News

Joan Evans, the daughter of screenwriters and goddaughter of Joan Crawford, who starred opposite Farley Granger in her first three films and with Audie Murphy in a pair of Westerns, has died. She was 89.

Evans died Oct. 21 in Henderson, Nevada, her son, John Weatherly, told The Hollywood Reporter.

She also toplined the Charles Lederer-directed On the Loose (1951), playing a suicidal teenager in the drama written by her parents, Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert; portrayed Irene Dunne’s daughter in the fantasy It Grows on Trees (1952); and enlisted in the U.S. Navy with Esther Williams in the musical comedy Skirts Ahoy! (1952).

Evans played the love interest of Granger’s character in the title role of Roseanna McCoy (1949), a drama loosely based on the family feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. The two worked together again in the 1950 releases Our Very Own and Edge of Doom, a bleak film noir directed by Mark Robson.

Exclusive: Arthur E. Friedman and Steven Jay Rubin are developing a limited series that will explore the life of actor, Congressional Medal of Honor winner and World War II hero Audie Murphy.

Friedman and Rubin have acquired rights to the 1959 Murphy biography No Name on the Bullet, written by Don Graham. The producers have teamed with Graham’s widow Betsy Berry for the project, and the search is now on for a writer to adapt.

The series will tell the unfiltered story of Murphy’s life, from his time in the Army fighting in WWII to his ascent as a Hollywood leading man in the 1940s and ’50s.

The producers say the TV series will add more depth to 1955’s To Hell and Back, in which Murphy starred in his own in the adaptation of his autobiography. It is set...

Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies and many more at Trailers From Hell. What else are you doing while stuck at home?

War is nothing to celebrate, although armed conflicts large and small have driven many to drink. Many of us have been doing more drinking than usual during the isolation of the pandemic. So, this week’s wine pairings are for the movies of a war hero who wouldn’t put his name on any bad habits. Audie Murphy left this mortal coil 49 years ago this week, after a lifetime that most people can’t even imagine.

Murphy fought in World War II, which was called The Big One before anyone had any idea how big wars could get. Elvis was already a star when Uncle Sam came calling, but Murphy went the other way and parlayed his celebrated bravery into an acting career.

The icon-establishing performances Marilyn Monroe gave in Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) are ones for the ages, touchstone works that endure because of the undeniable comic energy and desperation that sparked them from within even as the ravenous public became ever more enraptured by the surface of Monroe’s seductive image of beauty and glamour. Several generations now probably know her only from these films, or perhaps 1955’s The Seven-Year Itch, a more famous probably for the skirt-swirling pose it generated than anything in the movie itself, one of director Wilder’s sourest pictures, or her final completed film, The Misfits (1961), directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller and costarring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift.

But in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) she delivers a powerful dramatic performance as Nell, a psychologically devastated, delusional, perhaps psychotic young woman apparently on...