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  • The Casting Trampoline Part I: Might-Have-Beens (1927-1939)

    Fact or fiction: Groucho Marx was seriously considered for the part of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.  Try googling that.  You will receive an education in the collision of fact, distortion, half-truth, and mythologizing that makes Hollywood history.  You’ll find websites clamoring to give you the Groucho/Rhett connection.  Skim a little for the first limitation on the claim:  apparent...

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  • FOX ARCHIVES: Dante's Inferno & 60's Biblical Epics

    Dante's Inferno (1935), starring Spencer Tracy and Claire Trevor, is making it's DVD debut thanks to Fox's Cinema Archives line. Also coming are two Biblical epics: Esther and the King (1960) starring Joan Collins and Richard Egan and Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) starring Stewart Granger and Pier Angeli. While it has not been confirmed, the latter two are likely pan and scan. Due on April 8th, these ne...

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  • WARNER ARCHIVE: Tim Holt Western Collection, Vol. 4

    A welcome announcement this week as after a long hiatus in the series (since 2011), Warners' Archive Collection will be releasing Tim Holt Western Collection, Vol. 4. The 3-disc 9-film set will be available here on April 8th and adds to the total of over 1,200 Warner Archive titles exclusively available for rent at ClassicFlix.com.

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  • BLU CRITERION: Hard Day's Night, All That Heaven Allows

    Criterion has scheduled June street dates for their Blu-Ray / DVD Combo's of The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955). Both are making their Blu debut and come with loads of bonus features (below). Meet the Beatles! Just one month after they exploded onto the U.S. scene with their Ed Sullivan Show appeara...

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  • TV Time: If Movie Stars Graced Sitcoms

    I realize this is TV Time, but there's a big crossover between the worlds of classic television and movies, and in fact I often wish the intersection was even bigger. So all of you TV snobs who look down your noses at Hollywood films, be patient with me this time out because we’re gonna combine the two mediums. How many times have you watched a movie from the classic era of Hollywood--let's say the thirties and forties--and thought...

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  • Accidentally Preserved, Vol. 2

    Silent film accompanist Ben Model and his label, Undercrank, recently released Accidentally Preserved, Vol. 2. This follow up to the popular Volume 1 contains 9 more rare / lost silent films and is now available for rent here at ClassicFlix.  For those wishing to purchase, it is currently only available at Amazon.

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  • Character Actors: The Women

    A previous column saluted the great male character actors – this month, a look at the actresses who specialized in supporting roles in vintage films: the mothers, grandmothers, and matrons; landladies, secretaries, maids, and nurses; spinsters, gossips, harridans, and eccentrics; bad girls, earth mothers, and iron-willed women.  The films of the studio era are a museum of our images of women, both traditional and transitional. Lest this so...

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  • Joan Fontaine: Elegy for an Oscar Winner

    I began writing this article on Joan Fontaine before her death in December 2013 at the age of 96.  With her recent passing, I'm especially glad to have this opportunity to pay tribute to a remarkable actress. Joan Fontaine was born Joan de Havilland on October 22, 1917, in Tokyo, Japan.  When Joan first entered the film business, the name de Havilland was already 'taken' by Joan's older sister, Olivia de Havilland.  Particularly given ...

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  • COLUMBIA CLASSICS: Mary Astor - And So They Were Married

    Three more from Sony's Columbia Classics line are on their way with Mary Astor and Melvyn Douglas highlighting this wave in And So They Were Married (1936). The romantic-comedy co-stars Edith Fellows, Jackie Moran and Donald Meek.  Also out is the WWII war-drama The Boy from Stalingrad (1943) starring Bobby Samarzich, Conrad Binyon, Mary Lou Harrington and Scotty Beckett and the Western The White Squaw (1956) s...

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  • TV Time: Dynamic Duos

    Television at its best is a collaborative medium, with producers teaming up to develop concepts, screenwriters working together to turn those concepts into stories, and craftsmen behind the camera joining forces to turn the written word into living color (or black and white before the mid-sixties). This month, I'm counting down the best teams who appear on camera in the vast annals of classic television--my all-time favorite small-screen dynamic duos.

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