Tag Archives: classic films
What’s Your Classic Movie Intervention?
Okay here’s a question for all of you, who, like me, feel movies from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. What classic movie character would you like to stage an intervention for? Who makes you want to reach into the screen and say “Don’t do it!” I don’t mean warning …
The Un-Chilly Elegance of Frieda Inescort
“I’m so aristocratic on stage it’s a wonder I don’t come out blue when I take a bath.” Probably best known as the hopelessly haughty Caroline Bingley in Pride and Prejudice—who seemed to smell cabbage whenever Elizabeth Bennet stepped into the room—Frieda Inescort took a wry view of her typecasting. But there was so much …
Reel Infatuation: Rod Taylor in SUNDAY IN NEW YORK
Ladies! Traveling around New York, you’re likely to run into all kinds of guys. Take, for instance, the manspreader: Not even Dame Helen Mirren was safe from him. And The Nicest Man in America™ actually was him. Then there’s Oscar Shapeley, who’s certain your emphatic rejections are just a playful way of heightening the romantic tension before …
TINTYPE TUESDAY: Dan Duryea — Gardener and Cub Scout Leader!
Welcome to another edition of TINTYPE TUESDAY! A few years ago, between films of a double feature at the Film Forum in New York (Black Angel and Criss Cross), this old guy sitting next to me muttered, to no one in particular, “I wonder if that was really Dan Duryea playing the piano.” And I …
Saying Goodbye to My Dad and CASABLANCA
“Where I’m going, you can’t follow.” Not the most famous line in Rick’s closing speech to Ilsa, but the one that stays with me. Casablanca was the last movie I ever saw with my Dad, who I followed everywhere. We were true kindred spirits, and there was no one I saw more movies with. Saturday mornings were …
Ginger and Jimmy in VIVACIOUS LADY: The Backstory Was Even Crazier and Sexier Than the Movie
Vivacious Lady may be a fabulous screwball comedy, but what went on behind the scenes was even loopier. A year before the film was made, Ginger Rogers and director George Stevens had an affair while filming Swing Time, which, as these things tend to do, wrapped when the picture did. Then she started dating an up-and-comer named …
STREAMING SATURDAY! An All-Star Cast Discovers WE’RE NOT MARRIED!
Welcome to another edition of Streaming Saturdays, where we embed a free, fun film for you to watch right here every week! This week: Edmund Goulding’s 1952 anthology, We’re Not Married! The premise borrows (okay steals) a page from Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith: five couples discover that through a technical error—in this case a Justice of …
Four Extraordinary Heroes, One Regiment: Basil Rathbone, Ronald Colman, Claude Rains and Herbert Marshall in World War I
Basil Rathbone conceived an almost certain suicide mission—and carried it off disguised as a tree. Herbert Marshall, who lost a leg to a sniper’s bullet, downplayed his sacrifice, saying his most salient memories of the trenches were numbness and boredom. Claude Rains lost almost half his sight to a poison gas attack. And Ronald Colman …
TINTYPE TUESDAY: When Olivia Met (and Almost Married) Jimmy
You know who almost got married? Olivia de Havilland and Jimmy Stewart. Can you imagine? But when they got to the marriage license bureau, they were intercepted by the Minister of Fabulousness, who told them it would be just too much for them to join together in wedlock. Okay that’s not actually what happened. Here’s what did. In December 1939, …
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