Hooked on Hollywood by Leonard Maltin

Author:Leonard Maltin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paladin Communications
Published: 2018-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

With Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday.

With Margaret Lindsay and Ann Doran in Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery.

LM: I guess you played your part too well, because it typecast you for a while, didn’t it?

RB: It was one of those things; I guess there hadn’t been anything written for that type of character for a while.

LM: His Girl Friday comes to mind right away. How did that line describing your character as a Ralph Bellamy type come about?

RB: I was off one day, and I came on the lot to say hello, because we were having a good time on that. I ran into my friend, by now, Harry Cohn, and he said, “Let’s go see the rushes in my projection room.” I went up to his private projection room, and we saw the previous day’s rushes: I hadn’t been in them. The scene you’re talking about, I think, is where they’ve sent someone to pick me up and get me in some kind of trouble, and Cary says, “He’ll be in front of a building and he’ll probably have a raincoat and umbrella.” The guy says, “What does he look like?” and Cary says, “Sort of ordinary looking, like that guy in pictures, Ralph Bellamy.” When this came out, Harry said, “What the hell are they doing down on the set? This wasn’t in the script!”

LM: One of the notable things about that picture is the frantic pace of the dialogue. Did that require a lot of rehearsal?

RB: We all had worked together before. But you had to take the cue, instead of from the last word, from two or three words before the last word of the speech. Just a matter of concentration. It was a pretty good picture, as I remember it.

LM: How about Trade Winds?

RB: That was shot entirely against background plates. Tay Garnett had gone around the world on his yacht, and shot plates. Freddy March, Joan Bennett, Ann Sothern, and I did almost the entire picture against background plates of Siam and Singapore. Incidentally, Freddy told me he took a percentage on that picture—it cost nothing to make—and he said of everything he did in Hollywood, he made more on that. That was one of the few times, when the picture was over, I got a note from Walter Wanger saying, “Nice to have worked with you.” He could have done it by phone, or on the set, and I don’t think it had ever happened to me before; I thought it was quite nice.

LM: Although you’ve done a lot of films, many people identify you most closely with the short-lived Ellery Queen series.

RB: Yes, that’s very strange. I think I did four, and everybody calls it the Ellery Queen series. They were just inexpensive pictures, overseen by the two fellows who wrote the stories, so there would be some accuracy technically.

LM: Then at Universal you broke new ground by doing some horror movies.

RB: I did one that involves my favorite story.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.