In my writing, I am constantly comparing and contrasting films. I love to read films through other films, and I feel a great joy when I can make a connection between two works. It is for this reason that I think double bills are great. You can program two similar films back-to-back and earn a huge mileage in discussion from watching both. With that being said, “Double Bill” will be a new feature on my blog where I recommend two films that I think would make a great double bill unblocked games 66.
Alfred Hitchock’s “Vertigo (1958)” and Luis Bunuel’s “That Obscure Object of Desire (1977),” two films which are about an older male’s desire for a younger woman. Of course, both play out differently. “Vertigo” is a surreal film where the protagonist attempts to make his fantasy a reality and gets caught up in a bigger scheme unblocked sites. “That Obscure Object of Desire” is about an older male who entertains a group of fellow passengers with the story about his tumultuous relationship with a flamenco dancer.
I picked these two films to go together because of how differently they each handle the acquisition of their protagonist’s desire. In “Vertigo,” Scottie (James Stewart) is successful in making Madeleine (Kim Novak) into the living specter of his dead lover, Judy. He forces Madeleine to adorn the same clothing as Judy and to style her hair just as similarly. Scottie is able to make his fantasy come true, but it comes at a great cost, which I won’t talk about because of spoilers but for those who have seen the film, it will be obvious what I’m referring to.
“That Obscure Object of Desire” is very different, because Mathieu (Fernando Rey) is never able to attain what he truly wants. His lover, Conchita (Carole Bouquet) has two personalities, which are polar opposites. There’s the regular Conchita who adores Fernando; she praises him, kisses him, and only wants to love him. Then there’s her alter-ego played by Angela Molina. The Molina version of Conchita berates Mathieu, cheats on him, and ultimately wants nothing to do with him. Bunuel switches the actresses out on the fly, resulting in Conchita becoming a whirlwind of a personality, which Mathieu doesn’t know how to handle. When Molina spurns him, he swears to never have anything to do with her again but draws himself back to her when he meets Conchita.
Like “Vertigo,” “That Obscure Object of Desire” uses the role of two women in exploring a man’s desire. The key difference, however, is that while Madeleine may become Judy, thus fulfilling Scottie’s fantasy, Molina never becomes Conchita. Physically, they are indeed one person, but the distinct personality of Molina ultimately prevents Mathieu from fulfilling his desire.
Friday, 5 May 2017
Saturday, 26 March 2016
Kim Novak lashes out at 'The Artist,' score
LOS ANGELES -- "Vertigo" leading lady Kim Novak isn't keeping quiet about her disdain for "The Artist."
The 78-year-old actress said in a
statement released by her manager Monday that she feels violated
because music from the Alfred Hitchcock film is used in the French
black-and-white homage to the silent-film era. Novak said "The Artist"
filmmakers had no reason "to depend on Bernard Herrmann's score from
'Vertigo' to provide more drama."
"My body of work has been
violated by 'The Artist,"' Novak said. "This film took the love theme
music from 'Vertigo' and used the emotions it engenders as its own.
Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart can't speak for themselves, but I
can. It was our work that unconsciously or consciously evoked the
memories and feelings to the audience that were used for the climax of
'The Artist."'
Novak, who played the dual role
of both a suicidal trophy wife of a rich San Franciscan and a morose
working girl opposite Stewart in the 1958 thriller directed by
Hitchcock, said that even though Herrmann was given "a small credit at
the end," she believed "this kind of filmmaking trick to be cheating."
"The Artist," which was written
and directed by Michel Hazanavicius and stars Jean Dujardin and Berenice
Bejo as silent film actors, leads Sunday's Golden Globes ceremony with
six nominations. The wordless film combines a mostly original score,
sound effects and old-fashioned title cards which display dialogue.
"'The Artist' was made as a love
letter to cinema, and grew out of my (and all of my cast and crew's)
admiration and respect for movies throughout history," Hazanavicius
responded in a statement. "It was inspired by the work of Hitchcock,
(Fritz) Lang, (John) Ford, (Ernst) Lubitsch, (F.W.) Murnau and (Billy)
Wilder. I love Bernard Herrmann and his music has been used in many
different films and I'm very pleased to have it in mine. I respect Kim
Novak greatly, and I'm sorry to hear she disagrees."
Getting Picked On at the Oscars at Age 81
"Kim Novak's Face Is the Talk of Twitter" says an E! headline the morning after the Oscars. The talk seems to be a bunch of people arriving at the same joke about the 81-year-old Vertigo star thinking
she'd arrived to present an award for "Frozen," because of the way her
face looked. Donald Trump, speaking as he does for civilization's baser
instincts, tweeted that "Kim should sue her plastic surgeon!’"
In her celebrity heyday, Novak was a Hollywood sex symbol who followed in the wake of, and often was compared to, Marilyn Monroe. Film critic Farran Nehme writes in a short but powerful blog post this morning that her fame came after she modified herself for Hollywood: new name, new hair, new teeth, and the like.
Columbia Pictures' Harry Cohn engineered much of this transformation, and part of his management style was to feed her insecurities. "Where there was an especially cruel phrase in an article, Cohn would read it to Kim an extra time or two, for emphasis," Nehme relates, before going on to talk about last night's Oscars:
In her celebrity heyday, Novak was a Hollywood sex symbol who followed in the wake of, and often was compared to, Marilyn Monroe. Film critic Farran Nehme writes in a short but powerful blog post this morning that her fame came after she modified herself for Hollywood: new name, new hair, new teeth, and the like.
Columbia Pictures' Harry Cohn engineered much of this transformation, and part of his management style was to feed her insecurities. "Where there was an especially cruel phrase in an article, Cohn would read it to Kim an extra time or two, for emphasis," Nehme relates, before going on to talk about last night's Oscars:
So let’s say — just as a hypothetical for-instance — you are an 81-year-old star whose last movie was in 1991 and who hasn’t been to the Oscars in many a long year. Not that you were ever nominated for one in the first place; you were, after all, a sex symbol for most of your career. As the evening approaches, the anxiety sets in. Harsh lights, you think. High-definition cameras. And a public that remembers you chiefly as the ice goddess whose beauty once drove James Stewart to the brink of madness.It's no secret that society both encourages and stigmatizes cosmetic surgery for women. People have a lot of different opinions on this—maybe we should stop encouraging; maybe we should stop stigmatizing. Either way, perhaps we can agree that laughing at Novak in this case is particularly awful.
And even back then, when you were 25 years old, you worried constantly that no matter how you looked, it wasn’t good enough.
So a few weeks before the ceremony, you go to a doctor, and he says, “Relax honey. I have just the thing to make you fresh and dewy for the cameras.”
And you go to the Oscars, so nervous you clutch your fellow presenter’s hand. And the next day, you wake up to a bunch of cheap goddamn shots about your face.
Monday, 7 December 2015
Kim Novak on Hitchcock, Hollywood
Kim Novak
returned Wednesday to her hometown of Chicago to preside over a
screening of the film many people believe is the best that either she or
Alfred Hitchcock ever made. A restored version of "Vertigo"
(1958) was shown in a rare 70 mm print at the Chicago Film Festival,
and afterward Novak came onstage for a question-and-answer session that
spanned her career.
In an interview earlier Wednesday, she recalled the advice of Columbia Studios czar Harry Cohn, before he loaned her to Universal to make the film for Hitchcock. " 'It's not a good screenplay,' he said. 'But he's a good director, and he may make something of it.' "
He did. He told the story of a phobic retired police detective (James Stewart) who falls in love with a woman he sees only at a distance. And then, apparently, he sees the woman die.
Little does he suspect that both the woman and her death are fictitious - part of an elaborate murder plot. But when he encounters someone who looks exactly like his fantasy-woman, he persuades her to play the role of the woman in his dreams. What he doesn't suspect, of course, is that the woman he meets, named Judy, is the same woman who portrayed "Madeleine," the woman he dreams about.
Novak plays both roles. And there is a moment in the movie where, as Judy, she allows the Stewart character to make her over into "Madeleine." She walks toward him, as he's caught up in a frenzy of passion and gratified desire - and she feels a great sadness because she has come to love Stewart, and realizes he can't even see her; he only sees the woman in his imagination.
"Of course, in a way, that was how Hollywood treated its women in those days," Novak said. "I could really identify with Judy, being pushed and pulled this way and that, being told what dresses to wear, how to walk, how to behave. I think there was a little edge in my performance that I was trying to suggest that I would not allow myself to be pushed beyond a certain point - that I was there, I was me, I insisted on myself."
Novak had a reunion in Chicago with James C. Katz, the famed film restorer, who with Robert Harris took the aging materials of the Hitchcock classic and turned them into a fresh new print. He told her something she didn't know. She was paid only $750 a week to appear in "Vertigo" - but records uncovered by Katz indicated that Universal was paying Columbia $2,500 a week for her services.
"You mean Harry Cohn was pocketing the difference?" she said. "He screwed me every way he could . . . of course except for the one way that counts." I asked if the old Hollywood legend was true, that Frank Sinatra went to Cohn's funeral "just to be sure the SOB was dead," and she laughed and said it wouldn't surprise her.
Novak was romantically linked in the 1950s with Sinatra and other Hollywood stars, but she talked of only one relationship, with Sammy Davis Jr., that ended when Cohn's spies threatened Davis with bodily harm if he continued to see her.
"It wasn't a romance so much as a friendship with a beautiful man," she said. "He was so sweet and good, and something inside of me rebelled when I was told not to see him. I didn't think it was anybody's business. If he had been a bad man, a dangerous man, then the studio might have had reason - but simply because he was black?"
Working with Hitchcock was strange, she said, "because I don't know if he ever liked me. I never sat down with him for dinner or tea or anything, except one cast dinner, and I was late to that. It wasn't my fault, but I think he thought I had delayed to make a star entrance, and he held that against me. During the shooting, he never really told me what he was thinking."
It has been said that "Vertigo" comes closest to revealing Hitchcock's innermost obsessions, which had to do with controlling his actors, particularly women, and dictating every nuance of their behavior. By trying to do that with "Judy," the James Stewart character finds he simply cannot find the dream he seeks.
"I don't know how autobiographical the film was - or even if it was," she said. "I know that Hitchcock gave me a lot of freedom in creating the character, but he was very exact in telling me exactly what to do. How to move, where to stand. I think you can see a little of me resisting that in some of the shots, kind of insisting on my own identity."
Novak was born in Chicago in 1933, attended Farragut High School, was a beauty queen as a teenager and a Hollywood starlet before she was 20. Among her best-known roles were "Picnic" (1955), opposite William Holden; "The Man with the Golden Arm" (1956), opposite Sinatra; "Pal Joey" (1957), again with Sinatra, and "Bell, Book and Candle" (1957). The restored version of "Vertigo" starts a commercial run here today at the McClurg Court; a restored "Picnic" starts Monday at the Music Box.
While she's back in Chicago, she said, there is one haunting fear she wants to exorcise.
"I have a recurring dream," she said. "It's late afternoon - rush hour. I'm in the Loop and I need to get home. I lived on the Far West Side. There are no cabs. There's no way to get there. I start to walk home. It's dark and dangerous. That's a bad dream I've had for years. So while I'm here, I'm going to retrace that journey. Maybe put that nightmare to rest."
In an interview earlier Wednesday, she recalled the advice of Columbia Studios czar Harry Cohn, before he loaned her to Universal to make the film for Hitchcock. " 'It's not a good screenplay,' he said. 'But he's a good director, and he may make something of it.' "
He did. He told the story of a phobic retired police detective (James Stewart) who falls in love with a woman he sees only at a distance. And then, apparently, he sees the woman die.
Little does he suspect that both the woman and her death are fictitious - part of an elaborate murder plot. But when he encounters someone who looks exactly like his fantasy-woman, he persuades her to play the role of the woman in his dreams. What he doesn't suspect, of course, is that the woman he meets, named Judy, is the same woman who portrayed "Madeleine," the woman he dreams about.
Novak plays both roles. And there is a moment in the movie where, as Judy, she allows the Stewart character to make her over into "Madeleine." She walks toward him, as he's caught up in a frenzy of passion and gratified desire - and she feels a great sadness because she has come to love Stewart, and realizes he can't even see her; he only sees the woman in his imagination.
"Of course, in a way, that was how Hollywood treated its women in those days," Novak said. "I could really identify with Judy, being pushed and pulled this way and that, being told what dresses to wear, how to walk, how to behave. I think there was a little edge in my performance that I was trying to suggest that I would not allow myself to be pushed beyond a certain point - that I was there, I was me, I insisted on myself."
Novak had a reunion in Chicago with James C. Katz, the famed film restorer, who with Robert Harris took the aging materials of the Hitchcock classic and turned them into a fresh new print. He told her something she didn't know. She was paid only $750 a week to appear in "Vertigo" - but records uncovered by Katz indicated that Universal was paying Columbia $2,500 a week for her services.
"You mean Harry Cohn was pocketing the difference?" she said. "He screwed me every way he could . . . of course except for the one way that counts." I asked if the old Hollywood legend was true, that Frank Sinatra went to Cohn's funeral "just to be sure the SOB was dead," and she laughed and said it wouldn't surprise her.
Novak was romantically linked in the 1950s with Sinatra and other Hollywood stars, but she talked of only one relationship, with Sammy Davis Jr., that ended when Cohn's spies threatened Davis with bodily harm if he continued to see her.
"It wasn't a romance so much as a friendship with a beautiful man," she said. "He was so sweet and good, and something inside of me rebelled when I was told not to see him. I didn't think it was anybody's business. If he had been a bad man, a dangerous man, then the studio might have had reason - but simply because he was black?"
Working with Hitchcock was strange, she said, "because I don't know if he ever liked me. I never sat down with him for dinner or tea or anything, except one cast dinner, and I was late to that. It wasn't my fault, but I think he thought I had delayed to make a star entrance, and he held that against me. During the shooting, he never really told me what he was thinking."
It has been said that "Vertigo" comes closest to revealing Hitchcock's innermost obsessions, which had to do with controlling his actors, particularly women, and dictating every nuance of their behavior. By trying to do that with "Judy," the James Stewart character finds he simply cannot find the dream he seeks.
"I don't know how autobiographical the film was - or even if it was," she said. "I know that Hitchcock gave me a lot of freedom in creating the character, but he was very exact in telling me exactly what to do. How to move, where to stand. I think you can see a little of me resisting that in some of the shots, kind of insisting on my own identity."
Novak was born in Chicago in 1933, attended Farragut High School, was a beauty queen as a teenager and a Hollywood starlet before she was 20. Among her best-known roles were "Picnic" (1955), opposite William Holden; "The Man with the Golden Arm" (1956), opposite Sinatra; "Pal Joey" (1957), again with Sinatra, and "Bell, Book and Candle" (1957). The restored version of "Vertigo" starts a commercial run here today at the McClurg Court; a restored "Picnic" starts Monday at the Music Box.
While she's back in Chicago, she said, there is one haunting fear she wants to exorcise.
"I have a recurring dream," she said. "It's late afternoon - rush hour. I'm in the Loop and I need to get home. I lived on the Far West Side. There are no cabs. There's no way to get there. I start to walk home. It's dark and dangerous. That's a bad dream I've had for years. So while I'm here, I'm going to retrace that journey. Maybe put that nightmare to rest."
Kim Novak Looks Unrecognizable at 2014 Oscars, Sparks "Frozen" Twitter Jokes
The 81-year-old star, known for classics including the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock classic Vertigo, was tasked with announcing the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature alongside McConaughey. Unfortunately for her, the winner was Disney's Frozen -- which provided Twitter users with plenty of ammo for jokes about her stiff speech and appearance.
"Kim Novak's face just won for 'Frozen,'" user Chris Chua tweeted.
"Kim Novak was just safely transported back to the Hollywood Wax Museum," comedian Nick Youssef quipped.
"When Kim Novak said the winner was Frozen, I thought she was talking about her face," writer Fortune Feimster joked.
"MUST. NOT. TWEET. ABOUT. KIM. NOVAK'S. FACE. #BeNice #Oscar," actor David Krumholtz wrote.
Others on the site rallied to Novak's defense. Rose McGowan, for example, shared a photo of the actress in her heyday, captioning it, "Kim Novak! No standing ovation?! Self-obsessed and disrespectful, that sums up the Oscar audience."
Added user @jjtierney, "People making fun of Kim Novak on Twitter is why we can't have nice things."
Novak has not made a movie since 1991's Liebestraum. Two years ago, she revealed she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; she has also successfully battled breast cancer.
Kim Novak and Hollywood cruelty
Actress Kim Novak starred in what arguably is the best film ever made,
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. But when she stood with Matthew McConaughey
on the Academy Awards stage on Sunday night, it wasn't her professional
career people were talking about.
The Huffington Post's Howard Fineman tweeted: "#AcademyAward for worst plastic surgery: tie between Kim Novak and Goldie Hawn."
Comedian Nick Youssef: "Kim Novak was just safely transported back to the Hollywood Wax Museum."
Donald Trump (Donald Trump!): "Kim should sue her plastic surgeon!"
Robert Rorke of the New York Post listed Ms Novak's appearance as one of the "eight weirdest Oscar moments".
"Looking like Cesar Romero on Batman and sounding like Jimmy Durante, the hoarse Novak got through the presentation, but left us wondering whether extreme plastic surgery shouldn't be illegal in Hollywood," he writes.
The spate of snarky responses to the 81-year-old actress's appearance have prompted a discussion of celebrity culture and the high price it exacts on aging female stars. (It's also worth noting that Ms Novak recently was treated for breast cancer and suffered a serious horse-riding accident.)
"It's no secret that society both encourages and stigmatizes cosmetic surgery for women," writes Spencer Kornhaber in the Atlantic. "People have a lot of different opinions on this - maybe we should stop encouraging; maybe we should stop stigmatizing. Either way, perhaps we can agree that laughing at Novak in this case is particularly awful.
Film blogger Farran Nehme delves into Ms Novak's background and points out that movie producer Harry Cohn "discovered" the actress but was cruel to her in a way that should seem familiar even today. "I made you, I can break you," she says Cohn would tell actresses like Ms Novak.
"Cohn put Novak on a stringent diet, all the while calling her 'that fat Polack' (Novak's background is Czech) behind her back," Nehme writes. "She followed an exercise regime. She was assigned a make-up artist. Her teeth were capped. Her hair was dyed blonde, then rinsed to make it gleam lavender in the light."
Then Nehme imagines what Ms Novak must have been thinking on Monday night.
"And you go to the Oscars, so nervous you clutch your fellow presenter's hand. And the next day, you wake up to a bunch of cheap goddamn shots about your face. "
"Nice system we got here, isn't it," she says.
Older actresses are caught in a conundrum, writes Justine Musk on her blog:
It's expected that an actress like Catherine Zeta Jones would use fillers and plastic surgery to stay youthful ("more Botox") even as she's criticized for using fillers and plastic surgery at all (since they are neither natural nor effortless). If a woman hasn't made that obvious investment in looking youthful and thin, she's accused of letting herself go.
"Hollywood may value youth above all else, but as we learned last night, there's nothing sorrier than an older woman who tries to look young," writes Amanda Hess of Slate. "Hollywood made Novak a star, then abandoned her - decades ago."
She writes that unlike Ms Novak, 64-year-old Meryl Streep and 67-year-old Sally Field were held up as examples of how to age "gracefully".
"But we don't know what Streep and Field do to maintain their looks - all we know is that they have successfully navigated Hollywood's dual requirement to look amazing post-60 while never signalling that they've worked at it," she writes. "That means avoiding obvious plastic surgery, but it can also mean spending your life investing in the habits, trainers, diets, creams, and treatments that add up to a 'natural' look in old age."
She concludes: "Jennifer Lawrence is Hollywood's current girl crush, and she's got a bright career ahead of her - as long as she maintains her youthful looks until her deathbed, or else picks the appropriate moment to crawl into a hole to wait to die."
Or, as Musk puts it: "Don't destroy the players. Change the game."
Kim Novak American actress
Kim Novak, original name Marilyn Pauline Novak
(born February 13, 1933, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American actor best known for her dual performance as Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo (1958). Novak played both women as part of a plot to trick an acrophobic former detective (Jimmy Stewart), with whom Barton falls in love. Although not a commercial success at the time of its release, Vertigo
and Novak’s performance are now celebrated as significant contributions
to cinema history and to what is arguably Hitchcock’s finest film. In
2012 that film displaced—for the first time in 50 years—Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the best film of all time, as ranked by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound critics poll.
![Novak, Kim: Vertigo [Credit: KPA/Heritage-Images/Imagestate]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_voR1bC5hZTsGaUs3p0M4Ne2KhMD4Odue9Ays1O95hPiM-vv3qAbwgw5Kr_2R4IHyPUvmLvR50qrmtXXfV3YCQSiMkbtiot8jNkeHjm029dwihn8qdzaOueZhiarYwESBkJaRLfoXK39g=s0-d)
As a teenager, Novak left Chicago, where she was working as a model, and moved to Hollywood to audition to be an extra in The French Line (1954), a film starring Jane Russell. She succeeded in that mission and also came to the attention of the president of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn,
who offered her a contract and groomed her for a career as a Hollywood
sex symbol. Cohn transformed her image, instructing her to lose weight
and, as another young actress named Marilyn—Marilyn Monroe—was
then a rising star, suggested that she change her name. She refused to
change her surname but adopted the given name Kim. She also took acting lessons and, early on, was cast in films opposite well-established actors such as Fred MacMurray (Pushover, 1954) and Jack Lemmon (Phffft, 1954).
In 1955 she was given leading roles in a number of films, including The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra, and Picnic, with William Holden; the latter is often considered her breakthrough film. In 1955 she won a Golden Globe for most-promising newcomer. In both Picnic and The Man with the Golden Arm, Novak’s characters try to deflect the infatuation of her suitors, to be more than just a sultry sex object, a challenge, it is thought, that the actress herself faced throughout her career. In Picnic, Novak’s character—a small-town young woman—laments always being “the pretty one” instead of “the smart one.” Novak earned a nomination for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for that role. In The Man with the Golden Arm, Sinatra played a master card dealer and ex-con trying to make it as a jazz drummer, a path impeded by his heroin addiction and his deceptive wife. Novak played the strip-club dancer Molly, his sympathetic former flame, who stands by him as he goes “cold turkey” in an attempt to get his life back on track.
Another standout performance by Novak was in the romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1958), opposite Stewart and Lemmon. Novak played an art-gallery owner who is also a witch. She is forced to conceal her true identity and choose between love (with Stewart) or her supernatural powers. In Billy Wilder’s farcical comedy Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), Novak starred as Polly the Pistol, a waitress and prostitute. Although it is considered to show her in one of her better roles, the film opened to poor reviews and was criticized for its coarseness.
Novak was the top box-office star for three consecutive years in the 1950s. The trajectory of her career began to stall, however, when she appeared in such unsuccessful features such as Kiss Me, Stupid and The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965). That career change coincided with Cohn’s death, which Novak believed had much to do with the professional struggles she faced thereafter. None of her intermittent later movies approached the success of her early films. Her most-notable later role was that of the conniving Kit Marlowe in the 1986–87 season of the television series Falcon Crest (1981–90). She retired from acting after a disagreement with the writer-director Mike Figgis during the filming of Liebestraum (1991).
As a teenager, Novak left Chicago, where she was working as a model, and moved to Hollywood to audition to be an extra in The French Line (1954), a film starring Jane Russell. She succeeded in that mission and also came to the attention of the president of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn,
who offered her a contract and groomed her for a career as a Hollywood
sex symbol. Cohn transformed her image, instructing her to lose weight
and, as another young actress named Marilyn—Marilyn Monroe—was
then a rising star, suggested that she change her name. She refused to
change her surname but adopted the given name Kim. She also took acting lessons and, early on, was cast in films opposite well-established actors such as Fred MacMurray (Pushover, 1954) and Jack Lemmon (Phffft, 1954).In 1955 she was given leading roles in a number of films, including The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra, and Picnic, with William Holden; the latter is often considered her breakthrough film. In 1955 she won a Golden Globe for most-promising newcomer. In both Picnic and The Man with the Golden Arm, Novak’s characters try to deflect the infatuation of her suitors, to be more than just a sultry sex object, a challenge, it is thought, that the actress herself faced throughout her career. In Picnic, Novak’s character—a small-town young woman—laments always being “the pretty one” instead of “the smart one.” Novak earned a nomination for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for that role. In The Man with the Golden Arm, Sinatra played a master card dealer and ex-con trying to make it as a jazz drummer, a path impeded by his heroin addiction and his deceptive wife. Novak played the strip-club dancer Molly, his sympathetic former flame, who stands by him as he goes “cold turkey” in an attempt to get his life back on track.
Another standout performance by Novak was in the romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1958), opposite Stewart and Lemmon. Novak played an art-gallery owner who is also a witch. She is forced to conceal her true identity and choose between love (with Stewart) or her supernatural powers. In Billy Wilder’s farcical comedy Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), Novak starred as Polly the Pistol, a waitress and prostitute. Although it is considered to show her in one of her better roles, the film opened to poor reviews and was criticized for its coarseness.
Novak was the top box-office star for three consecutive years in the 1950s. The trajectory of her career began to stall, however, when she appeared in such unsuccessful features such as Kiss Me, Stupid and The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965). That career change coincided with Cohn’s death, which Novak believed had much to do with the professional struggles she faced thereafter. None of her intermittent later movies approached the success of her early films. Her most-notable later role was that of the conniving Kit Marlowe in the 1986–87 season of the television series Falcon Crest (1981–90). She retired from acting after a disagreement with the writer-director Mike Figgis during the filming of Liebestraum (1991).
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