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  • The Old Corral: The Durango Kid

    In 1940, Columbia Pictures' B unit released a typically unassuming Western called The Durango Kid. Directed by Lambert Hillyer, it starred a Dartmouth College football star turned Columbia contract player, Charles Starrett, along with Luana Walters and Kenneth MacDonald. At the time, that was pretty much it, just another B Western from Columbia. Five years later, Columbia returned to the character (or at least the name), changed things around, and came up with The Ret...

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  • Joan Crawford: Film Noir's Grand Dame

    Over the course of her decades-long career, Joan Crawford would inhabit and shed many different personas. In her silent days, she was the sassy, Charleston stomping flapper girl. When life got gritty during the Depression, she charmed audiences as an ambitious working girl always striving for a life of glamour. By the forties, when her hairstyles coiled higher and shinier and shoulder pads loomed over her tiny frame, she fell into a strange hodgepodge of so-called women's pictures, and suspen...

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  • Classics 101: Bad Films Gone Good - A Stroll Down Poverty Row

    Roger Corman: 'My work in low-budget exploitation films would eventually earn me some notoriety as 'The King of the B's', which is ironic ... I never made a B movie in my life. The B movie dated from the Depression and was a phenomenon only up through the early 1950s... Bs had died out by the time I began directing. The term was never used in connection with any of my films within the industry, where the precise meaning of the term was always known.' You may well be askin...

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  • The Birth of the Feature Part II: Hollywood in the Teens

    There's an eye-popping shot in the DVD release print of Cecil B. DeMille's Old Wives for New (1918). In the second reel, Elliott Dexter is fishing a mountain stream. He casts his line, and there is a brief shot of the line fluttering in the water. You see each detail clearly, from the play of light on the water's surface, to Dexter's line and lure, to individual pebbles on the bottom of the stream. It might have been shot yesterday. Because DeMille vaulted m...

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  • Irene Dunne: First Lady of Hollywood

    One of my earliest memories of Irene Dunne was of her singing Jerome Kern's 'The Folks Who Live on the Hill' in a revival house screening of High, Wide, and Handsome (1937) when I was growing up. That enchanted scene lingered in memory for decades and was a part of my falling in love with the 'silver screen' in general and Irene Dunne in particular. Irene Dunne was without question one of the most talented actresses of the 'Classic Hollywood' era, and yet she never won a...

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  • Classics 101: Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy

    Arthur 'Stan Laurel' Jefferson (1890-1965), from Ulverston, Lancashire, England, was the thin one who mucked things up and cried about it. Oliver Hardy (1892-1957), from Harlem, Georgia, was the fat one who mucked things up and blamed Stan. Together, they were the greatest comedy team in the history of movies, and the names of Laurel & Hardy -- or 'Dick und Doof' -- are known and loved around the world. This month, Classicflix presents a handy guide to Stan & Ollie and their best work...

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  • The Birth of the Feature Part I: Hollywood in the Teens

    The farther back one goes in film history, the more it resembles archaeology. The films themselves, the artifacts, are scant, they may exist in fragmentary form, and one is forced to generalize from a small sample. Occasionally, the artifacts come from actual excavations. The Oubliette (1914), an early Lon Chaney title, was recovered from the fill underneath a farmhouse porch in Georgia. An Even Break (1917), an Olive Thomas feature, was one of several films found in a fille...

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  • Marsha Hunt: Bloodied But Unbowed

    Actress Marsha Hunt, born in Chicago on October 17, 1917, recently celebrated her 96th birthday. She's an elegant, articulate lady continuing to grace Southern California classic film screenings, sharing her memories of decades in the movie business. At a 2012 talk at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, California, Marsha described having visited that theatre when on vacation as an 11-year-old child, dreaming of one day being a movie star. She said how amazing it was that not only...

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  • TV TIME: In Search of the Ultimate Classic Beach Party

    In the world of television, the arrival of summer used to signify reruns. In the real world, summer makes me think of the beach. On the TV front now, summer is more about short-run series and reality shows, most of which just make me appreciate the return of reruns. What better way to celebrate the season and its television than by entering the land of classic TV and find the ultimate party? I'm diving into the rerun universe in search of the best beach experiences. When searchin...

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  • Dark Cinema: Lawrence Tierney - The Perfect Creature of Noir

    Lawrence Tierney has frightened me since the first moment I laid eyes on him in the gritty film noir, Born to Kill (1947). I found him unpleasant in that first glimpse. I watched it to see one of my favorite actresses, Claire Trevor, but ended up being uncomfortably riveted by Tierney as her leading man. He seemed to soil everything around him, bringing out the worst in the flinty Ms. Trevor and destroying the innocence of her foster sister, played by Audrey Long. However, he also m...

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