Los Angeles is a living museum of mid-Century modern architectural design, those notably pared- down geometrically driven homes that interact copacetically in nature. So the house on view here is one of many. But it’s special. It’s historic. It’s one of the nine homes built on the edge of Silver Lake as a “Neutra Colony,” between 1948-1962.
“The aura of a Neutra House is calmer and quieter, the view from the street is unimportant; Neutra sends you into a slow moving trance. The blurring of indoors and outdoors is part of the spell,” wrote Alex Ross in the New Yorker.
The Ohara house’s ample front yard, and stone steps that merge into a water feature welcomes the visitor. The blurring effect here is fully realized in the living, dining and study area on the main level. A series of outdoor “rooms” connect with intimate interior spaces generously expanding the habitable area. The residence includes: 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, original built-ins, front balcony, side yard, hot tub and car port at the rear of the property.
Contact our friend Brian Linder for house tour and/or purchase.
At the fifteen annual Turner Classic Movies TCM Fest, just completed in Hollywood, we most enjoyed two marvelous movies, Only Yesterday (1933) in which Margaret Sullavan bucks the stigma of her single motherhood and The Good Fairy (1935) with Sullavan, again, playing a young innocent entangling with marital norms, this time with the always wonderful British-born actor Herbert Marshall. These two films guest critic Stephen Farber recommended in an artsmeme story here.
Neither films felt dated; au contraire, each was witty and charming, marvelous adult escapist fare.
Across the country, Museum of Modern Art film curator Dave Kehr was sharing Man’s Castle (1933), long considered one of the most profound and transporting of director Frank Borzage’s spiritual love stories—a cohort that includes 7th Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1928), History Is Made at Night (1935) and The Mortal Storm (1940). This constituted Kehr’s mini-Borzage festival, films cinephiles may like to watch out for.
tracy and glenda farrell
For decades Man’s Castle has been available only in a heavily censored cut created in 1938, when this extremely pre-Code film was reissued to cash in on the back-to-back Oscar wins of its star, Spencer Tracy.
A major subplot was dropped, weakening the film’s central conflict between the easygoing eroticism represented by showgirl Glenda Farrell and the more difficult and soulful connection proposed by Loretta Young, here astonishingly beautiful as an innocent young woman cast adrift in the Great Depression.
Many individual shots were deleted to appease the strict moral guidelines of the Production Code Administration; perhaps most absurdly, a wedding scene in the seventh reel was moved up to the first, to give some moral cover to Tracy and Young as they share a shack in a Central Park shantytown.
Man’s Castle has been restored by Sony Pictures Entertainment to a state quite close to its premiere version, and one can only say that a great film has emerged as something even greater — richer in its emotions and more profound in its philosophy. The curator who shepharded the movie’s special “rebirth” screening at MoMA, Mr. Kehr, informs us by email, “Borzage was a hit! Sold out or close for most shows!” a level of audience reception he found, “Very encouraging!”
On a day when five highly sensitive creatures — a cluster of the British monarchy’s beautifully bred military horses — got “spooked” (an actual term for when horses react and skitter and scamper) and proceeded to throw their riders and gallop around London causing havoc, it’s time for human beings face the limits of our ...
At the conclusion of the witty dance duet between Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), on the dance floor of a kooky retro coffee-shop-style restaurant, the full auditorium of TCM Fest 2024‘s opening night gala at the TCL Chinese Theatre broke into spontaneous applause. The occasion was the screening of Pulp Fiction ...
When the TCM Classic Film Festival opens its 15th year in Hollywood this week, you may well choose to see some of the high-profile events at the festival—the star-studded opening night screening of Pulp Fiction, Lady Sings the Blues with co-star Billy Dee Williams in person, North by Northwest introduced by filmmaker Nancy Meyers, or ...
American Ballet Theatre, now in its eighth decade, reclaims its mantle as a font of top international dance, dancers, and repertoire with “Woolf Works,” a theatrical evocation of three novellas written by the most poetic of 20th century authors, Virginia Woolf. The ambitious full-evening ballet has contemporary-classical choreography by Briton Wayne McGregor to a moody ...
We noticed it right away. Evil Does Not Exist, the new film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, director of Academy Award-winning DRIVE MY CAR opens with a long montage of treetops in a forest. Hey! We just saw something very similar in Wim Wenders’ Academy Award-nominated movie, Perfect Days (2023). This marvelous film, an artsmeme favorite, also had ...
We’ve been seeing intriguing images, not to mention advertisements, including ones running here on artsmeme, for American Ballet Theatre‘s new production of Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works, playing at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in five performances, April 11 – 14. Inspired by the writings of Virginia Woolf — an author this woman writer so greatly ...
Everyone thinks that the Academy Museum at Wilshire and Fairfax, was a repurposed May Company department store, but as a story in Curbed L.A. demonstrates, it was inspired by an oil refinery. We’ve been living around them forever! And to prove it, the Museum is staging a new exhibition featuring the kinds of clothes people ...
ed. note: To mark the 30th anniversary of French auteur Claude Chabrol’s dark masterpiece, La Cérémonie (1994), Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classic Series present a special screening of the film followed by a with a conversation between host Stephen Farber and actress Jacqueline Bisset, in person, at the Laemmle Royal Theatre in Santa Monica. ...
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