Film author and historian Anthony Slide discusses the subjects of The Silent Feminists, the story of the American film industry’s pioneering women directors.
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Film historian Anthony Slide discusses The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, about the life and career of the world’s ‘first woman director.’
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Film historian Anthony Slide discusses his new anthology book The Truth at Twenty-Four Frames per Second. Topics range from Lillian Gish to Betty White.
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5 Nazi movies: Joseph Goebbels’ ‘Third Reich’ cinema - a crucial and extremely popular propaganda tool - promoted the White Nationalist German ethos.
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Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe joined forces on the problem-plagued The Misfits. See also: The playwright’s answer to On the Waterfront.
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Film historian Anthony Slide discusses the frenzied and once hugely popular ‘everyman’ British comedian Arthur Askey, who has finally become a biographical subject.
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Legendary Broadway actor John Barrymore also enjoyed an impressive and enduring - yet vastly undervalued - movie career in the 1920s and 1930s.
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Little Fugitive director Morris Engel was the post-WWII ‘Father of American Independent Cinema,’ inspiring John Cassavetes and the French New Wave.
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Visions of the shattered American Dream in 2 ‘Arthur Miller movies’: The subversive family dramas All My Sons and Death of a Salesman.
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Best remembered for playing the creepy Omni chairman in RoboCop, Dan O’Herlihy was a one-of-a-kind Best Actor Oscar nominee during the studio era.
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Technicolor siren Virginia Mayo was most impressive as callous black-and-white women in films like The Best Years of Our Lives + White Heat.
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Actress Sandra Dee is seen as a sweet-looking but gutsy rule-breaker in the 1959 blockbusters A Summer Place and Imitation of Life.
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In movies like the Oscar-nominated The Cardinal, actress Carol Lynley portrayed great-looking ‘girls-next-door’ who dared to defy social traditions.
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Actress Ann Sothern enjoyed an unusual second career peak that included a top Oscar winner and decades later she became one of the oldest nominees.
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As an RKO and MGM star, sassy blonde Ann Sothern had an unconventional professional trajectory: A and B movies in a decades-long film career that had no less than 2 peaks.
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In Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s ‘best bad movie,’ The Barefoot Contessa, Ava Gardner exudes a magnetic - and underrated - mix of glamour and charisma.
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Lena Horne. Lena Horne movies: Velvety-voiced singer generally relegated to specialty numbers during heyday of the Hollywood musical Had things been different, it’s anybody’s guess whether or not three-time Grammy…
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Melvyn Douglas. Melvyn Douglas: From suave leading man to Hollywood’s top female stars to first-rate dramatic actor Unlike Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, or Gary Cooper, Melvyn Douglas couldn’t exactly be…
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Hal Prince Broadway musical legend: Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber collaborator + remembering subversive cult classic.
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The Music Man with Robert Preston and Shirley Jones: Independence Day movies. Numerous Hollywood musicals have attempted to capture that elusive, reality-averse quality known as “Americana-ness” – e.g., Yankee Doodle…
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John Paul Jones with Robert Stack: 4th of July movies. Although every sign indicates that 2019 is the new 1984, those in the U.S. shouldn’t fret: TCM’s 4th of July…
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Howard Keel at the height of his career in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, with Jane Powell. In his autobiography, Only Make Believe: My Life in Show Business, Howard Keel…
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Jane Powell. Jane Powell movies: MGM actress in musicals of the 1940s & 1950s Jane Powell, the youthful star of a series of lighthearted Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer color comedy-musicals of the 1940s…
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Howard Keel musicals at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Box office roller-coaster ride. Brought to Hollywood in 1948 to star in MGM’s then popular musicals, stage performer Howard Keel seemed poised to reach major…
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Howard Keel publicity shot ca. 1950. A prominent name in Hollywood musicals in the first half of the 1950s, Howard Keel was seen – and heard – as baritone-voiced, larger-than-life…
10 examples of theocracy in movies and TV illustrate the many forms of the inescapably authoritarian communion between religion and government.
Four-time Oscar-nominated Hollywood actress Barbara Stanwyck delivered many of the 20th century’s most captivating big-screen performances.
Citizen Kane and Song of the South actress Ruth Warrick became All My Children snob Phoebe Tyler and a Confederate flag critic.
The Poseidon Adventure actress Carol Lynley should also be remembered for a landmark teen pregnancy drama and for a first-rate British thriller.
Jimmy Stewart. ‘Jimmy’ Stewart: Unlikely Hollywood star enjoyed decades-long career in a variety of genres The personification of all-American aw-shucksiness – of the sort you find only in bad movies…
Author Allan R. Ellenberger discusses Miriam Hopkins in the interview further below – and in his Hopkins biography Life and Films of a Hollywood Rebel. From pre-Code antiheroine to matronly…
Howard Keel MGM musicals: Texas Carnival publicity shot with Esther Williams. In his MGM musicals of the 1950s, Howard Keel was almost always paired with small, girl-like leading ladies –…