Category Archives: Uncategorized

The 1941 version of “Charley’s Aunt,” directed by Archie Mayo, stars Jack Benny as a student from Oxford who dresses up in drag to help two schoolmates.  The fellow students need a chaperone so they can woo their sweethearts and … Continue reading →

I love seeing Betty Grable in those great color 20th Century-Fox musicals from the 1940’s.  Although she sings a few songs in Preston Sturges’ “The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend,” a 1949 sendup of westerns, we mostly see her as … Continue reading →

“The Sterile Cuckoo,” an Alan Pakula film from 1969 starring Liza Minnelli as Pookie Adams, highlights the romantic relationship between two freshman college students in upstate New York.  Almost an orphan — her father travels all the time and can’t … Continue reading →

William Wyler directed “How to Steal a Million” in 1966, which turned out to be both a fabulous caper movie and a wonderful romantic comedy.  Audrey Hepburn plays Nicole Bonnet, the daughter of Charles Bonnet, a successful art forger in … Continue reading →

I like to watch movies about artists because Hollywood and the world cinema does these films much better than films about food.  Painters and sculptors work in a visual medium, and film is visual.  Food can look good, it’s true, … Continue reading →

A documentary made in 1992, “Visions of Light,” describes several different styles of cinematography, including film noir, color films and other innovative examples.  A number of noted cinematographers, including Sven Nykquist,  Lazlo Kovaks, John Bailey, Lisa Rinzler and Conrad L. … Continue reading →

Having done my master’s thesis in writing school on the films of Billy Wilder, I know what inspired him to make “The Emperor Waltz” in 1948.  Wilder’s admiration of Ernst Lubitsch and memories of the lost Europe of his youth … Continue reading →

Soviet cinema produced some innovative and great movies, including “Battleship Potemkin” in 1925, and “A Man With a Camera,”  in 1929.  “The Childhood of Maxim Gorky,” made in 1938, does not break any new ground, but the poignant story of Gorky’s … Continue reading →

I watched a 1960 caper movie the other day called “The Day They Robbed the Bank of England.”  The “they” in the title includes a gang representing the Irish Republican Army and their American hired help, played by actor Aldo … Continue reading →

Although Vittorio De Sica — the acclaimed director of “Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves)” in 1948, and a master of Italian neorealist cinema — directed “Woman Times Seven (1967),” I watched it because I wanted to see Shirley MacLaine play … Continue reading →