[5] I’m at a loss for this one. I saw the movie, but I’m still not sure what it’s about. There’s a town that sabotages drivers, all so the community can trade auto parts among themselves and hand the drivers (the ones who live) over to a doctor for medical experimentation. The town’s adults live in fear of their own children, a punkish lot that …
[7] Barbara Stanwyck’s a card shark and Henry Fonda’s a naive millionaire. They meet and fall in love aboard an Atlantic cruise in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, a romantic comedy made tolerable with its sizzling sexual teasing and moderate slapstick humor. Stanwyck is great in her multi-faceted role. She starts the film as a deceptive villain, but turns into a very sympathetic character when …
[6] Henry Fonda is caught between a beleaguered WWII cargo crew and their vindictive captain in this oddly cheerful, lightweight drama directed by John Ford and Mervyn Leroy. James Cagney hams it up as the nutcase captain while William Powell makes a graceful big screen exit as the ship’s doctor. Jack Lemmon won the first of his two Oscars for his supporting role as an …
[7] Formulaic romantic comedies don’t usually fly with me, but when you place a genuine, sincere element into the formula, an element like Paul Hogan, it sometimes doesn’t matter how old the story is. And I have to credit Hogan and his fellow screenwriters for writing a central love relationship that doesn’t belabor itself. The characters don’t have to talk a lot for us to …
[7] It’s surprising Errol Flynn didn’t make more screwball comedies, because he’s completely at home in this ‘who’s duping who’ comedy, outrunning the guard dogs, shaking hands with people in side-by-side moving cars, and carrying on romantic telephone conversations with two women simultaneously. In Four’s a Crowd, he’s teamed with his regular leading lady Olivia de Havilland, as well as Rosalind Russell (in a newspaper …
[7] The Muppets have my blessing to reinterpret any piece of literature they want (except maybe Naked Lunch). It’s fun to see which characters are played by which Muppets, and all my favorites are featured in The Muppet Christmas Carol, from heckling critics Statler & Waldorf to gruff Sam Eagle. Michael Caine gives a faithful performance as Scrooge, and a lot of Dickens’ exact lines …
[6] This movie version of Irving Berlin’s musical is chintzy fun kept afloat by cartoonish performances from leads Betty Hutton and Howard Keel. Watching the movie at this end of the feminist movement can be frustrating. While Annie Oakley is presented as a strong, brutish character, she ultimately stifles herself to win the love of Frank Butler (Keel). The film is also considered racist for …
[5] Claude Rains is gold in all his scenes as the god-like Mr. Jordan, but I find the movie’s playfully fatalistic view of love and self-purpose too saccharine to swallow. Robert Montgomery is also good as the deceased boxer who, due to heavenly oversight, gets the opportunity to rejoin the living by possessing the bodies of freshly dead strangers. The film was nominated for several …
[7] Ryan Gosling stars as Lars, a young man who begins seriously dating a life-size doll. His friends and family are instructed by a doctor to go along with it until they can figure out why he has engaged in this suspicious behavior. I love these types of movies — the ones that take ludicrous concepts, and then treat them very seriously. This is a …
[5] Jean Harlow plays such a nasty little character in Red-Headed Woman, sleeping her way to the top of the workforce while ending marriages left and right. She’s so cold and calculating, I almost wish the movie would have been like most others of its kind and punished the slut for her wicked ways. But this time, the slut gets away with it all. I …
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