Reviews

Displaying 121 - 140 of 210

  • Well, at least it's short. Plus we like Allen Jenkins, right?

    First of two four-reel 'streamliner' long shorts (or short longs) made by Robert Lippert spotlighting the Ashton Detective Agency. This opens most humorously with Tom Neal introducing himself and the cast regulars both as themselves in REAL life and as the characters they portray. Then we're off to the mystery races (sort of). While Mr. Neal is out of town on business, Miss Blake is given an as...

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  • Scare Comedy with no scares and little comedy, but...

    Ever get deflated as the opening credits roll? Today's presentation was brought to us by Al Werker and writer Lou Breslow, the comic geniuses who gave us another 'scare comedy' that deserves its air quotes, A-Haunting We Will Go. Needless to say, I didn't go into this with high expectations. Brenda 'That Other Jane' Joyce has inherited, of all things, a wrecked pirate ghost ship(!) that she doe...

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  • Meh-cael Shayne

    A particularly absurd installment in the series, but not an un-entertaining one. Just be prepared for courtroom sequences that make the one in Duck Soup look like a documentary on proper court procedure. Shayne is a juror on a murder case(!); a pretty young woman is accused of murdering her fiance, and a showgirl who worked with the guy saw the accused leave the dead man's apartment, you see. A...

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  • Double Harry Feature

    Three's a Crowd was Harry's first film as director after firing Frank Capra; it didn't do well at the box office and the conventional opinion over the ages have been that it's terrible and Harry's career never recovered. These days, some silent film scholars, trying to rehabilitate Harry's reputation, have claimed it's a misbegotten masterpiece, a Waiting for Godot of the silent screen, unloved an...

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  • Where's That Been? - Just Off Broadway

    Lillian Hubbard (Janis Carter) is on trial for the murder of her fiance, Harley Forsythe, and a positive outcome does not bode well. There's been damning testimony from nightclub chanteuse Rita Darling (Joan Valerie) placing Lil at the scene of the killing, and additional input from Henry Randolph (Leyland Hodgson), a butler employed at a residence near Lillian's apartment who bears witness tha...

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  • Manila Calling: Don't Be Afraid to Answer the Call

    Manila Calling (1942), a new release from the Fox Cinema Archives, stars Lloyd Nolan, Carole Landis, and Cornel Wilde. Originally released in October 1942, it's a somber patriotic story set during the darkest days after America's entry into WWII. The film concerns a group of American radio communications experts working in the Philippines. When the Japanese invade, the men ...

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  • Teen Scene: Miracle on 34th Street

    Most Christmas movies for and about children revolve around Santa Claus. Miracle on 34th Street is the original one about the big guy himself, and some would say the very best one. Yes, there is another Miracle movie you've probably already seen, the '90s remake starring Mara Wilson and the great Richard Attenborough, but the first will always be the definitive one that everyo...

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  • Where's That Been? - Three Strangers

    Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald) lures two gentlemen -- Jerome K. Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet) and Johnny West (Peter Lorre) -- to her London apartment on the eve of the Chinese New Year in 1938. She has done so in the belief that a wooden statue of Kwan Yin, the Chinese goddess of destiny and fortune, will grant the three of them a wish at the stroke of midnight. The same wish must b...

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  • Colorama: Color Lives, Breathes, and Dances in An American in Paris

    If movie musicals had actual human personalities, then I would like to imagine Gene Kelly's An American in Paris locked in a sisterly rivalry with Singin' in the Rain. An American in Paris is like that overachieving older sister who won all the prizes in the beginning and got all the praise, while Singin' in the Rain is the raucous younger sibling that got overlooked ...

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  • Good, fun movie, but...

    H. Rider Haggard's novels come to life on the screen by the team behind King Kong, and looking very much like it. Dying explorer/scientist Samuel S. Hinds calls nephew Randolph Scott home to give him a map and send him on his way North to find the fabled Fountain of Youth. Randy takes family friend Nigel Bruce, a guide, and the guide's lovely daughter, Helen Mack, along with him and they discov...

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  • Where's That Been? - The Strange Love of Molly Louvain

    It's the age-old question of nature vs. nurture: is bad behavior inherent in individuals or something that is learned as a consequence of one's environment? The test subject for this theory is Madeleine Maude Louvain (Ann Dvorak) -- 'Molly' to her friends -- a woman who works a cigar counter in a small town hotel. Molly's mother abandoned her when she was seven years old, and Molly is determine...

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  • Beware the Jungle Woman!

    This is the Universal monster movie that the studio kept chained up in the basement next to the boiler, discovered only when the house was torn down and practically every other monster movie in their catalog had been released to home video. Jungle Woman is the second of three Universal horror pictures featuring a terrifying creature so evil, so monstrous, and so despicable ...

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  • Bela on Poverty Row, munching away on Apple Pie

    One of the more interesting films Bela Lugosi would ever make in his career. Which isn't too say that it's GOOD you understand; it sure is fascinating, though, mostly for all the wrong reasons but then, it does boast director Joseph H. Lewis, who went on to make Gun Crazy and The Big Combo, and not for nothin', but when you've got The Invisible Ghost on your resume, having Gun Crazy on there too s...

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  • Colorama: The Enduring Legacy of Oklahoma!

    By the time Oklahoma! made it to movie screens in 1955, so many of the great movie musicals of that decade had already come and gone: Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Annie Get Your Gun, An American in Paris. And yet Oklahoma! had really been the one to blaze the trail ahead for all these films. ...

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  • All the facts, ma'am, on Dragnet

    When a runner for the numbers racket ends up a tad short in his accounts, he's taken out into a field in broad daylight and blasted in two with with a sawed-off shotgun. Enter Joe Friday and Frank Smith, LAPD, who easily know WHO did it, but need to find the evidence to make a Grand Jury indict. That's not so easy. A terrific police procedural I liked very much. I'm a recent introductee to the ...

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  • No okay watching awful movie, Classic Flix buddies.

    I don't mind writing reviews of truly, truly terrible films at all. It's a chance to show off how cleverly I can lampoon, oh, Fire Maidens of Outer Space or Cat-Women of the Moon and amuse myself and hopefully you. That said, I have no enthusiasm for reviewing Dondi. It's like reviewing a kid on a tricycle being run over by the ice cream truck. This is a truly miserably horrid motion picture, a...

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  • Where's That Been? - The Old Dark House

    It's one of the hoariest cliches in all of moviedom -- but our feature presentation begins on a dark and stormy night; thunder, lightning, wind and rain threaten Philip and Margaret Waverton (Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart) as they drive hopelessly lost in the mountains of Wales (and manage to miss a mudslide by mere inches). The Wavertons, along with their wastrel friend Roger Penderel (Melvyn ...

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  • Where's That Been? - Betrayed

    Newlywed Millie Baxter (Kim Hunter) is giddy with delight during her train trip to New York: she'll be meeting her husband Paul (Dean Jagger) in the Big Apple, a man she married on a whim after just three dates. She's scheduled to meet him at the Sherwin Hotel, but by the time she arrives, Paul hasn't turned up yet. An old flame of hers from the same Ohio hometown in which she grew up, Fred Gra...

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  • The original grindhouse double feature, sort of!

    Where the heck has THIS movie been my whole life? It's tacky, tasteless, horrifying, stupid, creepy, and utterly baffling. Midway through, it appears as though somebody changed the channel from a pretty good film noir to a pretty good monster picture, too. Mostly, it completely flaunts the Hollywood Production Code! Director Stuart Heisler had been a long-time editor; I think the film ended up cla...

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  • Where's That Been? - Ali Baba Goes to Town

    Aloysius 'Al' Babson (Eddie Cantor) is spending his two-week vacation riding the rails -- his destination is Hollywood, where the star-struck Al hopes to grab a few celebrity autographs in his free time. Instead, a mishap involving falling off the train lands him in the middle of a 20th-Century Fox movie set on a production of Arabian Nights; Al then comes close to being trampled by a ...

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