Tiago's brain dump

Jane Russell  was one of the biggest sex symbols of the 40s and 50s. She was at the center of a several-year spanning controversy concerning her first movie,  Howard Hughes '  The Outlaw  (1943), in which Hughes, at the height of the Production Code era, exploited her voluptuous figure on his film as much as he could. Appearing in some of the biggest box office hits of her time, she also worked with screen legends such as  Clark Gable ,  Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx . Then, in 1953, she starred in  Howard Hawks '  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , having as co-star a then relatively unknown newcomer called  Marilyn Monroe . The film went on to become a box office success, with both Russell and Monroe being praised for their performances, as well as immortalizing their handprints  in front of the prestigious  Grauman's Chinese Theatre  in Hollywood. As years went by, however, both the movie's notoriety and its top billed star's fame waned away, crushed under the

What a year 1939 was for the movies! Not only did we get  both  David O. Selznick 's  Gone With The Wind  and  Victor Fleming 's  The Wizard of Oz  (which need no introduction), but also several other films that, despite not being as instantly recognizable, have nevertheless left their mark in cinema history -- well, at least for me.  William Dieterle 's  The Hunchback of Notre Dame , for instance, headed by a bravura performance by  Charles Laughton , remains to this day my favorite adaptation of Victor Hugo 's classic novel . The great Bette Davis  managed to give two spectacular performances that year, one for which she was awarded a nod as Best Actress (her Judith Traherne in  Edmund Goulding 's Dark Victory ), and other that, for me, remains one of the best in her career: the titular Virgin Queen in  The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex  by  Michael Curtiz  -- her farewell scene with her beloved Essex, played by the eternal  Robin Hood   Errol Flynn , ra