Thomas Jefferson Byrd was an American actor who worked several times with director Spike Lee.
Tag Archives: American cinema
RIP Olivia de Havilland (1916 – 2020)
Olivia de Havilland was a French-British-American actress.
She is best known for her part in Gone with the Wind (1939).
However, I remember her most fondly for her part in the psychological horror movie Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). In that film she is the evil Miriam Deering.
Above is the scene in Hush … Hush in which Olivia and Bette Davis get rid of the supposedly dead body.
RIP Kevin Rafferty (1947 – 2020)
Kevin Rafferty was an American filmmaker, best known for his 1982 documentary The Atomic Cafe.
The Atomic Cafe is a portrait of the United States in the 1950s, especially the nuclear threat and arms race of the Cold War.
The film makes use of archival government footage and propaganda.
RIP Carl Reiner (1922 – 2020)
Carl Reiner was an American comedian, actor, director, screenwriter, and publisher.
I have fond memories of the highly enjoyable films he directed starring Steve Martin in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
I think of The Jerk (1979), Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) and The Man with Two Brains (1983).
RIP Lewis John Carlino (1932 – 2020)
Lewis John Carlino (1932 – 2020) was an American screenwriter known for several films.
In our book, he wrote the screenplay to Seconds (1966), a film about an ordinary and unfulfilled man who wants a second life and is reborn in a new body.
There is an ‘orgy’ scene (above) which was supposedly only included in European films, a practice which was common at that time.
There are plenty of surreal images.
RIP Shirley Knight (1936 – 2020)
Shirley Knight was an American actress known for her performances in 1960s American cinema.
Here she is in a scene from the film Dutchman (1967), an adaptation of the Amir Baraka play of the same name.
RIP Allen Garfield (1939 – 2020)
Allen Garfield was an American actor.
In my book he is noted for playing a smut peddler in no less than two early Brian De Palma films: Greetings (1968) and Hi Mom! (1968).
In Greetings Garfield praises the imaginary book The Horney Headmaster by Richard P. Long (“beautiful book, tremendous insights!”) to Robert de Niro.
In The Conversation, that masterpiece of paranoia, he is the one to describe Hackman as “the best bugger on the West Coast.”
The true jewel of the three films I mention here, is the film Hi Mom! for its ‘black experience’ episode (but to be honest, Garfield is not in that segment).
While researching this death, I stumble upon Cry Uncle! (1971), judging from the trailer, I gather this is an amusing film.
Au revoir John. I suspect you were lots of fun.
RIP Stuart Gordon (1947 – 2020)
Stuart Gordon is a film director is best-known for his Re-Animator (1985), based on H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922).
The story starts with these lines ominous lines, in keeping with Lovecraft’s sinister oeuvre:
“Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.”
H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922)
The television documentary series Incredibly Strange Film Show did a special on Gordon in 1989 where they interviewed him in the La Brea Tar Pits
RIP Monique van Vooren (1927 – 2020)
Monique van Vooren was a Belgian-born American actress and dancer, perhaps best-known for her part in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (1973), also known as Flesh for Frankenstein.
In that film she is baroness Frankenstein, wife and sister of baron Frankenstein (Udo Kier). The film’s pretty awful but the gore is marked by high production values and it features Van Vooren nude in a duo with Joe Dallesandro with some ridiculously loud armpit slurping.
RIP Sonny ‘french connection’ Grosso (1930 – 2020)
The Poughkeepsie Shuffle: Tracing ‘The French Connection’ (2000)
Sonny Grosso was a New York City police detective turned movie and television producer, noted for his role in the “French Connection” heroin bust immortalized in the The French Connection (1971), directed by William Friedkin.
The BBC documentary The Poughkeepsie Shuffle: Tracing ‘The French Connection’ (2000) [above] features him extensively.
After being an adviser on The French Connection, Grosso went on to play a part in the film Cruising (1980), also directed by William Friedkin.
This film is also the subject of a documentary (above).