[10] William Wyler’s portrait of an English family weathering the darkest hours of World War II is a moving drama about hope and persistence. There’s a quiet strength and noble resolve about the characters in this movie that I find utterly disarming. Wyler shows admirable restraint in the direction and storytelling, sidestepping any opportunity to sensationalize the material. One of the greatest scenes in the …
[10] Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film and only one to win a Best Picture Oscar is Rebecca, starring Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, and Judith Anderson. Based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier, the film follows a nervous woman (Fontaine) who catches the eye of a wealthy widower (Olivier). After they marry, she is taken to his ancestral mansion, Manderley, where the icy cold head …
[9] Somewhere along the way, Hollywood forgot how to make good romantic comedies. Because there are plenty of them to be found in the ’30s and ’40s, with Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night being chief among them. Claudette Colbert plays a rich gal running away from what is essentially an arranged marriage. After she bumps into a reporter played by Clark Gable on a …
[9] The grand-daddy of ‘anti-war’ war movies is Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the first non-musical ‘talkie’ to win the best picture Academy Award. The film is stylistically way ahead of its time, with sweeping camera movement, realistic (non-theatrical) acting, deep layers of action in the photography, and sophisticated action choreography — all of which you just don’t see in most other …
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