The following is from The Hollywood Book Club: Reading With the Stars by Steven Rea.
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Harry Belafonte
Harry Belafonte displays some torso and more so, posing, puffing, and perusing literature in the somewhat controversial 1957 Caribbean-set melodrama Island in the Sun. Adapted from the novel by the prolific Alec Waugh, the film also stars Joan Fontaine, who whiles away the days and nights in Belafonte’s company, and James Mason, a plantation owner steeped in jealousy and paranoia over the assumed affair of his wife. Mason has a monologue about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the plot of which echoes here and there in the CinemaScope, Calypso-themed pic.
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Joan Fontaine
Joan Fontaine poses with a towering spire of Great Works—Aristotle! Freud! Homer! Marx! Plato! Voltaire!—in an aptly nutty publicity still from the screwball romance The Affairs of Susan. Typically remembered for serious melodramas, classic adaptations, and psychological thrillers like Rebecca, Jane Eyre, and Suspicion, Fontaine shines as the unconventional Susan Darell, an innkeeper’s daughter who becomes a Broadway star. A trio of Susan’s still-lovestruck exes meets with her new fiancé in the 1945 farce to share stories of the woman they knew—and each, it turns out, has a completely different take on Fontaine’s freewheeling character. Here the actress is in her bookish incarnation, sporting reading glasses and paraphrasing Hegel when she notes that “external appearance has no bearing on internal harmony.” Earlier in the film Fontaine can be spotted reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
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The Cast of The Wizard of Oz
Talk about large print editions! The cast of one of the most iconic movies of all time—1939’s The Wizard of Oz—perches atop a humongous copy of L. Frank Baum’s classic tale of a Kansas farm girl and her journey to a magical, mystical, flying-monkeys-plagued land. Probably not a coincidence that the cover art for the giant-sized volume features Judy Garland as Dorothy alongside costars Tin Man Jack Haley, Scarecrow Ray Bolger, Toto terry the terrier, Wizard Frank Morgan, and Cowardly Lion Bert Lahr.
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Gloria Sui Chin
Signed to Columbia Pictures in 1947, Gloria Sui Chin of Detroit, Michigan, was given a new name—Maylia, the Cantonese word for “beautiful”—and given the role of an orphaned Chinese teen in the Dick Powell thriller To the Ends of the Earth. Here she reads Doctors East Doctors West: An American Physician’s Life in China by Edward H. Hume during a coiffure fix off set. Other pics in Maylia’s CV: Boston Blackie’s Chinese Adventure, Chinatown at Midnight, Call Me Mister, and Return to Paradise, all made in the late 1940s and early 1950s. After leaving moviedom, the actress and her husband ran the popular chain of SoCal restaurants Ah Fong.
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Dorothy Malone and Humphrey Bogart
“Know anything about rare books?” private eye Philip Marlowe asks. “You could try me,” the Acme Book Shop proprietress responds. And so begins one of Hollywood’s best-known bookstore scenes—three minutes of antiquarian-lit chitchat (a Ben-Hur 1860 third edition with a duplicated line on page 116), day-drinking (Marlowe’s got a flask of “pretty good rye” in his pocket), and outdated ideas about women and eyewear. Some of the sexual innuendo in 1946’s The Big Sleep feels creaky and embarrassing now, but Humphrey Bogart’s dogged cool carries the day, and Dorothy Malone is smart and steady opposite the Warner Bros. star. William Faulkner was one of three credited scriptwriters to try to make sense of Raymond Chandler’s serpentinely plotted novel. Howard Hawks directs.
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From The Hollywood Book Club: Reading With the Stars. Used with the permission of the publisher, Chronicle Books. Copyright © 2019 by Steven Rea.
