Tag: Barbra Streisand

August 23, 2010 / / Main Slate Archive

LIZA WITH A Z

Liza with a Z – 1972 – dir. Bob Fosse

It is hard to describe to those who weren’t there just how famous Liza Minnelli was in the 1970s. During that decade, along with Barbra Streisand who bested her, but not by much, she cornered the market on kooky chic, and a singing voice like a locomotive coming straight at you right out of the dark (Liza was a “belter” in the tradition of her mother, Judy Garland).  Get out of her way!  She was out to overthrow the curvaceous Monroes, MacLaines and Lollobrigidas of the 50s and 60s and create a place for the ugly duckling becoming the swan.

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January 12, 2009 / / Film Notes

PILLOW TALK

Pillow Talk – 1959- dir. Michael Gordon

Audiences seem to have forgotten how for almost half-a-century, Doris Day dominated not only the movies but radio, the big-band circuit, stage and television. She WAS America in the way John Wayne WAS America. Her freckle-faced goodness and virgin-all-the-way persona mirrored American values and mores and was thus much-loved for decades. By the 1960s and ’70s, her star began to fade, a victim of  the sexual revolution and the unlikely stardom of less conventionally attractive actresses like Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli. Today, in her eighties, she lives a reclusive life in Carmel, California, answers only to the name, ‘Clara’ and very seldom engages in conversation about her Hollywood glory days.

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