“It all went wrong, and I don’t know why. That’s what I want to know–why!”

In 1949, twenty-eight year old British actress Deborah Kerr starred opposite screen veteran Spencer Tracy in Edward, My Son. Though Kerr had already won critical acclaim for a handful of popular films in her native England–among them I See a Dark Stranger (1946) and Black Narcissus (1947)–Edward was only her third American film, and in my mind, presented the young actress with…

Feminist Fridays: The Women of The Maltese Falcon

Chapter Three of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is titled, appropriately enough, “Three Women.” It opens with Sam Spade chastising his exhausted secretary, Effie Perine, for allowing Iva Archer, his dead partner’s widow, into the office. Spade is impatient with the woman–his secret lover–and extricates himself from her clutches as soon as possible. He later…

“I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.”

As part of our week-long celebration of the 70th anniversary of The Maltese Falcon (1941), today we are taking a look at the third and final film version of Dashiell Hammett’s pulp crime novel. For a brief introduction to this movie, check out our post on Falcon from last year. For a more in-depth synopsis of the film’s plot, we recommend…

“I was saved by a flying wild man in a loincloth!”

1999 marked a turning point for the Walt Disney Animation Studios in more ways than one. It was the ten-year anniversary of the release of The Little Mermaid, which had heralded the company’s veritable rebirth in the subsequent decade. It saw the release of Toy Story 2, the third critically-acclaimed film produced in a lucrative…