(Art is an orphan in trouble with the law, who is given a ...)
Art is an orphan in trouble with the law, who is given a second chance with the Dorays - a couple who own a pharmacy. However, when Art and his friend Nutty break into the drugstore to get medicine for Nutty's dying grandmother, the boy's motives are questioned. Academy Award® winner Spencer Tracy stars in the film with Doris Kenyon, Ralph Bellamy and Tommy Conlon. Shown in 4:3 full frame presentation.
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(Anita Ekberg plays the gorgeous and tortured dancer with ...)
Anita Ekberg plays the gorgeous and tortured dancer with the Great Dane named Devil, who, after being nearly attacked by a man with a knife, is put into an asylum under the obsessive care of psychiatrist Dr. Greenwood (Harry Townes). When the girl begins to show signs of improvement, the psychiatrist assumes her care on the outside so she can resume her dancing career. The proprietor (Gypsy Rose Lee) of El Madhouse, a tawdry nightclub, hires the girl but then a series of murders by "The Ripper" attracts the attention of a newspaper reporter (Phil Carey), and the doctor and reporter face off to try to protect the girl. A sensual statue of a dancing girl called "Screaming Mimi" seems to play a part in the bizarre mystery. Newly remastered.
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This product is expected to play back in DVD Video "play only" devices, and may not play in other DVD devices, including recorders and PC drives.
(Three manicurists get their shot at fame when one inherit...)
Three manicurists get their shot at fame when one inherits a ferryboat, which they turn it into a successful floating nightclub. Shown in 4:3 full frame presentation.
When sold by Amazon.com, this product will be manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
(Sonja Henie and Cesar Romero star in a romantic comedy, i...)
Sonja Henie and Cesar Romero star in a romantic comedy, in which a department store owner turns an attractive store clerk into his living mannequin by sending her off to college to promote his fashion ware. Richard Greene and Joan Davis also join this all-star cast.
(A hobo brings a New Deal to ancient Baghdad when he’s tra...)
A hobo brings a New Deal to ancient Baghdad when he’s transported back in time and mistaken for Ali Baba. Shown in 4:3 full frame presentation.
When sold by Amazon.com, this product will be manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
(
Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir became a New York Times bestsel...)
Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir became a New York Times bestseller in 1957, inspiring the 1959 hit musical, two movies, and three revivals. Now a fourth, directed by Arthur Laurents and starring Patti LuPone, is lighting up New York, winning top Broadway theatre awards, including three 2008 Tony Awards, as well as raves from critics and audiences:
“No matter how long you live, you’ll never see a more
exciting production.” —Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal
“Watch out, New York! This GYPSY is a wallop-packing show of raw power.” —Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“Not your ordinary theater experience. This is the best production
of the best damn musical ever.” —Liz Smith, Syndicated Columnist
The memoir, which Gypsy began as a series of pieces for The New Yorker, contains photographs and newspaper clippings from her personal scrapbooks and an afterword by her son, Erik Lee Preminger. At turns touching and hilarious, Gypsy describes her childhood trouping across 1920s America through her rise to stardom as The Queen of Burlesque in 1930s New York—where gin came in bathtubs, gangsters were celebrities, and Walter Winchell was king.
Gypsy’s story features outrageous characters—among them Broadway’s funny girl, Fanny Brice, who schooled Gypsy in how to be a star; gangster Waxy Gordon, who fixed her teeth; and her indomitable mother, Rose, who lived by her own version of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others … before they do you.”
(Two buddies go to New York City to break up an affair bet...)
Two buddies go to New York City to break up an affair between their boss's son and a showgirl. While in the Big Apple, the two become embroiled in some Broadway hi-jinks and they both fall for the same nightclub singer. Suddenly, the boss himself shows up and steals the singer from both of them. Gypsy Rose Lee appears under her real name Louise Hovick. Shown in 4:3 full frame presentation.
When sold by Amazon.com, this product will be manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
(Set in the days of the Great Alaskan Gold Rush, this dazz...)
Set in the days of the Great Alaskan Gold Rush, this dazzling musical stars Randolph Scott as Honest John Calhoun, a 'reformed con artist-turned-dance hall owner on the lam from the law in the upper reaches of the Yukon. Calhoun's former flame, Belle (Gypsy Rose Lee), sails in as part of a new show troupe and quickly falls for her ex-boyfriend's newfound honorasserting her intentions to keep Calhoun an honest man. But on her toes is a band of Calhoun's colorful old cohorts, and they ve got one thing on their conspiring minds GOLD. Can Calhoun remain an upstanding businessman as he endeavors to be the small town's banker, or will the old thief pull his greatest number yet on its unsuspecting citizens? Oscar(r) nominated for best original score this rousing western musical takes you on a hilarious ride through the backcountry of greed, deceit, and double-crossing for a fun-filled finale that is sure to catch you by surprise.
Gypsy Rose Lee was an American entertainer and writer. She was also an actress, author, and playwright.
Background
Gypsy Rose Lee was born Rose Louise Hovick, probably in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of John Olaf Hovick, a newspaperman, and Rose Thompson, whom Lee in her 1957 autobiography described as the archetypal stage mother. In 1960 Lee added that "Mother was rougher and more ruthless than I have portrayed her. She ran roughshod over the world. " When Louise (as she was called by family members) was about four her parents divorced, and the family went to live with Mrs. Hovick's parents in Seattle.
Education
Louise's schooling was minimal. When complaints of child-labor violations surfaced, Mrs. Hovick would hire a tutor. Louise in her early teens developed a love for books that continued into adulthood.
Career
About 1918 she and her sister Ellen Evangeline (later known as June Havoc) made their singing and dancing debut at a Knights of Pythias lodge. They were successful, especially June, who was cute and talented. Louise, large for her age, settled into a supporting role. Soon Mrs. Hovick took her daughters to California, where the girls performed in an act called Dainty June, the Hollywood Baby, and Her Newsboys, with Louise as the Doll Girl. In 1922 they were on the Pantages Circuit as Baby June and Her Pals. Their first long contract was on the Keith-Orpheum Circuit, in an act most often known as Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters.
Louise appeared on stage, and often off, in boy's clothes, in order not to detract from the femininity of her sister. Until 1928 they toured the country, and at the height of their vaudeville careers earned as much as $1, 250 to $1, 500 a week. At the age of thirteen June eloped with one of the "newsboys. " The act then became Rose Louise and Her Newsboy Songsters until revamped into an all-girl act called Madame Rose's Dancing Daughters. In 1929, stranded in Kansas City, the act changed to Rose Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes and was booked for the first time in a burlesque house.
Louise was about fifteen when she first stepped into a solo strip spot at the Gaiety in Toledo, Ohio. Working under various names, she finally settled on the cognomen Gypsy Rose Lee and developed her trademarks as a stripper: peeling off her garments by removing strategically placed straight pins, tossing a garter with a rose attached into the audience, and winning the audience with her wit as much as with her sensuality. Though not a classic beauty, Lee was tall (five feet, nine inches) and statuesque (130 pounds), with hazel eyes, auburn hair, a subtle overbite, and a throaty voice. H. L. Mencken coined the term "ecdysiast" to describe her; the French, to emphasize the sophistication of her strip, called her une déshabilleuse.
Lee had little talent, but, as Leonard Spigelgass noted, "she glowed. She stepped upon a stage, and she filled it, because she was a presence. " Billy Minsky claimed that she transformed the crass striptease into "seven minutes of sheer art"; Burns Mantle commented that "Miss Lee is very careful not to take off more than she has on. " In 1942 Life termed her "a classic paradox: an intellectual stripteaser. " Lee often stated that she actually spent no more than fifty weeks as a stripper and coasted for years with a fake strip. Believing that sex onstage should be played for laughs, she set her act by the mid-1930's and made few changes thereafter.
Lee's big break came in April 1931 in New York City at Minsky's Republic Theater. By 1935, at the Irving Place Theater, she made as much as $1, 000 a week. She became a friend of such intellectuals and artists as Mark Van Doren, e. e. cummings, Deems Taylor, Carson McCullers, Janet Flanner, Max Ernst, and Christopher Isherwood. In 1932, as Rose Louise, she appeared in Hot-Cha, the beginning of her career outside of burlesque. Using the name Gypsy Rose Lee, she appeared in 1936 with Fannie Brice and Bobby Clark in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies.
Lee went to Hollywood in 1937. In response to demands from church organizations, the Hays Office, which was known as the guardian of morality in the motion-picture industry, insisted that she be billed as Louise Hovick and that her career as a striptease artist not be mentioned. Without her stage name, the studio lost interest in her and pushed her into five "B" films over the next two years. Although her film career was never very successful, she returned in 1943 to make Stage Door Canteen, featuring a spoof on the striptease, and the following year Belle of the Yukon.
In 1945 she appeared in a version of her own play, The Naked Genius, called Doll Face. She was in two unsuccessful films in 1958, appeared in The Stripper in 1963, and made her final film, The Trouble with Angels, in 1966. Lee's first stage role in a straight comedy, I Must Love Someone (1939), was followed in 1940 by Michael Todd's The Streets of Paris at the New York World's Fair at $4, 000 a week. During this engagement her affair with Todd began. The same year she appeared in Gay New Orleans at Todd's Theatre-Café in Chicago.
In 1940 Walter Winchell asked Lee to write a guest column. This experience led to a serious interest in writing and to the publication of two mystery novels, The G-String Murders (1941) and Mother Finds a Body (1942), followed by an unsuccessful play, The Naked Genius (1943). In the 1940's and 1950's articles by her appeared in the New Yorker, American Mercury, Mademoiselle, Harper's, Collier's, Variety, Cosmopolitan, and Flair. She recommended to other writers, "You write it, so that it sounds like you and won't get slicked up; let someone else punctuate it. "
During World War II she played in numerous military camp shows with the United Service Organizations (USO). After touring carnivals in 1949 and earning a minimum guarantee of $10, 000 a week plus a percentage of the gross, she was fond of saying, "I'm probably the highest-paid outdoor entertainer since Cleopatra. "
In the mid-1950's she decided that she was too old to strip and began to seek other sources of income. In 1956 she performed in Las Vegas and first appeared on television, in an episode of "The U. S. Steel Hour" called "Sauce for the Goose. " In 1958 she tried her first televised talk and variety show, which led to a syndicated talk show, starting in 1966. She appeared on numerous dramatic shows in the 1960's and was a regular on the situation comedy "The Pruitts of Southampton" in 1966-1967. Her major accomplishment in this period was Gypsy: A Memoir (1957), a somewhat fanciful account of her early career. The book was more a celebration of her mother and her mother's ruthlessness, and of vaudeville and burlesque in the 1920's and 1930's, than an autobiography. Its success allowed Lee to exploit more fully her passion for collecting Victorian antiques. Gypsy, the musical based on her memoirs, opened on Broadway in 1959, followed by a film version in 1962.
Lee's last major creative effort was a one-woman show called A Curious Evening with Gypsy Rose Lee. Its first performance, in January 1958 in Palm Beach, was followed in 1961 by a brief run in New York City at the Mayfair Theater, with disappointing results. In 1961 she took her show to Los Angeles, moving permanently to Beverly Hills the same year. In the late 1960's she toured Vietnam for the USO, distributing Gypsy's Kosher Fortune Cookies, with bawdy, humorous fortunes inside. She died in Los Angeles.
Achievements
Lee was the best-known of her era and probably the most remembered burlesque dancer. Her most significant stage appearance in the 1940's was in Star and Garter (1942), a burlesque for the carriage trade, for which she was paid $3, 000 a week. She also published an autobiography, Gypsy (1957), which was the basis for the musical play (1959) and motion picture (1962) of that name.
Although Lee could be difficult, demanding, maddeningly self-assured, and astonishingly frugal, she was, as her son notes, "a woman of taste, intelligence, and style--an intellectual in the best sense of the word. " Her sister remembers her as "many people, all of them vivid and powerful. " As an entertainer and self-publicist, she was tireless. She was also something of an anomaly, quite modest, and almost Victorian in private life. Toward the end of her life she issued occasional admonitory statements about theatrical nudity that were both shrewd and an explanation of her success as a sex symbol. "Bare flesh bores men, " she often warned, and added, "I'm really a little prudish. "
Connections
Lee was unsuccessful with men, from her first passion, the burlesque comic Rags Ragland, to Billy Rose, with whom she had a platonic relationship in the 1960's. She was married and divorced three times. She first married Arnold R. Mizzy, a New York dental supply manufacturer on August 13, 1937, and divorced him in 1941; her second marriage, to the actor William Alexander Kirkland, began on August 31, 1942, and was dissolved three months later (they were formally divorced in 1944). Lee's final marriage, to artist Julio de Diego, lasted from March 19, 1948 to 1955. Her son, Erik Lee, born in December 1944, was thought to have been fathered by her second husband. In 1971, however, Otto Preminger acknowledged that Erik was his son and adopted him. Lee told her son that she chose Preminger to be his father intentionally. "It was right after Mike [Todd] left me. I felt so alone that I decided to have something no one would ever be able to take away from me. "
