Pedro Almodóvar’s brazenly subversive ‘gay film noir’ Bad Education is one of the most daring exemplars of the genre. Gael García Bernal stars.
5 Nazi movies: Joseph Goebbels’ ‘Third Reich’ cinema - a crucial and extremely popular propaganda tool - promoted the White Nationalist German ethos.
10 examples of theocracy in movies and TV illustrate the many forms of the inescapably authoritarian communion between religion and government.
Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe joined forces on the problem-plagued The Misfits. See also: The playwright’s answer to On the Waterfront.
Legendary Broadway actor John Barrymore also enjoyed an impressive, rewarding and enduring - yet vastly undervalued - movie career in the 1920s and 1930s.
Work-driven, four-time Oscar-nominated Hollywood actress Barbara Stanwyck delivered many of the 20th century’s most charismatic big-screen performances.
Little Fugitive director Morris Engel was the post-WWII ‘Father of American Independent Cinema,’ inspiring John Cassavetes and the French New Wave.
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.
Citizen Kane + Song of the South actress Ruth Warrick became All My Children’s snob Phoebe Tyler and a Confederate flag critic.
Technicolor siren Virginia Mayo was most impressive as callous black-and-white women in films like The Best Years of Our Lives + White Heat.
In many of her films, actress Carol Lynley (The Cardinal, etc. ) played ravishing girl-next-door types who were willing and able to break social conventions.
The Poseidon Adventure actress Carol Lynley starred in landmark teen pregnancy drama Blue Denim + thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing.
Actress Ann Sothern enjoyed an unusual second career peak that included a double Academy Award winner. Decades later, ‘Maisie’ became 1 of oldest Oscar nominees.
Ava Gardner The Barefoot Contessa: 1950s Hollywood star’s underrated mix of glamour and charisma in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s ‘best bad movie.’
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…
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…
Hal Prince. Out of his record-setting 21 Tony Awards, eight were as Best Director of a Musical for the following: Cabaret (at the 1967 ceremony), Company (1971), Follies (1972, with…
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…
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…
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…
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 –…
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…
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…
Lillian Gish: The Birth of a Nation actress enmeshed in Bowling Green University controversy. Should Lillian Gish be labeled a racist because at age 21 she had one of the…
Machiko Kyo. Japanese star Machiko Kyo was seen in several of the most widely admired cinema classics of the 1950s, including Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s…
Author Anthony Slide discusses the frenzied and once hugely popular British comedian Arthur Askey, who has finally become the subject of a full-fledged biography.
Arthur Miller movies: Visions of the shattered American Dream in the ‘subversive’ family dramas All My Sons and Death of a Salesman.
In the hits A Summer Place and Imitation of LIfe, actress Sandra Dee embodied the wholesome but tormented ‘all-American Girl.’
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.
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…
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…
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…