[9] Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell headline this quintessential screwball comedy from director Howard Hawks (Bringing Up Baby, Ball of Fire). His Girl Friday is based on a stage play and a previous film adaptation (The Front Page) about a newspaper editor (Grant) who’ll stop at nothing to keep his ex-wife and ace reporter (Russell) from quitting the newspaper business… and their marriage. The pressure …
[10] Those ruby slippers have lost no luster in the 80-plus years since the original release of The Wizard of Oz, a film that pretty much defines ‘timeless classic’. In the L. Frank Baum story, a spoiled farm girl named Dorothy (Judy Garland) is whisked away in a tornado to the magical land of Oz, where a good witch (Billie Burke) sends her down the …
[10] Directed by George Stevens and inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Gunga Din is the story of three indomitable British soldiers who find themselves at the center of a battle against the bloodthirsty Thuggee cult. Captured and enslaved with an aspiring water boy (the title character), the men endanger their lives to thwart an ambush of the British army coming to rescue them. Gunga Din …
[9] John Ford’s masterpiece is still a thoroughly entertaining ride. A handful of disparate personalities, including John Wayne as the notorious Ringo Kid, take their chances traveling through Apache territory. Along the way, friends and enemies are made, a baby is born, a seemingly doomed romance blooms, and not everyone makes it to their destination alive.
[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 …
[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 …
[10] Fritz Lang directed and Thea von Harbou scripted this grandfather of science-fiction films about violent class warfare in a futuristic city. The hero of Metropolis is Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), a privileged playboy who enjoys a life of luxury until a chance encounter with the beautiful Maria (Brigitte Helm) brings him to discover the city’s entire working class is living in the harsh underground to …
[9] Silent-screen star Buster Keaton plays a train engineer who gets rejected by the Confederate army because his job is too important to leave vacant. But he gets his chance to serve the South when Union soldiers steal his beloved locomotive, ‘The General,’ with his girlfriend (Marion Mack) onboard. The General is non-stop comedy and excitement as Keaton single-handedly pursues the kidnappers, rescues his train …
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