Category Archives: Movie Briefs
Win Classic Film Cards in the Sister Celluloid Contest!
Season’s Greetings, my classic film family of friends! To thank you all for helping make the first few months of this website such happy ones, I thought I’d shimmy in one more contest before the end of the year. This time, the prize is 10 classic film cards from the company that made them best: …
December 1931: Frankenstein Takes Manhattan!
Eighty-three years ago this week, on a stormy December night in 1931, James Whale’s Frankenstein came ali-i-i-ve at the Mayfair Theatre in New York City—pulling in a record-breaking 76,360 fans in the first week alone. According to the NY Times‘ rave review, “the stirring grand giugnol type of picture aroused so much excitement that many in the audience …
What’s Your “Green Eggs and Ham” Movie?
Has there ever been a movie you’ve avoided every time it was on, sure it wasn’t your cup of tea, and then bam! You finally watched it and fell in love? It happened to me recently with Lassie Come Home. For some silly reason I always thought it would be a bit on the clichéd and …
Cinderella Finally Settles a Few Scores in THE GLASS SLIPPER
In just about every version of Cinderella, our heroine reacts the same way to the vicious abuse heaped upon her by her evil step-family: She hides away in her little corner. And she dreams. And she aches. And she yearns. But here’s the thing: why doesn’t she ever get really mad? Enter Leslie Caron, in …
THE ROAD BACK Hits a Nazi Detour
During one of the most shameful periods in Hollywood history, what could have been James Whale’s finest hour instead became his downfall. As 1937 dawned, the director was huddled with writers R.C. Sherriff and Charles Kenyon in a back office at Universal, working on a film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, The Road Back. A sequel to …
Charles Boyer: A Birthday Celebration
Happy Birthday, Charles Boyer! I love you beyond all reason and sanity. This photo, taken during one of his many shifts at the Hollywood Canteen, really seems to capture him: warm, real, and totally un-movie-star-ish. Absent are the silly studio-mandated shoe lifts and toupee, which he never wore off camera—and you can see how hideously disappointed Claudette …
For Sighing Out Loud, and Other Tales from the TCM Festival
Ah, popcorn for breakfast, Milk Duds for lunch and french fries and Coke for dinner. I must be at a film festival! But these essential food groups balance each other out nicely: I’d bounce off the walls from the sugar if I weren’t so bloated from the salt. This was my third trip to the …
TCM Classic Film Festival Flashback: Mad for Maureen O’Hara
The five words that got the most thunderous ovation at the 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival: “Ladies and gentlemen, Maureen O’Hara!” On the surface, at least, the woman at the center of all the fuss was having none of it. As the applause in the El Capitan Theater melded with whistles, hoots and cheers, the 93-year-old …
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