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It’s an alarming cold open. Allison Courtland (Claudette Colbert) wakes up on a train to Boston with a gun in her purse and no recollection of how she got there. It drives her into a fit of hysterics that riles up the whole train, though a fellow passenger (Queenie Smith) attempts to steady h read more

Kings Row is apparently a good place to live. The billboard in town says as much. It’s the goings-on in the community that tells a different story — providing a conflicting more subversive view of small-town America. The story starts out with 5 children. It feels like we hardly get to read more

From a corny title comes a  wonderfully corny opening complete with Tony Randall playing the opening notes of the 20th-Century theme and reading off a few cue cards to introduce the film. What follows is much in the same vein. I sense this is all the doing of Frank Tashlin — the man who found read more

We enter a newsroom that feels like it could be ripped out of His Girl Friday (1940). The editor is lining up his copy for the following day with a big front-page spread on the renowned millionaire Jonathan Reynolds (Charles Laughton). They just need him to die and they can print it. Of course, at read more

The Universal dream team of Deanna Durbin, producer Joe Pasternak, and director Henry Koster are back at it again in this follow up to the wildly popular comedy that propelled Durbin to international stardom. The Craig sisters are back too and this one begins with a unique and rather hilarious openi read more

Here is a comedy born of a certain time and age when they made such trifles. It’s the kind of plot where you can read it off in a single sentence but it’s further cushioned by cutesy moments and musical asides. Where growing girls say “Mummy” and “Daddy,” always read more

Bob Hope was one of the 20th centuries greatest personalities but sometimes his pictures weren’t always up to par. The most obvious exceptions would be the majority of the Road pictures with Bing Crosby, The Paleface films with Jane Russell, and this fun addition pairing our beloved funnyman read more

I’ll lay my cards right on the table. I’ve never been a huge fan of Robert Montgomery. He just doesn’t have a charisma or a delivery that I much care for so as far as carrying a whole picture I’m not quite sold. Still, with Here Comes Mr. Jordan, it all seems to work and it& read more

When I was watching the film I distinctly remember one instance I threw my head back in the air and just smiled to myself. How I love Douglas Sirk. He gives us something seemingly so superficial and decadent that plays so perfectly into those expectations and simultaneously steamrolls them with a read more

With the name Douglas Sirk, Technicolor opulence no doubt springs to mind but his black and white pictures are no less diverting and still extremely attractive to look at with photography once more courtesy of longtime collaborator Russell Metty. The cinematography is crisp monochrome filmed in vol read more

Douglas Sirk’s films are always lovely to look at, almost to the point of making you sick. The panoramas swell with color. They’re too perfect. The sets are gaudy — the cars the same — to the point of almost being unsightly in their over the top artificiality. Try to find read more

The film begins with that old storytelling standard, Once upon a time in sunny California…and it’s raining outside. Not a minute has gone by and the tone of the picture has already been set with this opening taste of irony. It unravels on a smaller, less grandiose scale than other Sirk read more

  It’s summertime and the living is easy. It makes me think of sultry summer days and cool summer nights and George Gershwin. But summertime also means travel. It did for my family when we were growing up as kids and it took us to many places near and far off. That’s what this film read more

The people making the decisions, at least some of them, undoubtedly knew that this title implied some sort of sordid melodrama, a Douglas Sirk picture anyone? And yet I do admit despite the emptiness in the title, there’s some truth to its implications. Hollywood often is this gaudy, outrageo read more

Here is a Cary Grant and Myrna Loy vehicle that makes a comedy out of the morning drudgery and cramped quarters of domesticated life in that pearl of a city, New York. It’s a satire of the All-American Dream with the wry commentary of Melvyn Douglas guiding us through the raucous adventure. H read more

The opening gambit is wonderful. It’s marvelous. You can’t blame me if I get a little…Well, anyways if you thought that squeaky-clean Doris Day could never turn up in a film noir you were gravely mistaken. In this particular case, a jovial gas station attendant has her blaring lou read more

In the recent days, I gained a new appreciation of June Allyson as a screen talent and in her own way she pulls off Jo March quite well though it’s needlessly difficult to begin comparing her with Katharine Hepburn or Winona Ryder. Meanwhile, Mervyn LeRoy was a capable director of many quality films read more

I still remember visiting Louisa May Alcott’s home in Massachusetts and of course, my sister read her magnum opus innumerable times when we were younger but for some reason, maybe it was a fear of what the title suggested, I still never cracked it open during my childhood. But I’ve alwa read more

“The more you know about women the less you know about women.” It’s the story of my life and also a marvelous entry point for this film because it really is a throwaway line. It’s referred to several times thenceforward but really means nothing more. Anyways, if we came to th read more

The Three Musketeers is a luscious Technicolor swashbuckler done in the fashion of the luxuriant Hollywood costume dramas of the time as we are no doubt accustomed to seeing. Fittingly, they’re also easily subject to classic stereotypes. It’s positively bloated with top-tier talent and read more