Top Five Movie Screamers

Top Ten Movie Screamers: 10 to 6

5 – Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960)
I don’t recall myself recoiling in horror while watching Janet Leigh’s shower scene in Psycho, but I do recall quite vividly one night long ago when I was showering at an acquaintance’s place and imagined myself facing the same fate as Leigh’s unlucky bank teller. So, I guess that sequence did leave a lasting impression on me. (Needless to say, I was out of that acquaintance’s shower stall and all dried up in a matter of seconds.)

4 – Fay Wray in King Kong (1933), Doctor X (1932), and The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)
Fay Wray has to be here. To her belongs the title of [...]

Festival of Preservation 2009: Joan Bennett, Michael Redgrave, William Powell, Fay Wray, William Desmond Taylor

Tonight at 7:30 pm at UCLA’s Festival of Preservation you’ll be able to catch a screening of Fritz Lang’s unfairly neglected Secret Beyond the Door (above), a 1947 noirish psychological melodrama starring Joan Bennett as woman married to Michael Redgrave, whom she suspects is out to kill her (possibly for her money).
Unlike Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) and George Cukor’s similarly themed Gaslight (1944), Secret Beyond the Door boasts a highly stylized Gothic feel that makes the viewer feel just as off-kilter as both the heroine and the hero. Stanley Cortez, who also shot Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons, was the cinematographer.
Tomorrow, Sunday, April 5, at 7pm, the Festival of Preservation will feature two rarities from the 1910s: Lena Rivers, a [...]

Best Films – 1934

Norma Shearer in The Barretts of Wimpole Street
FILM
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
d: Sidney Franklin; scr: Ernest Vajda, Claudine West, Donald Ogden Stewart
The Count of Monte Cristo
d: Rowland V. Lee; scr: Philip Dunne, Dan Totheroh, Rowland V. Lee
The Gay Divorcee
d: Mark Sandrich; scr: George Marion Jr., Dorothy Yost, Edward Kaufman
Hide-out
d: W. S. Van Dyke; scr: Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich
The Merry Widow
d: Ernst Lubitsch; scr: Samson Raphaelson, Ernest Vajda
 

Fredric March, Evelyn Venable in Death Takes a Holiday
CHECK THESE OUT
Broadway Bill
d: Frank Capra; scr: Robert Riskin
Death Takes a Holiday
d: Mitchell Leisen; scr: Maxwell Anderson, Gladys Lehman
Gold
d: Karl Hartl; scr: Rolf E. Vanloo
Here Comes the Navy
d: Lloyd Bacon; scr: Earl Baldwin, Ben Markson
Maskerade / Masquerade in Vienna
d: Willi Forst; scr: [...]

Fay Wray

Fay Wray, best remembered as King Kong’s highly vocal love interest in the 1933 interspecies-romance classic, died in New York City on August 8, 2004. She would have turned 97 on September 15.
Besides King Kong (1933), directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, the Canadian-born Wray (Sept. 15, 1907, in Cardston, Alberta) also screamed and/or fainted in several other motion pictures of the 1930s, including Schoedsack and Irving Pichel’s first-rate thriller The Most Dangerous Game / The Hounds of Zaroff (1932), opposite Joel McCrea and mad hunter Leslie Banks, and a couple of two-strip Technicolor horror films directed by Michael Curtiz, Doctor X (1932) and The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), both starring Lionel Atwill. [...]