A couple more obituaries

Actress Patricia Morison died on Sunday at the ripe old age of 103. Morison had a more substantial career on Broadway where she originated the lead in Kiss Me, Kate. Among her films were playing the French Empress Eugenie in The Song of Bernadette, and the lower-budget (but still quite good) story of the Reinhard Heydrich assassination Hitler's Madman. One role that wound up on the cutting room floor was as Victor Mature's wife in Kiss of Death. The story called for the character to commit suicide while Mature's character was in prison, and that apparently was too much for the Production Code. So the scenes were deleted and the suicide was only referenced.

Bill Gold, a name I'd never heard of, also died on Sunday, at the age of 97. Gold wasn't seen on screen, because his work was well away from the studio, instead designing posters for movies. Among the posters are for Casablanca at the beginning of his career, Strangers on a Train, A Clockwork Orange, and a whole slew of movies in the 1970s and 1980s. Gold's is one of those jobs we don't normally think about when we think about the movies, but that in some ways are almost as important as the ones we see on screen. Not to denigrate the work of a Saul Bass, but why for example is his name better remembered just because his art design is actually in the movie?