“People say I’m a one-note actor, but the way I figure it, those other guys are just looking for that one right note.”
-Joel McCrea

I am an aficionado of wooden actors. I love them so, I ought to have splinters.  Among leading actors, Joel McCrea may be lumped in with them occasionally, but not by me. [...]

When was the last time you saw someone who could be described as debonair?
Chances are slim that the word could be aptly applied to anyone in the twenty-first century, but I hope I’m wrong about that. I think that the first time I saw a person that term might describe was as a kid. I [...]

A holiday movie, like the raised expectations of the festive season, can be burdened with some pretty extravagant hopes. Like the day itself, we always seem to hope for a cinematic experience that might transcend the reality of an enjoyable if sometimes stressful day such as Thanksgiving. This year we got lucky. After rejecting family [...]

If you are like millions of Americans, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade may be playing as video wallpaper in the background of tomorrow’s holiday hubbub in your household. In between stuffing that turkey and unsuccessfully averting your eyes from the crasser, materialistic moments of the television broadcast, it is still fun to catch sight of [...]

I suppose to the eyes of the world, we were a motley looking crew as the capacity crowd flowed eagerly into George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New York last month. Unlike the first Hollywood premiere of Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (1923) at Sid Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on October 18, 1922, there were [...]

“There is no such thing”, my friend Alan K. Rode pointed out to me, “as a bad Robert Ryan performance…”

As a culmination of a week that celebrated the versatile Robert Ryan’s contributions to film, this evening at 7:30 PM the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles will host an event with the perceptive author [...]

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of actor Robert Ryan’s birth on November 11th, 1909, the Movie Morlocks are initiating a blogathon devoted to the masterful actor, beginning today. This tribute will last through the coming week with contributions from each of the regular contributors to this blog. In addition to our words, TCM will [...]

Careening across the countryside in a gypsy wagon, a lovesick hunchback cries out piteously for release from his twisted form. A hardworking Jewish-American father tries to appease his young son on his birthday, seeking to interest him in a baseball bat rather than an expensive violin.
A tired general on the Western frontier finds a few [...]

Gladys Cooper was a bit of a snob.
Not in the usual social way that you may infer from that remark, but as a working woman she had an attitude that hers was a job, like any other, a way of making a very good living at times.  Sometimes it meant acting in The Letter, or [...]