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The Murky “History of Film”: Let’s Clean it Up
The world of cinema is still new enough that we break it down by decades, much as we do television and popular music. That’s all well and good for now but eventually the cinema will be hundreds of...
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Stepping Out of Their Comfort Zones
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the movies, and it’s questionable on certain days if I even have, it’s that many stars famous for one thing are much more multifaceted than they appear. Case in...
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Ruby Keeler: Come and Meet Those Dancing Feet
My favorite days of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars are those devoted to character actors, neglected stars, or actors whose careers were limited to one genre—sort of, the forgotten and forsaken of film...
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Past Lives: Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963)
“In general I am not interested in the events themselves but in what happens afterwards. Not the departure, but the return.” – Jean Cayrol In Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963), the repressed past...
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Roger Vadim: The Devil Is a Frenchman
I come here to praise Roger Vadim, not to bury him. Perhaps the most notorious bad boy director of French cinema, Vadim has been the subject of a few reputation rehab attempts over the years on home...
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Angie Dickinson in Cry Terror! (1958)
Angie Dickinson in 1958Angie Dickinson takes center stage in TCM’s ongoing Summer Under the Stars programming today. The leggy mid-western beauty first achieved widespread general and critical...
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Movies and Memory
Today is Ruby Keeler’s day here on TCM and fellow Morlock Suzi Doll did a fine write-up of her on Monday (read it here), talking about how many bygone stars there are out there that many of us know...
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“… powerful, persuasive, and a little hysterical.”
The title line is an excerpt from noted French film historian Georges Sadoul describing the filmmaking style of Robert Aldrich. When you look up Aldrich’s name on IMDB the three film titles that get...
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Memories of Garry Marshall
Director Garry Marshall, who died last month at the age of 81, owned American popular culture in the last quarter of the 20th century. His sitcoms from the 1970s introduced characters so iconic their...
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The Greatest Films of the 21st Century
I suffer from chronic list fatigue, initially eager to scroll through the latest re-ordering of greatest hits, but inevitably collapse into a heap before I ingest the whole thing. Enter the BBC to...
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Father of Fear
This Friday, August 26, finds TCM’s Summer under the Stars getting a little chillier than usual with an all-day marathon covering the career of horror icon Boris Karloff from the dawn of cinema’s...
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A Grand & Moving Thing: The King and I (1956)
Yul Brynner in The King and I. TCM & Fathom Events are screening this classic musical on August 28 and 31 in select theaters across the U.S. “If you live long enough and you’re lucky you may get...
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Karloff: The Past to the Present
Many actors spanned the silents to sound, some with great success than others. Some had careers so all-encompassing, Lillian Gish comes to mind, that it’s hard to even fathom an actor today going...
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A Foreign Affair: An Unexpected Delight
Today is Jean Arthur’s day here at TCM’s Summer Under the Stars and one of her movies playing is A Foreign Affair, from 1948, directed by Billy Wilder and co-written by him, Charles Brackett, and...
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Dementia 13: Coppola’s Graduation Film from “Corman College”
Francis Ford Coppola cut his teeth in the film industry working for B-movie master Roger Corman as a script doctor, dialogue writer, sound tech, and all-around jack of all trades. As a supplement to...
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End of an Era: Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story
Chimes at Midnight (1966) and The Immortal Story (1968) were the last two fiction features that Orson Welles completed. Still to come would be the self-reflective essays of F For Fake (1973) and...
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We’re Off to See the Zardoz
In the pantheon of wildly ambitious, certifiably insane major studio films released in the go-for-broke 1970s, few can hold a candle to ZARDOZ (1974). Director John Boorman was riding high on the...
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Preston Sturges: A Poster Gallery
Preston Sturges directs Harold Llyod & Frances Ramden on the set of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947, aka Mad Wednesday) airing tonight on TCM “There are some wonderful pictures to be made, and...
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Making the Old Series and Serials New Again
Today on TCM it’s Falcon Day. All day long, TCM is running The Falcon series from the thirties and forties in which George Sanders and Tom Conway, real life brothers, play the Lawrence brothers, two...
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Old and New
I’m attending the 43rd Telluride Film Festival, where TCM is a Signature Sponsor for the Palm theater. Although there are only three films being screened on 35mm (The Fire Within, The Barefoot...
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