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You Will Never See Its Like Again
Some actors have careers locked into a specific period of their life. Maybe they’re a successful child actor, like Tatum O’Neal or Shirley Temple, but nothing really pans out after that or if does,...
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Four Reasons Why I Love Natalie Wood
I love Natalie Wood but I hate writing about her. Whenever I declare my affection for Natalie or mention one of the films she appeared in some heartless dolt will inevitably respond with an idiotic...
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“Get your shovels.” BATAAN (1943) and all we need of horror.
First, a disclaimer. I don’t mean to diminish the sacrifices of the American armed forces and their Philippine compatriots by likening BATAAN (1943), MGM’s chronicle of the 1941-42 Japanese invasion of...
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Zip a Dee Doo Dah
While celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary at Walt Disney World a couple of weeks ago, I had occasion to think about racist content in family movies. No, no–hold on, bear with me. I was having a...
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The Brat Pack of Classic Hollywood
As today is Natalie Wood’s day on TCM, I can’t help but ruminate on how her career is one of the better examples of a child actor turned adult actor out there. She didn’t grow into puberty and out of...
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Lions in My Lap
While living in Chicago during the 1990s, I suddenly found myself unemployed. To keep active while searching for another job, I became a volunteer at the Field Museum, the city’s world renowned natural...
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You Were Meant For Me: Penny Serenade (1941)
Penny Serenade (1941) is the third and final film Cary Grant and Irene Dunne made together. The Awful Truth (1937) and My Favorite Wife (1940) are screwball comedies of re-marriage, and Penny Serenade...
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Stage and Screen: An Uneasy Marriage
Today is William Holden’s day and you might notice something if you look at his credits, particularly Golden Boy, Our Town, Born Yesterday, Stalag 17, The Moon is Blue, Sabrina, The Country Girl and...
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Clark Gable & Joan Crawford: The Affair that Nearly Burned Hollywood Down
One of the most notorious affairs in Hollywood was undoubtedly the romantic liaison between Clark Gable and Joan Crawford that blossomed on the backlot of MGM. The two stars appeared in no less than...
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Seeing Things, or “It’s one damned thing after another!!
I used to love in movies when characters would play the “free association” game. You know the bit… the psychiatrist guy presents to the patient a series of seemingly innocuous, unrelated words for...
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Buster Keaton, Red Skelton, and Clark Gable: Together at last
On Sunday night, TCM will be screening a lesser-known romantic comedy from 1938 called Too Hot to Handle. Regular readers of this blog with encyclopedic memories may recall that I wrote about this a...
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When Your Hometown Goes to the Movies
Today is Clark Gable’s day at TCM and where I grew up, Gable was an icon. Yes, yes, I know, he’s an icon everywhere, period. But I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina (“Charleston born and...
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On How ‘The Foxes of Harrow’ Is Definitely Not Like ‘Gone With the Wind’
To cap this year’s Summer Under the Stars series, TCM devotes the last day of August to British actor Rex Harrison, best remembered as Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Harrison’s extensive...
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Killer Bs: Where Are Your Children? and Kilroy Was Here
Falsely advertised as “The First Drama of Juvenile Delinquency to Reach the Screen”, Where Are Your Children (1944) was just another attention grabber for Poverty Row studio Monogram, who lured William...
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From Big Screen to Small Screen, and Back Again
Last week, I wrote about the marriage between stage and screen and this week, with Shirley Jones having her day on TCM, I’m thinking about the uneasy marriage between tv and screen. When tv was young,...
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Julie Harris 1925-2013: “And we who walk here, walk alone.”
“Hill House has stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more. Within, walls continue upright, bricks meet, floors are firm, and doors are sensibly shut. Silence lies steadily against the wood and...
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Trailer park!
Why let those Trailers from Hell guys have all the fun, right? Trailers belong to everybody, right? Movie trailers cause me great pain these days. They’re so long and drawn out and boring — not like...
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Daliwood
Salvador Dali’s surrealist career was bookended by his experiences in the movies. I have to couch that statement with the limiter “surrealist career” because Dali was a prolific and prodigious talent...
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The American Actor
There are a few classic actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood who came to represent America in the larger sense, and the average American man, in the smaller sense, to the rest of the world. John...
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There Must Be a Lone Ranger
One of this summer’s biggest misfires, The Lone Ranger was green-lighted in 2008, began shooting in 2011, came in with a $250 million budget, and cost about $150 million to market. For all of that...
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