Katharine Ross, circa 1967. She was America's answer to Julie Christie: sensual, intelligent, enigmatic.

While reading Gerald Kolpan's "Etta," an intriguing novel about Etta Place, the mystery woman who travelled with Butch and Sundance, I thought of the intriguing Katharine Ross who so memorably played Etta alongside Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the 1969 romp "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Ross used her low forehead, curtain of hair, sensual underlip and intelligent inscrutability to great effect in a number of film classics, most famously "The Graduate" (1967), "BC&TSK," and "The Stepford Wives." She is one of those actors who communicated more without dialogue than with.

Her fans -- and who is not? -- can enjoy a Ross triple-dip on April 18 when Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will show "Butch Cassidy," "The Graduate," and "Tell Them Willie Boy is Here " (1969), Abraham Polonsky's underknown film about a Paiute who kills in self-defense. The Native American is Robert Blake and Ross is his Paiute girlfriend. While Ross turned up on the evening soap opera "The Colbys" in the 1970s and was lately seen as Jake Gyllenhaal's shrink in "Donnie Darko," she is not a prolific actress. For 25 years she has been married to the gravel-voiced actor Sam Elliott.

My favorite Ross role is Etta. Yours?

Marilyn Chambers, pure as the driven Ivory Snow.

Marilyn Chambers, the Meg Ryan of X-rated film, was found dead by her daughter in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Clarita Sunday. The demure-looking Connecticut beauty became famous as the 99 44/100 % pure mother pictured on the Ivory Snow box in 1969 and infamous as Gloria, the innocent babe abducted and whisked off to a private sex club in the 1972 XXX sensation "Behind the Green Door." Her sunny presence as the sleeping beauty sexually awakened by male trapeze artists in crotchless tights helped mainstream porn movies. She also appeared in "Rabid," David Cronenberg's 1977 cult film about a bionic vampire with a blood-sucking syringe underneath her left arm, as unnerving an image of sexual voracity as anything in her X-rated films. The madonna/whore of the Boogie Nights era, Chambers died 10 days shy of her 57th birthday.

The Delfonics in the late 1960s. I believe that Randy Cain is on the far right.

Was sad to read that Randy Cain, a founding member of the suave and soulful Delfonics, passed away on Thursday in Maple Shade, NJ. As reader Bob Elwood reminded me, the Delfonics "La La Means I Love You" and their Grammy-winning "Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time" were nicely used by Quentin Tarantino in "Jackie Brown" to pungently underscore the developing relationship between Pam Grier and Robert Forster. Cain met brother Delfonics William and Wilbert Hart at Overbrook High, long an incubator of local talent.

Observe & Report's Seth Rogen. In a Mall Cop smackdown, does Seth Rogen lose to Kevin James?

If something is worth saying, it's worth saying twice -- or so it is said. But does this also apply to movies? Following close on the Vibram heels of "Paul Blart: Mall Cop," is "Observe and Report," opening tomorrow, the second shopping-center security comedy in a matter of months. 

Is Hollywood seeing double? In recent years, moviegoers had to choose from competing Truman Capote biopics, "Capote" and "Infamous"; colliding killer-asteroid actioners, "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" (yeah, I know, one was an asteroid, the other a comet); twin eruption thrillers, "Volcano" and "Dante's Peak"; the magician mysteries "The Prestige" and "The Illusionist"; and the insect animations "Antz" and "A Bug's Life."

In movies, as in pregnancies, twins are still relatively rare. The twinning effect may have been most pronounced in 1987 where it seemed almost every other film was about a parent and child trading bodies ("Vice-Versa," "Like Father, Like Son," "18 Again") , a kid becoming his adult self ("Big") or an adult regressing to her teen self ("Peggy Sue Got Married." (BTW, the upcoming Matthew Perry/Zac Efron comedy "17 Again" revisits this time-travelling comedy scenario.)

At the moment there are two Marvin Gaye biopics in pre-production, one to be produced by James Gandolfini and the other by director F. Gary Gray. The R & B singer is a great subject. Though Gaye himself sang, "It Takes Two," he didn't mean it takes two movies to make one complete film portrait.

When twin movies are delivered around the same time, are you more or less interested in seeing the films? Movie twins I've missed? Seth Rogen or Kevin James? I have to say that Sandra Bullock in "Infamous" was a sharper Harper Lee than Catherine Keener in "Capote." Your thoughts on movie twins? Observe and report. (Hat tip to Nick Tarnowski for his help.)

Sean Penn as Larry Fine? Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk.

Not a joke. Still, it made me laugh. According to the Hollywood trade newspaper Variety, Sean Penn -- an actor (despite his Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgmont High") better known for gravity than comedy -- is "attached" to a Farrelly Brothers screenplay about The Three Stooges. He would be Larry Fine.

Says the report: MGM and the Farrelly brothers are closing in on their cast for "The Three Stooges." Studio has set Sean Penn to play Larry, and negotiations are underway with Jim Carrey to play Curly, with the actor already making plans to gain 40 pounds to approximate the physical dimensions of Jerome "Curly" Howard. The studio is zeroing in on Benicio Del Toro to play Moe. The film is not a biopic, but rather a comedy built around the antics of the three characters that Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Howard played in the Columbia Pictures shorts."

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

Should Steve Martin play Shemp? Or should Jon Stewart?

In "Adam's Rib," Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn are married, but he's the prosecuting attorney and she's the defense attorney in court. Judy Holliday is the defendant. If this movie were made today, would it be considered a chickflick? Or would it star best buds Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson on opposites sides of the case?

My colleague Joe Baltake, who posts here as "Pash," e-mailed me yesterday to say how much he enjoyed "I Love You Man." His observation:  "These guy flicks - 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin,'  'The Wedding Crashers,'  'Role Models'" et al - have been consistently entertaining and surprisingly astute in their observations.  I wish I could say the same for the recent chick flicks, most of which (thanks to the 'Sex and the City' curse) have been preoccupied with expensive shoes, gargantuan weddings and questionable values.  Feel free to disagree. "

I don't disagree, Joe, as you might have read in a previous post about "Bride Wars" and its ilk. What we're seeing at the multiplex is the convergence of the buddy movie and the romantic comedy. The "bromance," or "brotherly romance" -- the platonic love story between two men -- has effectively replaced the rom-com, the romantic love story between man and woman.  I very much enjoyed "Wedding Crashers" and "I Love You, Man."

The good news is that these movies are terrific  -- and show men expressing their emotions outside of the baseball diamond and gridiron context. (Used to be that the only films where men spoke of their feelings or cried was the sports flick -- "Field of Dreams," "Bang the Drum Slowly," "Brian's Song.")  The not-so-good news about the  "Wedding Crashers" effect is that the rom-com,  once a genre that employed  actresses , female screenwriters and directors, has been co-opted by actors and male screenwriters and directors at the same moment that the so-called chick-flick has been co-opted by the fashion and bridal industries who use these film as a means of selling wedding dresses and diamond rings.

But there's another kind of chick-flick, as another colleague, Melissa Silverstein, writes about  this phenom.  "There is a brand of  'chick flicks' that are targeted at younger women (perhaps because it's safer to empower young women): a combination of feminism and girl power that engages the post Title IX generation. " Films like Legally Blonde, Blue Crush, Bend it Like Beckham, and Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants show young women seizing control of their lives. Alas, she writes, movies about adult women are more focused  on the getting and keeping of men.

There's no shortage of great screenwriters and directors -- male and female -- with original things to say about friendships and relationships. What gives me pause is reading about a Hollywood gender-divided into fraternities and sororities (i.e., recent features mapping "Apatown" versus the "Fempire" --  the writers of bromances versus the writers of chickflicks). What gives me pause is hearing Hollywood marketing mavens tell me their tracking figures show that women moviegoers will go to a bromance but men shy away from chickflicks (meaning that the bromances will get the bigger budgets and marketing pushes). What gives me pause is hearing from screenwriters that when they write a competent female character, a producer at the story meeting will suggest that she fall down in a scene so as to be less threatening to the men in the audience.

I don't know what the resolution to this problem is. But I know that making movies that appeal to, and star, those of both genders is a start. If the Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy comedy "Adam's Rib" -- the one about themarried lawyers on opposite sides of an attempted-murder case -- were made today, would it be considered a chickflick? Or would the characters be re-written so that the leads were best friends and be played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson?

Judy Garland, left, played by Anne Hathaway?

Just got the news that The Weinstein Company has optioned Gerald Clarke's splendid Judy Garland biography, "Get Happy." And that willowy beauty Anne Hathaway is expected to star as the diminutive dynamo whom mogul Louis B. Mayer liked to call "my little hunchback."

My kneejerk reaction was: How can a bona fide stunner -- perhaps the most gorgeous woman in Hollywood since Ava Gardner -- play the famously insecure Garland who was envious of Gardner, her sister MGM star?

Then I started thinking about about Hathaway's and Garland's similarities: Both were perky teen stars who made their names in family films and then surprised everyone with their dramatic chops. Hathaway has a lovely voice, but it will take some work for her to develop the Garland vibrato that massaged the hearts of its listeners.

What's great about Clarke's book is that it breaks the template of the typical biopic. It's both tragic and triumphal, and doesn't wallow in its subject's self-destruction.

Your thoughts, kneejerk or otherwise? Can you think of a better casting choice?

Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson as the duelling CEOS in "Duplicity," a movie with a lot of flashback-and-forth.

"A film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order," cracked French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard ("Breathless," "Alphaville") who famously reinvigorated movie narrative with fractures and jump-cut flash-forwards.

I thought of Godard's crack during "Duplicity," Tony Gilroy's sleek spy-versus-spy story that pits American agent Julia Roberts against her British counterpart Clive Owen. Through a series of flashbacks-within-flash-forwards, Gilroy (whose "Michael Clayton" likewise scrambled its chronology) makes the viewer wonder whether Roberts and Owen are in conflict or cahoots. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the film's erotic byplay and was warmed by its considerable starpower, by the fifth flashback I lost hold of the (very tangled) narrative thread. Has this happened to you in films such as "Memento," "Synechdoche, NY" and "Adaptation"?

It's hardly a new trend,.Preston Sturges used it in his very complex screenplay for "The Power and the Glory" (1933), itself a huge influence on the fractured narrative of "Citizen Kane" (1941). But in certain films, this flashback-and-forth is exhausting. Thoughts?

Robert Pattison restrains himself from initiating Kristen Stewart in "Twilight."

When Catherine Hardwicke's "Twilight" was released in November, the film based on Stephenie Meyer's young-adult novels was taken very seriously at the box office -- $372 million worldwide from its adherents known as Twi-hards -- less so by observers who sniffed that the film defanged the vampire movie by making it a teen fantasy about a gallant specimen of the undead who does not want to turn the girl he loves into a beast like him.  Unusual for a vampire film, Edward (played with humor by Robert Pattinson), is abstinent. Evidently, The critics of "Twilight" didn't get their bloodlust slaked. (If you haven't already seen it, the DVD is being released tonight at midnight.)

The vampire is a shape-shifting metaphor. Usually the creature is one of society's outsiders with an insatiable appetites for crime or sex.or violence. Or all three.  In Louis Feuillade's fantastic serial "Les Vampires" (1915), the vampire known as Irma Vep (an anagram for vampire) is a villainess and seductress, ringleader of a Parisian gang of thieves. In F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1924), the vampire is an accursed and feral creature living on the fringes of society, a bat-eared man who cannot control his thirst for blood. The genius of "Twilight," which is about the erotics of chastity, is how it inverts the story by presenting a vampire who not only can control himself, but is reluctant to initiate his beloved. Whether a teenager, monster, aristocrat or hillbilly, the vampire generally represents what society most fears.

Now,  I would put "Twilight" in my top five. That would be: Todd Browning's "Dracula" (1931) with Bela Lugosi, caped, coffin-creaking and suave;  Kathryn Bigelow's "Near Dark" (1987), teen bloodsuckers from the wrong side of the tracks; Tony Scott's "The Hunger" (1983), with Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve as elegant lesbian vampires;  and. of course, "Nosferatu," with the eerie Max Schreck. As Roger Ebert said sbout it, "To see Nosferatu is to see the vampire movie before it had really seen itself." I also have some affection for Roman Polanski's "The Fearless Vampire Killers" and "Andy Warhol's Dracula" (1974), in which the bloodthirsty Udo Kier insists, "I must have the blood of wirgins." That's right, virgins with a W.

Your favorite neckbiters?