Conversations With Classic Film Stars

In Conversations with Classic Film Stars, retired journalists James Bawden and Ron Miller present an astonishing collection of rare interviews with the greatest celebrities of Hollywood's golden age.

“There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” as the narrator immortally states at the close of this breathtakingly vivid film—and this is one of them. Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin and newspaperman-cum-producer Mark Hellinger’s dazzling police procedural, The Naked City, was shot entirely on location in New York. As influenced by Italian neorealism as American crime fiction, this double Academy Award winner remains a benchmark for naturalism in noir, living and breathing in the promises and perils of the Big Apple, from its lowest depths to its highest skyscrapers.

In Louis Malle’s captivating and philosophical My Dinner with André, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with friend and theater director André Gregory at an Upper West Side restaurant, and the two proceed into an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional on love, death, money, and all the superstition in between. Playing variations on their own New York–honed personas, Shawn and Gregory, who also wrote the screenplay, dive in with introspective, intellectual gusto, and Malle captures it all with a delicate, artful detachment. A fascinating freeze-frame of cosmopolitan culture, My Dinner with André remains a unique work in cinema history.

Humphrey Bogart plays a washed up director who gets a new opportunity from a millionaire (Warren Stevens) that wants to make a film starring his girlfriend (Ava Gardner in the title role), a Spanish beauty peasant who dances the flamenco provocatively. O'Brien plays a press agent. Gardner's character becomes a star after three films with (a fatherly) Bogart; she then runs off with a millionaire playboy played by Marius Goring. Later, she marries a Count (Rossano Brazzi) with a protective sister (Valentina Cortese) and a secret. The movie actually begins with the Contessa's funeral, with the story being told in flashback such that the audience eventually learns how and why she died.