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![]() Before It Takes a Thief there was To Catch a Thief, an exercise in high style, sumptuous settings and 1950s thrills, featuring the most glamorous couple in Silver Screen history. Cary Grant & Grace Kelly are über attractive as a rich heiress and a cat burglar … who was also a hero of the…
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The most glamorous couple, ever?
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![]() There’s No Business Like Show Business and there was no show business phonier than vaudeville, till movies. So an overtly phony movie about vaudeville makes for a phony convergence. It was perhaps the last of the musical extravaganzas, a calorically rich compendium of Irving Berlin’s showstoppi…
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Marilyn Monroe & Donald O'Connor: Sta...
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![]() A lavish Hitchcock treat, full of glamour, suspense and wit. The establishing scene is a virtuoso display of filmmaking all by itself, while Grace Kelly graces – there is no other word for it – the silver screen like a goddess amongst mortals.
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![]() Ava Gardner plays a moviestar inspired by Rita Hayworth and Humphrey Bogart a writer-director inspired by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in The Barefoot Contessa, Mankiewicz’s takedown of movie business amorality. A glamorous movie about showbiz mendacity, it is both brilliantly self-aware and gorgeous t…
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Classic Golden Age Scene
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![]() Dial M for Murder is lesser Hitchcock, yet worth watching for its classic tropes, timeless title and for Grace Kelly. But, the convoluted and constrained plot is insufficiently removed from its stage play roots.
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Hitch loved blond: Grace Kelly's Gold...
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![]() Marilyn Monroe didn’t want to appear in River of No Return, nor did Otto Preminger want to direct it, especially if Marilyn was to star. Studio contracts forced them into it and we’re all the better for it today. River of No Return is a fine mid-Fifties Western, with surprising Italian root…
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Marilyn sings: Let it wash over you.
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![]() The Wild One is an iconic movie better now as an iconic image and line than a motion picture experience. The image? Marlon Brando as an outlaw biker, inspiring popular culture for the next half-century. The line? Whattaya got? You don’t have to be a Jeopardy whiz to k…
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"Whattaya got?"
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![]() Elemental kid’s movie, just 40 minutes long, thy name is White Mane. It’s from France of all places, with French cowboys. Really. And wild French horses – white horses and white stallions. White Mane, the leader of a herd of wild Camargues, "was a proud and fearsome horse. All the other h…
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Wild Camargues on the run. Fabuleux!
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![]() How to Marry a Millionaire opens with a five minute bravura orchestral concert, which amazing though it is, is five minutes of men in tuxes when you’re expecting Marilyn Monroe. Then you get Lauren Bacall as the queen bee, the head girl, the model with a plan. And a luscious Marilyn. And …
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Marilyn at the premier. 'Nuff said.
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![]() John Wayne starring in an Old West fairytale based on a Louis L’Amour story endows Hondo with loads of old fashioned panache, yet saddles it with too many cliches for enduring greatness. That’s in 2D however. Having seen it years ago in 3D, I recall it as being better but still not great. It…
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The trailer hypes Hondo a bit too much.
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