Ava Gardner #1

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Cosmopolis
St Regis Grand Hotel Rome
Article by Louis Gerber added on October 1, 2008

The St Regis Grand Hotel Rome offers probably the most outstanding history of any hotel in the eternal city. In 1894, it started as the Grand Hotel, a brainchild of the most mythical name in the hotel business: Cäsar or César Ritz, the son of a humble goat farmer in the Swiss village in Niederwald, a village in the Swiss Alps.

The lobby of the St Regis Grand Hotel Rome offers a dramatic entrance into the world of luxury, which may remind some luxury travelers for instance of The Ritz London (which opened in 1906) or the Ritz Paris (1898) for the simple reason that its architect is the same: Charles Mewès (1860-1914).

At the time, it was considered Italy's most elegant hotel and the only Italian project of the London based Savoy Group. From the Savoy in London came also its first chef, Auguste Escoffier, the most prestigious name in the culinary field. Ritz and Escoffier had first worked together in the summer seasons of 1875 to 1882 in the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne, Switzerland. They redefined luxury and style. In Rome, he introduced the international standard with a staff equally half-Italian, half-French. In addition, the Grand Hotel's American Bar became the hottest spot in town.

At the time of the opening of the Grand Hotel, Rome was a booming city, with a population that had tripled over the past 20 years. The Italian elite looked to the example of London and concluded that they needed a leading hotel in their city. In 1891 the Italian Premier and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marquis di Rudini, approached the Swiss hotelier César Ritz in the lobby of London's Savoy Hotel. The Premier was accompanying Italy's young Crown Prince, the Prince of Naples, on a state visit to London, then the world's capital.

With the transatlantic liners disembarking hundreds of American tourists in London who are bound for the Eternal City, the Premier argued that Rome needed a state-of-the-art hotel too. The Americans stay at The Ritz London and then in Paris, they expect to find a true luxury hotel in Rome too.

In the late 19th century, the rich traveled by train, for instance with the sleeper of the Calais-Nice-Rome Express, operated by the Belgian Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits. Therefore, to build a hotel near the train station was just common sense. The hotel was far from the Colosseum, the Vatican and other tourist sights, but in addition to the railway station close to the government quarters of the Quirinale and opposite the Roman Museum, which had opened its doors in 1889.

From a fellow Swiss, Franz Josef Bucher-Durrer, whose family owned the Hotel Buergenstock in Switzerland - where Ritz had once worked - and who run the Hotel Minerva in Rome, César learned that an impressive and perfectly located building was available. A certain Mr Cavallini had left it unfinished because he had run out of money. While building the foundation walls, they had unearthed the western wall of Emperor Diocletian's baths. The alerted archeological society stopped the project the examine what was underneath. Cavallini lost time and money.

 

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The Pendulum
unday, Sept. 21 was an exciting day for instructor of communications Nicole Triche, who had two of her thesis films shown at filmSPARK 2008.

The film festival is an annual showcase of works from Triangle artists in the Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill areas.

The two films showed, “Experiment 002: Thaumatrope” and “Experiment 003: Wire,” are parts of a five-film series called “The Bars & Tone Experiment.”

The series was created for Triche’s thesis for her Master of Fine Arts from UNC Greensboro.

For the experiment, Triche had local bands give her one of their songs which she interpreted and put on film.

The local bands had no say in the outcome.

Images of birds are combined with music from Wembley to create motion pictures in “Experiment 002.” “Experiment 003” features pieces of wire, which appear to dance over changing backgrounds, set to the music of The Octobers.

“They’re short, weird films,” Triche said. “I like to create things from scratch.”

For example, in one of the films, she took a film leader and painted on it, making film with no camera imagery, with cracks and circles and, according to Triche, “all sorts of weird trippy imagery.”

Triche said she enjoys the experimental asset involved in filmmaking.

“I think it’s a creative pursuit, and in our daily lives we don’t get creative that much,” Triche said.

The emcee of filmSPARK was Godfrey Cheshire, a film critic from New York with an international reputation for his distinctive writing.

Cheshire recently did a documentary called “Moving Midway,” which is showing in the Triangle area.

Triche said she enjoyed having Cheshire here to interview all the filmmakers.

“The most exciting part is that he’s a big time film critic,” Triche said.

Triche started teaching at Elon in September and currently teaches communications in a global society.

She said teaching is her number one priority right now, but she will definitely continue filmmaking.

“One of the great things about teaching is you can do both,” Triche said. “It’s a form of scholarship.”

She said she wants to do animations and documentaries in the future.

Triche had her short film “Metacarpus” shown as a part of the Hi Mom! Festival on Sept.5.

This film, along with her animation “MELT,” was screened on Sept. 27 when the Flicker Film Festival received the Ava Gardner Film Festival Film Achievement Award.

All five of the films in the “The Bars & Tone Experiment” series had their Triangle premiere at the Cat’s Cradle in July along with the bands that are featured.

They also screened at the 100 Mile Film Screening Series on Sept. 23, and will be playing at the Cucalorus Film Festival in November.

 

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NY Sun

Though the likely audience favorite among the revivals in the 46th New York Film Festival will be the restored version of Max Ophuls's "Lola Montès," an equally glittering cinematic jewel is sure to get audiences talking.
As part of Martin Scorsese's ongoing preservation and presentation work, Albert Lewin's 1951 romantic fable "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" will unspool at the festival on October 10 in a new print from the George Eastman House. This new edition returns the film's extravagant Technicolor photography to a state closely approximating its original analog luster.

By the time he undertook "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman," Lewin (1894-1968) had been in Hollywood for two decades. The Brooklyn-born Harvard graduate taught English and served as a theater critic at the Jewish Tribune before relocating to the West Coast to work as a script consultant for Samuel Goldwyn. Lewin's work with Goldwyn and directors King Vidor and Victor Sjostrom eventually led him to MGM's story department and a multiyear association with the studio's sainted "boy wonder," producer Irving Thalberg. When Lewin began to make films himself in the early 1940s, it was as a writer, director, and producer — a threefold designation that was quite rare in Hollywood's specialized dream factories.

Lewin's 1945 adaptation of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" remains the best big-screen version of Oscar Wilde's book. And "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" remains one of the most spectacularly realized examples of American movie culture's mid-century forays into supernatural romance. Like Henry Hathaway's "Peter Ibbetson" (1935) and William Dieterle's "Portrait of Jennie" (1948), "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" places romantic love outside of the real (and obtainable) by conjuring a fascination between a narcissistic torch singer named Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner) and Hendrik van der Zee (James Mason), the ghost of a Dutch sea captain cursed to float through time in search of love eternal.

Lewin was an art collector and aesthete of some accomplishment. The slowly ebbing Aristotelian remove his film initially enforces between lover and loved suggests something of a wish fulfillment for someone accustomed to the unrequited romance between art appreciator and art object. In any case, Lewin's behind-the-scenes inspiration for his sumptuously daffy vision clearly included the work of Man Ray and Max Ernst, two artists he collected. Some sources claim that Man Ray himself directly contributed to the film's design.

The real production MVP, however, was the cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Though Mr. Cardiff made his considerable reputation by using Technicolor's bluntly lurid color palette to realize more impressionistic and muted color schemes than were then the norm in film work, for "Pandora" he willingly jettisoned chromatic self-control.

"Most directors who have been around a while have that gaunt, soul-scarred look associated with fighter pilots who have survived a way," Mr. Cardiff recalled in his memoir "Magic Hour." Somehow untouched by the ravages of show business, Lewin, according to Mr. Cardiff, "was always cheerful and his sky blue eyes constantly sparkled with humor." On location on the northeastern Spanish coast, however, Lewin became somewhat fixated on his female star. Mr. Cardiff recalls the film's continuity supervisor despairing as he had to keep track of the unnecessary close-ups that Lewin took of Gardner. For her part, the star, deep in the throes of her famed off-screen romance with Frank Sinatra, and nervous about appearing in her first color movie, took pains to point out to Mr. Cardiff that she needed to be lit differently depending on where she was in her lunar cycle.

The realities of film production notwithstanding, "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" is a heady and delightful Hollywood enchantment that, like its director's handful of similarly sincere forays into romantic fantasy and fatalism, deserves to be better known than it is. At least for one night, Lewin's ultimate expression of a magnitude of romance that barely exists on-screen anymore (let alone in the real world) will, thanks to the George Eastman House, Mr. Scorsese, and the New York Film Festival, briefly return from the beyond.

 

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Hartford Courant
feminist and a cranky guy's guy debate how far we've come, baby:


Larry

Since women won the right to vote in about 1978, political campaigns and news media have become well-trained in girl stuff designed to keep them interested, while the guys mull oil drilling and foreign policy and the impact of inflation on the price of beer kegs.

Unfortunately, what the womenfolk seem to be most fascinated with are the wives of the presidential candidates, because behind every great man is a better woman who can pick the right tie to match the socks that match the shoes that match the gray suit.

The media play along, because to actually analyze what Barack Obama and John McCain think is very hard work, while glorifying the pseudo-importance of their wives is as easy as it is trivial.


Laurence Cohen & Gina Barreca
E-mail | Recent columns

The subtext in all this is a journalistic instinct to be politically correct, with the pretense that the wives are something more than a decoration.

In real life, the degree to which the wives look adoringly at the political husband creature is less important than who gets picked to be secretary of agriculture. "Deep down," Ava Gardner once explained, "I'm pretty superficial." If only the presidential wives could be so honest.

 

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Gulfshore Life
No one does drop-dead glamour better than Mark Badgley and James Mischka. The designing duo are a favorite of practically every actress you could name, ranging from Catherine Zeta-Jones to Jennifer Lopez, because of their ability to conjure up the glamour of old Hollywood and make it look completely modern. But, say the designers, all their customers—whether they’re famous or not—are the stars of their own lives. And that means dressing the part. "Life has gotten so casual, it’s more of a novelty now when a woman puts herself together and wears a gorgeous dress or beautiful evening gown," says Badgley. "Our customer loves clothes, and she loves luxury."
The current collections offer plenty of opulent options. For fall, they were inspired by the off-handed elegance of Bianca Jagger and Jerry Hall. "We loved the way they put themselves together—very luxurious, but just a little bit off, which made their look less Park Avenue and more interesting," says Badgley. Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner were the muses for their Cruise collection. "City girls in the jungle or on safari," says Mischka.

When they’re not hard at work in Manhattan or redoing their new horse farm in Lexington, Ky., Mark and James are very much at home at their retreat in southern Florida. "It’s such a great escape," says Badgley. "It’s just so much fun here. As soon as you get off the plane, you feel it in the air. It’s a wonderful lifestyle, and it makes our winters fly by."

With Southwest Florida in mind, the two names behind the iconic label answer the questions from Gulfshore Life’s Style Council (see member list, opposite page) on what’s haute right now: