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I came to this film for Kay Francis and I stayed because of Kay Francis, George Cukor, Joel McCrea, Eugene Pallette, and Lilyan Tashman. All to say, it is a supreme pleasure to watch this cast in action and already Cukor seems capable of handling the material in a way that intuitively understands t read more

“Did anyone ever tell you that you look like the Prince of Wales?” ~ Kay Francis, Chico, and Groucho. The Marx Brothers were modern comedians. Out of Groucho Marx alone, there are numerous comics spawned and basking in his incomparable shadow. When certain jokes come out you can all but read more

The title Good News means next to nothing to me but it does suggest a certain sunny disposition we tend to equate with MGM musicals of the period. That assumption is fairly well-founded. Furthermore, I am well aware of Adolph Green and Betty Comden, that screenplay dream team, an integral part of A read more

DON’T BE SURPRISED IF THE SITE LOOKS DIFFERENT IN THE UPCOMING DAYS AS I TRY TO UPDATE THE LAYOUT AND DESIGN. THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE AND UNDERSTANDING! -Tynan at 4 Star Films read more

Does this film glorify those who cheat and deceive taking advantage of others through the advances of modern science? Certainly not! Well, maybe a little but this is one of those ludicrous stories that never makes a pretense of being real life or a moral tale for that matter. It’s just a zany read more

Laurel and Hardy had better films with better gags and more iconic moments but Babes in Toyland, or The March of The Wooden Soldiers as it was also known as develops the most immersive fantastical world that they ever had the privilege of gallivanting through. It’s almost fitting that we find read more

In the Hebrew Pentateuch, the Levitical law lays out a framework of precepts quite clearly that the people were meant to follow. One iteration can be paraphrased like so: If a man marries both a woman and her mother it is perversion. There must be no wickedness among you. Doing a once over of the S read more

Luis Bunuel made a name for himself ever since his early work on Un Chien Andalou (1929) as king of the surrealist filmmakers. That and bashing the bourgeoisie. Some might be surprised in finding that Diary of a Chambermaid, adapted from the eponymous 1900 novel of Octave Mirbeau, is a fairly strai read more

The opening narration of Los Olvidados asserts that the great modern cities of the world including New York, Paris, and London all mask issues of poverty and delinquency amid their magnificent structures. This is a universal problem that plagues Mexico as well. In Los Olvidados a test case is being read more

It’s easy to infer there is an innate kinship between famed director Jean Renoir and the folks within this picture. Certainly, he was no peasant, by any means related to those found in Millet’s The Gleaners. However, like his painterly father Auguste Renoir (a figure I always find mysel read more

If Bunuel’s well-remembered adaptation of this material is considerably darker and biting as his pictures always seem to be, then Jean Renoir’s version is fittingly consistent with his own sentiments and oeuvre. Celestine, as played by the ever precocious Paulette Goddard, looks to be read more

The Woman on the Beach is ripe with subject matter that feels akin to Jean Renoir as much as any Hollywood picture possibly could be. Since the beach, in his specific case, initially evokes not the California coasts but the shores that might have so easily cropped up in the paintings of his renowne read more

May 25th, 1945. That’s when The Clock was originally released. To save you doing all the mental calculations V-E Day was on Tuesday, May 8th and the folks at home were ready for the war to be over. So in such an environment, this is hardly a war film and it can’t even claim to be a post read more

Here is a good old-fashioned American musical that acts as an homage to the vaudevillian circuit that saw many performers realize their talents including many future Hollywood icons. At the core is a musical dream team in Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. Behind the camera is the much revered Busby Berk read more

The opening shots of The Strawberry Blonde are not unlike Easter gatherings at my family’s house. Croquet in the backyard…well, that’s about it. But that’s precisely the distinction that’s being made as Raoul Walsh develops a dichotomy between two societies on either s read more

Herein is a slightly off-kilter serial killer mystery-thriller and an early American film in the career of German emigre Douglas Sirk. Of course, the action is actually set in England. It’s a film that builds a paranoid framework like The Lodger (1944), I Wake Up Screaming (1941) or other lik read more

Douglas Sirk films almost by design seem to always revolve around the most uncomfortable thematic ideas that you can think of and whether that is Sirk’s own wry sense of irony or more so the material that was provided him, there’s always something to be gleaned from what he does. With e read more

This is the type of film that when the inevitable happens and a character mentions the title phrase a swell of angels voices begin to murmur and in one sense Magnificent Obsession is a sentimental even spiritual endeavor wrapped up in a soapy melodramatic morality tale. But the key is that if you k read more

It’s the curse of a childhood watching too many reruns of Get Smart but I can’t seem to get Don Adam’s impersonation of Ronald Colman out of my head while watching The Prisoner of Zenda. There are worse curses to be stricken with though I suppose. This classic adaptation of Anthon read more

There’s a moment in the film that can’t help but draw us back to Genesis where Joseph (of technicolor dream coat fame) has risen in the ranks of Egypt and finds himself with the lives of his brothers in the palm of his hands. He’s able to toy with them while also blessing them imm read more