Vienna is the capital, most populous city, and one of nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. Its larger metropolitan area has a population of nearly 2.9 million, representing nearly one-third of the country's population. Vienna is the cultural, economic, and political center of the country, the fifth-largest city by population in the European Union, and the most-populous of the cities on the Danube river.
The Manchurian Candidate is a 1962 American neo-noir psychological political thriller film directed and produced by John Frankenheimer. The screenplay is by George Axelrod, based on the 1959 Richard Condon novel The Manchurian Candidate. The film's leading actors are Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, with co-stars Janet Leigh, Henry Silva, and James Gregory.
Walter Davis Pidgeon was a Canadian-American actor. A major leading man during the Golden Age of Hollywood, known for his "portrayals of men who prove both sturdy and wise," Pidgeon earned two Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, for his roles in Mrs. Miniver (1942) and Madame Curie (1943).
Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury was a British and American actress. In a career spanning 80 years, she played various roles across film, stage, and television. Although based for much of her life in the United States, her work attracted international attention.
The year 1949 in film involved some significant events.
Peter Sydney Ernest Lawford was an English-American actor.
Ethel Barrymore was an American actress and a member of the Barrymore family of actors. Barrymore was a stage, screen and radio actress whose career spanned six decades, and was regarded as "The First Lady of the American Theatre". She received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, winning for None but the Lonely Heart (1944).
Maria Augusta von Trapp DHS, often styled as “Baroness”, was the stepmother and matriarch of the Trapp Family Singers. She wrote The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, which was published in 1949 and was the inspiration for the 1956 West German film The Trapp Family, which in turn inspired the 1959 Broadway musical The Sound of Music and its 1965 film version.
Maria Cebotari was a Bessarabian-Romanian lyric coloratura soprano. She was widely known as a singer by the mid 1930s and noted in particular for her wide range of repertoire.
Charles Van Dell Johnson was an American actor and dancer. He had a prolific career in film, television, theatre and radio, which spanned over 50 years, between 1940 and 1992. He was a major star at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during and after World War II, known for his upbeat and "all-American" screen persona, often playing young military servicemen, or in musicals.
That's Entertainment! is a 1974 American compilation film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to celebrate the studio's 50th anniversary. The success of the retrospective prompted a 1976 sequel, the related 1985 film That's Dancing!, and a third installment in 1994.
The Cheaters (1945), also known as MR. M. and the Pigeons, The Amazing MR. M., The Magnificent Mr. M. and The Magnificent Rogue, is a Christmas "screwball comedy" tale about a has-been actor invited to Christmas dinner by a rich family. The film was atypical of the Republic Pictures studio, directed by Joseph Kane and starring Joseph Schildkraut. The film was re-released in 1949 under a new title, The Castaway, and when the Republic film catalogue was sold in the 1950s as late night television fodder, it appeared consistently for years as a Christmas staple throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Audrey Mary Totter was an American radio, film, and television actress and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player in the 1940s.
Lieutenant-Colonel Claude Cunningham Bruce Marshall was a prolific Scottish writer who wrote fiction and non-fiction books on a wide range of topics and genres. His first book, A Thief in the Night came out in 1918, possibly self-published. His last, An Account of Capers was published posthumously in 1988, a span of 70 years.
Song of Russia is a 1944 American war film made and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The picture was credited as being directed by Gregory Ratoff, though Ratoff became ill near the end of the five-month production, and was replaced by László Benedek, who completed principal photography; the credited screenwriters were Paul Jarrico and Richard J. Collins. The film stars Robert Taylor, Susan Peters, and Robert Benchley.
Julia Misbehaves is a 1948 American romantic comedy film starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon as a married couple who are separated by the man's snobbish family. They meet again many years later, when the daughter whom the man has raised, played by Elizabeth Taylor, invites her mother to her wedding. The film also features Peter Lawford and Cesar Romero.
Emil-Edwin Reinert, or Emile-Edwin Reinert, was a French film director, screenwriter, audio engineer and producer.
Vespers in Vienna is a 1947 novel by Scottish writer Bruce Marshall. It was the basis of the 1949 film The Red Danube starring Walter Pidgeon, Ethel Barrymore, Peter Lawford, Angela Lansbury, and Janet Leigh. George Sidney directed.
Dear Heart is a 1964 American romantic-comedy film starring Glenn Ford and Geraldine Page as lonely middle-aged people who fall in love at a hotel convention. It was directed by Delbert Mann, from a screenplay by Tad Mosel. Its theme song "Dear Heart" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
The subject of rape during the Soviet occupation of Poland at the end of World War II in Europe was absent from the postwar historiography until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, although the documents of the era show that the problem was serious both during and after the advance of Soviet forces against Nazi Germany in 1944–1945. The lack of research for nearly half a century regarding the scope of sexual violence by Soviet males, wrote Katherine Jolluck, had been magnified by the traditional taboos among their victims, who were incapable of finding "a voice that would have enabled them to talk openly" about their wartime experiences "while preserving their dignity." Joanna Ostrowska and Marcin Zaremba of the Polish Academy of Sciences wrote that rapes of the Polish women reached a mass scale during the Red Army's Winter Offensive of 1945.
