Articles

Dark Cinema: Color Noir

When we think of film noir, dark, foggy streets and shadowy black and white cinematography often come to mind. That look is as closely tied to the genre as its fatalistic themes. Noir is about more than gloomy grey alleyways though. Sometimes it pops with juicy, lurid color. It seems so wrong to film the darkest moments of the human soul in rainbow hues, until you realize the bleakest tale is often of the evil that unfolds in broad daylight. What could be more jarring, and effecti...

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Silent Cinema: The Class of 1914

2014 marks the centenary of Charlie Chaplin's motion picture debut. This is certainly an important milestone and Chaplin deserves all the praise he gets, but let's not forget that two other important movie people also debuted in 1914. Cecil B. DeMille is remembered today for his religious epics and wooden dialogue, but three-quarters of his output was actually silent films. If you think you do not like DeMille, his silent films may come as a revelation. Sassy marital comedies, dar...

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Hollywood's B-Sides: Musical Moments for the Connoisseur

Once there was a place called Hollywood, and out of it poured wonderful things, fantastic creations that included musicals, musical comedies, and operettas. What fan of classic films has not watched One Hour with You, Shall We Dance, The Pirate, or a hundred others, and not marveled at the level of artistry and studio production that made these films possible? The golden age of movie musicals falls roughly between 1932 and 1954, but music was a key eleme...

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Classics 101 - Presenting Alfred Hitchcock: Part 1, The Silent Years

The name Hitchcock has become synonymous with motion-picture suspense. From the silent era through the mid-1970s, Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock directed more than 50 films, and although his resume includes a handful of non-thrillers, it's for such films as North by Northwest, Rear Window, Rebecca, Vertigo and Psycho that he's become a household word and cinematic legend...as The Master of Suspense. It's not that Hitchcock ('Hitch...

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TV TIME: Art Carney - More Than Just Ed Norton

Regular readers of this column know how much I love The Honeymooners, and of course an essential element of that sitcom's timeless appeal is Ed Norton, arguably the best second banana in television history. Jackie Gleason, who was immodest enough to dub himself 'The Great One,' nevertheless always gave credit to co-star Art Carney for creating such an unforgettable character. When you've seen The Honeymooners as many times as I have, and in so many of its differe...

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Alan Ladd: Hollywood's Great Gatsby

One of Alan Ladd's greatest performances -- though sadly also one of his least-seen -- was playing the title role in The Great Gatsby (1949). The off-screen Ladd had much in common with Jay Gatsby: outwardly successful, but inwardly insecure and vulnerable, the perfect meeting of man and role. And like Gatsby, Alan Ladd died far too young. Alan Ladd was born in Arkansas just over a century ago, on September 13, 1913. Ladd's father died when he was a kid. His c...

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Pre-Code Obsession: Journalistic Pre-Codes

Next to gold diggers and mustachioed cads, journalism was one of the most popular on-screen professions during the pre-Code era. Fast-talking reporters livened up early sound films, freeing them from the stiff feeling plaguing many pioneering talkies. In movies like Broadway transfer The Front Page (1931), a crackling newsroom comedy, Hollywood seemed to finally understand how to make sound pop. Newspapers were a bigger, more competitive business in those pre-Internet and...

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Silent Cinema: A Week of Silent Swashbucklers

Why do we love swashbucklers so much? Well, most of all, they are a ton of fun. Adventure, romance, a dash of humor and gorgeous costumes. What more could you wish for a night at the movies? When people talk about swashbucklers, the discussion often centers on the rousing films of Errol Flynn, the slick entertainments from Tyrone Power or movies from Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Burt Lancaster and others. While these Golden Age movies are spectacular, we are going to be heading a littl...

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Guilty Pleasures: A Further Selection

Here are more films I find addictive while acknowledging they are far from perfect. Most of these films earned average ratings in Leonard Maltin's (now defunct) Movie Guide and Scheuer's Movies on TV. But as film buffs discover, you should never let a rating of two or two and a half stars deter you from watching a vintage film. Films with worn-out stories can succeed on style, star power, and sometimes, sheer absurdity. For your consideration this month: His ...

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TV TIME: Are You Ready For Some Football?

Football dominates the television landscape today, and its biggest games fill up lists of the most watched broadcasts of all time. Yet in the classic era of TV, football steadily gained popularity while baseball remained the national pastime. Witness Herman the Rookie, a classic episode of The Munsters in which Herman Munster tries out for the Los Angeles Dodgers. By the end, Herman is playing football with Eddie, and he draws interest from the general manag...

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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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