Author Archives: John Grant

After seeing last year’s “My Week With Marilyn,” I wanted to screen  the “The Prince and the Showgirl,” made in 1957 and starring Marilyn Monroe and Lawrence Olivier.  My Week With Marilyn makes it seem like Monroe sabotaged The Prince and … Continue reading →

Part 2 of the so-called Huggett’s Trilogy, “Vote for Huggett,” came out in 1949 and features Jack Warner as Joe Huggett.  Huggett  runs for the city council elections in Streatham, London, on a platform that proposes building a war memorial … Continue reading →

“The Horse’s Mouth,” directed by Ronald Neame in 1958, stars Alec Guinness as Gully Jimson, a pushy and determined artist who plays con games to achieve his artistic vision.  The movie begins as Jimson leaves a prison after spending a … Continue reading →

The great Carole Lombard’s career ended too soon, but she left some magical and incomparable performances for us to see.  She played characters with the perfect combination of awareness, beauty and trustworthiness in the turbulent depression and gangster era of the 1930’s … Continue reading →

Norma Shearer made “The Divorcee” in 1930, a movie that explores what happens when men and women live by the same rules.  Shearer plays Jerry, a rich socialite who falls madly in love with Ted Martin (Chester Morris) and marries … Continue reading →

“Street Scene,” basically a filmed play from 1931, features a rather static camera trained on the front steps of a tenement apartment building as neighbors interact with each other for gossip, dreams and news of the day.  The numerous characters include a … Continue reading →

“Ivan the Terrible, Part 2,” from 1958, follows the career of Ivan as he continues to unify Russia despite interference from the boyars (noblemen).  Ivan’s repressive efforts against the boyars leads to intrigue involving Prince Vladimir, Ivan’s nephew and the … Continue reading →

Director Sergei Eisenstein’s 1944 masterpiece “Ivan the Terrible, Part 1,” presents a strong but brooding protagonist as Ivan, who unifies feuding principalities in Russia’s 16th century to fight the Kazans, Germans and other enemies.  But as Czar Ivan struggles to … Continue reading →