Many of director Alfred Hitchcock’s films take place in a single setting, restricting the movement of the characters to a central locale. Movies such as Lifeboat (1944), Rope (1948), and Rear Window and Dial M for Murder (both 1954) are claustrophobic and unnerving, filled to the brim with tension and unbearable suspense. The characters cannot get away from one another, and…
In the early 1940s, two different film versions of Patrick Hamilton’s play Angel Street were produced. The first version was released in 1940 and titled Gaslight. The second version of this film, which kept the same title, was released just four years later. Although both films were based on the same play and follow…
(This post was originally published on the sadly now-defunct site The Cinementals.) After the phenomenal success of Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), cartoonist Winsor McCay realized that he had found his passion in animation, and he was eager to create even more films. But his animated output was limited at the demand of his employer, publishing…
As many classic movie fans are likely aware, our television Lord and Master, Turner Classic Movies (in conjunction with Fathom and Warner Bros.) is following up this past spring’s successful nationwide theater screenings of Casablanca (1942) with a one-night-only showing of the incomparable 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain, which will be released in a special sixtieth-anniversary edition Blu-ray on July…
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…
History will remember him as a wise country sheriff and a charming country lawyer. But as wonderful as he was filling those roles, Andy Griffith was so much more than that. Before he passed away this morning, Griffith built a six-decade career on the persona of a good ol’ country boy sharing down-home wit and…
For this week’s entry in the Maudlin Mondays series, I chose to watch the 1952 film Invitation, mainly because of its star, Dorothy McGuire, who plays the role of Ellen Pierce. A few days ago, I watched The Enchanted Cottage, also starring McGuire. In The Enchanted Cottage, she plays a kind, plain-looking young woman who falls in love; in Invitation, she…
Another month has come and gone–a good month, all things considered (despite the drama that went down in the middle of June concerning a self-important, unnamed movie blog organization … bygones). And we have even more good stuff on tap for July! First, if you visit the site regularly, you may have noticed a change…
True Classics 