New Movie Releases – 7 January 2011

Season of the Witch (2011)

 

Stars: Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, Claire Foy, Stephen Campbell Moore

Director: Dominic Sena

Genre: Action/Adventure/Fantasy

Atlas Entertainment, Relativity Media

Time: 95 min

Rating: PG-13

14th-century knights transport a suspected witch to a monastery, where monks deduce her powers could be the source of the Black Plague.

Country Strong (2010)

Stars: Garrett Hedlund, Gwyneth Paltrow, Leighton Meester, Tim McGraw

Director: Shana Feste

Genre: Drama/Music

Screen Gems, Maguire Entertainment, TVM

Time: 117 min

Rating: PG-13

A rising country-music songwriter works with a fallen star to work their way fame, causing romantic complications along the way. 

Released 100 years ago today- 5 February 1910 (USA)

Twelfth Night (1910)

Stars: Julia Swayne Gordon, Charles Kent, Florence Turner

Directors: Eugene Mullin, Charles Kent

Writers: Eugene Mullin (scenario), William Shakespeare (play)

Genre: Short/Comedy/Drama

Production Co:Vitagraph Company of America

Time: 12 min

Rating: Passed

Status: Survived

Plot

When Viola and her twin brother Sebastian are shipwrecked and separated, Viola dresses in her brother's clothes and becomes a page in the palace of the Duke of Orsino. Thinking Viola is a boy, the Duke sends her with a message to Olivia, whom he loves. A series of complications begins when Olivia falls in love with the page 'boy'.

Fifty years ago today - Monday 5 January 1959

The Vancouver Sun - Monday 5 January 1959

Silent Screen Idol
     Romantic idol of the silent screen, Ramon Navarro, was arrested by Los Angeles police for drunk driving after running through a red light.
     Police said the 59-year-old actor, who was freed on $263 bail, was "abusive" and failed to pass sobriety tests.

Released 100 years ago today - 23 October 1908 (USA)

Romance of a Jewess

Stars: Florence Lawrence, George Gebhardt, Gladys Egan

Director: D.W. Griffith

Writer: D.W. Griffith

Genre: Drama/Short

American Mutoscope & Biograph

Time: 10 min

Rating: Not Rated

Status: Survived

Plot

Ruth Simonson, with her father, is seen kneeling at the bedside of her mother, whose sands of life are rapidly

ebbing. Realizing her end near, Mrs. Simonson takes from her neck a chain and locket and places it around the neck of her daughter, Ruth, with the prayerful injunction that she be ever guided in the path of prudence and virtue by this memorial. Commending her to the care of her father, the old lady goes to meet her Master in the Great Beyond. Two years later we find Ruth assisting her old father in his pawnshop. Mr. Simonson, although a money-lender, is benevolent in nature and his many deeds of munificence have endeared him to all who know him. Hence, when the local schatchen appears with Jacob Rubenstein, a wealthy suitor for his daughter's hand, it was his desire for her future happiness that induced him to look with favor on him. Ruth, however, had given her heart to Sol Bimberg, an impecunious bookseller in the neighbourhood. While Mr. Simonson has no aversion for Sol, ...

This Day 50 years ago – Saturday 5 January 1957

 DOCTOR DISPUTES STORY

'Kidnapped' Actress Found; Claims Pair Assaulted Her

   INDIO, Calif. (BUP)—Actress Marie (The Body) McDonald told Los Angeles police today she was criminally attacked by two men who she said kidnapped her Thursday night from her San Fernando Valley home.

   She told officers questioning her at a hospital here about her 24-hour disappearance that the two men, a Mexican and a Negro, abducted her under threats to harm her three children.

   She said they forced her to perform unnatural sex acts while she was held in a Los Angeles house, blindfolded "with a sack over my head."

   An examining physician at the hospital later disputed Miss McDonald's claim she had been raped.

BLACK EYE

   The 32-year-old blonde movie queen was found wandering dazed and Incoherent along U.S. highway 60.70 in the desert early today by a truck driver.

   Hospital attendants reported her face was bruised as from a beating, she had a black eye and portions of two front teeth were missing.

   Kept under sedation Friday night, the actress recovered suf­ficiently today to relate to officers her lurid tale of being kidnapped from her palatial home, attacked and then dumped from a speeding ear by her assailants.

HAD $167

   Clad only in a nightrobe over pajama tops, she was found by truck driver Richard D. Corn. 38. He turned her over to police whom she told that she had been beaten raped and robbed of a 22-carat diamond ring.

   Deputies said however that she had $167 in cash in her robe pocket.

   The FBI said it would not enter the case because there was "no evidence of interstate transport."

   Police said they didn't know how to treat the case.

PHONED FRIENDS

   They pointed cut that Miss McDonald had telephoned three times to friends while she claimed she was being held cap­tive but hadn't phoned police.

   They also said that clipped newspaper sections from which a kidnap note had been fashioned, and a tablet of writing paper similar to that to which the note was pasted were both found in the actress' home.

This Day 50 years ago - Friday 4 January 1957

Actress Missing, Feared Kidnapped

   HOLLYWOOD (BUP) — Beautiful actress Marie (The Body) McDonald disappeared from her $65,000 Fernando Valley home early today in night clothes and police feared she was kidnapped.

   Police indicated they had identified two men as the suspected kidnappers.

   Two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were called into the case, on "stand-by" until the 24-hours required by federal law has passed and provided for their entry into the case.

   A trail of anonymous threatening telephone calls and a kidnap note were left behind by the supposed kidnappers, believed by police to have abducted the blonde, 32-year-old divorced mother of three children shortly after midnight this morning.

   "We are compelled by the set of circumstances to treat the disappearance as a bona fide kidnap," said Los Angeles police Chief William Parker. "From all we know at this time it would appear that she left the premises with someone she knew."

   However, the Los Angeles Herald-Express said the actress telephoned the newspaper's Hollywood columnist, Harrison Carroll, at 4 a.m. saying she had been kidnapped by two men.

   'Tonight at my home these two men came in and abducted me. They drugged me. They gave me a shot of something... They carried me miles." the actress was quoted as saying.

   "They arc in the next room. They think I'm asleep. That's how I happened to get hold of a telephone ... They wanted “my ring and money.”

The Vancouver Sun

Obituaries: Virginia Grey, Dies at 87

VIRGINIA GREY

Actress longed for major role that never came

   Virginia Grey, who has died aged 87, spent a career before the cameras hoping for a role that would catapult her to international stardom; but she never showed the spark which launched her contemporaries Ruth Hussey and Laraine Day, and had to content herself with second lead ingenues.

   In more than 100 films she had supporting roles to such stars as Joan Crawford, Betty Grable, Susan Hayward, and even the Marx Brothers (in The Big Store, 1941). Off screen she attracted publicity by dating Clark Gable; she gave him a dachshund. But although she waited patiently for his divorce from Rhea Langham to come through, Gable married Carole Lombard instead. Heartbroken, Virginia Grey vowed never to let herself become too close to a man again and, although George Raft became a figure in her life she never married. Pressed to talk about her affair with Gable in 2003, she replied simply: "I adored him; I always will."

   Virginia Grey was born in Hollywood on. March 22,1917 the daughter of Ray Grey, an original Keystone Cop who became Universal Studio's comedy films director; among her babysitters was the actress Gloria Swanson. After Ray's death in 1925, Virginia's mother became a film cutter at the studio.

   When her mother heard that the studio was planning to remake Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1927, she encouraged young Virginia to do a screen test, which won her the role of Little Eva. Parts followed in Heart to Heart, with Mary Astor (1927); Jazz Mad, with Marian Nixon and George Lewis (1928); and The Michigan Kid (1928).

Daily Telegraph