I only can use a sound bite from him and, believe me, it’s going to be devoted to his memories of working for Jack Cole!

Read Chakiris’s stellar curriculum vitae …

He was one of the dancers in Marilyn Monroe‘s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and appeared as a dancer alongside Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas (in the “Love, You Didn’t Do Right by Me” number). He can also be seen in the “Chop Suey” number in the musical film Flower Drum Song and the funeral dance in the MGM musical film Brigadoon.

{note: the “Flower Drum Song” credential is apparently incorrect. please read comment below.}

For the film West Side Story (1961), Chakiris won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Bernardo, leader of the “Sharks”. Prior to the film, he’d appeared as “Riff,” leader of the “Jets,” in the musical’s London production. He appeared alongside Gene Kelly in Jacques Demy‘s French musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967).

Chakiris is still very handsome and fit, lives in the Hollywood Hills, and makes exquisite hand-crafted jewelry. Will keep you posted.

Indeed d’Amboise’s name, well-known considering he’s “just” a dancer, buzzed around the Festival screening room when the credit scrolled at the end of “Seven Brides”: “Jacques d’Amboise, courtesy of New York City Ballet.”

D’Amboise is very young in the film, and they keep him quiet, possibly to mum up his huge Bronx accent. He’s surrounded by dance giants, among them Marc Platt and Tommy Rall, the latter who Academy of Dance on Film founder, Larry Billman, calls, “the best dancer — ever.”

At his book talk, D’Amboise tells a funny story about waiting between takes on the set, and Rall stands up and with no warmup or preparation whatsoever, rips off multiple triple tours en l’air. D’Amboise, half laughing, admits that to this day, he has no clue why Rall did it. Boredom, d’Amboise conjectures. Dancers spend gobs of time sitting around, waiting, when making movies.

In “Seven Brides,” it’s the tall lanky Jack Cole dancer, Matt Mattox, who captures my eye. What a dancer. He has that hard-core Jack Cole iron gut. He’s still around, in France. A beautiful dancer who went on to choreograph and be a seminal jazz-dance teacher.

SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS

MGM, 1954, Color, 102 minutes

Produced by: Jack Cummings
Directed by: Stanley Donen
Assistant Director: Ridgeway Callow
Screen Play by: Albert Hackett & Frances Goodrich and Dorothy Kingsley
Musical Direction: Adolph Deutsch
Musical Supervision: Saul Chaplin
Lyrics by: Johnny Mercer
Music by: Gene DePaul
Orchestrations: Alexander Courage, Conrad Salinger and Leo Arnaud
Dances and Musical Numbers Staged by: Michael Kidd
Set Decorations: Edwin B. Willis, Hugh Hunt
Costumes Designed by: Walter Plunkett

Filmed in CinemaScope, Color by Ansco

Awards:
Academy Award for Best Score, Musical
Academy Award Nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay , Best Color Cinematography and Best Film Editing

Cast:
Howard Keel (Adam Pontipee),
Jane Powell (Milly),
Jeff Richards (Benjamin Pontipee),
Russ Tamblyn (Gideon Pontipee),
Nancy Kilgas (Alice),
Tommy Rall (Frank Pontipee),
Betty Carr (Sarah),
Marc Platt (Daniel Pontipee),
Virginia Gibson (Liza),
Matt Mattox (Caleb Pontipee),
Jacques d’Amboise (Ephraim Pontipee)

The occasion was the publishing of Mindy Aloff’s super book, “Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation.”

Mindy, a dance critic and Barnard College professor, describes how, under [Walt's brother] Roy Disney’s influence, “dancing and music were given very high priority in terms of quality and in terms of refinement of technology” at Disney studios. Aloff then dons her severe dance critic’s hat, and notes that “Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse were both very good dancers.”

A separate CBS interview with Marge (please bear with the commercial), intimates how Disney artists extrapolated animation from Marge’s dancing:

Watch the full 34-minute “Pillow Talk” interview here.

The upcoming Turner Classic Film festival in Los Angeles will feature a tribute to Disney animation & music.

I'm very excited to see PETER PAN (1924), the delicious silent film offering of the Los Angeles Conservancy's annual summer film fest, Last Remaining Seats at the Orpheum Theatre Wednesday night. It's the film event of the summer.

The über-gorgeous Anna May Wong plays (an American Indian) Tiger Lily in this early version of the James M. Barrie tale.

An L.A. girl from her birth here in 1905 till her death in Santa Monica in 1961, Wong ranked among early cinema's top exotic beauties. Her screen persona was distinctive and, in retrospect, controversial.  

(To see Anna May Wong hanging out with Marlene Dietrich and German director Leni Reifenstahl, click here.)

In 1935 MGM refused to consider Wong for the leading role in THE GOOD EARTH, instead casting German-born actress Luise Rainer to play O-Lan in "yellow face." The lovely Luise was just honored at last month's TCM fest.

Anna May Wong's story is beautifully told in a documentary that aired in 2008 on Turner Classic Movies.

Another important Chinese-American artist contributing to "Peter Pan" is cinematographer James Wong Howe. We just saw Howe's gritty New York City location shooting in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957) at TCM Fest. I thought the camera work was the film's best element – and that's saying a lot in view of its hard-boiled Clifford Odets dialogue and great performances by its two leading men.

Leonard Maltin, who always does a fantastic job, will host the "Peter Pan" screening at the sumptuous and tasteful Orpheum. Organist Robert Israel will thump on the vintage theater's mighty (original) Wurlitzer.

This theater has 2,000 seats. Repeat: 2,000 seats. Wait till you see the throngs of Angelenos queuing outside this grand remnant of Broadway's prior glory, when the boulevard was home to eleven movie palaces.

Unbelievable kid-style fun for grown ups.

Peter Pan | Los Angeles Conservancy's "Last Remaining Seats" | Orpheum Theatre | Wednesday June 30

Like this?  Read more about Last Remaining Seats:

• Liza in CABARET
• Marilyn & Jane in GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES
  

Yes, arts•meme, when she isn’t kvelling over Mozart or Balanchine, likes a good western!

Film critic Leonard Maltin and actor Ernest Borgnine, the prodigious character actor who co-stars with Ford and Rod Steiger in the film, chatted after the screening. The feisty Borgnine is still in fine fettle.

“[JUBAL] was a wonderful shoot,” he stated. “The director, Delmer Daves, one of the least known men in Hollywood, was a gentleman of the first order and he made a beautiful picture.” These were Borgnine’s emphatic opening words, delivered unapologetically. “I’m so sorry to see westerns aren’t being made anymore.”

How did an Italian kid from Connecticut learn to be a movie cow hand?

“There were no lessons,”  he said. “You rode. You had to. For a job.  Everyone had to make westerns. We were happy to go out on location. You were just one of the group.”

He noted, “Glenn Ford was the most magnificent rider ever. He was a tremendous rider.”

Borgnine peppered the  conversation with good sound bites: Spencer Tracy? “An actor’s actor.” Lee Marvin: “That rascal!” JUBAL co-star Rod Steiger? “Rod Steiger was Rod Steiger, ” he said to great laughter.

Winningly calling movies “pictures,” he modestly ducked compliments on his outings in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY and THE WILD BUNCH. But when asked about his Academy Award-winning role in MARTY, Borgnine admitted: “I thought it was a good picture, too.”

The love story-turned-sour reminds us of the negative trajectory of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or, frankly, of the many noir potboilers in which a gorgeous, scheming woman pulls down a good-hearted but naive man.

Cinematographer Leon Shamroy won an Oscar for the film’s picture-postcard tour of Taos, New Mexico, Warm Springs, Georgia, and Bar Harbor, Maine. Depicting a sumptuous bourgeois existence amidst the most beautiful landscapes the country has to offer, the film serves as a roadmap for American middle-class aspirations that would explode in the 1950s. Interestingly, it’s all about taming nature.

Gazing at the beautiful Ms. Tierney as she wafts through this film, we noted her striking resemblance to arts•meme‘s mother.

Or is it the other way around?

Former child actor Darryl Hickman, interviewed by genial TCM host Robert Osborne in a post-screening curtain talk, is seen here going down fast in an cold Maine lake while mademoiselle sits gripping the oars of the boat (see photo, above). According to Hickman, the scene took three weeks to complete and left him with zero good feelings toward either Ms. Tierney or the film’s director John M. Stahl. The lake drowning anticipates George Stevens’ better known, gender-reversed version for Monty Clift and Shelly Winters in A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951).

Yesterday at TCM Fest, I met a handsome, well dressed actor named Vincent DePaul who was still glowing after his luncheon with Luise Rainer.

The 100-year old German-born actress is being honored at today’s TCM Classic Film Fest screening of The Good Earth (1937).

Vincent shared this photo with me.

Your press representative (me) plans to spend the weekend immersed in great movies and film activity!

The festival takes place in the heart of old Hollywood at the historic Grauman’s Chinese Theater and its environs.

Grauman’s is an extraordinary place to watch movies. It’s still in perfect condition, has an opulent, spacious layout, great sightlines and state-of-the-art sound system. It’s usually given over to blockbusters, so viewing classic film in this house dating from 1927 is a dream come true.

We in Los Angeles are sweating bullets trying to attend all the film festivals on offer in our city.

For film alone, the April line-up is quadruple-booked. arts•meme’s good friend, Adam Hyman, director of Filmforum, provides this list:

S.E. Europe Film Festival
Polish Film Festival
Indian Film Festival
Contemporary Romanian Film

At our County Museum, Ian Birnie’s fabulous comprehensive Jean Renoir series continues in tandem with his father’s art show.

Not Ian’s. Renoir’s.

And life felt manageable until Ian and Bernardo announced LACMA’s upcoming homage to film critic Manny Farber. A tribute series dedicated to a writer. That’s the way it should be.

Filmforum presents shows with Julie Murray, Stephanie Barber, and co-presentations of poetry & film at UCLA.  Dance Camera West, thank god, happens only in June. But in April at the Nuart Theater, DCW screens “Dancing Across Borders.”

And then there is the big kahuna, the Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival. From April 22-25, Atlanta-based TCM lands its occupying force on Hollywood Boulevard for an entire weekend of mouth-watering film screenings and events.

Given all of this, you can understand how I was reduced nearly to tears when I learned of the Cinematheque’s film noir festival at the Egyptian Theater. I would go every night!  Who wouldn’t?

The April 10 screening looks just great. It’s one of Fritz Lang’s Hollywood canon and was made in my birth year, 1954, a great year.  And what a title: “Human Desire.”

HUMAN DESIRE, 1954, Sony Repertory, 91 min. Dir. Fritz Lang. You can’t really call this a re-do of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE because it’s based on Emile Zola’s 1890 novel La Bete Humaine – but then, tales of tortured lovers tempted to commit murder are timeless, aren’t they? Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame rekindle their flame from Lang’s 1953 smash THE BIG HEAT, and Broderick Crawford plays the loutish cuckold they want to be rid of. Do we need to note that things don’t go according to plan? Burnett Guffey supplies the wonderfully atmospheric cinematography.

There ought to be a restraining order on holding more events, but even if there were, would the French listen? In April they roll out their amazing annual French film festival with the unpronounceable acronym, COLCOA, (City of Lights, City of Angels … re-namez-vous s’il vous plait!).

We’re in film wonderland in La La Land. Ce n’est pas egal! It’s simply not fair.