Purr-fect casting: is Orangey the most important movie cat ever?

A new retrospective celebrates the work of the cat credited with roles in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Comedy of Terrors and Rhubarb In the midst of Oscar season, it becomes evident just how much work it takes to win an Academy Award, both in on-screen work and off-screen campaigning. Consider, however, that multiple actors have won more than one Oscar. (Emma Stone, one of this year’s best actress nominees, won twice in the past decade.) Only a single cat, meanwhile, has twice won the Patsy – the Picture Animal Top Star of the Year. (The award, given by the American Humane Association, not to be confused with the Humane Society, was discontinued in 1986.) That cat is Orangey, the subject of a small retrospective at New York City’s Metrograph cinema. Plenty of rep houses will play a movie like Breakfast at Tiffany’s around Valentine’s Day; the Metrograph is going deeper into the Orangey catalogue for a wider variety of titles and genres. Breakfast at Tiffany’s does offer Orangey his mo...

Who was Muriel Box, Britain’s most prolific female film director?

She was also the first woman to win an Oscar for best original screenplay. Now a new radio documentary aims to give her pioneering work a fresh appraisal

In 1991, as a film student, I was offered £50 by a German women’s collective to shoot Muriel Box. But when the documentary director and I arrived at her home we were told that she was too ill to see us. She died a few months later aged 85. While I regret never meeting her, I’m also relieved. How terrible to have shown even a glimpse of my full ignorance of her achievements, a pioneering film-maker who had fought her way through an industry hostile to women to make a major contribution to cinema.

Box directed 13 feature films in the 1950s and early 60s and remains Britain’s most prolific female director. Her titles, made for a mainstream audience, include The Passionate Stranger, an imaginative retort to the romance novel, which boldly experiments with form; the controversial juvenile courtroom drama Too Young to Love; and Box’s favourite, The Truth About Women, an eclectic tapestry of the complex lives of women.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/CgRB4qu
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Miracle Club review – Maggie Smith can’t save this rocky road trip to Lourdes

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

‘I lost a friend of almost 40 years’: Nancy Meyers pays tribute to Diane Keaton