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DIED. Lincoln Theodore Perry (stage name: Stepin Fetchit), 83, black comedian who, adopting the name of a horse he had won money on, played a gentle, shuffling, eye-rolling subservient in movies of the 1920s and '30s (Show Boat, Stand Up and Cheer); of congestive heart failure and pneumonia; in Woodland Hills, Calif. When a 1968 TV documentary accused Stepin Fetchit of popularizing the stereotype of the lazy Negro, Perry brought an unsuccessful $3 million defamation suit. "I had to defy a law that said Negroes were supposed to be inferior," he said. "I was a star--the first Negro...
...plan does have a certain breathtaking screwball grandeur, like some '30s movie written by Bertolt Brecht and directed by Preston Sturges. Donald Trump, the young multimillionaire real estate developer, owns 100 vacant acres of Hudson River waterfront just northwest of midtown Manhattan, a parcel that he characteristically calls "the greatest piece of urban land in America--the greatest piece of land in the world." One hundred acres! In one spot in Manhattan! At the center of that plot, the developer announced last week, he intends to put up the world's tallest building, an office and apartment tower shooting...
...comic essayist never did produce the serious work he wanted to, and he wasted too much time in Hollywood, playing small parts in smaller movies. But seated on the aisle during the '20s and '30s, as drama critic of Life, the humor magazine, and later The New Yorker, Robert Benchley was in his essential elements of earth, air and firewater. The boozy, bemused uncle of the theater sees a parade of greats. He applauds Jimmy Durante, discovers Bob Hope and Groucho Marx, and collects parodies of a Cole Porter lyric: "Night and day under the bark of me/ There...
Film buffs may regard the '30s and '40s as the Periclean Age of Celluloid. But those on the other side of the screen tended to view themselves as galley slaves. Joan Blondell reports, "During the Depression I was making more than six pictures a year. I made six pictures while carrying my son and eight with my daughter. They'd get me behind desks and behind barrels and throw tables in front of me to hide my growing tummy." Dancer Eleanor Powell runs into a friend, a film cutter at MGM, and lunches with him at the studio commissary. That...
...than the independent media start-ups that the judiciary routinely shutters. Some are even working for Shargh, a newspaper widely believed to be controlled by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is favored to win next week's presidential election. Kambiz Tavana, a voluble reporter in his early 30s, joined me at Cafe Mint in midtown Tehran to make the case for his journey to the Rafsanjani camp. He described the reform era as "a flailing moment, not a movement" and said its legacy was to illustrate the clerical regime's insurmountable power structure. Rafsanjani, Tavana said...