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A towering figure in the history and evolution of motion picture special effects, Ray Harryhausen created some of the most memorable creatures ever to stalk, slither and sail across movie screens in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. A tutelage under effects pioneers George Pal and Willis O'Brien inspired Harryhausen's own stop motion animation, which gave vivid life to aliens and monsters of myth in such iconic fantasy and science fiction films as "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (1953), "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" (1958), "One Million Years B.C." (1966) and "Clash of the Titans" (1981). Harryhausen's imaginative work would later serve as inspiration for generations of filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, James Cameron and countless others, all of whom paid tribute to him in their own fantasy film exploits.

Born Raymond Frederick Harryhausen in Los Angeles, CA on June 29, 1920, he was an avid reader of science fiction as a youth. His fascination with animation grew from a screening of "King Kong" (1933); he could not fathom how the giant ape moved, as he knew it was not a man in a suit and it moved too freely to be a puppet. Harryhausen soon learned that the secret behind the film was stop-motion animation, the process whereby a model is photographed one frame at a time, with minor adjustments between shots; when the footage is projected at normal speed, the model appears to move on its own. Harryhausen was so entranced by the technique and with its pioneer, Willis O'Brien, who almost single-handedly provided the effects for "Kong," that he set out to try it himself. His father encouraged him by building a studio for him in the corner of the garage, and his mother donated a coat to provide fur for a model of a bear. Harryhausen purchased a movie camera and began fooling around. By his late teens, he started taking night courses in motion picture photography at USC, where he learned about special effects, matte shots and multiple exposures. He also enrolled in art classes, studying sculpture and drawing, in part to ensure he had another career to fall back on.

He need not have worried. Harryhausen combined strong technical expertise with a natural talent for understanding movement and behavior. In 1940, he embarked on a special project; what was to be a full-length film entitled "Evolution," consisting entirely of stop-motion animated animals. The scope of the project eventually overwhelmed Harryhausen, who was also dissuaded when he saw Walt Disney's "Fantasia" (1940) and determined it was useless to continue. However, he did show some of his work to director George Pal, who hired him right away to work on his "Puppetoons" shorts. During World War II, Harryhausen was drafted into the Army Signal Corp, where he used his animation skills to make training films. After he was discharged at the end of the war, he returned to his home studio, where he made a short film, "Mother Goose Stories" (1946), which he sold to an independent producer for enough money that he could continue on to several additional short fairy tales, including "The Story of Little Red Riding Hood" (1949), "Hansel and Gretel" (1951) and "The Story of King Midas" (1953).

Harryhausen's career then took a big step forward when he contacted his hero O'Brien, with hopes to break in to the business. O'Brien was impressed with his work, hiring him to work as his assistant on another film about a giant ape, called "Mighty Joe Young" (1949). Written and directed by the same creative team as "Kong," the fantasy-drama, about a giant African ape who follows the girl he loves (Terry Moore) to America, featured more complex special effects than "Kong," and O'Brien's role as supervisor was to sort out the various problems that arose with the animation, while Harryhausen executed the majority of the actual effects. Though not regarded with the same level of admiration as "Kong," "Mighty Joe Young" was a box office hit and earned an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

Harryhausen worked sporadically for the next few years, as projects started and stopped, and he returned to his studio to continue working on his fairy tale projects in the interim. He then met producer Charles Schneer, and began a fruitful relationship that would last several decades. The re-release of "Kong" in 1952 kicked off a monster movie craze in Hollywood, and Schneer and Harryhausen began production on a feature titled "The Monster Beneath the Sea," which borrowed heavily from the plot of "Kong." Upon hearing that Harryhausen's friend, fantasy author Ray Bradbury, had sold a story to The Saturday Evening Post about an aquatic dinosaur that is summoned to the surface by the song of a fog horn, they quickly convinced Warner Bros. to purchase the rights to the story. Bradbury's short tale, "The Fog Horn," became the nucleus of Harryhausen's first effort as a solo animator, Eugene Lourie's "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms." An effective monster movie about a four-legged dinosaur (a fictitious species called a Rhedosaurs) awakened from Arctic hibernation by nuclear tests run amok in New York City, the film was a massive success for the studio, and Harryhausen's creature wowed audiences with its lifelike movements. The Rhedosaurus was a test run for his new technique, which combined images by projecting live action elements onto a miniature set, in front of which models were animated, with still another layer of live action matted onto the foreground, effectively sandwiching the models in the frame. The process, which eliminated the use of an expensive optical print, was later known in his color efforts as "DynaMation."

The success of "Beast" led to more science fiction work for Harryhausen, and he delivered some of the most indelible images of the genre's boom in the 1950s. For Columbia's "It Came from Beneath the Sea" (1955), Harryhausen created a colossal octopus that terrorized San Francisco, and in one startling sequence, pulled down the Golden Gate Bridge. Amusingly, the film's budget-conscious producer, Sam Katzman, only allotted enough money to animate six of the creature's arms, resulting in what Harryhausen later dubbed a "hextapus." In "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" (1956), Harryhausen unleashed a fleet of deadly UFOs on Washington D.C., which laid waste to the American military and in one jaw-dropping scene, brought down the Washington Monument. And in "20 Million Miles to Earth" (1957), Harryhausen created a lizard-like alien from Venus - dubbed the Ymir in press materials - that wreaked havoc in the streets of Rome before facing down soldiers in the Coliseum. As in all of his films, the show-stopper in "Earth" is a battle between the Ymir and a rogue elephant, which would set the tone for future monster rallies in his subsequent efforts.

Harryhausen also re-teamed with his mentor Willis O'Brien for a sequence in the 1956 feature-length documentary "The Animal World." Producer Irwin Allen had given O'Brien little time to conceive the film's opening, which was set in prehistoric times, and so the veteran called on Harryhausen to help him complete the eight-minute scene, which became the high point of the entire picture. All of Harryhausen's work had been in black and white, and he was reluctant to make the jump to color because of the difficulty in maintaining proper color balances with the DynaMation process. Producer Schneer convinced him otherwise for their next effort, "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" (1958), and the results earned him not only his greatest film success of the 1950s, but a four-year contract with Columbia to produce more epic fantasies. Although somewhat stodgy (from a script and acting standpoint) by modern standards, Harryhausen's work is nothing short of spectacular, and includes some of his best-loved creations, including a fire-breathing dragon, the two-headed monster bird known as the Roc, a snake woman (inspired by a belly dancer he saw in Beirut), and a combative Cyclops who grapples furiously with the dragon. The film was later cited by Dennis Muren, head of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, as his inspiration for a career in special effects.

Harryhausen continued to amaze with his subsequent Columbia efforts, which included "The Three Worlds of Gulliver" (1960) and the Jules Verne adaptation "The Mysterious Island" (1961), which added a massive crab, an industrious honey bee, a giant mollusk and a prehistoric bird to his menagerie. But it was his next film that elevated Harryhausen to legendary status. "Jason and the Argonauts" (1963) featured some of his most complex and challenging work to date, including the seven-headed serpent the Hydra and Talos, a giant bronze statute that comes to life to battle Jason and his men. However, both paled in comparison to a lengthy sequence in which a band of skeletons rise from the ground to wage a pitched sword battle with Jason. Completed by Harryhausen solo over a four-month period, it was a feat never again attempted by another animator, and rarely surpassed in any special effects-driven film.

Sadly, neither "Jason" nor his next effort, an adaptation of H.G. Wells' "The First Men in the Moon" (1964) was a box office success, leaving Harryhausen to freelance for the remainder of the 1960s and early 1970s. England's Hammer Films hired him to contribute some impressive dinosaurs to their remake of "One Million Years B.C." (1966), which scored largely on the strength of its leading lady, Raquel Welch, who appeared a fur bikini throughout the picture. Its success brought Harryhausen back to America for "The Valley of Gwangi" (1969), a personal project storyboarded by Willis O'Brien about a dinosaur discovered in Mexico during the early years of the 20th century. Though Harryhausen's work was typically top-notch, the film was buried by Warner Bros. on the bottom of a double bill and ultimately missed its target audience of young adults.

Harryhausen bounced back in the early '70s when Schneer convinced Columbia to revive Sinbad for a pair of new feature adventures. Shot in Europe for a remarkably low sum of money, "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1973) was a worthy successor to "Seventh Voyage" and offered a dazzling array of creatures, including a club-wielding centaur, a tiny demon created from the blood of the film's chief villain played by Tom Baker, whose performance earned him his celebrated stint as "Doctor Who" (BBC, 1963-1989; 2005- ), and a seven-armed, sword-wielding statue of the Hindu goddess Kali that evoked both Talos and the skeletons from "Jason." Its success was followed by another hit, "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger" (1977), which featured among its monstrous cast a giant walrus, a huge wasp (shades of the bee from "Mysterious Island"), and a cave-dwelling troglodyte that fought to the death with a saber-toothed tiger.

But gradually a new generation of visual effects artists, including stop-motion animators who had entered the business after seeing Harryhausen's work, emerged onto the scene, resulting in less emphasis on the work of a single artist for effects-driven movies. Undaunted, Harryhausen launched into a new film, "Clash of the Titans" (1981), which drew its storyline from the Greek myth of Perseus. Originally a modestly budgeted effort, MGM poured money into the film to hire an all-star cast, which included Burgess Meredith, Maggie Smith, Ursula Andress, Claire Bloom and a magnificently bearded and bewigged Laurence Olivier as Zeus. Their presence, however, was eclipsed by Harryhausen's creations, which included the winged horse Pegasus, a snake-headed Medusa, and a towering sea creature called the Kraken, which bore a distinct facial resemblance to the Ymir. Although a decent success at the box office, "Titans" convinced studio executives that Harryhausen's stop-motion technique was a costly and time-consuming process, especially when compared to more elaborate work done in recent special effects-driven films like "Star Wars" (1977). Faced with disinterest by Hollywood as a whole, Harryhausen and Schneer retired from filmmaking in the early 1980s.

However, he remained far from inactive in the decades that followed. He released several books devoted to his work, and supervised the release of his films on VHS, laserdisc and DVD. His work was honored with a 1992 Lifetime Achievement Oscar by the countless filmmaking professionals who had been influenced by his films. The award kicked off a renewed interest in his work and Harryhausen toured festivals, museums and colleges with his films and models, leaving a trail of sci-fi geeks, both young and old, waiting breathlessly to both meet him and hear him speak. He even returned to filmmaking in a limited capacity. In 2002, several filmmakers collaborated to help him finish "The Story of the Tortoise & the Hare," the fifth and final of his fairy tales, originally begun in 1952. The film won a 2003 Annie Award, and inspired Harryhausen to return to producing with surprising vigor for a man in his eighth decade. In 2005, he not only oversaw the release of a two-DVD set that compiled all of his non-feature efforts, but he also released colorized versions of his black-and-white films (citing that they were always intended as color pictures) and began work on a new series of short movies; this time based on works by Edgar Allan Poe. Harryhausen also worked on a colorized release of "Kong" director Meriam C. Cooper's "She" (1935), and furnished the artwork for a series of comic book sequels to some of his greatest film efforts.

(Courtesy of TCM Database)

Though her name was little-remembered by anyone under the age of 50, Deanna Durbin once saved a major Hollywood studio from bankruptcy with a winning smile, an operatic singing voice and a can-do attitude. A MGM discovery, the 13 year-old Canadian émigré was dumped by the studio in favor of a young Judy Garland in one of Tinseltown's most notorious intra-office screw-ups. Taken in at Universal, Durbin was groomed as a rival to Fox's pint-sized headliner Shirley Temple. Her first picture, "Three Smart Girls" (1936), was an unexpected box office smash and a string of subsequent hits made Durbin Hollywood's highest paid female star and an honorary Academy Award winner. As her international fame grew, Durbin's fans came to include British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Holocaust diarist Anne Frank. Shrewd investments and a share in a line of trademarked merchandise made the actress independently wealthy by the time she was 18 years old. With the end of the Great Depression and America's entry into World War II, Durbin's trademark sparkle faded somewhat, eclipsed by the rising stock of Judy Garland at MGM. Unhappy in her final roles for Universal, Durbin walked out of the limelight in 1949, never to return to films despite lucrative offers from Hollywood and Broadway. Raising a family in France with her third husband, Durbin refused all but one interview over the subsequent decades, preferring peace and privacy to her lasting fame as Hollywood's "Little Miss Fix-It."

Deanna Durbin was born Edna Mae Durbin on Dec. 12, 1921, at Grace Hospital, a Christian community medical center in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her parents, James and Ada Durbin (nee Reed), were British immigrants who had landed in Canada with their daughter Edith from Lancashire in the United Kingdom. James Durbin worked as a machinist with the Canadian Pacific Railroad until ill health prompted him to move his family to the more forgiving climate of Southern California, where he supported his wife and two daughters through the first hard years of the Great Depression via a string of menial jobs. Enrolled at Bret Harte Junior High School in Burbank, Edna Mae enjoyed swimming, roller-skating, school dramatics and singing at church functions; it was her sister, Edith, who thought she possessed a singing voice worthy of cultivation and gambled her weekly salary as a school teacher on voice lessons. While a student at the Ralph Thomas Academy, Edna Mae received attention from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, on the hunt for a teen singer with an operatic voice to play the younger Ernestine Schumann-Heink in a proposed biography of the famed Austrian contralto.

Brought into Metro, Edna Mae sang an aria from Luigi Arditi's "Il Bacio" for a number of studio executives and later MGM head Louis B. Mayer, for whom she auditioned via telephone. With her voice at age 13 already as refined as that of a mature soprano, Durbin won the role but the diagnosis of leukemia and subsequent death of Mrs. Schumann-Heink in 1936 finished MGM's plan for a movie biopic. Edna Mae had been given a provisional six-month studio contract and was renamed Deanna Durbin, a stage name inspired in part by her family nickname of Deedee. MGM promoted their new acquisition in the trade papers and loaned her out for singing engagements on the radio. Just before the step contract was to expire, Mayer ordered a screen test of Durbin and another young hopeful named Judy Garland to determine which of the gifted singers might be retained as MGM's answer to Shirley Temple. Produced as a short film, "Every Sunday" (1936) prompted Mayer to bark to a subordinate "Drop the fat one." He had meant Garland, but it was Durbin's contract which was allowed to expire, leaving the now 14-year-old hopeful a free agent.

When MGM casting director Rufus LeMaire, who had played a part in Durbin's discovery at the studio, shifted his allegiance to Universal, he brought Durbin along with him. Put on a $300 weekly salary, Durbin was plugged into the ailing studio's "Three Smart Girls" (1936), as the youngest of a trio of sisters who contrive comedically to reconcile their estranged parents. While the film was in production and Universal was busy trumpeting their new star, Durbin was invited to perform on the weekly radio program of singer Eddie Cantor; after her first on-air appearance, Durbin received 4,000 fan letters. During production of the film, the Hays Office gave the script its stamp of approval, which encouraged Universal's new studio head, Charles Rogers, to upgrade the miserly $100,000 budget to nearly four times that. Produced by Joe Pasternak and directed by Henry Koster (who coached Durbin extensively through shooting), "Three Smart Girls" was a hit, earning close to $2 million at the box office and pulling Universal back from the brink of insolvency.

As instant a movie star as Hollywood ever minted, Deanna Durbin's weekly salary was increased to $3,000 per week to suit her celebrity standing. As her public stock rose, so did her asking price and the size of her perquisites, which included a $10,000 per-picture bonus. "Three Smart Girls" would spawn two sequels: "Three Smart Girls Grow Up" (1939) and "Hers to Hold" (1943). Durbin's name was placed above the title in the credits for her second film, "One Hundred Men and a Girl" (1937), which put her on the screen with legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski, appearing as himself. Another popular hit, the film stamped the Deanna Durbin template; part Andy Hardy, part Nancy Drew and somewhere between Shirley Temple and Jeannette McDonald, Durbin was an archetypal virginal schemer whose plans to help others - usually one or both parents - seem doomed to failure until the climactic deus ex machina brings tears of happiness and songs of joy. "Mad About Music" (1938) and the Oscar-nominated "That Certain Age" (1938) both returned significant box office receipts and solidified Durbin's standing as a top box office draw.

In 1939, Durbin and her old MGM stable mate Mickey Rooney received Juvenile Academy Awards "for bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth." Later that same year, Durbin was given her first highly-publicized onscreen kiss later in "First Love" (1939), courtesy of a 20-year-old Robert Stack, making his film debut. During this period, Durbin attained the age of consent and weathered two short-lived marriages; the first to assistant director Vaughn Paul and the second to producer Felix Jackson. By 1940, she had seven box office hits to her credit, but Durbin was growing frustrated by Universal's refusal to allow her to graduate to mature roles. In 1941, she was put on suspension for refusing a project and 1942 came and went with no new films starring Deanna Durbin. When Universal and Durbin came to terms at last, the actress had won the power of script approval. Her first film under this new agreement, "The Amazing Mrs. Holliday" (1943), had a tortured journey to the screen, with original director Jean Renoir replaced after 49 days by producer Bruce Manning. The New York Times singled out Durbin for scorn for choosing as her adult debut a project so "slapdash contrived and crude."

Stranger still for her fans was Durbin's appearance in "Christmas Holiday" (1943). Despite its title and the pairing of Durbin with Broadway hoofer Gene Kelly, the Robert Siodmak film was not a Yuletide-themed musical but a noir-inflected adaptation of the Somerset Maugham tale of a good woman brought down by a smooth-talking wastrel. Intimations of incest between Kelly's natty wastrel and onscreen mother Gale Sondergaard and the suggestion that Durbin's character has turned to prostitution to support herself were a bitter pill for audiences who watched "Little Miss Fix-It" grow up at the movies. "Can't Help Singing" (1944) marked Durbin's only film shot in Technicolor and remained illustrative of how her home studio was impeding her career. At MGM, Judy Garland had made the Technicolor musical "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) and was moving on to other A-list star vehicles while Durbin remained stalled in mostly juvenile roles. In 1943, Universal refused to loan Durbin to star in "Oklahoma!" on Broadway, setting the inevitable outcome in motion.

Durbin's final films for Universal were a mixed bag for audiences and critics alike, but the comic mystery "Lady on a Train" (1945) introduced her to the man who would become her third husband, French director Charles David. Unhappy in her work, Durbin was conversely the highest paid female star in Hollywood during this period, her home a sprawling 1.5 acre estate in the Pacific Palisades. Separated from her second husband and raising their daughter alone, Durbin found herself at constant loggerheads with Universal, which kept her on salary even as they shelved or recut her films, keeping "For the Love of Mary" (1948) off the screen for a year and slashing songs from the film adaptation of the Broadway musical "Up in Central Park" (1948). In 1949, Durbin was released from her studio contract. Decamping to France, she married Charles David in 1950 and bore him a son the following year. Having severed her ties with Hollywood, Durbin spent the rest of her long life in the company of family and close friends, fending off increasingly lucrative offers to make her comeback.

By Richard Harland Smith

Avant-garde filmmaker Shirley Clarke had the same problem as other New York independents, even though she was far more successful than most. Her films The Connection and The Cool World found art house distribution and brought her name to prominence, but three years passed before she was in a position to make another picture. She eventually funded her experimental documentary feature Portrait of Jason with earnings from her work on a film for Expo '67.

This project was to be a break from Clarke's earlier work, a documentary that confronted the limitations of objective filmmaking head on. Clarke enlisted a very special personality to be filmed for twelve hours straight. Jason Holiday was a self-described hustler, houseboy and aspiring cabaret performer. A gay black man at time when gay sex was illegal in most states, Jason had invented a hipster personality for himself and lived a dodgy life looking for the easy path and doing "whatever needed to be done to get by."

We learn this and much more in Portrait of Jason, which consists of shots of Holiday talking about himself while drinking in Clarke's apartment in The Hotel Chelsea. Ms. Clarke lets us know exactly what the setup is right from the beginning. There are no titles. When a camera film roll runs out, the screen goes black and we hear Clarke telling the soundman to keep rolling. A few seconds later a new magazine has been loaded and the picture resumes again. No attempt is made to hide the 'rough edges' of the film shoot, quite the opposite. One of the few editorial adjustments Clarke makes is to cut out flash frames as the camera stops and starts.

Jason's self-invented public personality is "on" from the beginning, as he regales the audience with a barrage of smooth hipster jargon. Some of his talk is explicit about the sex and drugs in his life, but he also uses euphemisms and verbal sidesteps to steer away from places he doesn't want to go. For screenings in Sweden Clarke provided a glossary of Jason's hipster terminology, explaining expressions from 'uptight' and 'roach' to 'balling' and 'Sparkle Plenty.' We still must guess at what his full duties were when working as a "houseboy" to wealthy white women. Jason's audience was just the three-man crew and a couple of observers. He talks as if holding court in a cabaret, taking pains to be entertaining and congenial. He spends a great deal of time embellishing his reputation, smiling and laughing at his own jokes, and assuring his audience that he's telling the truth.

We're at all times aware that Shirley Clarke is present, as many takes begin with her verbal prompts. She'll say, "Tell us the cop story" and Jason will start a new monologue. Holiday apparently told the same stories at parties, as if they were material for a stand-up act. Clarke had known him as a colorful 'guy on the scene,' one of many eccentric personalities in search of fame. Clarke later said that Andy Warhol had tried to do something on film with Jason and Edie Sedgwick, but it hadn't worked out.

As the session went on for twelve hours, Clarke's editorial task was mainly to extract and arrange the most interesting material. Jason drinks and smokes through the night, becoming more mellow as the hours click by. No fades or transitions are used between takes. Cameraman Jeri Sopanen begins and ends a number of shots with the camera purposely out of focus. Jason is a blur while gathering his thoughts, and then the focus racks to clarity as he gets rolling with a particular story. The cameraman adds the same kind of "focus punctuation" when Jason finishes a story. After the figurative punch line, as Jason resumes his small talk, the focus is thrown out again to bring the 'scene' to a close.

Clarke must have chosen Jason Holiday because she knew he'd deliver a spectacle. Most audiences in 1967 had never seen an openly gay man talk about his lifestyle in such an exhibitionist manner. Holiday is funny and charming in a definite black / gay lounge-lizard vein. He's also sufficiently intelligent to be judicious about what he thinks his audience can and cannot handle. At one point he relates an incident involving a thoughtless racist remark from one of his lady employers, and we realize that he must endure casual offenses like this on a daily basis. He's learned to pretend that he has a thick skin, but we can sense the man's vulnerability. Jason only hints that his employment can sometimes involve sexual services; even he doesn't feel comfortable being more specific. When he gets close to something too personally revealing, he switches into Funny Mode and entertains us with another anecdote. At one point Holiday demonstrates an unexplainable 'cool' bit of body language, snapping his fingers while swinging his hand over his head in an offhand manner. The gesture expresses his laid-back attitude in a way that words cannot.

Portrait of Jason is far more than a film piece about an odd personality. A great deal of critical ink has been expended on its challenge to the notion of documentary objectivity. Shirley Clarke has eliminated most of the directorial tools used by documentary filmmakers to impose an author's message on filmed material. There are no passages of narration and no explanatory titles. The editing is a series of simple choices to either use or not use footage; there is no montage cutting and very little tightening of speeches, if any.

Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch used their entire 1960 film Chronicle of a Summer to ponder the practicality of cinéma vérité. Can film subjects really 'be themselves', or does the presence of a camera inevitably alter their behavior? Shirley Clarke's movie suggests an added complication, that the idea of "being ourselves" may be meaningless. We put on faces for the public, act differently with our family than with our co-workers, etc.. Jason has invented a complex public personality to survive in his unusual circumstance of being black as well as gay in a white-dominated society. Is there a "real" Jason Holiday / Aaron Payne? Is he acting or behaving?

Clarke knows that asking Holiday to be himself is meaningless, because Holiday's normal state is a deliberate performance. He carefully edits his checkered past in his monologues, and continually refers to his dream of being a New York stage performer -- he's even brought along a bag of hats bought for his act, which he tries on. Jason often affects speech patterns that remind us of characters from Tennessee Williams. Viewers unfamiliar with New York artistic fringe dwellers might conclude that he's seriously unbalanced, when he's merely adapted himself to an out-of-balance situation. Jason probably sees himself as a male, black, gay Holly Golightly.

Despite Clarke's occasional prompts from behind the camera, Jason Holiday is not really being directed. His personality would resist any attempt to shape him into a cinema pigeonhole; he's directing himself. We aren't certain what's happening in the film's later chapters, when Jason becomes more morose and self-critical, eventually appearing to drop his guard and admitting that he's as lonely and unhappy as the next guy. That's when we hear another off-camera voice, actor Carl Lee. Lee verbally badgers Holiday, pointing out his evasions and prevarications, urging him to stop the BS and be more honest. Jason breaks down and cries. We cannot be certain it the tears are spontaneous, or if the clever fellow is providing a dramatic finish to his filmic portrait. Is Jason exercising that much control over his 'performance', or has the long shooting session really broken down some of his defenses?

We're told that Shirley Clarke omitted more material in which she carried on the attack, reminding Jason of some inexcusable behavior and pressing him to face up to it. She later explained that the "scene" wasn't necessary, that it didn't break new emotional ground.

Milestone Films distributes video but is also a major distributor of important independent cinema. For several years the company has been working on "Project Shirley", an effort to find, restore and reissue the work of Shirley Clarke. All that remained of Portrait of Jason were some battered prints and edited versions. The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research had some film cans labeled as outtakes, and Milestone's Dennis Doros had them sent to the UCLA Film Archive. As the footage had no titles and was interrupted by pieces of black leader, it was first assumed that they were indeed outtakes, until UCLA's Ross Lipman doubled back to check. The reels were then confirmed as a16mm fine-grain of the entire uncut feature. Milestone's theatrical restoration of Portrait of Jason brings the show to a clarity not seen since a few legendary New York screenings back in 1967.

Portrait of Jason opened April 19 at New York City's IFC Center, and plays through Tuesday, April 30. It will open May 17 in Los Angeles at the New Beverly Cinema, with a May 10 charity sneak preview at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Linwood Dunn Theater.

By Glenn Erickson

DICK DINMAN AND TCM VAULT REVEAL GLENN FORD'S UNDERCOVER CRIMES (Part One): Producer/host Dick Dinman salutes TCM Vault's terrific GLENN FORD: UNDERCOVER CRIMES COLLECTION and Golden Age superstar Glenn Ford whose warm and naturalistic on-screen persona was in stark contrast to the driven, remote and chronically unfaithful reality of the man himself according to son Peter Ford, whose moving and nuanced biography of his father GLENN FORD: A LIFE reveals a Glenn Ford the public never knew with the keen insight and unflinching candor that only his son could provide. Peter Ford is producer/host Dick Dinman's guest on this, the first of six shows devoted to the criminally underrated film star. Part one covers Glenn Ford's humble beginnings, his callous mistreatment by his first film director, his first real break and his ultimately unhappy marriage to MGM's "queen of tap" Eleanor Powell.

DICK DINMAN AND TCM VAULT REVEAL GLENN FORD'S UNDERCOVER CRIMES (Part Two): In part two of our salute to the TCM Vault Collection's compelling GLENN FORD: UNDERCOVER CRIMES COLLECTION son Peter Ford "feels responsible" for the failure of his parents marriage and discusses Glenn Ford's huge film role break with Bette Davis (who makes a pass at him), and Ford is teamed with Rita Hayworth in the ultimate erotic noir GILDA during which the two begin their tempestuous extramarital affair.

DICK DINMAN AND TCM VAULT REVEAL GLENN FORD'S UNDERCOVER CRIMES (Part Three): Our salute to TCM Vault's GLENN FORD: UNDERCOVER CRIMES COLLECTION continues as we discover that Glenn Ford gets along famously with much disliked director Fritz Lang who offers Ford's young son Peter his first martini, and guest Peter Ford discloses his frustratingly difficult relationship with his dad which at one point almost leads to blows, and he reveals that Glenn gets Rita Hayworth pregnant.

DICK DINMAN AND TCM VAULT REVEAL GLENN FORD'S UNDERCOVER CRIMES (Part Four): Glenn Ford's co-star Eleanor Parker (in an exclusive interview you'll find nowhere else as this very private lady has agreed to no other broadcast interviews) joins Peter Ford on this show and shares her not completely flattering assessment of Ford with producer/host Dick Dinman, Glenn Ford's disintegrating film career is saved by two major MGM films (INTERRUPTED MELODY and BLACKBOARD JUNGLE), the "new, improved and dramatically different" Glenn Ford is finally propelled into superstardom, an affair with Jack Lemmon's eventual bride-to-be creates a lifelong coolness between Lemmon and Ford, Ford excels in three great Westerns, and delivers an incomparably finer performance in the first incarnation of RANSOM than Mel Gibson did in the remake.

DICK DINMAN SALUTES CRITERION'S WESTERN GOOD GUY (AND BAD GUY) GLENN FORD (Part Five): In honor of the Criterion Collection's sumptuous-looking Blu-ray releases of two of Glenn Ford's finest western classics (JUBAL and 3:10 TO YUMA) producer/host Dick Dinman and Peter Ford continue our salute to Glenn Ford as Ford is at odds with Marlon Brando in Japan, Ford and Shirley MacLaine get together, Glenn does two films with Debbie Reynolds and proposes, Glenn is voted number one box office star of the year, Frank Capra and Bette Davis verbally attack Glenn, three disastrous remakes instigate a precipitous career decline and producer/host Dick Dinman's previous guest Ernest Borgnine shares an uncomfortable experience with Ford on the set of JUBAL.

DICK DINMAN SALUTES CRITERION'S WESTERN GOOD GUY (AND BAD GUY) GLENN FORD (Part Six): We conclude our tribute to superstar Glenn Ford and our salute to the Criterion Collection's fantastic Blu-ray releases of JUBAL and 3:10 TO YUMA which are two of Ford's finest western dramas as Peter Ford and producer/host Dick Dinman cover Glenn Ford's affair with a reticent Hope Lange, director David Swift's incendiary quote about Ford, a brilliant Ford in Vincente Minnelli's THE COURTSHIP OF EDDIE'S FATHER, Ford riding the range with Henry Fonda, Ford's superb cameo as Superman's earth father, the final career slide, his victimization by Hollywood "jackals", plus Michael Anderson Jr., (Ford's co-star in his last major film) affectionately reveals Ford's prankster side, and Peter Ford summarizes his conflicted feelings about his stormy relationship with his father and praises the consummate skill which made Glenn Ford a beloved star for so many decades.

The award-winning DICK DINMAN'S DVD CLASSICS CORNER ON THE AIR is the only weekly half hour show (broadcast every Friday 1:00-1:30 P.M. EST on WMPGFM) devoted to Golden Age Movie Classics as they become available on DVD. Your producer/host Dick Dinman includes a generous selection of classic scenes, classic film music and one-on-one interviews with stars, producers, and directors. To hear these as well as other DVD CLASSICS CORNER ON THE AIR shows please go to the online archive.

On Friday May 24th, Bruce Crawford will present his 32nd classic film event with a salute to the legendary music and lyricist team of Rodgers and Hammerstein with a screening of their musical classic, Carousel, with special guest, star of the film, Oscar winning actress and TV legend Shirley Jones. The screening will take place at 7pm at the Joslyn Art Museum's Witherspoon Hall, 2200 Dodge St. Omaha, Nebraska. Mandy MacRae Daley, the daughter of co star Gordon MacRae will also be in attendance.

World renowned pop artist Nicolosi will also unveil an original art design he created for this event honoring Miss Jones, MacRae and Rodgers and Hammerstein and it will be available as an official United States Postal Service commemorative envelope.

Tickets are $20 at all Omaha Hy Vee food stores customer service counters. Proceeds benefit the Omaha Parks Foundation. For more information call: 402-926-8299

A towering figure in the history and evolution of motion picture special effects, Ray Harryhausen created some of the most memorable creatures ever to stalk, slither and sail across movie screens in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. A tutelage under effects pioneers George Pal and Willis O'Brien inspired Harryhausen's own stop motion animation, which gave vivid life to aliens and monsters of myth in such iconic fantasy and science fiction films as "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (1953), "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" (1958), "One Million Years B.C." (1966) and "Clash of the Titans" (1981). Harryhausen's imaginative work would later serve as inspiration for generations of filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, James Cameron and countless others, all of whom paid tribute to him in their own fantasy film exploits.

Born Raymond Frederick Harryhausen in Los Angeles, CA on June 29, 1920, he was an avid reader of science fiction as a youth. His fascination with animation grew from a screening of "King Kong" (1933); he could not fathom how the giant ape moved, as he knew it was not a man in a suit and it moved too freely to be a puppet. Harryhausen soon learned that the secret behind the film was stop-motion animation, the process whereby a model is photographed one frame at a time, with minor adjustments between shots; when the footage is projected at normal speed, the model appears to move on its own. Harryhausen was so entranced by the technique and with its pioneer, Willis O'Brien, who almost single-handedly provided the effects for "Kong," that he set out to try it himself. His father encouraged him by building a studio for him in the corner of the garage, and his mother donated a coat to provide fur for a model of a bear. Harryhausen purchased a movie camera and began fooling around. By his late teens, he started taking night courses in motion picture photography at USC, where he learned about special effects, matte shots and multiple exposures. He also enrolled in art classes, studying sculpture and drawing, in part to ensure he had another career to fall back on.

He need not have worried. Harryhausen combined strong technical expertise with a natural talent for understanding movement and behavior. In 1940, he embarked on a special project; what was to be a full-length film entitled "Evolution," consisting entirely of stop-motion animated animals. The scope of the project eventually overwhelmed Harryhausen, who was also dissuaded when he saw Walt Disney's "Fantasia" (1940) and determined it was useless to continue. However, he did show some of his work to director George Pal, who hired him right away to work on his "Puppetoons" shorts. During World War II, Harryhausen was drafted into the Army Signal Corp, where he used his animation skills to make training films. After he was discharged at the end of the war, he returned to his home studio, where he made a short film, "Mother Goose Stories" (1946), which he sold to an independent producer for enough money that he could continue on to several additional short fairy tales, including "The Story of Little Red Riding Hood" (1949), "Hansel and Gretel" (1951) and "The Story of King Midas" (1953).

Harryhausen's career then took a big step forward when he contacted his hero O'Brien, with hopes to break in to the business. O'Brien was impressed with his work, hiring him to work as his assistant on another film about a giant ape, called "Mighty Joe Young" (1949). Written and directed by the same creative team as "Kong," the fantasy-drama, about a giant African ape who follows the girl he loves (Terry Moore) to America, featured more complex special effects than "Kong," and O'Brien's role as supervisor was to sort out the various problems that arose with the animation, while Harryhausen executed the majority of the actual effects. Though not regarded with the same level of admiration as "Kong," "Mighty Joe Young" was a box office hit and earned an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

Harryhausen worked sporadically for the next few years, as projects started and stopped, and he returned to his studio to continue working on his fairy tale projects in the interim. He then met producer Charles Schneer, and began a fruitful relationship that would last several decades. The re-release of "Kong" in 1952 kicked off a monster movie craze in Hollywood, and Schneer and Harryhausen began production on a feature titled "The Monster Beneath the Sea," which borrowed heavily from the plot of "Kong." Upon hearing that Harryhausen's friend, fantasy author Ray Bradbury, had sold a story to The Saturday Evening Post about an aquatic dinosaur that is summoned to the surface by the song of a fog horn, they quickly convinced Warner Bros. to purchase the rights to the story. Bradbury's short tale, "The Fog Horn," became the nucleus of Harryhausen's first effort as a solo animator, Eugene Lourie's "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms." An effective monster movie about a four-legged dinosaur (a fictitious species called a Rhedosaurs) awakened from Arctic hibernation by nuclear tests run amok in New York City, the film was a massive success for the studio, and Harryhausen's creature wowed audiences with its lifelike movements. The Rhedosaurus was a test run for his new technique, which combined images by projecting live action elements onto a miniature set, in front of which models were animated, with still another layer of live action matted onto the foreground, effectively sandwiching the models in the frame. The process, which eliminated the use of an expensive optical print, was later known in his color efforts as "DynaMation."

The success of "Beast" led to more science fiction work for Harryhausen, and he delivered some of the most indelible images of the genre's boom in the 1950s. For Columbia's "It Came from Beneath the Sea" (1955), Harryhausen created a colossal octopus that terrorized San Francisco, and in one startling sequence, pulled down the Golden Gate Bridge. Amusingly, the film's budget-conscious producer, Sam Katzman, only allotted enough money to animate six of the creature's arms, resulting in what Harryhausen later dubbed a "hextapus." In "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" (1956), Harryhausen unleashed a fleet of deadly UFOs on Washington D.C., which laid waste to the American military and in one jaw-dropping scene, brought down the Washington Monument. And in "20 Million Miles to Earth" (1957), Harryhausen created a lizard-like alien from Venus - dubbed the Ymir in press materials - that wreaked havoc in the streets of Rome before facing down soldiers in the Coliseum. As in all of his films, the show-stopper in "Earth" is a battle between the Ymir and a rogue elephant, which would set the tone for future monster rallies in his subsequent efforts.

Harryhausen also re-teamed with his mentor Willis O'Brien for a sequence in the 1956 feature-length documentary "The Animal World." Producer Irwin Allen had given O'Brien little time to conceive the film's opening, which was set in prehistoric times, and so the veteran called on Harryhausen to help him complete the eight-minute scene, which became the high point of the entire picture. All of Harryhausen's work had been in black and white, and he was reluctant to make the jump to color because of the difficulty in maintaining proper color balances with the DynaMation process. Producer Schneer convinced him otherwise for their next effort, "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" (1958), and the results earned him not only his greatest film success of the 1950s, but a four-year contract with Columbia to produce more epic fantasies. Although somewhat stodgy (from a script and acting standpoint) by modern standards, Harryhausen's work is nothing short of spectacular, and includes some of his best-loved creations, including a fire-breathing dragon, the two-headed monster bird known as the Roc, a snake woman (inspired by a belly dancer he saw in Beirut), and a combative Cyclops who grapples furiously with the dragon. The film was later cited by Dennis Muren, head of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, as his inspiration for a career in special effects.

Harryhausen continued to amaze with his subsequent Columbia efforts, which included "The Three Worlds of Gulliver" (1960) and the Jules Verne adaptation "The Mysterious Island" (1961), which added a massive crab, an industrious honey bee, a giant mollusk and a prehistoric bird to his menagerie. But it was his next film that elevated Harryhausen to legendary status. "Jason and the Argonauts" (1963) featured some of his most complex and challenging work to date, including the seven-headed serpent the Hydra and Talos, a giant bronze statute that comes to life to battle Jason and his men. However, both paled in comparison to a lengthy sequence in which a band of skeletons rise from the ground to wage a pitched sword battle with Jason. Completed by Harryhausen solo over a four-month period, it was a feat never again attempted by another animator, and rarely surpassed in any special effects-driven film.

Sadly, neither "Jason" nor his next effort, an adaptation of H.G. Wells' "The First Men in the Moon" (1964) was a box office success, leaving Harryhausen to freelance for the remainder of the 1960s and early 1970s. England's Hammer Films hired him to contribute some impressive dinosaurs to their remake of "One Million Years B.C." (1966), which scored largely on the strength of its leading lady, Raquel Welch, who appeared a fur bikini throughout the picture. Its success brought Harryhausen back to America for "The Valley of Gwangi" (1969), a personal project storyboarded by Willis O'Brien about a dinosaur discovered in Mexico during the early years of the 20th century. Though Harryhausen's work was typically top-notch, the film was buried by Warner Bros. on the bottom of a double bill and ultimately missed its target audience of young adults.

Harryhausen bounced back in the early '70s when Schneer convinced Columbia to revive Sinbad for a pair of new feature adventures. Shot in Europe for a remarkably low sum of money, "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1973) was a worthy successor to "Seventh Voyage" and offered a dazzling array of creatures, including a club-wielding centaur, a tiny demon created from the blood of the film's chief villain played by Tom Baker, whose performance earned him his celebrated stint as "Doctor Who" (BBC, 1963-1989; 2005- ), and a seven-armed, sword-wielding statue of the Hindu goddess Kali that evoked both Talos and the skeletons from "Jason." Its success was followed by another hit, "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger" (1977), which featured among its monstrous cast a giant walrus, a huge wasp (shades of the bee from "Mysterious Island"), and a cave-dwelling troglodyte that fought to the death with a saber-toothed tiger.

But gradually a new generation of visual effects artists, including stop-motion animators who had entered the business after seeing Harryhausen's work, emerged onto the scene, resulting in less emphasis on the work of a single artist for effects-driven movies. Undaunted, Harryhausen launched into a new film, "Clash of the Titans" (1981), which drew its storyline from the Greek myth of Perseus. Originally a modestly budgeted effort, MGM poured money into the film to hire an all-star cast, which included Burgess Meredith, Maggie Smith, Ursula Andress, Claire Bloom and a magnificently bearded and bewigged Laurence Olivier as Zeus. Their presence, however, was eclipsed by Harryhausen's creations, which included the winged horse Pegasus, a snake-headed Medusa, and a towering sea creature called the Kraken, which bore a distinct facial resemblance to the Ymir. Although a decent success at the box office, "Titans" convinced studio executives that Harryhausen's stop-motion technique was a costly and time-consuming process, especially when compared to more elaborate work done in recent special effects-driven films like "Star Wars" (1977). Faced with disinterest by Hollywood as a whole, Harryhausen and Schneer retired from filmmaking in the early 1980s.

However, he remained far from inactive in the decades that followed. He released several books devoted to his work, and supervised the release of his films on VHS, laserdisc and DVD. His work was honored with a 1992 Lifetime Achievement Oscar by the countless filmmaking professionals who had been influenced by his films. The award kicked off a renewed interest in his work and Harryhausen toured festivals, museums and colleges with his films and models, leaving a trail of sci-fi geeks, both young and old, waiting breathlessly to both meet him and hear him speak. He even returned to filmmaking in a limited capacity. In 2002, several filmmakers collaborated to help him finish "The Story of the Tortoise & the Hare," the fifth and final of his fairy tales, originally begun in 1952. The film won a 2003 Annie Award, and inspired Harryhausen to return to producing with surprising vigor for a man in his eighth decade. In 2005, he not only oversaw the release of a two-DVD set that compiled all of his non-feature efforts, but he also released colorized versions of his black-and-white films (citing that they were always intended as color pictures) and began work on a new series of short movies; this time based on works by Edgar Allan Poe. Harryhausen also worked on a colorized release of "Kong" director Meriam C. Cooper's "She" (1935), and furnished the artwork for a series of comic book sequels to some of his greatest film efforts.

(Courtesy of TCM Database)

Though her name was little-remembered by anyone under the age of 50, Deanna Durbin once saved a major Hollywood studio from bankruptcy with a winning smile, an operatic singing voice and a can-do attitude. A MGM discovery, the 13 year-old Canadian émigré was dumped by the studio in favor of a young Judy Garland in one of Tinseltown's most notorious intra-office screw-ups. Taken in at Universal, Durbin was groomed as a rival to Fox's pint-sized headliner Shirley Temple. Her first picture, "Three Smart Girls" (1936), was an unexpected box office smash and a string of subsequent hits made Durbin Hollywood's highest paid female star and an honorary Academy Award winner. As her international fame grew, Durbin's fans came to include British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Holocaust diarist Anne Frank. Shrewd investments and a share in a line of trademarked merchandise made the actress independently wealthy by the time she was 18 years old. With the end of the Great Depression and America's entry into World War II, Durbin's trademark sparkle faded somewhat, eclipsed by the rising stock of Judy Garland at MGM. Unhappy in her final roles for Universal, Durbin walked out of the limelight in 1949, never to return to films despite lucrative offers from Hollywood and Broadway. Raising a family in France with her third husband, Durbin refused all but one interview over the subsequent decades, preferring peace and privacy to her lasting fame as Hollywood's "Little Miss Fix-It."

Deanna Durbin was born Edna Mae Durbin on Dec. 12, 1921, at Grace Hospital, a Christian community medical center in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her parents, James and Ada Durbin (nee Reed), were British immigrants who had landed in Canada with their daughter Edith from Lancashire in the United Kingdom. James Durbin worked as a machinist with the Canadian Pacific Railroad until ill health prompted him to move his family to the more forgiving climate of Southern California, where he supported his wife and two daughters through the first hard years of the Great Depression via a string of menial jobs. Enrolled at Bret Harte Junior High School in Burbank, Edna Mae enjoyed swimming, roller-skating, school dramatics and singing at church functions; it was her sister, Edith, who thought she possessed a singing voice worthy of cultivation and gambled her weekly salary as a school teacher on voice lessons. While a student at the Ralph Thomas Academy, Edna Mae received attention from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, on the hunt for a teen singer with an operatic voice to play the younger Ernestine Schumann-Heink in a proposed biography of the famed Austrian contralto.

Brought into Metro, Edna Mae sang an aria from Luigi Arditi's "Il Bacio" for a number of studio executives and later MGM head Louis B. Mayer, for whom she auditioned via telephone. With her voice at age 13 already as refined as that of a mature soprano, Durbin won the role but the diagnosis of leukemia and subsequent death of Mrs. Schumann-Heink in 1936 finished MGM's plan for a movie biopic. Edna Mae had been given a provisional six-month studio contract and was renamed Deanna Durbin, a stage name inspired in part by her family nickname of Deedee. MGM promoted their new acquisition in the trade papers and loaned her out for singing engagements on the radio. Just before the step contract was to expire, Mayer ordered a screen test of Durbin and another young hopeful named Judy Garland to determine which of the gifted singers might be retained as MGM's answer to Shirley Temple. Produced as a short film, "Every Sunday" (1936) prompted Mayer to bark to a subordinate "Drop the fat one." He had meant Garland, but it was Durbin's contract which was allowed to expire, leaving the now 14-year-old hopeful a free agent.

When MGM casting director Rufus LeMaire, who had played a part in Durbin's discovery at the studio, shifted his allegiance to Universal, he brought Durbin along with him. Put on a $300 weekly salary, Durbin was plugged into the ailing studio's "Three Smart Girls" (1936), as the youngest of a trio of sisters who contrive comedically to reconcile their estranged parents. While the film was in production and Universal was busy trumpeting their new star, Durbin was invited to perform on the weekly radio program of singer Eddie Cantor; after her first on-air appearance, Durbin received 4,000 fan letters. During production of the film, the Hays Office gave the script its stamp of approval, which encouraged Universal's new studio head, Charles Rogers, to upgrade the miserly $100,000 budget to nearly four times that. Produced by Joe Pasternak and directed by Henry Koster (who coached Durbin extensively through shooting), "Three Smart Girls" was a hit, earning close to $2 million at the box office and pulling Universal back from the brink of insolvency.

As instant a movie star as Hollywood ever minted, Deanna Durbin's weekly salary was increased to $3,000 per week to suit her celebrity standing. As her public stock rose, so did her asking price and the size of her perquisites, which included a $10,000 per-picture bonus. "Three Smart Girls" would spawn two sequels: "Three Smart Girls Grow Up" (1939) and "Hers to Hold" (1943). Durbin's name was placed above the title in the credits for her second film, "One Hundred Men and a Girl" (1937), which put her on the screen with legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski, appearing as himself. Another popular hit, the film stamped the Deanna Durbin template; part Andy Hardy, part Nancy Drew and somewhere between Shirley Temple and Jeannette McDonald, Durbin was an archetypal virginal schemer whose plans to help others - usually one or both parents - seem doomed to failure until the climactic deus ex machina brings tears of happiness and songs of joy. "Mad About Music" (1938) and the Oscar-nominated "That Certain Age" (1938) both returned significant box office receipts and solidified Durbin's standing as a top box office draw.

In 1939, Durbin and her old MGM stable mate Mickey Rooney received Juvenile Academy Awards "for bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth." Later that same year, Durbin was given her first highly-publicized onscreen kiss later in "First Love" (1939), courtesy of a 20-year-old Robert Stack, making his film debut. During this period, Durbin attained the age of consent and weathered two short-lived marriages; the first to assistant director Vaughn Paul and the second to producer Felix Jackson. By 1940, she had seven box office hits to her credit, but Durbin was growing frustrated by Universal's refusal to allow her to graduate to mature roles. In 1941, she was put on suspension for refusing a project and 1942 came and went with no new films starring Deanna Durbin. When Universal and Durbin came to terms at last, the actress had won the power of script approval. Her first film under this new agreement, "The Amazing Mrs. Holliday" (1943), had a tortured journey to the screen, with original director Jean Renoir replaced after 49 days by producer Bruce Manning. The New York Times singled out Durbin for scorn for choosing as her adult debut a project so "slapdash contrived and crude."

Stranger still for her fans was Durbin's appearance in "Christmas Holiday" (1943). Despite its title and the pairing of Durbin with Broadway hoofer Gene Kelly, the Robert Siodmak film was not a Yuletide-themed musical but a noir-inflected adaptation of the Somerset Maugham tale of a good woman brought down by a smooth-talking wastrel. Intimations of incest between Kelly's natty wastrel and onscreen mother Gale Sondergaard and the suggestion that Durbin's character has turned to prostitution to support herself were a bitter pill for audiences who watched "Little Miss Fix-It" grow up at the movies. "Can't Help Singing" (1944) marked Durbin's only film shot in Technicolor and remained illustrative of how her home studio was impeding her career. At MGM, Judy Garland had made the Technicolor musical "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) and was moving on to other A-list star vehicles while Durbin remained stalled in mostly juvenile roles. In 1943, Universal refused to loan Durbin to star in "Oklahoma!" on Broadway, setting the inevitable outcome in motion.

Durbin's final films for Universal were a mixed bag for audiences and critics alike, but the comic mystery "Lady on a Train" (1945) introduced her to the man who would become her third husband, French director Charles David. Unhappy in her work, Durbin was conversely the highest paid female star in Hollywood during this period, her home a sprawling 1.5 acre estate in the Pacific Palisades. Separated from her second husband and raising their daughter alone, Durbin found herself at constant loggerheads with Universal, which kept her on salary even as they shelved or recut her films, keeping "For the Love of Mary" (1948) off the screen for a year and slashing songs from the film adaptation of the Broadway musical "Up in Central Park" (1948). In 1949, Durbin was released from her studio contract. Decamping to France, she married Charles David in 1950 and bore him a son the following year. Having severed her ties with Hollywood, Durbin spent the rest of her long life in the company of family and close friends, fending off increasingly lucrative offers to make her comeback.

By Richard Harland Smith

Avant-garde filmmaker Shirley Clarke had the same problem as other New York independents, even though she was far more successful than most. Her films The Connection and The Cool World found art house distribution and brought her name to prominence, but three years passed before she was in a position to make another picture. She eventually funded her experimental documentary feature Portrait of Jason with earnings from her work on a film for Expo '67.

This project was to be a break from Clarke's earlier work, a documentary that confronted the limitations of objective filmmaking head on. Clarke enlisted a very special personality to be filmed for twelve hours straight. Jason Holiday was a self-described hustler, houseboy and aspiring cabaret performer. A gay black man at time when gay sex was illegal in most states, Jason had invented a hipster personality for himself and lived a dodgy life looking for the easy path and doing "whatever needed to be done to get by."

We learn this and much more in Portrait of Jason, which consists of shots of Holiday talking about himself while drinking in Clarke's apartment in The Hotel Chelsea. Ms. Clarke lets us know exactly what the setup is right from the beginning. There are no titles. When a camera film roll runs out, the screen goes black and we hear Clarke telling the soundman to keep rolling. A few seconds later a new magazine has been loaded and the picture resumes again. No attempt is made to hide the 'rough edges' of the film shoot, quite the opposite. One of the few editorial adjustments Clarke makes is to cut out flash frames as the camera stops and starts.

Jason's self-invented public personality is "on" from the beginning, as he regales the audience with a barrage of smooth hipster jargon. Some of his talk is explicit about the sex and drugs in his life, but he also uses euphemisms and verbal sidesteps to steer away from places he doesn't want to go. For screenings in Sweden Clarke provided a glossary of Jason's hipster terminology, explaining expressions from 'uptight' and 'roach' to 'balling' and 'Sparkle Plenty.' We still must guess at what his full duties were when working as a "houseboy" to wealthy white women. Jason's audience was just the three-man crew and a couple of observers. He talks as if holding court in a cabaret, taking pains to be entertaining and congenial. He spends a great deal of time embellishing his reputation, smiling and laughing at his own jokes, and assuring his audience that he's telling the truth.

We're at all times aware that Shirley Clarke is present, as many takes begin with her verbal prompts. She'll say, "Tell us the cop story" and Jason will start a new monologue. Holiday apparently told the same stories at parties, as if they were material for a stand-up act. Clarke had known him as a colorful 'guy on the scene,' one of many eccentric personalities in search of fame. Clarke later said that Andy Warhol had tried to do something on film with Jason and Edie Sedgwick, but it hadn't worked out.

As the session went on for twelve hours, Clarke's editorial task was mainly to extract and arrange the most interesting material. Jason drinks and smokes through the night, becoming more mellow as the hours click by. No fades or transitions are used between takes. Cameraman Jeri Sopanen begins and ends a number of shots with the camera purposely out of focus. Jason is a blur while gathering his thoughts, and then the focus racks to clarity as he gets rolling with a particular story. The cameraman adds the same kind of "focus punctuation" when Jason finishes a story. After the figurative punch line, as Jason resumes his small talk, the focus is thrown out again to bring the 'scene' to a close.

Clarke must have chosen Jason Holiday because she knew he'd deliver a spectacle. Most audiences in 1967 had never seen an openly gay man talk about his lifestyle in such an exhibitionist manner. Holiday is funny and charming in a definite black / gay lounge-lizard vein. He's also sufficiently intelligent to be judicious about what he thinks his audience can and cannot handle. At one point he relates an incident involving a thoughtless racist remark from one of his lady employers, and we realize that he must endure casual offenses like this on a daily basis. He's learned to pretend that he has a thick skin, but we can sense the man's vulnerability. Jason only hints that his employment can sometimes involve sexual services; even he doesn't feel comfortable being more specific. When he gets close to something too personally revealing, he switches into Funny Mode and entertains us with another anecdote. At one point Holiday demonstrates an unexplainable 'cool' bit of body language, snapping his fingers while swinging his hand over his head in an offhand manner. The gesture expresses his laid-back attitude in a way that words cannot.

Portrait of Jason is far more than a film piece about an odd personality. A great deal of critical ink has been expended on its challenge to the notion of documentary objectivity. Shirley Clarke has eliminated most of the directorial tools used by documentary filmmakers to impose an author's message on filmed material. There are no passages of narration and no explanatory titles. The editing is a series of simple choices to either use or not use footage; there is no montage cutting and very little tightening of speeches, if any.

Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch used their entire 1960 film Chronicle of a Summer to ponder the practicality of cinéma vérité. Can film subjects really 'be themselves', or does the presence of a camera inevitably alter their behavior? Shirley Clarke's movie suggests an added complication, that the idea of "being ourselves" may be meaningless. We put on faces for the public, act differently with our family than with our co-workers, etc.. Jason has invented a complex public personality to survive in his unusual circumstance of being black as well as gay in a white-dominated society. Is there a "real" Jason Holiday / Aaron Payne? Is he acting or behaving?

Clarke knows that asking Holiday to be himself is meaningless, because Holiday's normal state is a deliberate performance. He carefully edits his checkered past in his monologues, and continually refers to his dream of being a New York stage performer -- he's even brought along a bag of hats bought for his act, which he tries on. Jason often affects speech patterns that remind us of characters from Tennessee Williams. Viewers unfamiliar with New York artistic fringe dwellers might conclude that he's seriously unbalanced, when he's merely adapted himself to an out-of-balance situation. Jason probably sees himself as a male, black, gay Holly Golightly.

Despite Clarke's occasional prompts from behind the camera, Jason Holiday is not really being directed. His personality would resist any attempt to shape him into a cinema pigeonhole; he's directing himself. We aren't certain what's happening in the film's later chapters, when Jason becomes more morose and self-critical, eventually appearing to drop his guard and admitting that he's as lonely and unhappy as the next guy. That's when we hear another off-camera voice, actor Carl Lee. Lee verbally badgers Holiday, pointing out his evasions and prevarications, urging him to stop the BS and be more honest. Jason breaks down and cries. We cannot be certain it the tears are spontaneous, or if the clever fellow is providing a dramatic finish to his filmic portrait. Is Jason exercising that much control over his 'performance', or has the long shooting session really broken down some of his defenses?

We're told that Shirley Clarke omitted more material in which she carried on the attack, reminding Jason of some inexcusable behavior and pressing him to face up to it. She later explained that the "scene" wasn't necessary, that it didn't break new emotional ground.

Milestone Films distributes video but is also a major distributor of important independent cinema. For several years the company has been working on "Project Shirley", an effort to find, restore and reissue the work of Shirley Clarke. All that remained of Portrait of Jason were some battered prints and edited versions. The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research had some film cans labeled as outtakes, and Milestone's Dennis Doros had them sent to the UCLA Film Archive. As the footage had no titles and was interrupted by pieces of black leader, it was first assumed that they were indeed outtakes, until UCLA's Ross Lipman doubled back to check. The reels were then confirmed as a16mm fine-grain of the entire uncut feature. Milestone's theatrical restoration of Portrait of Jason brings the show to a clarity not seen since a few legendary New York screenings back in 1967.

Portrait of Jason opened April 19 at New York City's IFC Center, and plays through Tuesday, April 30. It will open May 17 in Los Angeles at the New Beverly Cinema, with a May 10 charity sneak preview at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Linwood Dunn Theater.

By Glenn Erickson

DICK DINMAN AND TCM VAULT REVEAL GLENN FORD'S UNDERCOVER CRIMES (Part One): Producer/host Dick Dinman salutes TCM Vault's terrific GLENN FORD: UNDERCOVER CRIMES COLLECTION and Golden Age superstar Glenn Ford whose warm and naturalistic on-screen persona was in stark contrast to the driven, remote and chronically unfaithful reality of the man himself according to son Peter Ford, whose moving and nuanced biography of his father GLENN FORD: A LIFE reveals a Glenn Ford the public never knew with the keen insight and unflinching candor that only his son could provide. Peter Ford is producer/host Dick Dinman's guest on this, the first of six shows devoted to the criminally underrated film star. Part one covers Glenn Ford's humble beginnings, his callous mistreatment by his first film director, his first real break and his ultimately unhappy marriage to MGM's "queen of tap" Eleanor Powell.

DICK DINMAN AND TCM VAULT REVEAL GLENN FORD'S UNDERCOVER CRIMES (Part Two): In part two of our salute to the TCM Vault Collection's compelling GLENN FORD: UNDERCOVER CRIMES COLLECTION son Peter Ford "feels responsible" for the failure of his parents marriage and discusses Glenn Ford's huge film role break with Bette Davis (who makes a pass at him), and Ford is teamed with Rita Hayworth in the ultimate erotic noir GILDA during which the two begin their tempestuous extramarital affair.

DICK DINMAN AND TCM VAULT REVEAL GLENN FORD'S UNDERCOVER CRIMES (Part Three): Our salute to TCM Vault's GLENN FORD: UNDERCOVER CRIMES COLLECTION continues as we discover that Glenn Ford gets along famously with much disliked director Fritz Lang who offers Ford's young son Peter his first martini, and guest Peter Ford discloses his frustratingly difficult relationship with his dad which at one point almost leads to blows, and he reveals that Glenn gets Rita Hayworth pregnant.

DICK DINMAN AND TCM VAULT REVEAL GLENN FORD'S UNDERCOVER CRIMES (Part Four): Glenn Ford's co-star Eleanor Parker (in an exclusive interview you'll find nowhere else as this very private lady has agreed to no other broadcast interviews) joins Peter Ford on this show and shares her not completely flattering assessment of Ford with producer/host Dick Dinman, Glenn Ford's disintegrating film career is saved by two major MGM films (INTERRUPTED MELODY and BLACKBOARD JUNGLE), the "new, improved and dramatically different" Glenn Ford is finally propelled into superstardom, an affair with Jack Lemmon's eventual bride-to-be creates a lifelong coolness between Lemmon and Ford, Ford excels in three great Westerns, and delivers an incomparably finer performance in the first incarnation of RANSOM than Mel Gibson did in the remake.

DICK DINMAN SALUTES CRITERION'S WESTERN GOOD GUY (AND BAD GUY) GLENN FORD (Part Five): In honor of the Criterion Collection's sumptuous-looking Blu-ray releases of two of Glenn Ford's finest western classics (JUBAL and 3:10 TO YUMA) producer/host Dick Dinman and Peter Ford continue our salute to Glenn Ford as Ford is at odds with Marlon Brando in Japan, Ford and Shirley MacLaine get together, Glenn does two films with Debbie Reynolds and proposes, Glenn is voted number one box office star of the year, Frank Capra and Bette Davis verbally attack Glenn, three disastrous remakes instigate a precipitous career decline and producer/host Dick Dinman's previous guest Ernest Borgnine shares an uncomfortable experience with Ford on the set of JUBAL.

DICK DINMAN SALUTES CRITERION'S WESTERN GOOD GUY (AND BAD GUY) GLENN FORD (Part Six): We conclude our tribute to superstar Glenn Ford and our salute to the Criterion Collection's fantastic Blu-ray releases of JUBAL and 3:10 TO YUMA which are two of Ford's finest western dramas as Peter Ford and producer/host Dick Dinman cover Glenn Ford's affair with a reticent Hope Lange, director David Swift's incendiary quote about Ford, a brilliant Ford in Vincente Minnelli's THE COURTSHIP OF EDDIE'S FATHER, Ford riding the range with Henry Fonda, Ford's superb cameo as Superman's earth father, the final career slide, his victimization by Hollywood "jackals", plus Michael Anderson Jr., (Ford's co-star in his last major film) affectionately reveals Ford's prankster side, and Peter Ford summarizes his conflicted feelings about his stormy relationship with his father and praises the consummate skill which made Glenn Ford a beloved star for so many decades.

The award-winning DICK DINMAN'S DVD CLASSICS CORNER ON THE AIR is the only weekly half hour show (broadcast every Friday 1:00-1:30 P.M. EST on WMPGFM) devoted to Golden Age Movie Classics as they become available on DVD. Your producer/host Dick Dinman includes a generous selection of classic scenes, classic film music and one-on-one interviews with stars, producers, and directors. To hear these as well as other DVD CLASSICS CORNER ON THE AIR shows please go to the online archive.

On Friday May 24th, Bruce Crawford will present his 32nd classic film event with a salute to the legendary music and lyricist team of Rodgers and Hammerstein with a screening of their musical classic, Carousel, with special guest, star of the film, Oscar winning actress and TV legend Shirley Jones. The screening will take place at 7pm at the Joslyn Art Museum's Witherspoon Hall, 2200 Dodge St. Omaha, Nebraska. Mandy MacRae Daley, the daughter of co star Gordon MacRae will also be in attendance.

World renowned pop artist Nicolosi will also unveil an original art design he created for this event honoring Miss Jones, MacRae and Rodgers and Hammerstein and it will be available as an official United States Postal Service commemorative envelope.

Tickets are $20 at all Omaha Hy Vee food stores customer service counters. Proceeds benefit the Omaha Parks Foundation. For more information call: 402-926-8299