Cloris Leachman was an American actress with a long an fruitful career.
I give you a fragment from The Last Picture Show (1971) in which she is a wife angry at her husband.
And one set of fragments from the Young Frankenstein (1974), where she famously is Frau Blücher, and everytime her name is pronounced the horses start to whinny, neigh and rear.
Joan Micklin Silver was an American filmmaker.
My film bible Cult Movie Stars lists Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) and Between the Lines (1977) as noteworthy.
I feel I have to add Crossing Delancey (1988).
Carol Arthur was an American actress and wife of Dom DeLuise (1933-2009). She played bit parts in the films of Mel Brooks. I think I was 12 years old when I insisted on seeing Brooks’s Silent Movie (1976).
Silent Movie. Smart slapstick. A film about film. What’s not to love?
In that film she played an “extremely pregnant woman”. Was it perhaps she who completely tilted Brooks’ sports car nose in the air due to a heavy weight in the back seat? I cannot remember.
Later I saw Brooks Blazing Saddles (1974), the Western parody with the many and loud farts around the campfire. Beans and cowboys, you know how that works out.
In Blazing Saddles, Carol plays a schoolteacher who first speaks very shyly at a city meeting, then is told that she speaks too quietly, and then she announces in a loud and not at all shy voice to the governor that he is the “leading asshole of the state”.
Thomas Jefferson Byrd was an American actor who worked several times with director Spike Lee.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.