Pre-Code Hollywood Collection (The Cheat / Merrily We Go to Hell / Hot Saturday / Torch Singer / Murder at the Vanities / Search for Beauty) (Universal Backlot Series)
(For the first time ever, Universal opens its vaults to br...)
For the first time ever, Universal opens its vaults to bring you 6 classic films from the most decadent era in motion picture history: Pre-Code Hollywood. In 1934, Hollywood was turned upside down by the enforcement of a strict “Production Code” that would change the way movies were made for the next 34 years. During the “pre-Code” period (1929 to mid-1934), censorship barely existed in Hollywood and filmmakers had free reign to make the movies they wanted and the public demanded. No subject was taboo including adultery, murder, or sex. Starring screen legends Cary Grant, Fredric March, Claudette Colbert, Tallulah Bankhead, Randolph Scott, and Sylvia Sidney, the Pre-Code Hollywood Collection forever captures one of the most unique periods in cinema history. The Cheat A compulsive gambler (Tallulah Bankhead) will do anything to pay off her debt - including turning to a wealthy businessman behind her husband’s back. Merrily We Go to Hell An abusive alcoholic (Fredric March) reunites with a woman from his past and drives his wife (Sylvia Sidney) to drastic measures. Hot Saturday Scandal erupts after a young woman (Nancy Carroll) innocently spends the night with a notorious playboy (Cary Grant) and neglects to tell her fiancé (Randolph Scott). Torch Singer After giving up her illegitimate child for adoption, a notorious nightclub singer (Claudette Colbert) attempts to find her daughter through a children’s radio show. Murder at the Vanities While sexy musical revue “The Vanities” captivates an audience on its opening night, a murder investigation takes place backstage. Search for Beauty Olympic swimming champions (Buster Crabbe and Ida Lupino) are tricked into endorsing a racy magazine - and much worse.
Tallulah: My Autobiography (Southern Icons Series)
(
Her father and her uncle were U.S. congressmen. Her gra...)
Her father and her uncle were U.S. congressmen. Her grandfather was a U.S. senator. Although born to privilege in Alabama and groomed in a convent school, Tallulah Bankhead resolved not to be just another southern belle.
Quickly she rose to the top and became an acclaimed actress of London's West End and on the Broadway stage. Her performances in many plays of the 1920s brought her to the notice of Hollywood. She starred in such Paramount films as My Sin, Faithless, The Devil and the Deep, and Thunder Below. Even though she won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for her leading role in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), she never achieved the prominence in movies that she enjoyed in the theater and on radio. On the New York stage she originated the starring roles of Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and of Sabina in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.
Tallulah, like Eudora, Flannery, and Coretta, was a southern woman identifiable by her first name. Her flamboyant public personality may be the most fully realized and memorable character Bankhead ever played. She became famous for her snappy repartee, candid quotes, and scandalous lifestyle. She was disposed to remove her clothes and chat in the nude. Overfond of Kentucky bourbon and wild parties, she was a lady baritone who called everybody "Dahling."
In Tallulah, first published in 1952 and a New York Times bestseller for twenty-six weeks, Bankhead's literary voice is as lively and forthright as her public persona. She details her childhood and adolescence, discusses her dedication to the theater, and presents amusing anecdotes about her life in Hollywood, New York, and London. Along with a searing defense of her lifestyle and rambunctious habits, she provides a fiercely opinionated, wildly funny account of American stage at a time when the movies were beginning to cast theater into eclipse. This is not only a memoir of an independent woman but also an insider look at American entertainment during a golden age.
(Legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (North by Northwest,...)
Legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (North by Northwest, Psycho, Rope) directed this suspenseful World War II thriller, a remarkable story of human survival. After their ship is sunk in the Atlantic by Germans, eight people are stranded in a lifeboat, among them a glamorous journalist, a tough seaman, a nurse and an injured sailor. Their problems are further compounded when they pick up a ninth passenger - the Nazi captain from the U-boat that torpedoed them. With its powerful interplay of suspense and emotion, this breathtaking classic is a microcosm of humanity, revealing the subtleties of man's strengths and frailties under extraordinary duress. The stellar cast features the great character actors Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, John Hodiak, Heather Angel, Hume Cronyn, Henry Hull and Canada Lee. Lifeboat received three Academy Award nominations for Director (Hitchcock), Best Writing - Original Story (John Steinbeck) and Cinematography, Black-and-White (Glen MacWilliams).
Special Features: Audio Commentary by Film Historian Tim Lucas | Audio Commentary by Film Professor Drew Casper | The Making of Lifeboat | Animated Montage of Images | Trailers
Maniac (1963) - B&W - Not Rated - Starring: Kerwin Mathews, Nadia Gray, Donald Houston, Liliane Brousse
While vacationing in France, an American artist becomes romantically involved with an older woman, Eve, while also attracted to her teenage stepdaughter, Annette. Pulled between them, a plot is hatched to free Eve's husband from jail but Eve has a different plan in mind.
Die! Die! My Darling! - (1965) - Color - Not Rated - Starring: Tallulah Bankhead, Stefanie Powers, Peter Vaughan, Donald Sutherland
Young Pat Carroll (Powers) goes to the home of her dead fiancé to meet his beloved mother, Mrs. Trefoile (Tallulah Bankhead). There, she discovers that Mrs. Trefoile is not the loving mother she had anticipated, but rather a grieving psychopath who blames Pat for the death of her son.
(Russia’s Catherine the Great falls in love with a handsom...)
Russia’s Catherine the Great falls in love with a handsome young army officer who is really a revolutionary plotting her downfall. Shown in 4:3 letterbox format using the highest quality source material available.
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.
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was an American actress of the stage and screen.
Background
She was born on January 31, 1902 in Huntsville, the daughter of William Bankhead, a lawyer and Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and Adelaide Eugenia Sledge. Bankhead was named for her grandmother, who had been named after a waterfall - Tallulah Falls. Because her mother died from complications of childbirth when Tallulah was three weeks old, Tallulah's early upbringing was left to aunts in Montgomery and Jasper, Ala.
Education
She attended various private schools, including the Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York City, the Mary Baldwin Academy in Staunton, Va. , and Fairmont Seminary in Washington, D. C. , where she was best known for her tantrums and other attention-getting behavior.
Career
Bankhead won a contest in Picture-Play magazine, which awarded her a screen contract in New York, and at fifteen she left school for good. Tallulah Bankhead was a natural actress, as a lifetime of self-dramatization demonstrated. Even as a child she was fascinated by entertainers and took to imitating them for her family. Will Bankhead, who had once hoped to become an actor, encouraged his daughter's theatrics. In Exiles from Paradise, Sara Mayfield compared the young Bankhead and Zelda Fitzgerald, another celebrated southern belle: "Even in those days, both of them had dash, a style and daring that left me wide-eyed and open-mouthed with admiration, for Zelda and Dutch, as we called Tallulah, were personalities and performers long before they became famous. "
Bankhead's first acting job, compliments of the Picture-Play contest, was in the film The Wishful Girl (1918), where she went unnoticed. But the movie director Ivan Abramson spotted her in a nonspeaking role on Broadway in The Squab Farm (1918) and cast her in When Men Betray (1918). The first notice of her work highlighted the qualities that propelled her to stardom. "Miss Tallulah Bankhead, " wrote the reviewer, is "exquisite of feature, dainty of form, deliciously feminine. .. Her appearance brings with it the feeling that the very atmosphere is surcharged with energy. "
Bankhead continued briefly in films with a featured role in Samuel Goldwyn's Thirty a Week (1918) and a walk-on in The Virtuous Vamp (1919), but she had her greatest success on the stage. Bankhead had her first speaking part on Broadway in 39 East (1919). She made only six appearances before the play was closed by an actors' strike. After a brief run in Footloose (1919), a comedy, Tallulah did not work again until 1921, when she went into Nice People for 120 performances. She did five more Broadway shows, including Everyday (1921), written for her by Rachel Crothers, and then set out for London in quest of theatrical opportunities and Lord Napier Alington, whom she had met in New York. Bankhead's affair with Alington ended badly, but the move to England advanced her career. Uninvited, Tallulah presented herself backstage to Sir Gerald du Maurier, one of England's great leading men, who cast her in The Dancers (1923). She soon established herself as a great favorite of London playgoers. Indeed, she became the object of a Tallulah craze. Her appearance onstage often inspired tumultuous reactions from an adoring public.
To many she personified the exuberance of the 1920's. And to catch a part of that spirit for themselves, women copied her fashions, affected her manner, and even imitated her husky voice, while men sought her company or admired her from the gallery. Bankhead did sixteen plays during her eight years in England, most notably Noel Coward's Fallen Angels (1925), Michael Arlen's The Green Hat (1925), and Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted (1926). She returned to the United States in 1931 for a film contract with Paramount. In Tarnished Lady (1931), My Sin (1931), Thunder Below (1932), and Devil and the Deep (1932), Bankhead portrayed a succession of jaded women. But the vitality she brought to the stage was not evident on the screen. Although "talkies" were the rage, even her famous voice did not save her. Her pictures failed, and Paramount did not renew her contract. Believing herself to be a victim of miscasting, she decided to return to the stage. Bankhead established herself as one of Broadway's leading ladies during the 1930's, though she had some notable flops. Her Antony and Cleopatra (1937) is best remembered for the famous opening line of John Mason Brown's review: "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra--and sank. " Yet, her performance as Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes (1939) was widely hailed and earned her Variety's best-performance award.
During the 1940's and 1950's, Bankhead remained busy in the theater. She was praised for her performance in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), for which she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and enjoyed a long run in Private Lives (1948). She worked infrequently in films, most of them mediocre, but was outstanding in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), for which she was named best actress by the New York film critics. Bankhead frequented radio and television talk shows, usually discussing baseball or politics: she was a passionate fan of the New York Giants and was a staunch Democrat. During this period she was best known as the hostess of "The Big Show" (1950 - 1952), network radio's much-touted effort to compete with variety programs on television. Radio lost the competition, but the program was an effective vehicle for Bankhead's wit and unique voice.
Age, abetted by cocaine, alcohol, and tobacco, had diminished her beauty, and she had gained a reputation for being difficult to work with. There is merit in Brendan Gill's assessment that Bankhead "invented by trial and error an exceptional self, which with a child's impudent pretense of not caring she flung straight into the face of the world. " But her colorful personality enabled her to remain a celebrity long after her acting career had faded. She died in New York City.
Achievements
Bankhead was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1972, and the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1981. She is regarded as one of the 20th-century theatre's great Leading Ladies.
In her personal life, Bankhead struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction, and was infamous for her uninhibited sex life. Bankhead was capable of great kindness and generosity to those in need, supporting disadvantaged foster children and helping several families escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II.
Connections
Bankhead often appeared with the actor John Emery, whom she married on August 31, 1937, and divorced in June 1941, after a predictably stormy marriage; they had no children.