May 16

Henry Fonda is born in Grand Island, Nebraska, 1905. The actor made nine films with director John Ford, including The Battle of Midway (1942), a documentary narrated by Fonda and his costar in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Jane Darwell. “He would never rehearse, didn't want to talk about a part,” Fonda said about his frequent director. “If an actor started to ask questions he'd either take those pages and tear them out of the script or insult him in an awful way. He loved getting his shot on the first take, which for him meant it was fresh. He would print the first take—even if it wasn't any good.” Among their collaborations were Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), which Fonda turned down until Ford convinced him otherwise after making him do a screen test in full make-up, My Darling Clementine (1946), with Ford overruling Darryl F. Zanuck’s choice of James Stewart in favor of putting Fonda in the lead and Mister Roberts (1955) for which Ford was replaced by Mervyn Leroy reportedly due to conflict between the director and his longtime star. “He had instinctively a beautiful eye for the camera,” Fonda recalled. “But he was also an egomaniac.”

May 15

Invitation to the Dance is released nationwide, 1956. It was star Gene Kelly’s idea to bring the greatest dancers in Europe and the various types of dance from all over the planet to mainstream movie audiences. MGM objected to Kelly’s plan to appear in just one of the film’s segments—thus he appeared in all three of them, playing a clown, a Marine and Sinbad the Sailor. Shooting began in England in August 1952 and finished in Culver City in October 1953, with the animation forces of William Hanna, Joseph Barbera and Fred Quimby taking over through June 1954 to complete the Sinbad the Sailor section. MGM, skittish over the box office potential of Kelly’s wordless dance tribute, held the film from release until May of 1956, whereupon the studios fears were realized—audiences stayed away.

May 14

Frank Sinatra dies in Los Angeles, 1998. When it came time to make Guys and Dolls (1955), Sinatra lobbied hard for the part of Sky Masterson, which instead went to non-singer Marlon Brando; Sinatra ended up with the smaller role of Nathan Detroit. The two men did not get along during the shoot, with Sinatra referring to Brando as “Mumbles” and Brando reportedly flubbing a scene in which Sinatra eats cheesecake over and over again so that Sinatra would get sick of it. In adapting the Broadway show for film, three numbers were added, including "Adelaide," sung by Sinatra. To further increase his singing role, the actor was also included in the title tune. Brando, on the other hand, was at the mercy of audio editors, who had to patch his songs together from multiple takes.

May 11

Lex Barker dies of a heart attack in New York City, 1973. Barker figured heavily in one of the more dramatic parts of Detour, the autobiography by Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane. In Crane’s book, she relays her experiences of sexual abuse at the hands of the actor, who was Turner’s fourth husband at the time. In movies, he was the tenth official Tarzan, playing the primitive man in five films. A number of westerns followed before he headed to Europe to make movies there, the most notable being Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960).

May 8

In a press release, the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable criticizes Disney Studios for hinting at plans to re-release Song of the South, 2007. Upon the film’s release in 1946, it did not exactly win any prizes for racial sensitivity. The National Urban League and the National Negro Congress charged the filmmakers with promoting racial stereotypes, while the NAACP denounced “the impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship.”

The picture, a mix of live action and animation, is based on the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris and takes place in Georgia during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. James Baskett plays Remus, who tells fables involving the characters Bre’r Rabbit, Bre’r Fox and Bre’r Bear to a young boy from an unhappy home. Critical reception was mixed-to-poor, with film critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times commenting that  “apparently the Disney wonder-workers are just a lot of conventional hacks when it comes to telling a story with actors instead of cartoons. The cartoon episodes, when they do intrude, assume refreshing proportions which they probably do not actually have—they come as such moments when the humans have so completely candyfied the screen that they seem sublime salvations, avenues into fresh, song-laden air.”

Song of the South was re-released in 1956, 1972, 1981 and 1986, sitting out the civil rights era of the early 1960s. It has never been released on DVD in the United States.