Production Code Articles

Ann Sheridan, "The Oomph Girl" (top); Ann Sheridan, Ronald Reagan in Sam Wood's Kings Row Ann Sheridan, the determined, humorous, sensual 1940s Warner Bros. star, is one of my favorite movie toughies. Sheridan was also a first-rate comedienne (I Was a Male War Bride) and in the right role was a capable dramatic actress (Angels with Dirty Faces — except for the hysterical scene). As [...]

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 [...]

Thomas Doherty in The Forward: "'These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence,' fumed Joseph I. Breen in a letter to the Rev. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., editor of the Jesuit weekly America. The year was 1932, and the hot-tempered Irish Catholic, lately summoned to Hollywood, Calif., by motion picture czar Will H. Hays to convert a reprobate medium, was raging [...]