Certain movies are like the dinosaurs: it’s hard believing they existed and realizing they did. I don’t use this analogy disparagingly, more as a means of emphasizing how special Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow truly is. In our cinematic landscape where turning 35 is practically the end of one’s career, a movie about two elderly…
You don’t often find noir that is just plain bad. Noir has a formula and conventions, and not every testing of that formula yields gold but it’s hard to get coal outright. Where Danger Lives contains a polished pedigree with Robert Mitchum and Claude Rains, even B-list actress Faith Domergue isn’t awful, but Charles Bennett’s…
Summer comes to a close and that means TCM (and I) start gearing up for the fall. I know I sound like a broken record, but where did the year go? September is my birthday month and since I’m the birthday girl I’m giving you twelve titles to watch with me this month on TCM!…
Summer is winding down, the kids are going back to school. You could say that, for those who enjoy the summertime, the circus is leaving town. But that’s no reason to get morose because TCM has the best theme month of the year (in my opinion) in August: Summer Under the Stars! In this special…
After Babes in Arms’ (1939) rampant success MGM thought, “Hey, those crazy kids have something special.” The eventual follow-up, Strike Up the Band sees Mickey and Judy go bigger with a larger budget and runtime. Mickey and Judy move out of the barn and into the world of small-town America with a script that ironically lampoons…
Originally published January 28th, 2015 Second-wave feminism (you’ve already stopped reading, haven’t you?) wouldn’t crop up for another couple of years, but that’s not to say Hollywood wasn’t doing its part showing women were sick, tired, and unwilling to take it anymore! Okay, maybe things weren’t that militant, but director Norman Jewison (who went on to…
Van Johnson week closes – or lies dormant until his Summer Under the Stars day – with his role in a remake of a popular Jimmy Stewart Christmas classic! A turn-of-the-century remake set in America of The Shop Around the Corner (1940), In the Good Old Summertime is an effectively charming film that, in many regards,…
