Joan Crawford: Ambitious, driven Movie Star. Joan Crawford movies on TCM: Underrated actress, top star in several of her greatest roles If there was ever a professional who was utterly, completely, wholeheartedly dedicated to her craft, Joan Crawford was it. Ambitious, driven, talented, smart, obsessive, calculating, she had whatever it […]

Clark Gable, Loretta Young, The Call of the Wild Judy Lewis, out-of-wedlock daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable, died of cancer on Friday, Nov. 25, at a retirement home in the Philadelphia suburb of Gladwyne. She was 76. Young, who was an ardent Catholic, and Gable, then married to […]

Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night It is a very rare thing when a light-hearted comedy, something that is quintessentially the stuff of a “good movie,” breaches into that territory where the term “good film” can also be applied, but Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), adapted […]

Edward G. Robinson in Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar Turner Classic Movies' Moguls & Movie Stars, A History of Hollywood continues this evening with “Brother, Can You Spare a Dream?” which takes us to the beginning of the talkie era and the Great Depression. That was the time when most studios […]

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz in James Mangold's action comedy-thriller Knight and Day Aug. 26 '10 update: Tom Cruise's vehicle Knight and Day was labeled a “belly-up flop” in the United States because it opened in late June with $20.1 million on its initial weekend (the spy caper had been […]

Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer in Ernst Lubitsch's The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (top); Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, second husband Martin Arrouge (bottom) Norma Shearer may not be a household name today, but back in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s all the way to the early 1940s, Shearer's […]

“… Far and away the biggest-grossing movie with a female as its sole main player, which is certainly a challenge to conventional Hollywood assumptions (men can star alone, while women need a co-star of either sex).” That's Sandra Bullock in the 2009 football drama The Blind Side, right? Wrong. Film […]

Clark Gable has his “Summer Under the Stars” day on Wednesday, Aug. 12. Turner Classic Movies will present thirteen of the actor's films, all of which have been shown before. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure what a rare Clark Gable movie would be, unless one includes […]

“Hollywood's Greatest Year: The Best Picture Nominees of 1939” is the title of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' summer series, which kicks off next Monday, May 18, with a big-screen presentation of Gone with the Wind. “Hollywood's Greatest Year” will showcase all of the best picture nominees […]

Among the special events at the 2009 Atlanta Film Festival, which runs April 16-25, is “Gone With the Wind: A 70th Anniversary Celebration,” with the presence of Turner Classic Movie's host and film historian Robert Osborne, Baltimore Sun critic Michael Sragow, and author/critic Molly Haskell. On Saturday, April 18, at […]

Sexual abuse family drama Precious with Gabourey Sidibe: Rare Sundance double winner. Adapted by Geoffrey Fletcher from the novel Push by Sapphire (a.k.a. Ramona Lofton), Lee Daniels' sexual abuse family drama Precious (initially known as Push) stars Brooklyn-born newcomer Gabourey Sidibe as Claireece Precious Jones, a Harlem adolescent who has consistently suffered psychological and sexual abuse at […]

LOVE IS A MUCH-FRUSTRATING THING By Marcus Tucker of Shadow Waltz With the advent of new technology comes experimentation. When sound arrived in Hollywood, films became stagebound because of the crippling limitations of the primitive equipment. But by the time MGM's film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's 1928 Pulitzer-winning play Strange […]