So, because you all enjoyed that list so much, and because I apparently have a death wish, it’s time for another: The Top 10 Most Overrated Actors/Actresses of All Time.

Unlike last time, I will claim that these are objective facts, not subjective opinions, so that all my critics may have full liberty to attack me (To those same critics who claimed last time that I phrased my opinions in an “objective” manner, this is called being facetious. That means I’m kidding. Also, seriously? That was your criticism?).

Here are my criteria: are they considered great actors/actresses? If not, they can’t make the list (sorry, Rob Schneider). Are they actually great actors? If so, they can’t make the list (sorry, Laurence Olivier). Only those who are considered great actors but are not, in fact, great actors can make this list. Even then, I’m not claiming that these are bad actors unless I explicitly say that I am.

So, here we go. In the words of Han Solo, I’ve got a bad feeling about this …

10. George Clooney: Not a great actor. Not a good actor. Not really an actor. If you’ve ever seen a movie with Clooney where you didn’t say to yourself, “Hey, I’m watching George Clooney” every thirty seconds or so, you haven’t seen a George Clooney movie. You’re mixing him up with Kate Winslet. He’s a D actor. Dull in “Michael Clayton.” Dreary in “Up In The Air.” Dreadful in “Syriana.” Dismal in “Batman and Robin.” He’s not a low-rent Cary Grant. He’s an affordable-housing Robert Wagner.

9. Dustin Hoffman: He turned in some tremendous performances in his early days (most notably “Papillon,” “Kramer vs. Kramer,” and “Tootsie”), then became a caricature of himself. He has not done anything worthwhile since “Tootsie,” in fact. Even in his better performances, he is a bit too mannered for my taste, perhaps an effect of his method acting. Laurence Olivier thought the same thing. When they were working on “Marathon Man” together, Hoffman showed up on set after having not slept for several days in order to get “in character.” Olivier took one look at him and said, “Dear boy, it’s called acting.” (more…)

“MICHAEL MOHHHRRREEEEAAAHHHHTTTEEEEE?!” she echoed again.

“I thought you wuh dead!”

Symbolically I had, indeed, died to the business of celebrity and fame. It frightened me. Sickened me, actually. Made me commit a kind of career suicide. Because my career blip had fallen off Katharine Hepburn’s radar screen, I had become dead to her.

I’m sure, though, if I had ever called again, it would be her, Hepburn and not her secretary, picking up the phone in the East Side Manhattan brownstone she owned. This particular clip from “Glass Menagerie” says it all.

“Then go to the moon, you selfish dreamah!!!”

That is Hepburn rocketing the whole, profoundly ignorant, lifeless world to an equally banal and distantly barren planet. The faint echo placed upon Miss H’s cry of “dreamah” is particularly resonant now, insofar as the symbolic son that Kate was exhorting was, in real life, the playwright Tennessee Williams whom I also knew. About whom I will write in a future Big Hollywood post.

I came to know both Ms. Hepburn and Tennessee because of “Glass Menagerie.” My friendship with Tennessee lasted much longer than the volatile one I’d briefly shared with Hepburn.

Why?

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How can an actress from England who doesn’t appeal to me at all in interviews as her very British self — how can she so mesmerize me as a Canadian shiksa goddess of marital perfection in the film “Barney’s Version”?

Only an exceptional actress could ever pull that off.

Unadulterated goodness is, I feel, the hardest and most challenging thing for any actor or actress to play. No one really believes you can be that sainted, least of all yourself.

Having worked with a few of the female greats, Katherine Hepburn and Meryl Streep, and met a few others such as Bette Davis, I found the unadulterated health and blistering sanity of Rosamund Pike’s Miriam in “Barney’s Version” most astounding.

Everyone in the audience just has to fall in love with her during our first glimpse of this vision of her Miriam’s low key, Canadian nobility.

We actually drop off a cliff in the same way alcoholic, eternally Boychick Barney does. She is, of course, strikingly beautiful but eloquently frank and irresistibly unselfconscious. How does Barney win her and keep her for as long as he does? That is the major flaw in the script.
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This is the most recent installment of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College, on his book revealing how communists, from Moscow to New York to Chicago, have long manipulated America’s liberals/progressives. Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century is based on an unprecedented volume of declassified materials from Soviet archives, FBI files, and more.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, Hollywood is celebrating its Academy Awards, a look back at great actors and actresses and films.

Kengor: For me, it’s a moment to look back at Hollywood’s worst communists, communist sympathizers, Stalinists, and duped liberals and progressives—as well as the good guys (and gals) that fit none of those categories.

Big Peace: Fair enough. This should be fun. Let’s start with communists.

Charlie Chaplin comment, “Thank God for
communism!” will make you see (him) red.

Kengor: How about the Hollywood screenwriters who liberals still insist were innocent lambs? Dalton Trumbo, Communist Party code “Dalt T;” Albert Maltz, party no. 47196; Alvah Bessie, no. 46836; John Howard Lawson, no. 47275. Or, if you turn to page 191 of my book—if you don’t have a copy yet, shame on you—you can view Arthur Miller’s party application. Miller wrote The Crucible, about how Joe McCarthy pursued “liberals” unfairly suspected of being communists—“liberals” like Miller, Trumbo, Maltz, Bessie, Lawson.

Big Peace: As you say in Dupes, Hollywood produced “quite a cast.” Let’s narrow the focus to the Academy Awards. (more…)

When director George Stevens decided to film Shane in the early fifties, it was a momentous decision on a number of levels.

Born in 1904, he was the product of a family of actors, and grew up in San Francisco helping his parents learn lines, doing backstage work, and even acting when the occasion demanded. “I was fascinated by all of it,” Stevens said. “The sounds of the theater and the audience, their rapture when a play took over and moved them and held them quietly. . . When the audience was truly moved, it was absolutely quiet. They were in a communion because they were learning the truth about themselves.”

In 1921 his parents moved the family to Los Angeles to find work in the silent movie industry, and for Stevens it was a wonderful change. He leveraged a job his cousin had at Hal Roach studios to begin visiting the lot.

“I was really a kid at the time,” Stevens said, “and I had been interested in photography as a kid, as a hobby. . . I was on a picture for four or five days, had an opportunity to be on a set, and the assistant cameraman kept showing me things. One day I climbed the fence, knowing they needed an assistant cameraman. A couple of days later I was one. The first day or two it was pretty disastrous, but I knew something about photography, and I caught on quick.” (more…)

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“[John Ford] was the only one of the Hollywood directors who fought who did not forget his men.”

– Captain Mark Armistead, USN –

Thus quotes Joseph McBride in his masterful biography Searching for John Ford, at the head of the chapter dealing with the director’s wartime activities. It is usually seen as lamentable when a genius is pulled from the practice of his art for any extended period, but here we must make a special allowance. As filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (1923-1994) explains in his essential critical volume About John Ford (which, like the McBride book, should be sitting proudly and dog-eared on the bookshelf of every conservative film fan): “War service took Ford away from the making of films for some three years when his powers were at their height. One would regret this interruption more had it not led directly to the making of a masterpiece.” (more…)