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Loretta Young must own a pair of the most luminous eyes in the history of Hollywood, and in black and white, she’s incandescent. More important than that, she’s one of the great sympathetic heroines of Classic Hollywood. In The Accused, she plays both a woman in danger and a working prof read more

The Unsuspected has a delicious opening dripping with a foreboding chiaroscuro atmosphere. It’s the dead of night. There’s a woman on the telephone tucked away in a back room. The familiar face of Audrey Totter picks up on the other end of the line. She’s out enjoying herself at a read more

The Chase opens as a wonderful contrivance of noir done up in a couple of successive visuals. A bedraggled man (Robert Cummings) stares through a shop window at a griddle laden with fresh bacon and hot cakes. He leans in so his hat brim mashes up against the glass, and proceeds to cinch up his belt read more

“No Ma. They ain’t my people. To tell the truth, I don’t know who’s my people. Maybe I don’t got any.” – Elvis as Pacer Burton If I may be so bold The Flaming Star feels like an inflection point in Elvis Presley’s film career. It comes at a time where read more

It might be on the nose, but Elvis Presley doing a call and response rendition of “Crawfish” from his balcony with the lady vendor (jazz singer Kitty White) on the street below places us instantly in the movie’s milieu. We’re in the French Quarter of New Orleans, a place bles read more

Harry Dean Stanton, aka Lucky, feels like a bastion of a bygone era at the center of this story. The world around him still has the flavor of the West, though it has modernized. He is planted in a tradition reminiscent of The Misfits or Hud. Of course, he costarred with the likes of Paul Newman in C read more

The Straight Story is based on the real-life journey of one Alvin Straight to visit his brother, who suffered a stroke. What makes it extraordinary is that he lived hundreds of miles away, and Straight made the journey on his John Deere lawn mower, going about 5 mph! The material doesn’t immed read more

Fred Zinnemann had one of his first Hollywood successes with the daring Seventh Cross. Since he was Austrian and lost family to the concentration camps, the personal nature of the material is unquestionable. He takes the novel by fellow Austrian emigre Anna Seghers and packs the story full with a we read more

Although I would probably choose 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, a movie also penned by Dalton Trumbo and featuring Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson, there are numerous reasons to search out A Guy Named Joe. This was Van Johnson’s first starring role, allowing him to craft a stage presence that would only read more

Keeper of The Flame strikes me as good ol’ fashioned Hollywood storytelling. It’s conveyed through a fatal opening car crash and a flashing montage of newspapers spelling the death of that great American institution, Robert Forrest. We’re hooked immediately as the story keeps on ro read more

The great thing about The Big Three — Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd — and all the great silent clowns, is how they engender a kind of audience identification with profoundly comic results. Because each had their own unique persona that remained constant throughout all the trials and tribulation read more

It feels necessary to begin with a prelude to The Gold Rush. I came to a realization I’ve only ever seen Charlie Chaplin’s updated version from 1942 with a new sound introduction and soundtrack. In some ways, watching the original feels like seeing a new film. It was the first Chaplin fe read more

Jerry Schatzberg took his career as a fashion photographer and integrated it into a splintering portrait of a model based partially on his experiences with real-life inspiration Anne St. Marie. Like Blow-Up it is a film about the image, but in this case the visuals often play against disembodied voi read more

I remember my dad telling a story about the first time he saw Jaws back in 1975, now 50 years ago. He was on a road trip visiting a childhood friend in the Midwest, and though he had spent all his life in California, he was grateful to be in a place that was landlocked when the movie came out.  If read more

“The Cast and Crew of Star Trek wish to dedicate this film to the men and women of the spaceship Challenger whose courageous spirit shall live to the 23rd century and beyond…” The opening remarks of The Voyage Home honoring the “courageous spirit” of those lost on The C read more

If I had to take a stab at the age-old distinction, I would differentiate Star Trek and Star Wars like so.  Star Wars was a sci-fi Fairy tale and became something more. Star Trek began as a sci-fi allegory on TV and became something more. In a word: beloved. The Wrath of Khan opens with a scenario read more

To my mind, Marty is the only movie adapted from TV to win an Oscar and certainly to get as much publicity as it did. During the surge of the Golden Age of Television, Paddy Chayefsky was king and Marty became a pinnacle of what could be accomplished by a writer with a singular voice. It’s a t read more

It Should Happen to You was the brainchild of screenwriter Garson Kanin and director George Cukor with Judy Holliday as their lead. As such it’s easy to cast the movie in the same lineage of Adam’s Rib (1949) and Born Yesterday (1950). Except in this movie, there’s also a featured read more

It was my pleasure to see Mickey 17 and it was because I was in the company of new friends. The film itself comes with complex feelings.  Bong Joon Ho joins forces with Robert Pattinson for a story that defies easy categorization. It’s full of a myriad of ideas in line with the South Korean read more

Any chance I get to champion Ivan Dixon, I do my best because he’s such a groundbreaking individual who rarely gets the credit he’s due. Ostensibly, he’s known for playing Kinch on Hogan’s Heroes, a part that was pioneering and ahead of its time, if mostly a thankless role. I read more