1938

[10] Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant give marvelous slapstick performances in Howard Hawks’ farcical masterpiece, Bringing Up Baby. This is my favorite screwball comedy of them all. The mismatched characters are forced into couple-hood through their shared adventures trying to recapture Hepburn’s lost pet leopard. Matters are complicated when another leopard escapes from the local zoo and the two animals get mixed up. By the …

[9] On a train ride through Europe, a young woman (Margaret Lockwood) discovers a fellow passenger (Dame May Whitty) has gone missing. No one remembers seeing the old woman, not even the people who shared a cabin with them. A rogue musicologist (Michael Redgrave) is sympathetic to Lockwood’s dilemma, and together they uncover a conspiracy behind the woman’s disappearance. But will they be able to …

[8] Spencer Tracy won his second (consecutive) Academy Award for his portrayal of Father Flanagan, a man who firmly believed “there are no bad boys.” In the movie and in real life, Flanagan built an educational refuge for homeless and delinquent boys to prove his theory, and the facility still operates today. Mickey Rooney plays the toughest of Flanagan’s kids, a boy whose defiance and …

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