Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Guy Green, a postwar British cinematographer who won an Academy Award for his black-and-white filming of director Sir David Lean’s “Great Expectations” and later directed “A Patch of Blue,” has died. He was 91.

Green, a co-founder of the British Society of Cinematographers, died early Thursday at his Beverly Hills home after a long illness, said his wife, Jo.

“Guy was a leading figure in cinema both in the U.K. and in the United States for over 40 years,” actor/director Richard Attenborough, a longtime friend who worked with Green on several productions, said in a statement Thursday.

“I had the most profound respect for his remarkable talent. He was a great friend and will be sorely missed on both sides of the Atlantic,” Attenborough said.

Before Green became a director in 1954, his credits as a director of photography included films such as “Oliver Twist,” “The Way Ahead,” “Captain Horatio Hornblower RN,” “Passionate Friends” and “I Am a Camera.”

Among the best-known films he directed before working in the United States are “Sea of Sand,” “The Angry Silence” and “The Mark”. He went on to direct movies such as “Light in the Piazza,” “Diamond Head,” “A Walk in the Spring Rain” and “The Magus.”

As a director, Green was proudest of his work on “A Patch of Blue,” a 1965 interracial love story for which he wrote the screen adaptation of Elizabeth Kata’s novel.

The film, a sensitive drama about a blind girl falling in love with a black man, starred Sidney Poitier and Elizabeth Hartman. It earned five Academy Award nominations and won a supporting actress Oscar for Shelley Winters, who played Hartman’s bigoted mother.

“It was a courageous film,” Poitier told The Times on Thursday. The movie, he said, was “a comment on American society at that time,” one that “accentuated the need for human beings to have respect for each other’s culture…. Over and above that, he was speaking of his view of the family.”

Poitier said Green “was a remarkable person both as an artist and as a human being. We worked together that one time and have been friends throughout the subsequent years. That’s because I was impressed with him in both areas.”

Green’s screenplay for “A Patch of Blue” also was nominated for a Writers Guild Award. And he received a nomination from the Directors Guild of America and nominations from the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. for best director and best screenplay.

Yesterday brought us Robert Wise - a film editor turned director - and today we have Guy Green - a cinematographer turned director.

Robert Wise stated his career by editing the first film of another young man - Citizen Kane by Orson Wells. Wells was 25 at the time. Mr. Wise wasn’t much older at 28 - just a couple of fine young gentlemen having a go at movie making. The two would have a falling out over The Magnificent Ambersons, but their first go was absolutely golden.

Guy Green worked his way up from camera assistant to camera operator and finally to director of photography. It is said that his masterpiece was the black and white filming of Sir David Lean’s Great Expectations.

Both men were Oscar winners and both passed at age 91. Saying that both led very accomplished lives is a bit of an understatement.

Survivor has started, college football has started, the NFL has started and the NHL (remember - hockey???) is about to roll out. All the diversions from real life you could want for your upcoming weekend. Pass the mustard will you please?

NY Times
Robert Wise, a conscientious craftsman in many movie genres who twice received Academy Awards as best director, died yesterday at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 91.

Mr. Wise enjoyed a long career in which he became a notable editor of such films as Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane,” then made a successful transition from making B-movies at RKO Studios during Hollywood’s golden era of the 1940’s to making important films in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s.

His career soared with “West Side Story,” the 1961 filming of the landmark Broadway musical, for which he shared an Oscar as best director with the choreographer Jerome Robbins. He received a second Academy Award as producer when the film was voted best picture. He gained his third and fourth Oscars with “The Sound of Music,” the lavish 1965 adaptation of the musical stage hit, in which he was again cited as best director and as producer of the best film.

In all, “West Side Story” received 10 Oscars and “Sound of Music” won 5. Mr. Wise also was honored at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1966 with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement as a producer.

Other films by Mr. Wise that continue to enjoy enthusiastic support include “The Body Snatcher,” a 1945 horror film with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; “The Set-Up,” a gritty 1949 study of second- rate boxers; and the 1951 science-fiction cult favorite “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

Mr. Wise counted among his own favorites “The Haunting,” a cult favorite from 1963 with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, and the 1958 drama about capital punishment, “I Want to Live!” Mr. Wise considered himself a director of content, not messages, and he was not afraid to experiment.

In 1959 he filmed “Odds Against Tomorrow,” an antiracist drama with Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan about a brutal bank robbery that he made without the customary fades (going to black) or dissolves (overlapping scenes) to denote the passage of time. Fades and dissolves, he remarked, tend to slow the tempo and break the mood.

We know - you’re just hanging about today waiting ever so impatiently for the season premier of Survivor. We thought we’d divert your attention while the clock ticks and provide you with a wee small alternative. This may only play well in Wyoming, New Zealand or the Dingle peninsula of Ireland, but the Sheep Reality Show is coming down to the wire. Check the show’s official web site for up to the minute status on the herd. We’re betting Prozerpina is the next one voted out.

If you just can’t shake watching the clock perhaps diving into a film from today’s ODDmember Robert Wise - try the Sand Pebbles for instance and take note of Steve McQueen and 19 year old Candice Bergen. Or yell ‘Klaatu Barada Nikto’ and then dive into The Day The Earth Stood Still.

And Remember Survivors: make a plan, get to know your neighbors, take care of your own damn self and skip out on your place in the herd when The Sheep Look Up.

LA Times
Retired 1st Sgt. Mark Matthews, one of the last of the nation’s Buffalo Soldiers and said to be the oldest, died of pneumonia Sept. 6 at Fox Chase Nursing Home in Washington, D.C. He was reported to be 111.

Matthews was heir to a proud military heritage that originated with the black soldiers who fought in the Indian wars on the Western frontier. Historians say that the Cheyenne, Kiowa and Apache tribes bestowed the appellation because the soldiers’ hair reminded them of a buffalo’s mane.

Given Native American reverence for the Plains animal, the soldiers wore the nickname proudly — and with good reason. The Buffalo Soldiers won 20 Medals of Honor, more than any other regiment. They helped lay roads and telegraph lines, protected stagecoaches, battled the Apache chief Geronimo and fought in Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War.

Matthews joined up at the end of the Buffalo Soldiers’ colorful Western exploits. The regiments that made up the Buffalo Soldiers — the 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments and the 24th and 25th Infantry regiments — stayed together for years afterward, fighting in World Wars I and II and Korea. The all-black regiments were disbanded in 1952 as the Army desegregated.

Matthews was born Aug. 7, 1894, in Greenville, Ala., and grew up in Mansfield, Ohio. He rode horses starting when he was a child and delivered newspapers on his pony.

According to stories Matthews told friends, family members and at least one military historian, he was 15 when he met members of the Buffalo Soldiers’ 10th Cavalry; they were visiting a Lexington, Ky., racetrack where he worked exercising the horses. When the soldiers told him that they rode horseback wherever they went, he decided to join. Although young men had to be 17 to enlist, his boss concocted documents that persuaded a Columbus, Ohio, recruiter that he was of age.

“I was 16 when I joined the Army to be a soldier,” he told Parade magazine in 2003. “I had to wait awhile before I could get on duty. But then they shipped me to the West.”

NY Times
Al Casey, a guitarist whose playful acoustic rhythms and solos were a defining feature of Fats Waller’s band in the 1930’s and 1940’s, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 89.

The cause was colon cancer, said Albert Vollmer, leader of the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, with which Mr. Casey played until 2001. He had been hospitalized at the Dewitt Rehabilitation Center for about a year.

Born Sept. 15, 1915, in Louisville, Ky., Mr. Casey joined Waller’s group in the early 1930’s and was Waller’s main guitarist until Waller died in 1943. Mr. Casey also worked with Teddy Wilson’s big band in 1939 and 1940 and recorded with Billie Holiday, Frankie Newton and Chu Berry.

Mr. Casey played and recorded with Louis Armstrong in 1944 when both were recognized as leading jazz musicians in the Esquire magazine readers’ poll, Mr. Vollmer said.

Along the way he switched from acoustic to electric guitar. Over the next decades he freelanced in swing and blues venues and from 1957 to 1961 played rhythm and blues with the saxophonist King Curtis.

In 1981, Mr. Casey was coaxed out of retirement to join the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, said Mr. Vollmer, who founded the band.

Yup, National Cream-filled Donut Day has arrived. Celebrate early. Celebrate often.

Our guests today are Al Casey and Mark Matthews - we were tempted to call today Two First Name Day. Almost. Except for that one ’s’. Mr. Casey had quite the life and career with guitar in hand and played with Fats Waller amoungst others.

Mr. Matthews not only reached supercentenarian status, but also belonged to the Buffalo Soldiers. Another Matthews - Mr. Paul J. Matthews - founded the Buffalo Soldier Museum. Next time you find yourself in Houston drop in and look around.

And finally today’s ALERT: ODDones prepare thyselves for the morrow doth bring Felt Hat Day AND Born To Be Wild Day.