moirafinnie
They say that Moira was "born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad"?...no, no, maybe that description is best left to Rafael Sabatini and his characters. Actually, Moira's checkered past includes a stint as a silversmith, caterer, scribe for a government agency, technical and creative writer, corporate instructor, and trail guide through the financial woods in this topsy turvy world.

Needless, to say, all this experience has sometimes led to a profound affection for the glorious escapism of the films of the classic studio era. The beauty of a well-lit black and white scene as it flickers and glows while telling a tale of human beings without any noticeable special effects makes her heart sing.

If you'd like to read more of her musings and continue to explore the abiding power of engaging classic movies with others, you are welcome to join her here:
The Silver Screen Oasis (website)
Skeins of Thought (blog)
Posts by moirafinnie

“No wonder so many actors are out of work,…considering all the lousy scripts the agents hand you…with such big build-ups. They’re nearly all tripe. The dialogue is all the same. Everything’s been done before. I’ve read 15 or 20 scripts in the last three weeks and only one was any good.” –Helen Walker, in one [...]

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Normally, blogs that commemorate a “deathiversary” of a person are anathema to me.  Still, when I stumbled across the fact earlier this month that March 10th marked the day that actress Helen Walker died in 1968 at age 47, my attention was drawn to her story. I’ve always been beguiled by the indelible impressions she [...]

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Tyrone Power introduces the first of three stories told in the film The Rising of the Moon (1957) with the wry comment that “This is a story about nothing, or perhaps about everything.” For the director John Ford, this roughly 84 minute black and white movie, made in Ireland, which he did for free and [...]

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*Spoilers Abound Below* Ernest Hemingway may have loathed most of the translations of his own stories to film, and sometimes with good reason. Happy endings were tacked on to many of his stories. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) a conflicted hero lived, despite a touch of systemic septicemia, a gangrenous leg, and a heckuva [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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