Author: Peter J Patrick
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Oscar Profile #510: Terence Stamp
Born July 22, 1938 in London, England, Terence Stamp was the eldest of five children of Ethel and Thomas Stamp, a tugboat stoker. With his father away for long periods of time with the Merchant Navy, he was raised mostly by his mother, grandmother, and aunts. His family endured heavy bombing during the World War…
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The DVD Report #686
New This Week Gone with the Wind was pulled from HBO Max in June, a month after it was added to the streaming service, citing the need for “an explanation and a denouncement” of the movie’s depictions of race relations. It quickly went to number one on Amazon’s list of best-selling DVDs and Blu-rays. Although…
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Oscar Profile #509: Janet Leigh
Born July 6, 1927 in Merced, California, Jeannette Morrison (screen name Janet Leigh) was an only child. Raised in poverty during the Great Depression in Stockton, California where her family relocated shortly after her birth, she sang in the choir of her local Presbyterian church. Leigh excelled in academics and graduated from high school at…
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The DVD Report #685
New This Week The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum began life as a novel by Nobel laureate Heinrich Bohl based on the pacifist author’s arrest by the German government and pillorying by the press for his alleged involvement in violent anti-Vietnam War protests. It was a novel to the extent that the middle-aged writer made…
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Oscar Profile #508: Wes Anderson
Born May 1, 1969 in Houston, Texas, Wes(ley) Wales Anderson was the middle of three children of archeologist turned real estate agent Ann (née Burroughs) and Melver Leonard Anderson, who worked in advertising. Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs was his great-grandfather. His grandfather was Burroughs’ illustrator. It’s no wonder the young Anderson began writing plays…
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The DVD Report #684
New This Week Girl Crazy was the last and best of the four MGM musicals that Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland made between 1939 and 1943. It was the second of three film versions of the 1930 Broadway musical starring Ginger Rogers and introducing Ethel Merman. Unlike the 1940 Rooney-Garland musical Strike Up the Band,…
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Oscar Profile #507: Steven Soderbergh
Born January 14, 1963 in Atlanta, Georgia, Steven (Andrew) Soderbergh was the second of six children of Mary Ann and Peter Soderbergh, a college professor and later dean of the College of Education at Louisiana State University. He became interested in filmmaking as a teenager and made experimental 8mm and 16mm films from the age…
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The DVD Report #683
New This Week Marriage Story was my fifth favorite film of 2019, behind 1917, Parasite, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and The Irishman. The first three were previously released on Blu-ray and DVD as were Little Women, Jojo Rabbit, The Joker, and Ford v Ferrari, the other four films comprising the 2019 films nominated for…
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Oscar Profile #506: Richard Attenborough
Born August 29, 1923 in Cambridge, England, Richard (Samuel) Attenborough was the son of May (née Clegg), a founding member of the Marriage Guidance Council and Frederick Levi Attenborough, don at Emmanuel College and author of a standard text on Anglo-Saxon law. The family later moved to Leicester where his father was appointed principal of…
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The DVD Report #682
New This Week Hair was a worldwide sensation on stage. The rock musical, which debuted off-Broadway in late 1967, quickly moved to Broadway in early 1968 and soon expanded all over the world. The Original Cast Recording was also a phenomenon and the 2009 Broadway revival was a tribute to its timelessness. In the meantime,…
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Oscar Profile #505: Peter Finch
Born September 28, 1916 in London, England, Peter Finch was the subject of a custody battle between his mother and her husband who was not his actual father. His “father” won, and the child was kept from his mother who later married Finch’s actual father. He never met his mother until he was 33, and…
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The DVD Report #681
New This Week Hud is a film that collectors have long wanted to see released on Blu-ray but remains, like many other films from Paramount, unreleased in the U.S. There is, however, a perfectly fine region-free Australian Blu-ray from Shout Entertainment that was released under license from Paramount Pictures International in September 2019. Ironically, it…
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Oscar Profile #504: Eileen Heckart
Born March 29, 1919 in Columbus, Ohio, (Anna) Eileen Herbert was an only child who went with her mother when her parents separated when she was 2. Her mother was an alcoholic who married five times. She was often shunted off to her mother’s mother and her second husband who eventually adopted her, changing her…
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The DVD Report #680
New This Week San Francisco was both the highest grossing film of 1936 and the first of three films for which one of its Oscar nominations was later declared to be category fraud. That, however, was technically not the case as Spencer Tracy in San Francisco, Luise Rainer in The Great Ziegfeld, and Stuart Erwin…
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Oscar Profile #503: Henry Koster
Born Hermann Kosterlitz on May 1, 1905 in Berlin, Germany, the future Henry Koster was the grandson on his mother’s side of famed operatic tenor Julius Salomon who died of tuberculosis in the 1880s. His father, who was a salesman of women’s underwear, abandoned his family when the future director was 5. His mother got…
