“Forgive me for being profound, but it’s good to be alive,” mumbles Troy Donahue to his date, Suzanne Pleshette, as Italian singer Emilio Pericoli warbles the reverberating “Al-Di-La,” in Rome Adventure (1962-Delmer Daves).  Well, forgive me for being a goof, but this girl’s fancy, (and questionable taste) finds such fare pretty irresistible as the days [...]

“…a long time ago, I made me a rule. I let people do what they want to do.” I’m always surprised how many John Wayne films I’ve never seen. Not that seeing the young man playing Singin’ Sandy warbling “A Cowboy’s Song of Fate” in Riders of Destiny (1933) is going to enlighten me much [...]

Color me green with envy after reading all those positive reports from all over about the recent TCM Classic Film Festival. While giving friends who attended the third degree to extract every droplet of vicarious enjoyment from their accounts of that long, delirious weekend in LA, one of the things that stands out in their [...]

Asking Elliot Lavine to talk about his favorite film noirs is a little like asking a parent of many different children to describe what he loves about his babies. If you are anywhere near San Francisco in the next few weeks, you may want to hightail it over to the newly remodeled Roxie Theater in [...]

Jim Thorpe, All American (1951) is a biopic that is too easily dismissed as a mass of clichés about race, sports, and the elusive nature of the American Dream for Native Americans. Some might argue that it was old fashioned, even in its day. You can’t help cringing at lines such as “Indian boy got [...]

This is an MGM Movie? In the rousing opening scene of Ride, Vaquero! (1953), a half-drunken bandido leader called José Esqueda (Anthony Quinn), announces to his ragtag, brawling followers that the Civil War has ended. The Americans, he explains, will turn their violent attentions to the Indians and gangs like theirs, moving into their territory [...]

“The director who, hands down, helped me the most was George Cukor. He didn’t just help me do better in the films he directed me in, but he helped me be me. His words stayed with me always, so he was actually directing me later when I did films with lesser directors, and everyone was [...]

Now that Spring is here, I can look back on this event with amusement as I recall Daniel Webster’s comment that there “is nothing so powerful as truth—and often nothing so strange” Ain’t it the truth?: The Real and the Imaginary Elisabeth of Bavaria (1837-1898) The Scene: My Living Room The Time: The Late Winter [...]

This is the second part of a profile of actress Helen Walker. The first part can be seen here. “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 [...]