Motherhood and the movies have often made for boffo box office returns. My glowing memories of those warm-hearted, endearingly fluttery, or nobly self-sacrificing mothers played by Spring Byington, Mary Astor, Fay Bainter and Barbara Stanwyck and others in classic movies may have fogged my vision of celluloid motherhood a bit.
The Silver Cord (1933), a 77 [...]

Last year, in part because of the celebrations surrounding the films of 1939, I had a chance to introduce Gone With the Wind to younger viewers in my family who had never seen the film. It’s not a favorite movie of mine, so I could understand their appalled reactions to the innate racism of the [...]

Captured! (1933-Roy Del Ruth) is a Warner Brothers film that was advertised in overheated ad copy of the time as a “cavalcade of human passions in the maelstrom of mankind’s great adventure”. This little known pre-code movie never reaches those hyperbolic proportions, and has largely been forgotten, but, despite its strengths and flaws, I suspect [...]

Moonrise (1948), which has its TCM premiere this evening, Feb. 3rd, at 10pm EST, is a film that is as hard to categorize neatly as the rest of the movies in director Frank Borzage’s long career. Despite the fact that many movie buffs might associate Borzage with a gauzy, passé sentimentality in classic silent films [...]

In the days since Jean Simmons‘ death at age 80 on January 22nd, many appreciative comments have been written in the press. In honor of Jean Simmons, Turner Classic Movies has scheduled an evening of three of her best movies this Friday, January 29th, 2010. The scheduled films are as follows (all times shown are [...]

My dictionary gives the definition of a cri de coeur (krēt kër′) as “a cry from the heart, an impassioned protest, complaint, etc.” If you really want to see that term translated onto film, the Warner Brothers movie, Two Seconds (1932) could fill the bill.
Crude, raw and disturbing, Two Seconds (1932) is being broadcast on [...]

Film fans always talk about The Omen or The Bad Seed as if the characters that those kids played were truly disturbing children. Poppycock, I say.

So what if Damien’s presence on earth was a sign of the coming apocalypse and if Rhoda Penmark’s blond sweetness masked a murderous soul? 1940s child star Margaret O’Brien could [...]

When I realized that both Method Acting and the Shadows of Russia were being explored on Monday and Wednesday nights respectively for the next few weeks on TCM, all I could think was:
“Why, oh, why, isn’t character actor Vladimir Sokoloff around to sit down with Robert Osborne for a chin wag on these two fascinating [...]

Imagine yourself hopscotching through time in Hollywood at the holiday season in the 1930s and 1940s. Chances are, if you are a just a visitor, a civilian with little interest in show biz, or even one of the hoi polloi, eking out a pretty fair living as one of the worker bees in the film [...]