Veronica Lake @ 100: "I Married a Witch"

by Cláudio Alves

"I Married a Witch" | © United Artists

Silky blonde tresses fall over one eye, a face masked by spun gold accented with spidery lashes and a slash of scarlet lipstick. When struggling to promote Veronica Lake's first movies as a full-on movie star, that's the image distributors found, depurating her commercial value into a flat facsimile of her beauty. Whether it was Paramount's poster for Sullivan's Travels or the main art for United Artist's I Married a Witch, it seemed as if Lake was a head of hair first, an actress second. Legend says that once, during the filming of 1941's I Wanted Wings, the young woman kept struggling with a lock of hair falling over her right eye. For the wannabee starlet, it was an irritation. For the studio execs lusting over the teenager, it was the look of a silver screen goddess, instant movie magic. The rest, as they say, is history…

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The Furniture: "À Nous la Liberté" and Freedom from Industrial Design

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Once upon a time, the Oscars were in November! Well, thrice upon a time. The 3rd, 4th and 5th Academy Awards were held in the fall - the last of them on November 18th, 1932. Nathaniel covreed the biggest piece of trivia from that night earlier this morning. But there were also a few firsts, including the debut of the short film categories and the first-ever foreign-language nominee. René Clair’s À nous la liberté was nominated for Best Art Direction, an award it lost to a cruise ship comedy called Transatlantic.

But it’s Clair and art director Lazare Meerson who have the last laugh, as their losing film is now largely regarded as a classic and Transatlantic barely has a Wikipedia page. A nous la liberte is a charming little oddity, a musical comedy about the alienation inherent in modern industry. It opens in a prison, where cellmates Émile (Henri Marchand) and Louis (Raymond Cordy) are at work hand-carving toy horses. The cavernous space evokes the ominous architecture of the modern prison, its high balconies a reminder of constant surveillance...

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