For the Love of Lombard

Carole Lombard (1908-1942) is the continuing and concluding honoree of a 23-film retrospective of her luminous career in talking pictures, of which she appeared in no fewer than 42 in her tragically abbreviated career, cut short by a fatal plane accident on her way back from a war-bond ceremony in Indiana. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt Read More

Carole’s Carol

Carole Lombard (1908-1942) made her debut as an actress at the age of 12 in Allan Dwan’s A Perfect Crime, in 1921. After finishing junior high school in 1925, she reentered films, but remained an obscure blond bombshell type until she got her big break in 1934, opposite John Barrymore in Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century, Read More

Screwball’s Garbo? Carole Lombard Wants Fun

If you accept the world of screwball comedy as an alternate universe, with a logic inside its seeming illogic, then the idea that Carole Lombard is screwball’s Garbo is a natural one. There was a whisper of a physical resemblance, in the high forehead and finely arched brows, in the gaze that could seem both Read More

Screwball’s Garbo? Carole Lombard Wants Fun

If you accept the world of screwball comedy as an alternate universe, with a logic inside its seeming illogic, then the idea that Carole Lombard is screwball’s Garbo is a natural one. There was a whisper of a physical resemblance, in the high forehead and finely arched brows, in the gaze that could seem both Read More