A gossip columnist's rise to fame. Based closely on the real life of Walter Winchell.
09-08-1932
1h 18m
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Main Cast
Movie Details
Production Info
Director:
Tay Garnett
Writer:
Scott Pembroke
Production:
Universal Pictures
Key Crew
Screenplay:
William Anthony McGuire
Director of Photography:
Arthur C. Miller
Producer:
Carl Laemmle Jr.
Locations and Languages
Country:
US
Filming:
US
Languages:
en
Main Cast
Lew Ayres
Lew Ayres was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and raised in San Diego, California. A college dropout, he was found by a talent scout in the Coconut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles and entered Hollywood as a bit player. He was leading man to Greta Garbo in The Kiss (1929), but it was the role of Paul Baumer in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) that was his big break. He was profoundly affected by the anti-war message of that film, and when, in 1942, the popular star of Young Dr. Kildare (1938) and subsequent Dr. Kildare films was drafted, he was a conscientious objector. America was outraged, and theaters vowed never to show his films again, but quietly he achieved the Medical Corps status he had requested, serving as a medic under fire in the South Pacific and as a chaplain's aid in New Guinea and the Phillipines. His return to film after the war was undistinguished until Johnny Belinda (1948) - his role as the sympathetic physician treating the deaf-mute Jane Wyman won him an Academy Award nomination as Best Actor. Subsequent movie roles were scarce; an opportunity to play Dr. Kildare in television was aborted when the network refused to honor his request for no cigarette sponsorship. He continued to act, but in the 1970s put his long experience into a project to bring to the west the philosophy of the East - the resulting film, Altars of the World (1976), while not a box-office success, won critical acclaim and a Golden Globe Award. Lew Ayres died in Los Angeles, California on December 30, 1996, just two days after his 88th birthday.
Maureen Paula O'Sullivan was born in County Roscommon, Ireland, on May 17, 1911. The future mother of Mia Farrow was a schooldays classmate of Vivien Leigh at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton in London. Even as a schoolgirl, Maureen desired an acting career; she studied hard and read widely. When the opportunity to be an actress came along, it almost dropped in her lap. The director Frank Borzage was in Dublin filming “Song o’ My Heart” (1930) when Maureen, then 18, met him. Borzage suggested a screen test, which she took. The results were more than favorable, as she won the part of Eileen O’Brien. The part was a substantial one, so much so that Maureen went on to Hollywood to complete the filming. Once in sunny California, Maureen wasted no time landing roles in other films such as “Just Imagine” (1930), “Princess and the Plumber” (1930), and “So This Is London” (1930). Maureen was on a roll that her contemporaries could only have wished for when they were coming up through the ranks. In 1932, Maureen was teamed up with Olympic medal winner Johnny Weissmuller for the first time in “Tarzan the Ape Man” (1932). Five other Tarzan films followed, the last being “Tarzan’s New York Adventure” (1942). The Tarzan epics rank as one of the most memorable series ever made. Most people agree that those movies would not have been successful had it not been for the fine acting talents, not to mention beauty, of Maureen O’Sullivan. But she was more than Jane Parker in the Tarzan films; she had great roles and played beautifully in films such as “The Flame Within” (1935), “David Copperfield” (1935), and “Anna Karenina” (1935). She turned in yet another fine performance in “Pride and Prejudice” (1940). After the 1940s, Maureen made far fewer films, not because she lost popularity but by choice. It isn’t always easy to walk away from a lucrative career, but she did because she wanted to devote more time to her husband, John Farrow, an Australian writer, and their seven children. The couple were married from 1936 until his death in 1963. She did not, however, retire completely; Maureen still found time to make an occasional appearance in films or TV or on the stage. Later movie-goers remember her as Elizabeth Alvorg in the hit film “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986). Her final silver screen appearance was in “The River Pirates” (1988). Some TV movies followed, but only until 1996. She maintained homes in New Hampshire and Arizona, and it was in Scottsdale that Maureen died on June 23, 1998, of a heart attack. She was 87 years old.
Carl Henry Vogt (February 19, 1895 – May 12, 1956), known professionally as Louis Calhern, was an American stage and screen actor. For portraying Oliver Wendell Holmes in the film The Magnificent Yankee (1950), he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. Calhern began working in silent films for director Lois Weber in the early 1920s; the most notable being The Blot in 1921. A 1921 newspaper article commented, "The new arrival in stardom is Louis Calhern, who, until Miss Weber engaged him to enact the leading male role in What's Worth While?, had been playing leads in the Morosco Stock company of Los Angeles."
In 1923 Calhern left the movies, but would return to the screen eight years later after the advent of sound pictures. He was primarily cast as a character actor in films while he continued to play leading roles on the stage. He reached his peak in the 1950s as a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player. Among his many memorable screen roles were Ambassador Trentino in the Marx Brothers classic Duck Soup (1933) and three that he appeared in at MGM in 1950: a singing role as Buffalo Bill in the film version of the musical Annie Get Your Gun, the double-crossing lawyer and sugar-daddy to Marilyn Monroe in John Huston's film noir The Asphalt Jungle, and his Oscar-nominated performance as Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Magnificent Yankee (re-creating his role from the Broadway stage). He was also praised for his portrayal of the title role in the John Houseman production of Julius Caesar (adapted from the Shakespeare play) in 1953, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Calhern also played the role of the devious George Caswell, the manipulative board member of Tredway Corporation in the 1954 production of Executive Suite.
Calhern's other film roles included the grandfather in The Red Pony (1949), adapted from the novel by John Steinbeck and starring Robert Mitchum, and the spy boss of Cary Grant in the Alfred Hitchcock suspense classic Notorious (1946). A performance as Uncle Willie in High Society (1956), a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, turned out to be his final film.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Louis Calhern, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Edward Arnold was born as Gunther Edward Arnold Schneider in 1890, on the Lower East Side of New York City, the son of German immigrants, Elizabeth (Ohse) and Carl Schneider. Arnold began his acting career on the New York stage and became a film actor in 1916. A burly man with a commanding style and superb baritone voice, he was a popular screen personality for decades, and was the star of such film classics as Diamond Jim (1935) (a role he reprised in Le roman de Lillian Russell (1940)) Arnold appeared in over 150 films and was President of The Screen Actors Guild shortly before his death in 1956.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Henry Armetta (born Enrico Armetta, July 4, 1888 – October 21, 1945) was an Italian-born American character actor who appeared in at least 150 American films, starting in silents around 1915 to 1946, when his last film was released posthumously.
Henry Armetta (born Enrico Armetta, July 4, 1888 – October 21, 1945) was an Italian-born American character actor who appeared in at least 150 American films, starting in silents around 1915 to 1946, when his last film was released posthumously.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Emerson Treacy (September 17, 1900 – January 10, 1967) was a film, Broadway, and radio actor.
Treacy was teamed with comedienne Gay Seabrook to form the double-act Treacy and Seabrook. The team was very successful on radio and in theater during the early 1930s, with routines similar to those of real husband-and-wife team Burns and Allen.
Modern audiences will remember Treacy as the flustered father of Spanky McFarland in the Our Gang short films Bedtime Worries and Wild Poses.
Treacy played in dozens of other feature films, including small roles in Adam's Rib and The Wrong Man, as well as television programs such as The Lone Ranger, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Perry Mason.
Treacy died after undergoing surgery on January 10, 1967.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Willard Robertson (January 1, 1886 – April 5, 1948) was an American actor and writer. He appeared in 147 films between 1924 and 1948. He was born in Runnels, Texas and died in Hollywood, California.
Willard Robertson first worked as a lawyer in Texas, but he left his profession for a sudden interest in acting. He appeared on Broadway in 16 plays between 1907 and 1930. Robertson played supporting roles in many Hollywood films from 1930 until the year he died, typically portraying men of authority such as doctors, elected officials, military officers, and also lawyers. He played Jackie Cooper's stern but loving father in the oscar-winning drama Skippy (1931) and its sequel Sooky (1931). Robertson also portrayed a flamboyant lawyer in Remember the Night (1940) and the straight sheriff in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943).
Willard Robertson was also a notable writer of numerous plays, two of them were adapted into films. He also wrote the novel Moon Tide (1940) which was turned into Archie Mayo's drama thriller Moontide (1942) starring Jean Gabin and Ida Lupino.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Margaret Lindsay (born Margaret Kies; September 19, 1910 – May 9, 1981) was an American film actress. Her time as a Warner Bros. contract player during the 1930s was particularly productive. She was noted for her supporting work in successful films of the 1930s and 1940s such as Jezebel (1938) and Scarlet Street (1945) and her leading roles in lower-budgeted B movie films such as the Ellery Queen series at Columbia in the early 1940s. Critics regard her portrayal of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hepzibah Pyncheon in the 1940 film adaptation of The House of the Seven Gables as Lindsay's standout career role.
From Wikipedia
Gilbert Emery Bensley Pottle (June 11, 1875 – October 28, 1945), known professionally as Gilbert Emery, was an American actor who appeared in over 80 movies from 1921 to his death in 1945.
American character actor whose career lasted nearly half a century. James Wilson Flavin Jr. was the son of a hotel waiter of Canadian-English extraction and a mother, Katherine, whose father was an Irish immigrant. (Thus Flavin, well-known in Hollywood as an "Irish" type, was only one-quarter Irish.) Flavin was born and raised in Portland, Maine (a fact that may have enrichened his later working relationship with director John Ford, also a Portland native). He attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, but (contrary to some sources) did not graduate. Instead he dropped out and returned to Portland where he drove a taxi. Then as now, summer stock companies flocked to Maine each year, and in 1929 he was asked to fill in for an actor. He did well with the part and the company manager offered him $150 per week to go with the troupe back to New York. Flavin accepted and by the spring of 1930 was living in a rooming house at 108 W. 87th Street in Manhattan. Flavin didn't manage to crack Broadway at this time (his Broadway debut would not occur for another thirty-nine years, in the 1971 revival of "The Front Page," in which Flavin played Murphy and briefly took over the lead role of Walter Burns from star Robert Ryan). He worked his way across the country in stock productions and tours, arriving in Los Angeles around 1932. He quickly made the transition to movies, landing the lead in his very first film, a Universal serial, The Airmail Mystery (1932). He also landed his leading lady, marrying the serial's female star Lucile Browne that same year. However, the serial marked virtually the last time that Flavin would play the lead in a film. Thereafter, he was restricted almost exclusively to supporting characters, many of them without so much as a name. He specialized in uniformed cops and hard-bitten detectives, but played chauffeurs, cabbies, and even a 16th-century palace guard with aplomb. Flavin appeared in nearly four hundred films between 1932 and 1971, and in almost a hundred television episodes before his final appearance, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Francis Gary Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident (1976). Flavin died of a heart ailment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on April 23, 1976. His widow Lucile died seventeen days later. They were survived by their son, William James Flavin, subsequently a professor at the United States Army War College. James and Lucile Brown Flavin were buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Onslow Stevens (March 29, 1902 – January 5, 1977) was an American stage, television and film actor.
Stevens became involved in performing in 1926 at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, where his entire family worked as performers, directors and teachers.
His Broadway debut came in Stage Door (1936). He starred over 80 films, at first as the lead actor, but mostly in character roles later in his career.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Onslow Stevens, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Akim Mikhailovich Tamiroff (Russian: Аким Михайлович Тамиров; 29 October 1899 – 17 September 1972), Tiflis, Russian Empire (now Tbilisi, Georgia) was an Armenian actor. He won the first Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor. He was born of Armenian ethnicity, trained at the Moscow Art Theatre drama school. He arrived in the US in 1923 on a tour with a troupe of actors and decided to stay. Tamiroff managed to develop a career in Hollywood despite his thick Russian accent.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Akim Tamiroff, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia