Alfred Borden (Walter Connolly) is having a bad day. His business is in trouble; his wife, Martha (Verree Teasdale), is cheating on him with another man; his son, Tim (Tim Holt), would rather play polo than work; and his daughter, Katherine (Kathryn Adams), is in love with Mike (James Ellison), the family’s disdainful, Communist-sympathizing chauffeur.…
In 1912, infant Dorothy Hunter (Miriam Hopkins) was orphaned when her parents drowned during the sinking of the Titanic. For years, her guardian, John Connors (Henry Stephenson), has shielded the young heiress from the glare of the media spotlight–few people even know what she looks like. After she finally comes of age, Dorothy travels to New…
“I think half of this belongs to a horse somewhere out in the valley.” –Lee Marvin, upon accepting the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1965 Cat Ballou (Jane Fonda), a naive schoolteacher turned vigilante, sits in jail awaiting her execution by hanging. As a duo of singing cowboy minstrels (Nat King Cole and Stubby…
“Butch,” the loyal valet of playboy shipping heir Jonathan Blair, enters his employer’s bathroom one morning, chattering away about the bright, beautiful day. He asks Jonathan what he would like to wear, only to have the shower door fly open as a shower-capped Valentine Ransome pokes her head out and asks for a bath towel.…
“I knew the Marines could do almost anything, but I never knew they could do anything like this.” Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) has, as you can probably tell by his name, a lot to live up to. His father, “Hinky Dinky” Truesmith, was a Marine who died at the Battle of Belleau Wood…
“This is the story of two men who met in a banana republic. One of them was honest all his life except one crazy minute. The other was dishonest all his life except one crazy minute. The both had to get out of the country.” So begins the directorial debut of Preston Sturges … and…
This post is our small contribution to Project Keaton, a month-long celebration of all things Buster Keaton. Check out The Kitty Packard Pictorial for more information, and see the Project Keaton Tumblr site for contributions from other bloggers and participating writers from around the world! By the 1940s, Buster Keaton’s days as one of the…
I may be breaking some rules here by not doing a particular film, but I like the general approach. More importantly, I couldn’t choose a movie to feature and haven’t had the time (sad …) to rewatch any of them, as I would want to do before posting. Instead, I decided to just talk about…
True Classics 