Picture of the week:
One of my favorite movie titles is also, as Andrew Sarris has said, probably the most romantic title in pictures, and names a film directed by an Italian-American from Salt Lake City who is responsible for several of the most intensely affecting love stories ever made: Frank Borzage’s 1937 European triangle tale, HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT (available on DVD”> Starring France’s biggest American screen star, Charles Boyer, and Frank Capra’s “favorite actress,” Jean Arthur, the…
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History Is Made at Night 1937
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Stage Door 1937
Picture of the week
Which picture did Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Eve Arden and Ann Miller all appear in together? It was the funny and touching 1937 adaptation of Edna Ferber’s and George S. Kaufman’s Broadway success about a bunch of struggling actresses in a New York women’s boarding club, STAGE DOOR (available on DVD). Directed with a discreet and delicate touch by Gregory LaCava (whose Carole Lombard-William Powell classic, My Man Godfrey, had come out the previous…
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Stagecoach 1939
Picture of the week:
In mid-1968, I was out at John Wayne’s home in Newport Beach, California, preparing a filmed interview with Wayne for a documentary which the American Film Institute had asked me to make on John Ford. As the Duke was walking me back to my car, he took a shortcut, leading me through the sizeable garage. Entering, I was greeted by a virtual sea of 35mm motion picture canisters—-large, octagonal specially-built metal cases to hold the heavy…
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Vertigo 1958
1958: (Long, talky, confusing Hitchcock suspense film; with occasional moments of the old excitement, beautiful photography of San Francisco, little else.)
Added 1962: Exceptional* (One of Hitchcock’s most personal and truly exquisite achievements: a complex, tragic love story about a man whose love of an illusion is destroyed by reality --- the most striking vision of that conflict ever put on the screen. Magnificently conceived, executed with subtlety, and striking control, very well acted by James Stewart, Barbara Bel Geddes,…