My third post for the ongoing romantic films countdown at Wonders in the Dark is live. At number five, it’s F.W. Murnau’s lovely and deceptively simple silent allegory Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927): Out of context, the idea of ranking a film in which a man is seduced into plotting to kill his wife as one…
“I never told you I was anything but what I am. You just wanted to imagine I was.” That claim, uttered by Jane Greer as the devious Kathie Moffat in director Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, is not entirely true. The character is an exercise in self-construction, spending much of the film behind an array of…
My second post for the ongoing romantic films countdown at Wonders in the Dark is up now. At number 32, it’s Frank Capra’s seminal sexy screwball classic, It Happened One Night (1934). Night has been cited as one of the founding pictures of the screwball genre, and indeed, many of the elements that would come to define…
It’s been a difficult week for film fans. First, we lost the immensely talented Robin Williams. And yesterday, we learned that the iconic, lovely Lauren Bacall has passed away at the age of 89. She was a model who parlayed arresting good looks and no short amount of talent into a storied career that lasted for more than…
Our friends at Wonders in the Dark are currently hosting their annual film countdown. This year, it’s all about the romance, with a wide selection of talented writers posting articles on the top one hundred romantic films as voted by the site’s contributors. This week, it’s my turn, with the first of my four pieces going live…
In 1956, UPA released the final of four cartoons featuring Dr. Seuss’s adorably strange, noise-making little boy, Gerald McBoing-Boing. This last cartoon in the series deviates from the typical McBoing-Boing short in one important way: the creative, sometimes nonsensical rhyming meter of the previous Gerald entries is gone, replaced by a straightforward narrative. And while I find myself…
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907-1940 Victoria Wilson Release Date: November 12, 2013 Simon & Schuster Hardcover, 1044 pages The word “exhaustive” gets thrown around quite a bit when talking about biographies. But never has that term been more aptly used than when referring to Victoria Wilson’s stunning recent biography of film legend Barbara Stanwyck.…
On June 9, 1934, the Walt Disney animation studios released The Wise Little Hen, a Silly Symphony adapted from a classic fairy tale. As with most of the Silly Symphonies, the cartoon did not feature any of Disney’s stock recurring characters, such as the already-legendary Mickey Mouse. But one member of Hen’s supporting cast–a petulant, musical, sailor suit-clad duck–would…
True Classics 