30 Friday Dec 2022
Posted in Film, Jeanne Eagels
≈ Comments Off on To Save and Project: ‘The Letter’ at MoMA
A new digital restoration of Jeanne Eagels’ only surviving talking picture, The Letter (1929) will be screened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York on January 13, 2023, at 5 pm. Continue reading
30 Friday Apr 2021
Posted in Film, Jeanne Eagels
≈ Comments Off on From Jeanne, to Bette: A Tale of Two Letters
Before its restoration in 2013, Jeanne Eagels’ penultimate movie, The Letter (1929), was falling into obscurity. But while the 1940 remake is more accomplished overall, Jeanne’s performance as a frustrated colonial wife more than holds up against Bette Davis in the same role. An in-depth comparison between the two is posted at the Notoriously Nora movie blog today. Continue reading
26 Monday Apr 2021
Posted in Film, Jeanne Eagels
≈ Comments Off on And the (Posthumous) Oscar Goes to…
Tags
Academy Awards, Anthony Hopkins, Chadwick Boseman, Jeanne Eagels, Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed, Johnny Oleksinski, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, New York Post, Oscars, The Letter
Last night’s Academy Awards was an unusual event in more ways than one. Firstly, the pandemic made it something of a bare-bones affair. And secondly, the favourite to win in the Best Actor category – Chadwick Boseman, for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – passed away in 2020, aged 43, after a long battle with cancer. In another change of routine, this award was presented at the end of the ceremony, with winner Anthony Hopkins, in a speech given from his home in Wales, acknowledging his fellow nominee: “At 83 years of age, I did not expect to get this award, I really didn’t … I want to pay tribute to Chadwick Boseman, who was taken from us far too early.”
In her own way, Jeanne Eagels was as much an icon of the Roaring Twenties as Ma Rainey, and as several media outlets have noted lately, she also heads up the select group of actors who earned Oscar nominations posthumously. Continue reading
09 Monday Dec 2019
Posted in Film, Jeanne Eagels
≈ Comments Off on Two-Faced Woman: Joan Crawford and ‘Rain’
Tags
1932, Imogen Sara Smith, Joan Crawford, Lewis Milestone, Pre-Code, Rain, Scarface, The Chiseler, Walter Huston
While it is generally agreed that no actress surpassed Jeanne Eagels’ performance as Sadie Thompson in Rain, many have tried. Among them was none other than Joan Crawford, in a 1932 talkie which was widely panned on release (and later, by Crawford herself.) While at first her Sadie may seem close to parody, a more striking portrayal soon emerges, as Imogen Sara Smith writes in ‘Two-Faced Woman’, an article for The Chiseler. Continue reading
07 Thursday Nov 2019
Posted in Anniversaries, Jeanne Eagels, Theatre
≈ Comments Off on The ‘Rain Girl’ in November
As noted in the Playbill Vault, Jeanne Eagels began her legendary Broadway run as Sadie Thompson, “a prostitute at odds with a jungle missionary in Rain, primarily based on a W. Somerset Maugham quick story,” on this day, November 7, in 1922. We’re now just three years away from its centenary. Continue reading
Tara Hanks 
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