Showbiz History: Milk baths, hit singles, and Montalban's centennial

7 random things that happened on this day (Nov 25th) in showbiz history... 

1932 Claudette Colbert infamously bathes in milk in Cecil B DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, new in theaters.

1947 The Hollywood Blacklist begins, denying employment to those with perceived Communist ties or sympathies. This period has haunted self-reflecting Hollywood since as witnessed in Trumbo, The Way We Were, Guilty by Suspicion, Good Night and Good Luck, and numerous other movies...

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Distant Relatives: The Bicycle Thief and The Road

Robert here w/ Distant Relatives, exploring the connections between one classic and one contemporary film. This week the last in a three part series on how one classic film can have many children.

Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road will most likely always be remembered as a great novel first and a somewhat well received film second. But whatever your opinion ofthe film, and the consensus seems to be that it could have benefited from a little more Bicycle Thief-esque neo-realisism (indeed it's the only of the three "children" of The Bicycle Thief that we've looked at, that isn't heavily influenced by that style), it's hard to ignore the relationship between the two films as two tales of a father and a son wandering through the remnants of humanity.

 

But before we get into the father/son dynamic, it's worth noting that the heightened reality of post-apocalyptic cinema and the unavoidable realism of wartime pictures (and by that I mean films shot in a country during wartime or immediate post-wartime, not romantically shot prestige pictures) are fascinatingly similar. More after the jump...

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