10/2/2023 0 Comments Cast of babylon 5![]() ![]() But in “Babylon,” you’ll hear the song “Singin’ in the Rain” in a scene that takes place decades earlier: Chazelle shows the shooting of “The Hollywood Revue of 1929,” a characteristically stiff, celebrity-packed musical that featured Gilbert. Throughout “Babylon,” Chazelle nods to “Singin’ in the Rain,” which memorialized the transition to sound from the standpoint of 1952. game of touch football on Clara’s front lawn, was tame.” ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ But Stenn, who interviewed players, concluded that “even the wildest party, which ended in a 4 a.m. Trojans on Saturday nights at her Beverly Hills bungalow. In his biography, Stenn traces the rumor to Bow’s true-enough habit of hosting the U.S.C. football team “during beery, brawly, gangbanging weekend parties.” (Nellie’s overalls-and-nothing-else outfit, on the other hand, resembles a widely circulated photo of Bow’s contemporary Bessie Love.) When Nellie is trailed by University of Southern California football players after beating them at craps, the scene evokes Anger’s assertion that Bow played “party girl” to the entire U.S.C. While Anger’s “Babylon” is not the official source for Chazelle’s “Babylon,” the connection is tough to ignore. Serious film historians regard it as pernicious nonsense and have been trying to correct its claims ever since. In 1959, the experimental filmmaker Anger (“Fireworks”) published “Hollywood Babylon,” which cataloged, with a tongue-clucking tone, the supposed details of deaths, drug habits and sex lives of members of the movie industry. (Long stretches are silent.) But it was financially successful enough to indicate that talkies had a future. In fact, the Jolson film is “The Jazz Singer” (1927), which, contrary to its popular reputation, was not the first sound film or even a full-fledged sound film. is going to be big, Jack asks if it’s “like ‘Don Juan’”- a 1926 film that had synchronized music but no talking. Informed that the new Al Jolson sound picture at Warner Bros. “Babylon” alludes to the piecemeal nature of the transition to sound. The film was one of the last made by the producer Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), one of a handful of figures in “Babylon” to use real names. Often typecast in supporting roles, Wong was considered a possibility for the lead in “The Good Earth” (1937), but there were concerns that casting her opposite the white actor Paul Muni would suggest miscegenation. ![]() By 1932, Wong was back in Hollywood appearing in Josef von Sternberg’s “Shanghai Express” with Marlene Dietrich.īut Wong did lose work because her image didn’t fit with the times, as “Babylon” suggests, understating the role that racism played. Wong’s best-known movie from Europe - the extravagant, London-set “Piccadilly” (1929) - was silent. The film groups Wong, who, like Fay, was rumored to be a lesbian, with casualties of the advent of sound. It’s Anna May Wong, the groundbreaking Asian American actress and daughter of a laundryman who for a time moved to Europe, though a little earlier than Fay does. There’s no mistaking the inspiration for Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). (When Gilbert played opposite Greta Garbo in “Queen Christina” in 1933, the New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall praised him as “far more restrained” than in silents.) Both men died young, although their fates differed from Jack’s. Fairbanks and Gilbert are commonly cited as great silent leading men whose popularity petered out with sound, but there are sound movies in which they appear perfectly comfortable. Valentino exists in “Babylon” (his death in 1926 is mentioned), and unlike Jack, who sometimes pretends to be Italian, Valentino was born in Italy. Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert and Rudolph Valentinoīrad Pitt has said he modeled his character, Jack Conrad, on Fairbanks, Gilbert and Valentino. And her exploitative father took it upon himself to be her business manager. Doctors thought her mother, who died just as Bow was getting her start, suffered from a nervous disorder (which was in fact epilepsy). She was said to be unusually good at crying on command. David Stenn’s well-regarded biography “Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild” suggests many similarities: Bow’s humble origins were a source of insecurity. Chazelle told The New York Times in November that much of Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the live wire who shoots to stardom in “Babylon” only to flame out in the sound era, was inspired by Bow. When you hear that a movie star has “it” - whatever that means - you can thank Brooklyn’s own Clara Bow, advertised as “the ‘It’ Girl” for, well, “It,” a smash 1927 adaptation of a novel by Elinor Glyn. Here are some of the underpinnings of Chazelle’s three-hour opus. ![]() Crossing “Singin’ in the Rain” with “Boogie Nights,” Damien Chazelle’s fictional “Babylon” draws on just enough real film history to flatter cinephiles and to risk their ire. ![]()
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