The Greatest Show on Earth (review)
It’s got baby gorillas, dogs riding horses, and Jimmy Stewart as a clown. Man, The Greatest Show on Earth is one fun flick.
drama
An American in Paris (review)
As if there was any doubt that An American in Paris was nothing but an excuse for some fabulous singing and dancing, the film wraps up with a spectacular 18-minute ballet sequence. It’s got only the vaguest connection to plot or character, but it’s a gorgeous piece of filmmaking.
All About Eve (review)
From the snarky opening scene, I knew I was gonna love All About Eve. Written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, this is perhaps the first film with an attitude we today would call modern.
All the King’s Men (review)
Goodness me, this movie could not have been more prophetic had Nostradamus himself written it. All the King’s Men, based on Robert Penn Warren’s novel, is the story of Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), a nobody from an unnamed state who rises from the mud of the backcountry to become governor. Along the way, there’s a succession of broads and dead bodies, the use of intoxicating substances and the bribing of state troopers. And finally, oh yeah, impeachment.
Hamlet (review)
Olivier’s take on Shakespeare’s story of madness and murder most foul is unmistakably a filmic one — with its monologues recast as internal thoughts heard in hushed voiceovers and use of dizzying camerawork to show Hamlet’s inner turmoil, this could never have worked on stage. The emotional desolation of Elsinore’s inhabitants is conveyed with a roving camera that swoops down on characters plotting or moping in huge, empty halls.
Gentleman’s Agreement (review)
Gentleman’s Agreement proves that The Lost Weekend of two years earlier wasn’t an aberration — Hollywood in the 40s, while not abandoning sheer entertainment (though often with solemn underlying themes), began exploring serious social problems in an upfront manner. Gentleman’s Agreement may be a trifle too earnest at times, but it’s obvious that screenwriter Moss Hart and director Elia Kazan felt strongly about their subject.
The Best Years of Our Lives movie review: as the world war turns
In postwar 1946, three soldiers are coming home to their small midwestern city. Air Force Captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), a soda jerk before the war, returns to the railyard slums of his parents; Army Sergeant Al Stephenson (Frederic March), VP of a small bank, has a lovely wife (Myrna Loy) and two perfect children waiting for him in their luxury apartment; Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), a Navy grunt and a kid from a middle-class family, has lost both his hands and hides himself away in his parents’ house.
The Lost Weekend (review)
American cinema took a sudden, gritty turn with director Billy Wilder’s terrifying The Lost Weekend. Whereas earlier films kept some distance from their subjects, Weekend zooms in and puts one man’s obsession under a microscope.
Casablanca (review)
I’d never seen Casablanca before — sure, bits and pieces here and there while channel surfing, but not as much as I thought I’d seen. And watching it at last was like a revelation. This is the ultimate movie. This is the purpose for which Hollywood invented itself. This is how good a film can be.
Mrs. Miniver (review)
Mrs. Miniver is a strikingly unsentimental account of the theft of England’s innocence in the early days of WWII. Kay and Clem Miniver (Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon) head up a stalwart middle-class family in the small town of Belham. It is the summer of 1939, and village life plods along as idyllically as it always has.
