Flicker Alley debuts two brand-new restorations this week with the DVD/Blu-ray combo release of Too Late for Tears (1949) and Woman on the Run (1950). Public domain victims whose copies have proliferated on YouTube and other sites, Flicker Alley shows why, at least in the case of Woman on the Run, what an assured thriller…
The 1960s have come represent a decade in turmoil, and that’s true. With Vietnam, political and racial unrest, it doesn’t appear too far removed from our current times; but in the heart of the sixties, Beatlemania took over and defined the decade. A Hard Day’s Night was the Beatles’ first movie (they would come to do five),…
Out of all the on-screen teams the studio system created, none endures as strongly as the teaming of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The two made nine films together, and had a strong romantic relationship off-screen, and nearly every film they made is magic distilled in some form. Their first pairing put them would set…
The 1950s is easily the decade where the Western thrived. Captured in expansive CinemaScope, the Wild West never looked wilder. But with so many cowpokes roaming the range it was only a matter of time before the range turned in on itself. The year before he took teen rebellion to the mainstream with Rebel Without…
Natalie Wood was like looking at the sun. Just staring at her in photographs the luminosity burns out of her. Her daughter Natasha has described her as tough when necessary, but always present and loving. It’s often easy to overshadow Wood’s life and career in the wake of her tragic death at the age of…
Oft-considered one of the greatest film noirs ever made, John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle is a story about the perils of city life…with the added bonus of a jewel heist. John Huston’s story is a dark and twisty tale that isn’t so much about law and order, but the crimes people commit against each other. Newly…
In honor of Maureen O’Hara’s birthday I’m joined by mother/daughter duo Colleen and Nora Fiore as we run down our top three favorite O’Hara films.
By 1946 actor Humphrey Bogart fit into the role of detective Philip Marlowe so perfectly it might as well have been his favorite pair of shoes. Though this was Bogie’s own time playing the detective, The Big Sleep was simply a culmination of his past films coming together in perfect unison. He’d played another famous…
Despite the ingrained conventions of film noir some films can leave you surprised. So it is with director Phil Karlson’s Kansas City Confidential. What starts as a typical heist film becomes a story of duplicity between good guys and bad about the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell to spare others. Filled with a…
The liminal threshold between the 1950s and 1960s seems as distinct as to be a literal crevasse between the two decades, and the clearest divide comes through in the cinema separating the two eras. Narrative styles, definitions of romance, and gender weren’t just changing and reforming for the new era, but the old guard of…
Forgive me for the delay of this month’s TCM Top 10. I was celebrating my birthday this weekend and time got away from me. TCM has a stacked September that will hopefully cushion the sting of anticipating Halloween. I tried to pick from all the network’s themes, including another foray into the Treasures of the…
It’s a love affair – on screen – as guest William Bibbiani talks with me about Cary Grant’s 1957 romantic drama An Affair to Remember.
