The first Patricia Highsmith novel to be adapted to film was the author’s first book, published in 1950,  STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, which Alfred Hitchcock made into a movie the next year. Yet, with the exception of U.S. television which adapted some of Highsmith’s stories for the small screen (The Talented Mr. Ripley for Studio [...]

Despite a long and prolific career, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is more famous for being the son of the silent era superstar Douglas Fairbanks Sr., his Hollywood social connections (including ex-wife Joan Crawford) and a handful of films in which he’s overshadowed by his co-stars (Greta Garbo in A Woman of Affairs [1928], Edward G. Robinson [...]

This month on Turner Classic Movies a number of unheralded and lesser known films that deserve some attention are being aired along with a few personal favorites that I never get tired of watching again like GIRL CRAZY (1943) starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. The date to mention though is Tuesday, June 8th, in [...]

He was the man behind such soft core sleazefests as Girls for Rent (1974), The Naughty Stewardesses (1975) and Cinderella 2000 (1977). He was also the schockmeister responsible for exploitation classics such as Satan’s Sadists (1969), Five Bloody Graves (1970) and the seriously deranged Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971). He would be the last person you’d [...]

On screen in A CRY IN THE NIGHT (1956), he played the tormenter and she was his victim but offscreen the 38-year-old actor and the 17-year-old ingenue became close friends and possibly more during the shooting.   (The film will air on TCM on Monday, June 14th at 8 pm ET as part of our “Star of the [...]

After purposely avoiding it for years due to its terrible reputation, my curiosity finally got the best of me when TCM aired TENTACLES (1977), following the stupefying ZAAT (1972) on Friday May 7th, and I finally watched it from start to finish. One of several ill-conceived and pathetic attempts to cash in on the boxoffice [...]

Meet Gojko Mitic, DEFA’s all-purpose Native American from Yugoslavia.          

Now that the dust has settled from last weekend’s TCM Film Festival in Hollywood, I wanted to post a few final images from the event – a mixture of archival and live captures – that didn’t make it into our blog coverage as well as a few posts that didn’t make the deadline. Foremost among [...]