This weekend T2: Trainspotting is released in cinemas. It's taken 21 years for novelist Irvine Welsh, director Danny Boyle, scriptwriter John Hodge and the famous cast to get back together. That's not actually that long, though. This year Blade Runner 2049 is promised following a gap of 35 years after Ridley Scott's original film. Dick Van Dyke is heading for the UK to take a part in Mary Poppins Returns 64 years on, this time starring Emily Blunt in the title role.
Before the blonde, there was Bergman. In the second half of the 1940s, Hitchcock cast Ingrid Bergman three times, and on each occasion asked her to incarnate a different kind of leading lady. In the film noir Spellbound (1945) she was a psychoanalyst defrosted by Gregory Peck, and she played the loyal sister of a convict in 19th-century Australia in Hitchcock's first colour film, the costumed period piece Under Capricorn (1949).
It’s 50 years since Marilyn Monroe died alone on the night of August 4, 1962, from swallowing too many sleeping pills. The sad story soon became the stuff of legend. When they found her, she was still slumped over the telephone receiver; she had been ringing around, desperately trying to get help. Rumours soon spread about her relationship with Senator Robert Kennedy and possible access to state secrets, which gave rise to far-fetched conspiracy theories implicating the CIA in her death.
Movie stars and marriage have always helped the headline-writers. When in 1956 Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe tied the knot (he for the second time, she the third), they were dubbed the Egghead and the Hourglass. “Arthur Miller wouldn’t have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde,” claimed the blushing bride. The civil wedding lasted five minutes. The marriage lasted five years.
“I’ve never been intimidated by them. I don't suffer from thinking, that person is a star. They’ve got their job. I’ve got mine. If they’re pleasant so much the better.” Angela Allen’s lifetime in film has found her working closely with some of the most iconic figures in 20th-century entertainment, from matinee idols to gnarled silverscreen pros. Of the 75 pictures on which she was script supervisor, this selection of photographs from her personal album gives some sense of her long and distinguished contribution to cinema, including the occasional bit of body double work when no other appropriate female was around.
Although there are thematic links between many of the movie posters designed by Bill Gold between 1942 and 2003, especially in the talismanic use of telephones (Dial M for Murder, Klute, The Front Page) and guns (Casablanca, Deliverance, the Dirty Harry films), what’s remarkable is the range of styles he used in creating numerous iconic works. It seems unlikely that the designer responsible for the conventional rendering of James Cagney in patriotic garb in Yankee Doodle Dandy (Gold’s debut) could have conceived the frilly pink collage of My Fair Lady, the blobbed, multicoloured hippie images for Woodstock, and the upside-down nocturnal reflections of Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (Gold’s last campaign). But he delighted, clearly, in being a visual magpie.
Something has just happened to make Clint Eastwood's day. We refer, of course, not to the fact that he was yesterday made a Commander of the French Legion of Honour in Paris by President Sarkozky, but to the publication of Clint Eastwood, Icon, a gorgeous assembly of artwork from around the world commemorating an incredibly long-lived career.