There were a lot of Hollywood talents from the studio era whose names were associated with the “factory” aspects of that time:  making one film after another of varying quality, jumping from genre to genre, producing “good Hollywood fare.”  The output of these industry creatives tended to be lumped together, the good with the bad, [...]

I have a single, personal mathematical equation that applies to the entire History of Film:  Cecil B. DeMille = Butt-Aches. Moribund and overblown movies such as THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH set me fidgeting after the first quarter-hour.  A movie-loving friend summed up the director’s tastes by pointing out DeMille’s movies [...]

“Who was Frank Ryan??” I’ve been asking that question for a decade and haven’t come up with an acceptable answer. Ryan co-directed a comedy at RKO, then helmed four features at Universal.  One of the few verified facts I’ve found on him only increases the Ryan Enigma:  he died a few weeks after his 40th [...]

I’m not joking:  GODZILLA vs. THE SMOG MONSTER is a multi-layered, supremely heightened movie experience that can bless an appropriately receptive viewer with enormous gratifications by the final fade-out. However – the producer of the Godzilla series, Tomoyuki Tanaka, disagreed.  Hospitalized during the film’s production, Tanaka went virtually apoplectic when he saw the finished work, [...]

If I were using the old rule of judging a book by its cover, I shouldn’t be able to tolerate this movie. For most of the studio era, Twentieth Century-Fox generated tons of awful musicals, with listless plots, sexless dancing, and brassy orchestrations.  When Veronica Lake told Joel McCrea in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS that “musicals hurt [...]

Since I’ve worked in the Industry, some of my posts approach a movie as more than an end product:  they also look at the work culture of making a film plus the bottom-line realities of how everything up on the screen had to be paid for one way or another. That’s why I really enjoyed [...]

Director Gregory LaCava left a far greater imprint on Hollywood history than just his chef d’ouevre MY MAN GODFREY.  A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, LaCava broke into the industry as an animator.  Soon he was recruited for William Randolph Hearst’s new animation studios where he adapted the Hearst Syndicate’s comic strip Katzenjammer [...]

Under the leadership of Edward Muhl, the 1950s witnessed Universal Studios’ ascendancy from A-Notch-Above-Poverty Row grindhouse to Top Dawg moneymaker in the movie industry.  While other studios had a restrictive agenda to their films [M-G-M had its family values; Warner Brothers its social conscience; Paramount provided sophistication to the masses], Universal cut and pasted whatever [...]

I was an adolescent — and the day was cold and sunny — when I went to a Saturday matinee of Richard Brooks’ THE HAPPY ENDING. That day and that movie came back to me as I read that Jean Simmons died. I haven’t seen it since (the film might not have aged well) but [...]

On a snowy, slushy day in Chicago, gazing out the plate glass window of a Starbucks, I’m thinking of the New Jersey native who embodied all things sunny and casual:  Sandra Dee. “Ms. Dee defined a new kind of natural, sun-soaked innocence that America, and much of the rest of the world, quickly embraced as [...]

In a true case of (to quote a friend) “Hollywood Timing” I’m in Shanghai during the week when TCM is screening Orson Welles’ THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI twice. In order to heighten the pleasure of its viewing, here’s a link to an essay I wrote on this blog’s parent site, PostModern Joan.com:  THE LADY FROM [...]

Star vehicles can be a twonky trip when you know zip about the star it’s carrying.  Worshipful costuming, dramatic entrances and exits, and deifying lighting plans can help you interpret what kind of characters this actor generally plays, what fantasy audiences project upon him.  Indeed, few things illuminate Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that “the medium is [...]

I set the DVR for this morning’s cablecast of Frank Borzage’s MAN’S CASTLE, a lyrical pre-Code film that represents the American version of Jean Vigo’s L’ATALANTE in its feathered duality of lusty reality and ethereal transcendence. Early in the film, after Tracy takes in a starving and homeless Loretta Young, he brings her back to [...]

1946′s international intrigue thriller TANGIER produced at Universal — the best of the second-tier Hollywood studios — is a juicy mash-up of Warner Brothers’ CASABLANCA, with a little of 1938′s ALGIERS thrown into the mix.   There’s a chic nightclub populated with gents in white dinner jackets and uniforms of various loyalties, shady deals with [...]

“No matter when one lives in Hollywood, one brings one’s own mental furniture along.”      – Otto Friedrich,  journalist / cultural historian The final (and rarest) episode of Jacques Demy’s Lola film trilogy has made its home video debut this month.   Unlike the first two, MODEL SHOP was in English and shot in Southern California. [...]

At her excellent website Ferdy on Films, etc. Marilyn Ferdinand has called for film bloggers to list their 15 favorite dancers.   CLICK HERE TO READ MY LIST. Doug / PoMo Joan

I once went on record as saying that Frank Borzage’s Deanna Durbin vehicle HIS BUTLER’S SISTER can give you a headache.  During this Borzage-rich year (the release of the Borzage/Murnau boxed DVD set, good Borzage programming on TCM, and even finding a legitimate copy of I’VE ALWAYS LOVED YOU on VHS), I’ve decided to re-evaluate [...]

This post is part of the Robert Wise Blog-a-Thon that Josh at the Octopus Cinema blogsite is hosting during the first week of September. I’ve had a long time to think about how to articulate my admiration for Robert Wise:  I worked in the same building as Wise when I got my first temp job [...]

A few years before Hollywood’s most celebrated movie on racism and personal identity was filmed, Douglas Sirk’s IMITATION OF LIFE, M-G-M sent a stellar cast and crew to Pakistan to bring John Masters’ 1952 best-selling novel of identity politics, Bhowani Junction, to the screen. Ava Gardner plays Victoria Jones, a half-caste woman serving in the [...]

It’s time for me to  ’fess up:   until this week, I’d never seen the the original Hammer Dracula movie, the one that made Christopher Lee a star. I’d never acquired a taste for Hammer horror; Universal Studios’ three-decade output (from 1924′s HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME to 1954′s CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON) supplied all [...]

The Malaysian films of actor / singer / songwriter / orchestrator / screenwriter / director P. Ramlee are gems:  disarming, humorous, tuneful treasures needing to be discovered by Western cinephiles. On a cursory look Ramlee’s Cinema may look like Bollywood-on-a-Budget, but as the viewing unfolds what emerges is a picaresque slapstick world with a common [...]

With constant revelations of Republican politicians’ sex scandals coming at us like loads of spermatazoa in hot pursuit of an ovum, I thought it would be appropriate to write an appreciation of the best comedy ever created on American Hypocrisy and false puritanism: Richard Boleslavski’s THEODORA GOES WILD. Barely remembered today, director Boleslavski’s career managed [...]

In order to build allies as World War 2 approached, the Hollywood film industry at the request of the federal government began incorporating aspects of Latin American culture in its films: glamorizing locales such as Rio and Buenos Aires, incorporating Latin culture in costume design (such as Edith Head’s designs for Barbara Stanwyck in 1941′s [...]

The Fourth of July weekend was the epicenter of the new film releases: major studio films are timed to be released in June, July and December. Lots to choose from but, for me and a friend, the agreed-upon movie to catch during the holiday was Michael Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES. I once heard the great experimental [...]