Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Putting Faces to Names

First, I should probbly apologize for not having done a post on The Baron of Arizona, which is airing this morning as part of a day of films directed by Sam Fuller. Thankfully, it's on DVD, as part of a box set of his first three movies. There's an increasing number of movies I saw on TCM the last time they showed up, and probably ought to get around to doing reviews on them. Life however is, if not a mess, energy-sapping at times, and this is one of those times, which is why there haven't been quite so many posts actually about individual movies, and why the overall quality of posts has been lower. As always, though, I feel it's a good habit to write something every day, which is why posts like this show up from time to time.

So today's post will be about another blog I came across recently. When I was doing the birthday post on Elisabeth Risdon a few days back, a Google image search led me to, among other places, a blog called Forgotten Actors. It seems to be updated on weekdays, with a picture or two of some actor whose name you might see a good ways down the credits, but whose role you might not recognize. One of the things I like about some of those Warner Bros. movies from the 1930s is that in between the traditional opening credits and the action, there will be a montage of cast members with their names and the names of the characters they're playing. It's something that makes it much easier to look for some of the upper tier of 1930s character actors, like a Hobart Cavanaugh or a Donald Meek. Other movies had a screen in between showing just a list of the first ten or so cast members and which characters they played, which is also nice, but not quite as good, of course. Forgotten Actors gives us photos of actors further down the list, which is also a nice thing to have.

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