If there was ever any doubt that movie studios in the pre-Code era were fully aware of the financial perks of naughtiness, films like Parachute Jumper and Call Me Savage (both 1932), with their laundry lists of violations of the Production Code, put those doubts to rest. Scandal sold so well that even otherwise innocuous dramas ensured a little titillation was included. These spicy bits, however, had to be set apart from the rest of the film so they could be removed by state censorship boards wi...
Read moreJoel McCrea is the quintessential California story, a remarkable life which included a childhood stint delivering the L.A. Times to movie industry names such as Cecil B. DeMille, attending the University of Southern California and Pomona College, decades in a highly successful career in the film business, and simultaneously working at the beloved job he listed as his occupation on his tax returns, rancher. Joel was born in Pasadena on November 5, 1905. Growing up in Los Angeles, h...
Read moreMaybe classic television can't teach us everything about the world, but I ask, if TV doesn't know it, is it really worth knowing? I was recently in a philosophical mood and looking to acquire some life lessons, so I turned to perhaps the most instructive of all genres: TV Westerns. After viewing some old favorites as well as a few series I had never seen, here is what I learned: The Rifleman As single father and rancher Lucas McCain, Chuck Connors projects solid moral ...
Read moreThe Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb) credits Edward Everett Horton with a quotation that pokes fun at his career as a character actor in films: 'I have my own little kingdom. I do the scavenger parts no one else wants and I get well paid for it.' Horton was modest. It is left to the vintage film buff to insist that Horton and his fellow character actors created their kingdoms with inimitable acting skills; that what he called parts no one else wanted were parts that very few actors could pull ...
Read moreI classify Chaplin as the greatest motion picture comedian of all time. - Buster Keaton After his apprenticeship with Mack Sennett at Keystone Studios in 1914, Charlie Chaplin signed a one-year deal with Essanay Studios where he directed fourteen shorts, including such films as The Tramp and Burlesque on Carmen. By the end of that year, Chaplin was the most famous entertainer in the world. He had, especially when directing himself, a sense of rhythm that turned comedy into ...
Read moreLinda Darnell is best remembered as one of the most beautiful women to grace the movies in the '40s and '50s, yet a closer look at her career suggests she was much more than that. The underrated Darnell was talented as both a dramatic actress and a comedienne, and her list of credits is one any actress would envy. Darnell starred in every kind of movie, including film noir, Westerns, swashbucklers, comedies, musicals, and dramas; some of her films are among the very finest titles in American c...
Read moreMark Twain invented the time travel story. Six years later H.G. Wells perfected it and revealed its paradoxes. Between them they left little for latecomers to do. Many have tried, successfully, thanks to the diverse theories and hypotheses of the consequences of time travel. Through a variation on a theme, every science fiction writer has attempted to preach his own theories. But regardless of how many novels, stories, comics, motion-pictures and television programs have been created, as author ...
Read moreWe're here at ClassicFlix because we love vintage television programs and movies, but what started that fondness? I'm especially interested in people who did not grow up on the TV shows from the 1950s and 1960s, yet still watch them today. I believe my own preference for old-school entertainment is a combination of nature and nurture--nature in the sense that my parents watched and loved it, nurture in the sense that--well, my parents watched and loved it. Reruns were scattered all...
Read moreThe films of John Huston have few similarities between them save for broad, humanistic themes common to the literary works Huston often chose to adapt for screen. As he once said, directing a film was 'simply an extension of the process of writing,' thus he stuck to no single genre, something that has irritated auteurists and critics alike. Exasperated with the inability to neatly categorize Huston's oeuvre, Francois Truffaut wrote, 'Will John Huston always be no more than an amateur?' while And...
Read moreNo one can argue that the San Diego Comic Con established an annual three-day media frenzy. Conventions have been popping up all over the country using the words 'Comic Con,' attracting a mass audience of young and old alike. Even children under the age of five show up in their super hero pajamas and Halloween costumes to participate. Sadly, the same cannot be said for film festivals and nostalgia pop culture conventions that are devoid of comic book vendors and celebrities who made an appearanc...
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