A Night At The Opera
Say what you will about the Marx Brothers but there is no denying their immeasurable impact on comedy. Their film with director Leo McCarey, Duck Soup (1933), is a masterpiece… Read more »
Say what you will about the Marx Brothers but there is no denying their immeasurable impact on comedy. Their film with director Leo McCarey, Duck Soup (1933), is a masterpiece… Read more »
Preston Sturges’ screenplay adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s 1930 stage play The Good Fairy follows the exploits of Luisa Ginglebusher (Margaret Sullavan) after she is discharged from an orphanage to work… Read more »
Rasputin & The Empress (1932) was something of a coup for MGM. It’s the only film to feature all three of the Barrymores; John, Ethel and Lionel. Each of them… Read more »
Dorothy Arzner’s pre-code classic Merrily We Go To Hell (1932) is more of the zeitgeist now than it was back when it was first released. A home video package of… Read more »
The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) is one of Ernst Lubitsch’s most important pre-code operetta films because it marks the beginning of his collaboration with Miriam Hopkins. While Hopkins is very good… Read more »
Four Frightened People (1934) is an underrated entry in director Cecil B. DeMille’s filmography. It may lack the scope and grandeur of The King Of Kings (1927) or Cleopatra (1934)… Read more »
Midnight (1939) is the first of three films written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett that Mitchell Leisen directed. Midnight is a screwball comedy of mistaken identities that in the… Read more »
History remembers Alexander Nevsky (1938) as the film Sergei Eisenstein made at the behest of Stalin. A commissioned work always seems to be looked down upon in Western terms of… Read more »
For many Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) is lesser Ernst Lubitsch. Sure Lubitsch and star Claudette Colbert could never top the “Jazz Up Your Lingerie” sequence in The Smiling Lieutenant (1931),… Read more »
There are few things as fierce as Marlene Dietrich in our culture. The persona Dietrich created and Josef von Sternberg curated in the cinema is the stuff of legends. Entire… Read more »