The King's Thief - on TCM!

Ann Blyth and David Niven gamble over high stakes in the aftermath of the English Civil War in The King's Thief (1955).  The swashbuckling adventure features Edmund Purdom, George Sanders, and the late Roger Moore.  Turner Classic Movies will show the movie this Friday, June 2nd, at 5 p.m. ET.

From Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. -

Ann Blyth plays the daughter of one such discredited nobleman, who has lived in exile in France.  Now that the war is done, she’s eager to return to England, but is shocked and heartbroken when her father’s friend comes to tell her the news that Niven has put her father to death.  Though told she must never return to England now, nevertheless, Ann is a feisty gentlewoman.  She’s heading back to find out what happened to her father and confront this David Niven fellow.

For more on the movie, have a look at this post on my Another Old Movie Blog.

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The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

Also in paperback from CreateSpace, and from my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.

One Minute to Zero on TCM!

Ann Blyth and Robert Mitchum star in One Minute to Zero (1952) this coming Saturday, May 27th at 10:30 a.m. ET on Turner Classic Movies.

From my book Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. --

Their most intriguing scene together, however, is playing sitting opposite each other at a kitchen table after she has made supper for him at her apartment in Japan, their first date.  The candles burn down, and both, slightly slumped over the table, he with his chin on his hand, give the impression of being all talked out.  A soothing, lazy tune, in a delicately Asian style, penetrates their silence, coming, we are told in a quick camera shot from a record on a portable record player.  Suddenly, Robert Mitchum begins to sing along to the tune, in Japanese.  Catch Ann’s expression of surprised delight.  She is glued to his face, watching him sing, fascinated by him.  It opens the door to their romance.  She sees there is more to him than just a blustering alpha male dismissive of her opinions on the war.

For more on the movie, have a look here at my Another Old Movie Blog post.

Red Canyon location still

The publicity still from Red Canyon (1949) shows Ann Blyth and costar Howard Duff on location in what was Ann's first color film (even though the publicity still is black and white), and only feature western.  We discussed her work in this film on my Another Old Movie Blog:

She was 19 years old and had hit her stride.

It was a pinnacle of a kind, and the beginning of new trail.  After a string of six heavy dramas that gave her intense roles to prove herself a major up and coming actress, her last film before Red Canyon, Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, was a complete change that charmed the public and clued-in the studio that Ann was also athletic, and that her beauty was as much an asset to selling a film as her acting skill.  Her trim body, also, could lend itself to more than posing in a crisp Noir wardrobe. 

It also reminded the studio that she was young.  In those dramas, from Mildred Pierce through Another Part of the Forest, Ann’s characters were increasingly poised, knowing, sophisticated, and wore a mantle of worldly experience even though in real life she was still some years away from being old enough to vote.  Her characters were restless, mean, sad, tragic.

Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, because of her fanciful character and its exotic costuming, her silent communication through her expressive face, and the joyful silliness of the plot, actually managed to re-set the clock on her screen sophistication.  She was suddenly much younger again.  For the next several films she would play more innocent ingénues, most of them in comedies, and this one western...

For more, head on over to this post at Another Old Movie Blog.

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The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

Also in paperback from CreateSpace, and from my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.

Mother's Day with Mildred Pierce

Stunning photography—cinematography—
along with an ingenious twist in the script, turned James M. Cain’s novel of Mildred Pierce, into a visual masterpiece.  Unlike his other novels that were later made into the films Double Indemnity (1944), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) which are noir stories even on the page, Mildred Pierce was not written as such.  It’s more a character study of a woman who indomitably struggles against privation, and whose Achilles’ heel is her greatest passion, her daughter.  In the hands of the Warner Bros. studio, this story, rather than a weepy so-called “woman’s picture” becomes first class noir.  Largely, this is due to the cinematography—and a newly invented murder plot.
--- From Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.

You know this coming Sunday is Mother's Day when Turner Classic Movies includes Mildred Pierce (1945) in the lineup.  That infamous mother-daughter duo played by Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth will start their scene-stealing at 2 p.m. Eastern Time.  Ann and Zachary Scott play out a famous scene in the striking lobby card above.