baby-faced, 17 year-old beauty queen a contract.

In 1926, Kent was cast in ”Flesh and the Devil” (1926) as a young woman in love with the dashing John Gilbert who has eyes only for the heartless vamp Greta Garbo. Garbo gets all the loving close-ups, but I’ve always felt that Kent was far more attractive and desirable than the remote and narcissistic Garbo.

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There was a time when Hollywood and Hollywood stars represented hope and freedom.

Universal’s top star in the 1940s was Deanna Durbin (b.1921 – ) who starred in a series of hugely popular and successful light musical comedies. Durbin, a lyric soprano, was paid $400,000 per film, and she saved the troubled studio from a looming bankruptcy.

Deanna Durbin, Anne Frank’s favorite movie star.

She was, like Judy Garland, a Hollywood creation and a world-wide phenomenon.

Deeply unhappy in the rigid studio system and locked into an image—the cheerful little girl next door—that, increasingly felt alien as she matured, Durbin married producer Charles David, her third marriage, and retired from the movies in 1949.

Deanna Durbin and her family moved to Neauphle-le-Chateau, a small village in rural France, where she continues to fiercely guard her privacy. (more…)

Just a few steps outside my room at Hillsdale’s Dow Hotel & Leadership Center hangs this wonderful portrait of George Washington.

Hillsdale Feels a Lot Like Yeshiva

Growing up in Brooklyn, I attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush, an Orthodox elementary school. Every morning, we solemnly recited the Pledge of Allegiance and then sang the Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, thus affirming our loyalty to America and our love of Zion.

At Hillsdale College, before every lunch and dinner, I am delighted to report, we recite the Pledge of Allegiance and then a student leads us in a prayer.

Hillsdale is a non-denominational college, but the spirit of Judeo Christianity is alive and well.

I am more than comfortable here at Hillsdale, I feet right at home.

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“I feel a little reactionary,” deadpans Hedy Lamarr in Comrade X, 1940.

On their improbable wedding night, anti-Communist reporter—remember them?—Clark Gable gives Bolshevik Hedy Lamarr a luscious, Adrian designed silk nightgown. Unlike Travis Banton, Adrian was concerned with silhouette and in this exquisitely bias-cut negligee—Gable just happens to have it in his suitcase—Hedy Lamarr’s figure is highlighted to a spectacular effect.

Long live the products of decadent American capitalism.

Capitalist Clark Gable puts Communist Hedy Lamarr in touch with her feminine side in Comrade X, 1940.

Hedy, playing a variation of Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka, is a humorless Soviet scold more concerned with industrial production than with her own femininity, which translates into her humanity.

TCM’s Shadows of Russia series, organized and programmed by my favorite  film blogger Self-Styled Siren and The New York Posts’s fine film critic Lou Lumenick, kicks into a refreshing mode—after the shallow and dopey Reds—as we view the lighter side of the Russian revolution.

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Hedy Lamarr’s perfectly arched eyebrows emphasize her symmetrical features. Considered the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, Lamarr was also incredibly bright, co-inventing, in 1941, a “frequency-hopping device that now serves as the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology.” That quote is grabbed from Wikipedia. I have absolutely no idea what it means, but darn, I’m impressed. Anyhoo. Married six times, Lamarr gained and lost several fortunes. After her career was over she was arrested on shoplifting charges.

Screening movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, I’ve noticed an interesting trend—in eyebrows.

During the early days of silent films, female stars appeared pretty normal. Which is to say, eyebrows were lightly plucked, but retained a recognizably human configuration. (more…)

Ricardo Cortez (1899-1977) was a handsome and talented leading man whose image, in the silent era, was that of a hot-blooded Latin lover.

In truth, his name was Jacob Krantz, the son of a kosher butcher, born and raised in the mean streets of New York’s Lower East Side.

Cortez worked as a runner on Wall Street while training to be an actor at night.  Soon his good looks afforded him an opportunity to break into the young but flourishing movie business. Paramount groomed the tall and handsome Cortez by giving him bit parts, and then moving him up to more substantial roles.

One of the more interesting glimpses into Cortez’s career and character comes from a 1965 interview Cortez granted to silent film historian Kevin Brownlow, published in The Parade’s Gone By. Brownlow was seeking information regarding director D.W. Griffith. Cortez had starred in Griffith’s The Sorrows of Satan (1926).

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