Wednesday, January 31, 2018

A00860 - Peggy Cummins, Gun Crazy Actress

Peggy Cummins, Seductive Star of a Cult Film, Dies at 92

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
Peggy Cummins played a carnival sharpshooter who persuaded a gun-obsessed veteran (John Dall) to commit a series of robberies in Joseph H. Lewis’s “Gun Crazy.” United Artists
Peggy Cummins, an actress best remembered for her turn as a femme fatale with a hair trigger in the influential low-budget film noir “Gun Crazy,” died on Dec. 29 in London. She was 92.
She died after a stroke, her friend Dee Kirkwood said in an email message.
Slender, blond and young, Ms. Cummins, who grew up in Ireland and moved to the United States in 1945, had more often played innocents before being cast in “Gun Crazy.”
In “Gun Crazy” (also known as “Deadly Is the Female”), released in 1950, she played Annie Laurie Starr, a seductive carnival sharpshooter who marries a gun-obsessed Army veteran, played by John Dall, and goads him into an increasingly violent crime spree.
The script, based on a story by MacKinlay Kantor, was written by Mr. Kantor and the celebrated screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. But because Trumbo was blacklisted at the time, it was credited to another writer, Millard Kaufman. The film was shot in 30 days, cost $400,000 and was released to little fanfare.
“This spurious concoction is basically on a par with the most humdrum pulp fiction,” Howard Thompson, reviewing the film for The New York Times, wrote in 1950. He said the fresh-faced leads worked hard but were miscast.
“Just why two such clean-cut youngsters as Miss Cummins and Mr. Dall should be so cast is something for the Sphinx, but they certainly give it the works,” he continued. “Looking as fragile as a Dresden doll, Miss Cummins bites into her assignment like a shark.”
“Gun Crazy” was directed by Joseph H. Lewis, who made dozens of gritty B-movies that were little noticed when they were first released but that developed a cult following over time, especially among filmmakers like Peter Bogdanovich, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
“Gun Crazy,” with its sometimes documentary-style camerawork, came to be regarded as Mr. Lewis’s masterpiece. Cinephiles lauded a three-and-a-half-minute uninterrupted shot from the back seat of a car during a bank robbery, during which Ms. Cummins and Mr. Dall improvised much of their dialogue.
Gun Crazy (1950) Heist Scene Video by pedrogoldfinger
The film’s sometimes gleeful portrayal of sexualized crime and violence was echoed in later movies like Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” (1994).
Ms. Cummins in Los Angeles in 1945, shortly after signing a contract with 20th Century Fox.Associated Press
Writing in The New York Times in 1991 before a screening of Mr. Lewis’s films at the Public Theater in Manhattan, the screenwriter and critic Jay Cocks and the director Martin Scorsese called “Gun Crazy” “a great movie that never set out to be one,” noting that it “caught the delirium of crime and matched it up with a special kind of sexual heat.”
“Dall’s character is a smiling sociopath with an abiding love for guns but no real violence in his heart,” they continued. “Cummins plays one of those pure noir incarnations of the id, evil in a tight skirt.”
Ms. Cummins’s career had less staying power than her most famous role. She returned to England in 1950 and appeared in several British films, notably Jacques Tourneur’s horror movie “Curse of the Demon” (1957), but the parts became infrequent and she stopped acting in the mid-1960s.
Ms. Cummins was born on Dec. 18, 1925. She told The Boston Globe in 1946 that she began acting in Dublin when she was 7.
She acted on radio and in films before her performance as a sassy teenager in a long-running London production of “Junior Miss” caught the eye of a 20th Century Fox executive. The studio signed her to a contract in 1945.
She was cast as the title character in the period romantic drama “Forever Amber,” but after filming for several months the studio decided that she was wrong for the part and replaced her with Linda Darnell. Her actual Hollywood debut was Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s adaptation of the John P. Marquand novel “The Late George Apley” in 1947.
Ms. Cummins, who lived in London, married Derek Dunnett in 1950. Her survivors include a son, David Dunnett; a daughter, Diana Cummins; and several grandchildren.
Ms. Cummins’s other films include the thriller “Moss Rose” (1947) and the western “Green Grass of Wyoming” (1948). Her last film was the 1962 British comedy “In the Doghouse.”
But she was forever identified with “Gun Crazy.”
During an interview after a screening of the film in San Francisco in 2013, Ms. Cummins told the film writer Eddie Muller that she still received “a lot of letters from all over the world, and they all speak about ‘Gun Crazy.’ ”
“Of course it’s wonderful,” she added, “but it still makes me feel very sad at times because it’s a sad movie, isn’t it?”
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 Peggy Cummins (18 December 1925 – 29 December 2017) was a Welsh-born Irish actress, best known for her performance in Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1949), playing a trigger-happy femme fatale, who robs banks with her lover, played by John Dall.

Biography[edit]

Early life[edit]

Cummins was born Augusta Margaret Diane Fuller in Prestatyn, Denbighshire, Wales. Her Irish parents were visiting there when a storm kept them from returning to their home in Dublin.[1]
She lived most of her early life in Killiney,[2] Dublin, where she was educated, and later in London. Her father was Dublin-born Franklin Bland Fuller (1897–1943), who was a grandson of architect James Franklin Fuller. Her mother was actress Margaret Cummins (1889–1973), who played such film roles as Anna in Smart Woman and Emily in The Sign of the Ram (both 1948).

Early acting career[edit]

There is a legend that actor Peter Brock noticed Cummins at a Dublin tram stop and introduced her to Dublin's Gate Theatre Company, but Peggy told Barbara Roisman Cooper when interviewed aged 88: "That is absolutely nonsense." As a child in Dublin, she attended the Abbey School of ballet. From there she was spotted and chosen for a non-speaking role in The Duchess of Malfi at the Gate Theatre. "I played one of the children, only seen in silhouette because they had been murdered ... that was my start in the theatre." Peggy’s London stage debut was in the role of Maryann, the juvenile lead in Let’s Pretend, a children’s revue which opened at the St James’s Theatre on her 13th birthday.
On the basis of this she was cast the British film directed by Herbert Mason, Dr. O'Dowd (1940). As part of an agreement with the London County Council, Cummins was limited to five hours of filming per day and had to be supervised by a governess. Cummins went on to have support roles in Salute John Citizen (1942) and Old Mother Riley Detective (1943).
She appeared on the London stage in 1943 aged 17, playing the part of 12-year-old Fuffy in Junior Miss at the Saville Theatre and in the title role of Alice in Wonderland in 1944 at the Palace Theatre.[1]
Her first major film was English Without Tears (1944) with Michael Wilding and Lilli Palmer, directed by Harold French and released in the USA as Her Man Gilbey. She followed this with Welcome, Mr. Washington (1944).

Forever Amber and 20th Century Fox[edit]

In 1945, Cummins was brought to Hollywood by Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox, to play Amber in Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber (1947). Because she was considered "too young", she was soon replaced by Linda Darnell.[3]
Zanuck then gave her a lead role in a mystery, Moss Rose (1947), directed by Gregory Ratoff, which was a financial disappointment.[4] He tried her in two films directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, The Late George Apley (1947), playing the daughter of Ronald Colman, and Escape(1948), co starring with Rex Harrison. Cummins then appeared with Charles Coburn in Green Grass of Wyoming (1948),[5] a sequel to My Friend Flicka released in 1943.
Cummins returned to Europe to appear in That Dangerous Age (1948) for Alexander Korda, directed by Gregory Ratoff) with Myrna Loy and Roger Livesey.[6] She went back to the US for Gun Crazy (1949). "I loved being in Hollywood", she told The Sunday Times a few years before she died,[7] but it was her last film shot in the United States.[5]

England[edit]

She returned to London in 1950 to marry and work in British films. She made My Daughter Joy (1950) for Korda and Ratoff, co-starring with Edward G. Robinson and starred in Who Goes There! (1952) for Korda and Street Corner(1953) for Muriel Box. Around the same time, she appeared in Meet Mr. Lucifer, an Ealing Studios comedy, and Always a Bride with Ronald Squires (both also 1953).
Cummins was in The Love Lottery (1954) with David Niven, and To Dorothy a Son (1954) with Shelley Winters and John Gregson. She starred in The March Hare (1956) with Terence Morgan, and Carry On Admiral (1957) with David Tomlinson.
She later starred alongside Dana Andrews in the horror film Night of the Demon (1957), directed by Jacques Tourneur, and Hell Drivers (also 1957), which featured Stanley Baker, Patrick McGoohan, and Herbert Lom.
Cummins went back to comedies with The Captain's Table (1959), Your Money or Your Wife (1960), and Dentist in the Chair (1960). Her last film, was Darcy Conyers' In the Doghouse (1961), alongside Leslie Phillips.

Gun Crazy[edit]

In 1998, Gun Crazy (1950) was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Michael Adams wrote in Movieline in August 2009 that the film was "directed by B-movie specialist Joseph H. Lewis from a script co-written by MacKinlay Kantor and blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, "fronted" by his friend Millard Kaufman. Gun Crazy was made for $400,000 in 30 days in 1949.
Movieline found Cummins in 2009, still healthy. "It was a great part", she said of Laurie Starr. "It was a brilliant story from a brilliant writer. We had a very good director and a great cameraman. I think John Dall and myself were in those days quite well-suited in the parts we had." The film played at the British Film Institute in London in February 2009. At the screening, Cummins viewed the film with an audience for the first time in six decades.[citation needed]

Night of the Demon[edit]

On 14 June 2006, she appeared as guest of honour at a special screening of Night of the Demon in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, hosted by the Elstree Film and Television Heritage Group. At the screening, she answered questions from the audience before viewing the film for the first time. She said she had never worked with her co-star Dana Andrews before, though she knew and liked him; they remained friends for the rest of his life. [8]
On 29 September 2010, Cummins introduced the film Street Corner (1953) as part of the Capital Tales Event at BFI Southbank London hosted by Curator Jo Botting. She played Bridget Foster in the film written by Muriel and Sydney Box and directed by Muriel Box.
On 29 August 2013, Cummins introduced the world premiere of a digital remastering of Night of the Demon, screened by the British Film Institute in the courtyard of the British Museum. The screening location features prominently in the film, with shots of the courtyard before a key scene in which the psychologist Holden meets occultist Karswell for the first time in the British Library, which until 1998 was housed within the museum. [9]

Personal life[edit]

In 1954, she became the First Honorary Commander of the 582d Air Resupply Squadron at RAF Molesworth, England to be designated by the United States Air Force Squadron.[10]
She was married to Derek Dunnett (William Herbert Derek Dunnett) from 1950 until his death in 2000; and had two children with him, a son in 1954, and a daughter in 1962. Her husband, who came from a wealthy family, was born in Epsom, Surrey, England, on 9 February 1921, and died in East Sussex, England, on 10 July 2000.
Cummins' film career ended in 1961, although she made a handful of television appearances up to the mid-1960s. During the 1970s, Cummins was active in a national charity, Stars Organisation for Spastics, raising money and chairing the management committee of a holiday centre for children with disabilities in Sussex. The charity, known as SOS, became an independent registered charity in 2001 and in 2008 changed its name to Stars Foundation for Cerebral Palsy. Cummins was a trustee of the charity which is run entirely by volunteers and raises funds for communication and mobility aids for people with cerebral palsy. In later life, she lived in West London.
On 25 January 2013, Cummins was honored at the Noir City Film Festival at the Castro Theater in San Francisco with a screening of a restored print of Gun Crazy. [11]
Cummins died on 29 December 2017, aged 92, in London, England.[5]
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A00859 - Ervin Appelfeld, Israeli Novelist and Holocaust Survivor



Aharon Appelfeld, Israeli Novelist Haunted by the Holocaust, Dies at 85

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The novelist Aharon Appelfeld in 2010. He escaped a labor camp during World War II.CreditPhilippe Merle/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Aharon Appelfeld, the acclaimed Israeli novelist who wrote disturbing, obliquely told stories of self-deluded Jews slowly awakening to the reality of the Holocaust, died on Thursday in Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by Beilinson Hospital, where he died.
As someone whose mother was killed at the beginning of World War II, and who escaped a labor camp to hide among hostile peasants, Mr. Appelfeld made the Holocaust his great subject. Yet he told his stories from a seemingly naïve eye, a baffled child’s eye, working by indirection and intimation. The horrors, as critics pointed out, happened offstage; his novels rarely identified the threat explicitly as storm troopers with whips or concentration camps with poison-gas showers.
Rather, people wrestled with the banalities of daily life as ominous events were apprehended like distant thunder, lending his narrative the absurdist quality of a Beckett play or the chill of a Kafka story.
In “Badenheim 1939,” perhaps his most famous novel, which the critic Irving Howe called “a small masterpiece,” cultivated, petit bourgeois Jews blithely sunbathe, flirt and nosh on strudel and ice cream at a resort outside Vienna, deluding themselves about ominous developments like the shadowy Sanitation Committee’s requiring all Jews to register. Soon they are figuring out how to help the committee relocate them to Poland, where the implication is that they will soon end up in concentration camps.
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In “The Age of Wonders,” a return train trip by a vacationing mother and son is disrupted by the registration of Jewish passengers and foreshadows a journey on a cattle car, just as the appearance of a creaking locomotive does after an eastward journey by a mother and son in “To the Land of the Cattails” (1986).
“The ingenuous person is always a shlimazl, a clownish victim of misfortune, never hearing the danger signals in time, getting mixed up, tangled up and finally falling in the trap,” Mr. Appelfeld told Philip Roth in a conversation published in The New York Times Book Review in 1988. “Those weaknesses charmed me. I fell in love with them. The myth that the Jews run the world with their machinations turned out to be somewhat exaggerated.”
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To his hapless characters, many of them westernized Jews who try to dissociate themselves from what they see as a Jewish rabble responsible for their demonization by anti-Semites, the menace is mysterious, the outcome unknown. They are also hobbled by the human need to deny approaching reality, to keep deluding oneself, while the murderers and persecutors, as Mr. Appelfeld said, know precisely what they intend to do.
The reader knows the menace from the beginning, and is bitterly aware that the Holocaust will swallow the assimilated as well as the outwardly religious. That historical knowledge lends the convulsive events their haunting quality.
Mr. Appelfeld’s indirection allowed for an intellectual engagement that won him a strong following that awaited his every novel — and he did not disappoint. He delivered books in Hebrew almost every couple of years, and at least 16 novels were translated into English from 1981 to 2011.
He was a major figure in a constellation of world-class Israeli writers that included Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman. Mr. Roth called hima “displaced writer of displaced fiction who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.” The critic Eva Hoffman wrote, “In his call to break the concealed silence, he has courageously begun to illuminate regions of the soul usually darkened by secrecy and sorrow.”
Mr. Appelfeld, an elfin, round-face man with what Mr. Roth described as “the playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard,” was born Feb. 16, 1932, in a town near Czernowitz, in what is now Ukraine but what was then Romania. The family was proudly middle class, speaking the treasured German of the area’s better-off inhabitants and forbidding the earthier Yiddish. They spent summers in spa towns like Badenheim.

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Mr. Appelfeld with Gerhard Langemeyer, the mayor of Dortmund, Germany, in 2005, when the author received the city’s Nelly Sachs Prize, named after the Jewish poet and playwright who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966.CreditPeter Brenneken/Associated Press

“It took years to understand how much my parents had internalized all the evil they attributed to the Jew, and, through them, I did so, too,” he told Mr. Roth. “A hard kernel of revulsion was planted within each of us. The change took place in me when we were uprooted from our house and driven into the ghettos. Then I noticed that all the doors and windows of our non-Jewish neighbors were suddenly shut, and we walked alone in the empty streets.”
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Mr. Appelfeld and his father endured a forced march through mud to a labor camp in Ukraine. He escaped the camp and resourcefully spent the next three years as a shepherd working for various peasants and always concealing his Jewish identity, and then joined the Soviet Army as a cook’s helper. It was the kind of anxious vagabond existence that his child characters reprised. When the war was over, he returned to his hometown, which was now devoid of Jews, an experience he captured in “The Age of Wonders.”
After months in a refugee camp in Italy, he made his way in 1946 to what was then the British mandate of Palestine, worked on a kibbutz, studied Hebrew at night and fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“Naïvely I believed that action would silence my memories, and I would flourish like the natives, free of the Jewish nightmare, but what could I do?” he told Mr. Roth. “The need, you might say the necessity, to be faithful to myself and to my childhood memories made me a distant, contemplative person. My contemplation brought me back to the region where I was born and where my parents’ home stood. That is my spiritual history, and it is from there that I spin the threads.”
Mr. Appelfeld portrayed Holocaust survivors in “The Immortal Bartfuss” (1988) as more than slightly lost as they mutely wander the Israeli landscape. “No one knew what to do with the lives that had been saved,” he wrote.
In the Roth interview, he said the Holocaust was “the type of enormous experience that reduces one to silence” because “the wound is too deep and bandages won’t help, not even a bandage such as the Jewish state.”
Moreover, like Theo, the protagonist of “For Every Sin” (1989), he sometimes found himself repelled by fellow survivors, believing that his engagement with them would produce only more misery.
The novel, though, suggests that survivors need to confront the past, an argument he advanced directly in a 2005 Op-Ed for The New York Times, in which he pointed out that “every barrier, every distance, inevitably separates you from the most meaningful experience of your life.”
In the 1950s, he learned that his father was alive — in Israel. Israeli newspapers reported that the reunion, after almost 20 years, was so emotional that Mr. Appelfeld was never able to write about it.
He completed his studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and despite a national don’t-look-back ethic, he began writing short stories rooted in his war experience, choosing Hebrew rather than his native German. His first novel, “The Skin and the Gown,” was published in 1971.
He also supported himself by teaching — eventually becoming a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba.
He is survived by his wife and three children.
Mr. Appelfeld won the prestigious Israel Prize for literature in 1983, and many other prizes followed. Yet when his books started making an impression in Israel, it was not among the Holocaust survivors, who he said “were afraid to be confronted with their past,” but among their children.
“Until now, those parents are still afraid to touch my books, and it’s very moving to see because there was such a deep gap between parents and children,” he told Richard F. Shepard in a 1992 interview for The Times. “Somehow my books have helped to cross the gap.”

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Aharon Appelfeld (Hebrew: אהרן אפלפלד‬; born Ervin Appelfeld[2]; February 16, 1932 – January 4, 2018) was an Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor.

Biography[edit]

Ervin Appelfeld was born in Jadova Commune, Storojineț County, in the Bukovina region of the Kingdom of Romania, now Ukraine. In 1941, when he was nine years old, the Romanian Army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet occupation and his mother was murdered.[3] Appelfeld was deported with his father to a Nazi concentration camp in Romanian-controlled Transnistria. He escaped and hid for three years before joining the Soviet army as a cook. After World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel's independence. He was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish Agency list. The father had been sent to a ma'abara (refugee camp) in Be'er Tuvia. The reunion was so emotional that Appelfeld has never been able to write about it.[4]
In Israel, Appelfeld made up for his lack of formal schooling and learned Hebrew, the language in which he began to write. His first literary efforts were short stories, but gradually he progressed to novels. He completed his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He lived in Mevaseret Zion and taught literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and was often writing in Jerusalem's Ticho House (Beit Ticho).
In 2007, Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 was adapted for the stage and performed at the Gerard Behar Center in Jerusalem.

Choice of language[edit]

Appelfeld was one of Israel's foremost living Hebrew-language authors, despite the fact that he did not learn the language until he was a teenager. His mother tongue was German, but he was also proficient in Yiddish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Russian, English, and Italian.[3] With his subject matter revolving around the Holocaust and the sufferings of the Jews in Europe, he could not bring himself to write in German. He chose Hebrew as his literary vehicle for its succinctness and biblical imagery.
Appelfeld purchased his first Hebrew book at the age of 25: King of Flesh and Blood by Moshe Shamir. In an interview with the newspaper Haaretz, he said he agonized over it, because it was written in Mishnaic Hebrew and he had to look up every word in the dictionary.[5]
In an interview in the Boston Review, Appelfeld explained his choice of Hebrew: "I’m lucky that I’m writing in Hebrew. Hebrew is a very precise language, you have to be very precise–no over-saying. This is because of our Bible tradition. In the Bible tradition you have very small sentences, very concise and autonomic. Every sentence, in itself, has to have its own meaning."[6]

The Holocaust as a literary theme[edit]

Many Holocaust survivors have written an autobiographical account of their survival, but Appelfeld does not offer a realistic depiction of the events. He writes short stories that can be interpreted in a metaphoric way. Instead of his personal experience, he sometimes evokes the Holocaust without even relating to it directly. His style is clear and precise, but also very modernistic.[7]
Appelfeld resided in Israel but wrote little about life there. Most of his work focuses on Jewish life in Europe before, during and after World War II. As an orphan from a young age, the search for a mother figure is central to his work. During the Holocaust he was separated from his father, and only met him again 20 years later.

Motifs[edit]

Silence, muteness and stuttering are motifs that run through much of Appelfeld's work.[4] Disability becomes a source of strength and power. Philip Roth described Appelfeld as “a displaced writer of displaced fiction, who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.” [8]

Awards and honors[edit]

Cultural references[edit]

Appelfeld's work was greatly admired by his friend, fellow Jewish novelist Philip Roth, who made the Israeli writer a character in his own novel Operation Shylock.
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