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…
Two decades after burning up the screen with Jean Harlow in Red Dust (1932), Clark Gable returned to the material that had made him one of the preeminent leading men of the 1930s when he starred in Mogambo (1953). This time around, the action–shot on location and brought to life in splendid Technicolor–was moved from Indochina to…
We’re wrapping up our April of Barbara Stanwyck flicks with a look at one of my favorite pre-Codes, the 1931 drama Night Nurse, co-starring Joan Blondell and a villainous, non-mustachioed Clark Gable. Stanwyck stars as Lora Hart, an aspiring nurse who finagles a probationary training position at a hospital after meeting the chief of staff, Dr.…
Of the six films in which Jean Harlow and Clark Gable appeared together, China Seas is one of the pair’s better outings. By this time in her life, at the tender age of 24, Harlow had come into her own as an actress, demonstrating the combination of sharp-edged femininity and self-assurance that marked the final roles…
In the 1937 film Broadway Melody of 1938, a young Judy Garland sings “Dear Mr. Gable: You Made Me Love You” to a photograph of the handsome star: “Dear Mr. Gable, I am writing this to you and I hope that you will read it so you’ll know My heart beats like a hammer and…
Ladies and gentlemen, today I present to you the case of the most celebrated and vilified Southern belle to ever grace the silver screen. Now, depending upon where you fall in that camp–whether you revere the young woman in question, or cringe at the sound of her name–generally determines your opinion of the film that…
Tonight, Turner Classic Movies will show a lineup of some of director Frank Capra’s best. SET YOUR DVR. Now that I’ve gotten the warning/mild-threat-of-violence-if-you-don’t-comply out of the way … If you’ve read my introduction page (in the links to the right), you know that I consider Capra one of my five favorite film directors of…
True Classics 