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...
Read moreBefore there was a mouse in the Walt Disney house, there was a rabbit. A rather unassuming creature-black and white with a rounded, simplistic design masterminded by Disney's brilliant early animator, Ub Iwerks-the hare, dubbed Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, made his debut in theaters in 1927. Oswald's tenure as Disney's first animated star was brief; the studio produced twenty-six Oswald shorts over the course of the next year, before Disney was forced to give up ownership of the character to his dis...
Read moreI've written previously about the evolution of cinema from the earliest experimental tinkering of the great inventors to the stylistic breakthroughs of D.W. Griffith and Louis Feuillade, a twenty-five year period when movies went from nothing more than a gleam in Louis Le Prince's eye to a world-wide phenomenon playing in a form not all that different from what we still enjoy today. The fastest and most startling evolution in film, though, may well have been in the genre of comedy...
Read moreRobert Taylor, a star at MGM for close to a quarter of a century, was one of Hollywood's best-loved actors, popular with moviegoers and colleagues alike. Taylor was born in Nebraska on August 5, 1911. As a young man he was interested in both medicine and music; he ultimately selected music and was headed toward a career as a professional cellist when he followed a favorite professor to Pomona College in California. Once in California, Taylor fell into acting and a career at MGM; ...
Read moreIn the November 7, 1959 issue of TV Guide, Rod Serling commented, “Here’s what The Twilight Zone is: It’s an anthology series, half-hour in length, that delves into the odd, the bizarre, the unexpected. It probes into the dimension of imagination but with a concern for taste and for an adult audience too long considered to have I.Q.s in negative figures. The Twilight Zone is what it implies: that shadowy area of the almost-but-not-quite; the unbelievable told in terms that can be believed. Here’...
Read moreHe had that face, that laugh, and that coast-to-coast grin that was a little aw-shucks humility and all sinister intent underneath. Richard Widmark often played characters so far in shadow they were invisible, yet your eyes were always searching for him in the frame. An innocuous 'come on' or 'heya, pal' had you leaning forward in your seat, rapt and unblinking, simultaneously fascinated and worried about what he would do next. Widmark possessed a delicious, contradictory combination of boyish c...
Read moreI had a great relationship with television when I was growing up. It amused me, thrilled me, and at times maybe even baby-sat me. But there were times when the images and sounds on that little set flat-out scared me. This month I 'fess up to some of the classic television elements that spooked me when I was younger. Count Von Count: I don't want to offend any Countsylvanians out there, but I must admit the Count's accent and appearance startled me when I first saw Sesame Street. I...
Read moreActress Coleen Gray may not be a household name today, but she is greatly appreciated by fans of film noir, having given outstanding performances in some of the all-time noir classics. Gray was a very fine actress, and it may be that her chameleon-like ability to submerge herself into her roles worked against her being as well remembered as some other actors of her era. It's also interesting to note that some of the films for which Gray is best known today – Nightmare Alley (1947) being a pri...
Read moreOnce a staple down at the local Bijou, the movie comedy team has gone the way of the sing-along bouncing ball and newsreel, vanished into cinema history. These days, actors may team for a film or two but only in between their multi-million-dollar solo paychecks; no more than occasional co-stars, more akin to Hope & Crosby and Tracy & Hepburn than to Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Howard. In this installment of Classics 101, I thought it’d be fun to review some of the best work of the movies’ grea...
Read moreAlmost from cinema's beginning, recurring characters were popular with filmmakers and theatergoers alike. With the actor's persona—Chaplin's Tramp, for example—clearly established before the film had even begun, audiences knew what to expect and could make their choices with some confidence. Directors meanwhile could dispense with character exposition, which ate up precious film time, and get right to the action. And theater owners, who drove the development of film much more than people reali...
Read more2020 will mark the true centenary of Alfred Hitchcock's entrance into the British film industry, as a title card illustrator. But to honor a man who often compressed and distorted time in his films, we can celebrate the Hitchcock century now. Hitch is with us as much as when he was alive and active, crafting his whimsical celebrity as the master of the macabre. Now we see him in the round, and there are few reputations as secure. He would savor the acclaim and the critical r...
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