C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) works on the lower rungs of an insurance company in New York City. He’s ambitious, but miserable–miserable because he has agreed to loan his apartment to various executives in the company to conduct extramarital affairs, forcing him to spend his nights waiting for the temporary “tenants” to vacate his premises. One…
Today, it just feels appropriate to borrow a quote from one of the funniest screenwriters of all time, the great Preston Sturges. His 1941 opus Sullivan’s Travels, from which the title of this post derives, remains one of the best comedies of all time–incisive, witty, keenly observational, and filled with moments of rolling-on-the-floor hilarity. We…
The legendary blonde bombshell, Marilyn Monroe, has for some time been a mystery to me. The handful of movies that I’ve seen of hers have left me unimpressed. While unarguably beautiful, she always seems to play an unintelligent, gold-digger type, which is unappealing to me (personally, I’ve always been more of a Katharine Hepburn fan: I…
“It’s a conspiracy, I tell you. The minute you start, they put you on the all-American sucker list. You start out to build a home and wind up in the poorhouse. And if it can happen to me, what about the guys who aren’t making $15,000 a year? The ones who want a home of…
McLintock! (1963) is my favorite John Wayne movie. Not being a big fan of Westerns in general, this hardly may be great praise, but perhaps it is. It is on my short list of “westerns worth watching.” I love the humor, the banter, and the playfulness of this movie. My grandmother loved Westerns, and she…
Before High Anxiety, Mel Brooks starred in and directed Silent Movie (1976). The ultimate silent movie, it’s a silent film about creating a silent film. Aided by his two loyal associates, Dom Bell (Dom DeLuise) and Marty Eggs (Marty Feldman), Mel Funn (Mel Brooks) takes a silent film script to Hollywood, where he was once revered.…
Last year, Brandie found a cheap collection of random classic musicals (mainly from the 1940s) and gave it to Carrie as part of her Christmas present. Though the collection features a number of well-known classic Hollywood stars, most of the films are relatively obscure, and the prints are admittedly not the best quality (considering all…
Charles (Clifton Webb) and Arthur (Edmund Gwenn) are an unlikely-named pair of angels who are sent down to earth to fetch a young soul named Item (Gigi Perreau). Item has been hanging around the home of the Boltons, Jeff (Robert Cummings) and Lydia (Joan Bennett), for seven years, waiting to be born. But the show-biz…
True Classics 