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Joan Benedict Steiger, who was part of the original stock company for Candid Camera and later became the wife of actor Rod Steiger, died June 24 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications from a stroke. She was 96.

Her death was announced by a family spokesperson.

As Joan Benedict, she got her start on TV during the medium’s early days, appearing in the 1950s on Candid Camera and The Steve Allen Show. She would go on to score dozens of TV credits with guest appearances in the 1970s on such series as The Smith Family, Apple’s Way, The Incredible Hulk and Fantasy Island, among others.

Later TV and film credits include The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, Hotel, The Trials of Rosie O’Neill and Dollhouse. She recurred on soap General Hospital as the character Edith Fairchild, and also appeared in Days of Our Lives and Capitol.

Born July 21, 1927, in Brooklyn,...

Don Murray, who rose to fame co-starring with Marilyn Monroe in 1956’s Bus Stop and enjoyed a prolific career that stretched into the 21st Century with Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017, has died. He was 94.

His death was announced by his son Christopher to The New York Times. No additional details were provided.

Murray was Oscar-nominated for his debut performance as Beauregard “Beau” Decker, the lovestruck cowboy who falls for Monroe’s saloon singer Cherie in Joshua Logan’s Bus Stop, an adaptation of the William Inge play.

A conscientious objector during the Korean War who fulfilled his service obligation by working in German and Italian refugee camps, Murray became known for building an acting career in what were once called “message” movies, films with socially responsible themes. In Fred Zinnemann’s A Hatful of Rain (1957), he played a morphine-addicted war veteran, and in 1962 starred as a closeted (and blackmailed...

Exclusive: Emily Mann, who directed Daphne Rubin-Vega in the 2012 Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, will re-team with both the actor and the playwright in December with an Off Broadway revival of The Night of the Iguana co-starring Tim Daly.

Also featured in the cast will be Lea DeLaria, Austin Pendleton and Jean Lichty. Previews begin December 6 at the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, with opening night on December 17. The engagement will run through February 25, 2024.

The staging is a production of La Femme Theatre Productions, a company dedicated to showcasing the diverse female experience. The announcement describes the production as “an evocative 21st century production of Tennessee Williams’s timeless masterpiece.”

“The Night of the Iguana poses critical questions of faith and identity that are particularly relevant today as we navigate a paradoxically divided yet open world,” Lichty said in a statement.

Horton Foote strikes again, with a warm and thoughtful tale of life as it was lived in East Texas in 1950. Geraldine Page won an Oscar for her unguarded portrait of Carrie Watts, a woman who has outlived her peers and been uprooted from an ideal hometown of her youth. Her trip to recover her life becomes a bittersweet acknowledgment that some things just need to be accepted with as much grace as can be mustered.

The Trip to Bountiful

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1985 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 108 min. / Street Date September 25, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Geraldine Page, John Heard, Carlin Glynn, Richard Bradford, Rebecca De Mornay.

Cinematography: Fred Murphy

Film Editor: Jay Freund

Original Music: Norman Kasow, J.A.C. Redford

Written by Horton Foote from his play

Produced by Dennis Bishop, Horton Foote, Sam Grogg, Sterling Van Wagenen, George Yaneff

Directed by Peter Masterson

They say ‘you can’t go home...

What are two individualistic, highly motivated movie stars supposed to do when faced with an unimaginative studio system eager to misuse their talents? Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen collaborate with a great writer, director and producer for an urban romance with an eye on the sexual double standard. It’s a hybrid production: a gritty drama that’s also a calculated career move.

Love with the Proper Stranger

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1963 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 100 min. / Street Date September 19, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Natalie Wood, Steve McQueen, Edie Adams, Tom Bosley, Herschel Bernardi, Harvey Lembeck, Agusta Ciolli, Nina Varela, Marilyn Chris, Richard Dysart, Arlene Golonka, Tony Mordente, Nobu McCarthy, Richard Mulligan, Vic Tayback, Dyanne Thorne, Val Avery.

Cinematography: Milton Krasner

Film Editor: Aaron Stell

Original Music: Elmer Bernstein

Written by Arnold Schulman

Produced by Alan J. Pakula

Directed by Robert Mulligan

1963’s Love with the Proper Stranger is...

On the Spot Broadway Comedy Club, NYC Monday nights, 8:00 Pm

In the olden days ("Tell us great-grandfather") there was vaudeville, where young performers could cut their teeth, playing on the various circuits all around the country. So where do emerging singers and comedians get their time before an audience in this strangest of all eras? Of course there's the web, but tweeting responses or comments below a YouTube video do not in my opinion constitute a flesh and blood audience--those hearty folk who make an effort to move their bodies into a performance space, and let a singer or comedian know in no uncertain terms if they've "got it."

Handsomely patrician actor, Nathan Armstrong took it upon himself to create a venue in which the energy and exuberance of those on the quest for stardom can indeed show what they go -- in abundance. On the Spot is a...

Above: Wichita (Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1955).

The great Andrew Sarris—dean of American film critics, thorn in the side of Pauline Kael, and the man who introduced the auteur theory to America—passed away last June at the age of 83. In an inspired piece of programming, Anthology Film Archives and guest programmer C. Mason Wells have chosen to honor Sarris with a baker's dozen of American rarities that, even with Kubrick at the IFC, Cimino at Film Forum and Rivette at Bam this weekend, must be the best show in town.

Sarris’s seminal book The American Cinema, Directors and Directions 1929-1968 was a bible to a generation of cinephiles (J. Hoberman publicly kissed his copy of it at the New York Film Critics Circle tribute to Sarris this year), a book that was both revered and disparaged for its canny cataloguing system. Sarris famously divided the roster of American directors...

Baby boomers and younger fans of Sixties pop music may remember folk singer Glenn Yarbrough's "Baby, the Rain Must Fall," a major 1965 hit that remains a staple of oldies radio station playlists.

Less well remembered is that Yarbrough's hit is the title song from Baby, the Rain Must Fall, a 1965 movie starring Steve McQueen and Lee Remick. In many ways, the lackluster drama deserves its relative obscurity. But with many Texas connections, it's a significant part of the state's film history.

Set in Columbus, Texas, Baby the Rain Must Fall is the story of Columbus native Henry Thomas (McQueen), an aspiring rockabilly singer/guitarist recently paroled after serving a sentence for stabbing a man during a bar fight. Thomas does his best to stay sober and out of trouble with help from Deputy Sheriff Slim (Don Murray), a lifelong friend who keeps an eye on him. Not so helpful is Henry's elderly,...

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By Tom Lisanti

Steve McQueen: The Actor and His Films by Andrew Antonaides and Mike Siegel from Dalton Watson Fine Books is one of the finest, most lavish movie books about a single actor that I have ever read. All of iconic superstar Steve McQueen’s films are equally discussed from his classics (The Blob, The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Cincinnati Kid, The Sand Pebbles, Bullitt, The Thomas Crown Affair, Papillon), to his lesser known earlier movies (Never Love a Stranger, The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery)An Enemy of the People, The Hunter), to his misfires (The Honeymoon Machine, Soldier in the Rain, Baby the Rain Must Fall), to his TV series (Wanted: Dead or Alive). Most coffee table-type movie books that I have encountered are extravagantly- made, featuring glorious photographs, but containing very little substance. However, Steve McQueen...

Weirder, wilder, and more unruly than I remember, The Parallax View (1974), remains a deeply paranoid conspiracy drama. Directed by Alan J. Pakula, the film feels like a dry run for All the President's Men, which Pakula made two years later.Pakula began as a producer, working with director Robert Mulligan, for 1957's Fear Strikes Out, a character drama starring Anthony Perkins as a baseball player, followed by To Kill a Mockingbird, Love with the Proper Stranger, Baby the Rain Must Fall, Inside Daisy Clover, Up the Down Staircase, and The Stalking Moon; most are respectable dramas (the last was an odd little Western) during a fairly bleak and dry period in American cinema. Finally, Pakula got behind the camera as a director at the age...

Cinema Retro has received the following press release:

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A Thief Catcher (Keystone, 1914), featuring a previously unknown performance by silent comedy star Charlie Chaplin, will have its west coast re-premiere during the 46th annual Cinecon Classic Film Festival at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood California over Labor Day Weekend, September 2-6, 2010

Chaplin is officially credited with appearing in thirty-five films during his year at Keystone in 1914, but he claimed in various interviews that he had also played bit roles as a cop and a barber while at the studio--but he did not name the films, and although there has been some speculation about the possibility of additional Chaplin-Keystone appearances, none has turned up until now. Film collector Paul Gierucki found a 16mm film print in a trunk at a Taylor, Michigan, antique store last year. "I could tell it was a Keystone comedy,...