April 14

Julie Christie is born in Chabua, Assam, India, 1941. Her movie debut came in 1962 with Crooks Anonymous, though audiences really didn’t take notice until her performance in director John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar the following year. Two years later came the high-water mark for her early career when she reunited with Schlesinger for Darling (1965), the jet-set tale of a mod, freewheeling social climber who goes from self-indulgent bra model to jaded Italian princess. Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice wrote “it is Schlesinger to whom I must be eternally grateful for catapulting Julie Christie into stardom. Miss Christie’s sensual-sentimental assault in Darling has devastated me as nothing has since Harriet Anderson bared a bosom so ample as to contradict her Cocteau face in Naked Night, and Vivien Leigh clawed her way into my heart in Gone With the Wind.” Darling received five Oscar nominations, winning three—Screenplay, Costumes and one for Christie as Best Actress. She would join forces with Schlesinger twice more in her career, for Far From the Madding Crowd (1967) and, for television, Separate Tables (1983).

Oscars 1946: Selznick's Folly

With Duel in the Sun, producer David O. Selznick aimed to equal or exceed the artistic and commercial achievement of Gone With the Wind seven years earlier. He spent more than $1 million to advertise the $7 million production and ran teaser ads 18 months prior to the film’s release. He missed the mark by a mile. The turgid tale concerns one Pearl Chaves (Jennifer Jones)—charmingly referred to as a “half-breed”—who shakes up a Texas family, including younger brother Jesse (Joseph Cotten) and older brother Lewton (Gregory Peck). The men battle over Pearl in a lengthy gunfight that climaxes the film, which also sees an overheated Peck and Jones shoot each other and expire together in a ridiculously erotic clinch. The epic, dubbed Lust in the Dust by industry wags, received Oscar nominations only for Jennifer Jones as Best Actress and Lillian Gish as Best Supporting Actress.

BEST PICTURE
The Best Years of Our Lives

BEST DIRECTOR
William Wyler, The Best Years of Our Lives

BEST ACTOR
Fredric March, The Best Years of Our Lives

BEST ACTRESS
Olivia de Havilland, To Each His Own

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Harold Russell, The Best Years of Our Lives

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Anne Baxter, The Razor’s Edge

Oscars 1939: Wichita Hattie

“Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid?” actress Hattie McDaniel said about many of the roles that came her way. “If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week being one.” The Kansas native got her start as a singer with a band in the mid-1920s, then, by 1932, found her way into movies. She played a memorable Queenie in Show Boat (1936) opposite Paul Robeson as well as the aforementioned maid roles—to Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932), Jean Harlow in China Seas (1935), and Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams (1935), among others. In 1939, Gone With the Wind provided McDaniel with the greatest role of her career, and, on February 29, 1940, she became the first African-American to win an Acedemy Award.  “This is more than an occasion,” remarked actress Fay Bainter upon presenting the Oscar to McDaniel. “It is a tribute to a country where people are free to honor noteworthy achievements regardless of creed, race or color.”

BEST PICTURE
Gone With the Wind

BEST DIRECTOR
Victor Fleming, Gone With the Wind

BEST ACTOR
Robert Donat, Goodbye, Mr. Chips

BEST ACTRESS
Vivien Leigh, Gone With the Wind

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Thomas Mitchell, Stagecoach

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Hattie McDaniel, Gone with the Wind

100 Great Closing Lines

Last lines of movies can be prose or poetry—neat little wrap-ups, baffling enigmas, witty punch lines, weighty morals, desperate pleas and wicked surprises. And they can be a tricky, delicate thing to pull off. The lasting impression of a movie that is merely very good can be greatly elevated by a killer coda; conversely, a stinker exit can sour an otherwise satisfying night at the theater. Here are a hundred of the better ones—final sentiments that rank as our favorites, from the intertitle of a 1927 silent science fiction film to a rare spoken line from 2011’s (mostly) silent Oscar winner.

“Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
Walsh (Joe Mantell)
Chinatown (1974)

“I’m not even gonna swat that fly. I hope they are watching. They’ll see. They’ll see and they’ll know and they’ll say ‘Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly.’”
Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins)
Psycho (1960)

“I now pronounce you men and wives.”
Reverand Elcott (Ian Wolfe)
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

“Happy the man and happy he alone, he who can call today his own, he who is secure within can say: Tomorrow do thy worst! For I have lived today.”
Narrator (Micheál Mac Liammóir)
Tom Jones (1963)

“How’d you like to make yourself a thousand dollars a day, Mr. Boot? I’m a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman. You can have me for nothing.”
Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas)
Ace in the Hole (1951)

“Where ya headed, cowboy?”
“Nowhere special.”
“Nowhere special…I always wanted to go there.”
“Come on.”
Jim (Gene Wilder) and Bart (Cleavon Little)
Blazing Saddles (1974)

“What do we do now?”
Bill McKay (Robert Redford)
The Candidate (1972)

“How shall I make out the report on him, Captain?”
“Better make it ‘dead on arrival.’”
D.O.A. (1950)

“Goodbye, Mary Poppins. Don’t stay away too long.”
Bert (Dick Van Dyke)
Mary Poppins (1964)

“There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”
Narrator (Mark Hellinger)
The Naked City (1948)

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American Movies, Foreign Posters

It’s no secret that we love movie posters, as our galleries on Al Hirschfeld, Anselmo Ballester, silent movie posters and UFA one sheets attest. The terrific Gotta Dance! The Art of the Dance Movie Poster exhibition at Santa Monica’s California Heritage Museum got us to thinking about famous movies and how they are viewed and advertised in foreign lands. As a result, here are some of our favorite international posters, a selection of 25 well-known American films as they were marketed to audiences abroad.

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