What's Wrong With This Picture?

If you’re part of the marketing team in charge of promoting a suspense thriller where the climactic shock—indeed the last minute of the movie—reveals the murdered corpse of a major character, then why, oh why, would you show an image of said corpse on the movie poster? That was the question some critics and fans had about What’s the Matter With Helen?, a 1971 schlock horror film in the same vein as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), where two big female movie stars play cat and mouse while bodies pile up around them.

The film was an example of “the macabre genre of the menopausal metaphysical mystery movie,” as film critic Roger Ebert categorized it, with plots that “seem to involve a couple of middle-aged ladies with shameful pasts, who make lots of trips up and down dark stairs and into unlighted cellars, get the hell scared out of them when dust mops fall out of the shadows, and end up hideously, with blood and feathers all over the place.”

What’s the Matter with Helen? concerns Adelle (Debbie Reynolds) and Helen (Shelley Winters), Midwestern dames who move to Hollywood and open a dance studio after their sons are convicted of a gruesome murder. Adelle schools young Shirley Temple-like hopefuls while Helen bangs out “Goody, Goody” on the piano. Eventually Adelle is wooed by a Texas millionaire (Dennis Weaver) while Helen is drawn to an Aimee Semple-like evangelist (Agnes Moorehead) and goes increasingly nuts, finally knifing Adelle to death and stringing her body up on a ladder.

Perhaps the Helen marketers thought the poster would not overtly suggest the grisly end of the Reynolds character. An image showing a bloodstained bosom and a red trickle down her chin, however, might not have been the way to go.

American Landmarks on Film

We recently revisited Alfred Hitchcock’s war-era thriller Saboteur (1942) and, as actor Norman Lloyd dangled off the Statue of Liberty during the film’s climax, we got to thinking about other movies that showcased similarly famous manmade American attractions. We geeks think of things like that, making lists in our head while we sit in the dark, or drive, or lie in bed. And so, here's our lineup—a collection of ten films where a famous landmark figures into the plot.

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Happy (Belated) Arbor Day!

Arbor Day has come and gone, and, for some reason, we remained oblivious to the raucous celebrations surrounding that tree lovers’ holiday. And so, in belated honor of woody perennials everywhere, we crafted a short little movie salute where trees figured into the plot, or at least provided a lovely backdrop. Enjoy the video…and go plant a sapling.

May 18

Elisha Cook Jr. dies of a stroke in Big Pine, California, 1995. He was called Hollywood’s lightest heavy, a career character actor largely defined by the neurotic, cowardly criminal types he played throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s. Cook was at his best in The Phantom Lady (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Shane (1953), The Killing (1956)—his personal favorite—and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). But it is his turn as runty gunsel Wilmer opposite Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) for which audiences perhaps best remember him. "[Cook] lived alone up in the High Sierra, tied flies and caught golden trout between films,” said his Maltese Falcon director John Huston. “When he was wanted in Hollywood, they sent word up to his mountain cabin by courier. He would come down, do a picture, and then withdraw again to his retreat." The five-foot-five-inch actor appeared in a total of 106 pictures, beginning in 1930 with Her Unborn Child through to 1984 with Treasure: In Search of the Golden Horse.

Deanna Durbin

Greta Garbo and Luise Rainer were certainly not the only major stars who shunned Hollywood. Since 1950, Deanna Durbin, who died last month, lived in relative anonymity on a farm outside Neauphle-le-Chateau near Paris, enjoyiong a quiet, peaceful existence away from the limelight. As with her later life, there are few details surrounding her death of a few days ago.

She was born in Winnipeg, Canada, on December 4, 1921. Universal became her home after being dropped by MGM soon after she made Every Sunday (1936), a short that also starred a young hopeful named Judy Garland. Durbin made a tuneful comedy called Three Smart Girls (1936), about a trio of daughters out to thwart their father’s intention of marrying a gold-digger, when she was 15. The film was a hit, receiving an Oscar nod for Best Picture, and its diminutive star was on her way to saving Universal Studios from bankruptcy.

The following year, Universal released One Hundred Men and a Girl (another best picture nod), followed by 19 more Durbin star vehicles over the course of 11 years. By the time she was 21, she was the highest paid actress in the world and the highest paid woman in the United States. In 1948 she made her final film, For the Love of Mary, and walked away from the movie business at the age of 27. “I couldn't go on forever being Little Miss Fixit who burst into song,” she once remarked.