Welcome to BlogHub: the Best in Veteran and Emerging Classic Movie Blogs
You can rate and share your favorite classic movie posts here.
You can rate and share your favorite classic movie posts here.
Black Widow (1987, Bob Rafelson)
The Stop Button Posted by on Nov 26, 2012
Black Widow is an odd film. Ronald Bass’s script starts being about Debra Winger as a Justice Department analyst who can’t get her male colleagues to take her seriously when she discovers a woman (Theresa Russell) killing her rich husbands. The film never discusses Russell’s motiv read more
Planet of Dinosaurs (1977, James K. Shea)
The Stop Button Posted by on Nov 23, 2012
Where does one even start with Planet of Dinosaurs? The only good thing about the film is some of the scenery… and maybe some of the music from Kelly Lammers and John O’Verlin. Most of the music is quite bad, but the film’s “theme” is this electronic piece and it adds both a sense of danger read more
The Most Dangerous Game (1932, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel)
The Stop Button Posted by on Nov 12, 2012
Running about an hour, The Most Dangerous Game shouldn’t be boring. But it somehow manages. Worse, the boring stuff comes at the end; directors Schoedsack and Pichel drag out the conclusion with a false ending or two. The film doesn’t have much to recommend it. That laborious ending wip read more
The Ghost Ship (1943, Mark Robson)
The Stop Button Posted by on Nov 9, 2012
Although the title suggests otherwise, The Ghost Ship is not a supernatural thriller. It is, however, a very effective suspense picture. Russell Wade (in a sturdy lead performance) is a new officer. On his first ship out, he begins to suspect the captain–Richard Dix, who steadily gets creepie read more
Slumber Party ’57 (1976, William A. Levey)
The Stop Button Posted by on Nov 7, 2012
I think Slumber Party ’57 is supposed to be a titillating sex comedy but the lame jokes invalidate the latter and the exploitative misogynistic creepiness hopefully nullifies the former. Before getting to the acting, I do want to mention director Levey’s transitions. At times, it’ read more
She Done Him Wrong (1933, Lowell Sherman)
The Stop Button Posted by on Nov 2, 2012
With her cane and big goofy hat, it’s hard not to think of Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera when Mae West breaks out into her first song in She Done Him Wrong. While West wrote the film’s source, a play, it seems like the film would play better as a silent. Her acting “style” doesn’t lend read more
Mademoiselle Fifi (1944, Robert Wise)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 31, 2012
Mademoiselle Fifi is split down the center, roughly, into two parts. The first involves Simone Simon on the trip to her hometown. The second is when she reaches the town. The film takes place in occupied France during the Franco-Prussian War, but it opens with a title card presenting it as an analo read more
Men of the Sky (1942, B. Reeves Eason)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 30, 2012
Men of the Sky opens with General Henry H. Arnold addressing a graduating class of air cadets. Charles P. Boyle’s Technicolor photography is glorious and Harold McKernon’s editing is outstanding and Sky feels like an almost too precious time capsule. Only then the realism shatters when read more
North by Northwest (1959, Alfred Hitchcock)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 26, 2012
North by Northwest seems a little like a Technicolor version of an early Hollywood Hitchcock–the regular man combating the bad guys against incredible odds (at an American monument no less), but it’s a lot more. The film’s a tightly constructed proto-blockbuster; there’s not read more
High Road to China (1983, Brian G. Hutton)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 25, 2012
Upon hearing John Barry’s beautiful opening titles music, I realized it was unlikely High Road to China would live up to its score. It does not. It does, however, at times, come rather close. The film takes place in the twenties, with Bess Armstrong as a flapper who hires WWI veteran Tom Sell read more
Lassiter (1984, Robert Young)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 24, 2012
Lassiter suffers from a definite lack of charisma. Not from leading man Tom Selleck, who looks a tad too tall to be a jewel thief, but from his leading ladies, Jane Seymour and Lauren Hutton. Seymour plays the girlfriend, which should give Lassiter an edge–if Seymour and Selleck had any chemi read more
Penguin Pool Murder (1932, George Archainbaud)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 22, 2012
Penguin Pool Murder, besides the peculiar title (and lack of a definite article), opens like almost any other early thirties mystery. A possible unfaithful wife, Mae Clarke, has a swindling louse of a husband, Guy Usher. When he ends up dead, there are multiple suspects. Only the murder occurs at t read more
My Dear Miss Aldrich (1937, George B. Seitz)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 17, 2012
All My Dear Miss Aldrich is missing is a good script. Well, it’s missing some other things, but with a good script, it could have survived. The film has a lot of events in the first thirty or forty minutes, with the remaining minutes centered on a mystery. But it’s not really a mystery because Aldr read more
How to Be a Detective (1936, Felix E. Feist)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 11, 2012
How to Be a Detective is a disjointed Robert Benchley miniature. He sets it up as a lecture on detecting practices and director Feist (and Benchley and his co-writers) miss the jokes. Towards the end, Feist mimics detective movie filmmaking techniques, which gives the short a boost, but it’s read more
Miss Pinkerton (1932, Lloyd Bacon)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 10, 2012
It’s not difficult to assign blame for Miss Pinkerton‘s failings, it’s difficult to identify anything good about it. I suppose Joan Blondell bad in the lead, but she isn’t good. She’s just doing a persona. Wait, George Brent is good. He’s the police inspector wh read more
One Wet Night (1924, William Watson)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 9, 2012
One Wet Night is profoundly unfunny. It’s not terrible or anything, just not funny. It even might deserve points for having the idiot butler be a white guy (Bert Roach). But Roach is the butler to two more idiots, a couple played by Alice Howell and Neely Edwards. Wet is a great example why u read more
The Spiral Staircase (1945, Robert Siodmak)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 8, 2012
The Spiral Staircase opens with this lovely homage to silent cinema. Director Siodmak takes great care with the setting in time–Nicholas Musuraca’s sumptuous cinematography helps–and then Spiral becomes a waiting game. Certainly if Siodmak took such great care with one sequence, h read more
The Hobbit (1966, Gene Deitch)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 4, 2012
Director Deitch does a couple brilliant things with The Hobbit. First, he condenses a novel of some three hundred pages to eleven minutes. I’m fairly sure it’s not a faithful adaptation, but there’s a wizard, a hobbit and a ring so it’s fine by me. Second, he turns The Hobbi read more
Our Lady of the Sphere (1972, Larry Jordan)
The Stop Button Posted by on Oct 2, 2012
Our Lady of the Sphere has two definite narratives. Jordan’s cut-up animation seemingly defies narrative, as eggs are landing on the moon, which then grows flowers, but I found two definite ones. The first has to do with a falling child. Jordan opens Sphere with the child falling, later showi read more
Monkey Business (1931, Norman Z. McLeod)
The Stop Button Posted by on Sep 28, 2012
It takes about seventeen minutes for Monkey Business to start. The first seventeen minutes are the Brothers running around a cruise ship, on the run from the ship’s officers. In those seventeen minutes–about a fifth of the picture–they manage to get in a number of gags, including read more