Actress Ann Sothern enjoyed a belated (second) career peak: In the late 1940s, the former Maisie franchise star was seen in a cluster of A productions – admittedly, not always…
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…
American military movies: Besides depicting the Civil War, D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 feature The Birth of a Nation had the Ku Klux Klan saving heroine Lillian Gish. From ‘The Birth…
D.W. Griffith Father of Film, controversial figure. To say that the movies wouldn’t be what they are today without D.W. Griffith is probably inaccurate. I mean, someone – or “someones”…
Cuban movie posters: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Here’s something unusual: hand-silkscreened Cuban posters for Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (right), Costa-Gavras’ Z, Ernesto Daranas Serrano’s Fallen Gods, Stanley Kubrick’s…
The Whales of August with Lillian Gish, Bette Davis, Vincent Price, and Ann Sothern. According to my math, the careers of the three leading ladies – Lillian Gish, Bette Davis,…
The Fall of the House of Usher (top); John Gilbert, Eleanor Boardman in Bardelys the Magnificent (middle); Douglas Fairbanks, Lupe Velez in The Gaucho (bottom) Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert,…
‘Sold for Marriage’: Remarkably modern early silent film Though all but completely forgotten today, Christy Cabanne (at times billed as William Christy Cabanne) was a respected name in the 1910s…
Way Down East with Richard Barthelmess and Lillian Gish: Griffith Cinema. One of the movies included in Kino’s second D.W. Griffith cinema box set, Way Down East was one of…
A few recommendations for those who watch Turner Classic Movies: The beautifully photographed (and tinted) 1921 Cecil B. DeMille sex drama The Affairs of Anatol stars Wallace Reid as the…