Films

Big box office does not make a classic. Only time can do that. Although this adaptation of Reginald Rose’s pioneering TV drama barely broke even on its initial release, its critical reputation has grown over the years thanks to an intelligent script by Rose and a dozen indelible performances under the guidance of Sidney Lumet,…

Shooting on location is nothing out of the ordinary today, but when The African Queen went into production in 1951 the idea of sending major stars to someplace as remote as the Belgian Congo was still a novelty. Director John Huston had already done it by shooting The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) in…

A new genre became the rage when a jet liner filled with stars like Dean Martin, Jacqueline Bisset, Helen Hayes, and Van Heflin took off with one unwelcome item on board: a bomb. Disasters were nothing new to Hollywood, which had made films about everything from the sinking of the Titanic to the Johnstown Flood….

Would we still be talking about All About Eve today if it had starred Claudette Colbert as an aging stage star whose life is invaded by fan-turned-rival Jeanne Crain? Certainly, their presence wouldn’t have dimmed the luster of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s script, one of the best and wittiest ever to hit the screen. Nor would…

How do you make a highly fanciful version of history seem believable? For this adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s award-winning play, having a literate script and a superb cast helped tremendously. Another plus was the work of Oscar-winning art directors Patrizia von Brandenstein and Karel Černy, who built convincing 18th century interiors in Prague’s Barrandov Studios…

Where were you 50 years ago? If you were lucky, you were in a movie theater discovering a hot new director named George Lucas. While working on his first feature, the dystopian science fiction thriller THX 1138 (1971), Lucas was challenged by producer Francis Ford Coppola to come up with a more mainstream film. Drawing…

Casting Barbara Stanwyck as Snow White may seem an odd notion. But when Howard Hawks enlisted her in one of the last screwball comedies released before the U.S. entered World War II and things got serious, he created a hit that brought her the second of her four Oscar nominations. Of course, with Hawks directing…

She wears a bat suit in the wrestling ring but switches to a bikini when she’s fighting crime. Ads hailed her as “an untamable woman with a heart of steel and a sculptural body.” She’s Gloria (Maura Monti), one of the world’s richest women, who fights crime as the Batwoman when she’s not reigning as…

Since the mid-‘50s, independent studio American International Pictures (AIP) had specialized in movies for the drive-in market, which mostly consisted of teenagers. Juvenile delinquent dramas and horror films were among their specialties, and many of them included musical numbers. When writer and future producer Lou Rusoff decided to mix the two genres and play it…

Although not the first Italian neorealist film, director Vittorio De Sica’s masterpiece was one of the key films in the style’s international acceptance. Shot on the streets of Rome with a largely unprofessional cast, it captures the teeming life of the city and the sense that the story on screen is just one of millions…

Although not the first picture in which old friends meet to reminisce about their collective pasts, Lawrence Kasdan’s second film as director was one of the most effective at capturing the spirit of a generation. By 1983, the baby boomers who had rebelled against the Vietnam War and tried to redefine politics and morality were…

They’ve been called the original odd couple. The portly, pompous Oliver Hardy and the gangly, guileless Stan Laurel were the perfect blend of opposites. They were unique among comedy teams in that neither was the straight man; they were both comics living in their own little world, a perpetual folie à deux. Hardy was already…

Though the Westerns was far from his favorite genre, director Robert Wise broke through with one that he always claimed was his “first big feature.” He only directed two other Westerns in his distinguished career, which may account for the fact that rather than being a paean to the wide-open spaces, Blood on the Moon…

MGM knew how to inspire audiences, as TCM fans are well aware. Eighty-five years ago, the studio did such a good job presenting a fictionalized history of Boys Town, the Nebraska home for underprivileged young men founded by Father Edward Flanagan, it not only motivated one young actor in the film to become a minister,…

MGM knew what they were doing when they forced Elizabeth Taylor to make this loose adaptation of John O’Hara’s novel about a call girl who falls in love. At the time, Taylor was the queen of the scandal sheets after she allegedly “stole” Eddie Fisher from his wife, Debbie Reynolds. With one film left on…

Sixty years ago, Ann-Margret became a star while singing the title tune for this adaptation of the Broadway hit, flirting with the camera—a stand-in for Presley-esque rock star Conrad Birdie—and electrifying her audience. With much more to offer than mere sex appeal, she was the rare performer who knew how to build a character through…

Dorothy Dandridge blazed trails for actresses of color with a deeply felt performance that made her the first Black woman to be nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. The role of an independent, assertive woman of color was so daring in 1950s America that she almost backed out of the film before production started. Only…

Timing is everything. Casablanca was more than just one of the supreme achievements of the Hollywood studio system. Like many great films, it was the result of a series of lucky breaks. The script for Murray Burnett and Joan Alison’s unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick’s arrived at the Warner Bros. story department December 8,…

We might not be celebrating the Warner Bros. centennial this year were it not for the star that helped put the studio on the map during the silent era. It wasn’t John Barrymore, Irene Rich, or any other two-legged performer. It was a German shepherd born on a World War I battlefield in France and…

From John Garfield in the 1930s to James Dean and Marlon Brando in the 1950s, rebels have long ruled at the box office. With protests against the Vietnam War and racial injustice in the 1960s, they became particularly popular, and 1967 was a watershed year. Warren Beatty turned Depression-era outlaw Clyde Barrow into an anti-establishment…

Jazz and murder provide a potent mixture in this long-neglected B murder mystery about trumpeter Noah Beery, Jr.,’s attempts to clear himself and an old war buddy of a murder charge. The film’s atmosphere is uniquely enhanced by its music, with an innovative jazz score and rare screen appearances by the great saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and bassist Oscar Pettiford—as…

Even with three features under her belt, including her arthouse breakthrough, Hester Street (1975), director Joan Micklin Silver had trouble securing funding for this adaptation of Susan Sandler’s play about a young Jewish woman torn between the culturally upscale world where she works and her roots on the Lower East Side. It wasn’t until she…

In Pittsburgh, Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was advertised as “The Picture That Makes Frankenstein a Bedtime Story!” Such ballyhoo must have been music to the ears of Paramount studio head Adolph Zukor, who had put the production into motion in hopes of repeating the success of Universal’s Frankenstein and…

When director Elia Kazan realized Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift were too old to play the brothers in his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, he went looking for new talent. Boy, did he find it! In his first starring role (and the only one of his major films released during his lifetime), James…

Fifty years ago, the martial arts film entered the U.S. mainstream with the success of this high-octane action thriller. Bruce Lee stars as a martial artist and intelligence agent who infiltrates a tournament on crime lord Han’s forbidden island. His goal isn’t just to win. He wants to destroy Han’s criminal empire and avenge his…

Even with the passage of 50 years, two sequels, two prequels, a TV series, and numerous rip-offs, this adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel remains one of the most unsettling horror films ever made. The tale of a movie star’s daughter possessed by a demon created a national furor. There were reports of audience members…

Ninety years ago, audiences flocked to stay at the “Honeymoon Hotel” before meeting “Shanghai Lil” “By a Waterfall” in the third of Warner Bros.’ great Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. Earlier in 1933, 42nd Street had revived the film musical, thanks largely to Berkeley’s imaginative dance routines and the teaming of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. Gold…

Seventy years ago, The Rank Organisation wasn’t really interested in producing comedies. When Great Britain’s premier comedy studio, Ealing, turned down William Rose’s script for this road-racing romp, however, director Henry Cornelius took it to Rank, which allowed them to proceed on a dismally small budget. Shooting entirely on location and with no money for…

Do you ever have the feeling you’ve seen this movie before? In this case, that’s entirely appropriate, as Harold Ramis’s hilarious time-loop tale—often credited with introducing fantasy elements into popular comedy—is all about a man who, day after day after day, keeps trying to get his perfect Hollywood ending. Bill Murray stars as cynical TV…

In 1988, John Waters—the sultan of sleaze famous for transgressive films like Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974)—presented his most shocking film ever: a PG-rated comedy. There are still some off-the-wall moments in Hairspray, as when a rat runs over the leading lady’s foot during a love scene, but on the whole the film…

James Stewart had to wrestle with reality to win the role of Elwood P. Dowd in the film version of Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Universal had bought the rights early on for a then-record $1 million but was barred from starting production until the hit show closed, which wouldn’t happen until five years after…

This film opens in Hell’s reception area, where social dragon Florence Bates extols her many virtues before being sent to the fiery pit. It’s a deliciously subversive joke, underlined by Bates’s talent for pomposity and the eccentric comic timing of Laird Cregar, who plays His Excellency or, in other words, Satan. But if Bates’s exemplary—by…

The 3D fad of the 1950s was at its height 70 years ago when Warner Bros. conquered the genre with this horror remake directed by André De Toth, a man with ironically only one eye. Of course, you didn’t need two eyes to follow the gimmick’s formula by throwing everything from paddle balls to a…

Audrey Hepburn in Paris is a film lover’s dream. The city she conquered in Funny Face, Love in the Afternoon (both 1957), and Charade (1963) and that transformed her, at least off-screen, in Sabrina (1954) is the setting of this delightfully improbable caper film that teams her for the only time with Peter O’Toole. In…

Lon Chaney made the transition from respected character actor to star when he strapped almost 50 pounds of plaster to his back to embody Quasimodo the bellringer in what’s often hailed as the best adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel. He had dreamed of playing the role for years and even bought the screen rights himself,…

One of the most beautiful images in all of cinema is that of Takashi Shimura, as a dying bureaucrat, singing a romantic song in the middle of falling snow as he sits on a swing in a playground he helped build. It’s the answer to the question director Akira Kurosawa raises in his elegiac Ikiru…

It was the slap heard round the world. When a corrupt Southern business leader (Larry Gates) struck Black police detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) for being “uppity,” Tibbs slapped him back, and progressive audiences around the world cheered. Released shortly after race riots in Newark and Detroit, In the Heat of the Night captured the…

Lunacy reigns supreme in this unlikely buddy picture. Writer Andrew Bergman was riding high on the success of his first screenplay, Blazing Saddles (1974), when Warner Bros. approached him with an offer. Alan Arkin and Peter Falk wanted to do a film together, and he was given the chance to write it. The pairing of…

When Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, it was big news, particularly when he helped the team win the pennant and was named Rookie of the Year. A film about his career seemed a natural idea, but none of the major studios wanted to take a chance at…

When he presented special effects giant Ray Harryhausen with a special Oscar in 1992, Tom Hanks called this mythological adventure the greatest movie ever made. Though there are critics who might propose Citizen Kane (1941), Vertigo (1958), or Jeanne Dielman (1975) as worthier choices, they would at least have to agree that Jason and the…

Two stars were born when producer Mark Hellinger convinced Ernest Hemingway to sell him the rights to his 1927 short story “The Killers.” The writer had long held out against Hollywood on that one, even as he sold others of his works to the studios. Perhaps he was worried about what screenwriters would add to…

Even at 90 years of age and after years of CGI magic on screen, King Kong remains an amazing achievement. Its innovations were many. It was the first film to use rear-screen projection of actors that were matched with model animation shot one frame at a time. It was one of the first films to…

Edward G. Robinson ended his original Warner Bros. contract with a spoof of the roles that had made him a star. As adept at comedy as he was at heavy drama, he scores a personal success in this caper film helmed by versatile director Lloyd Bacon, aided by a great supporting cast including Harry Davenport,…

Music plays a key role in the only film Alfred Hitchcock ever remade. The picture gave Doris Day her signature song, the Oscar-winning “Que Sera, Sera” and reaches a nail-biting climax during a performance of Arthur Benjamin’s “Storm Clouds Cantata.” A vacation turns into a nightmare for American doctor James Stewart and his wife, retired…

Frank Borzage had a unique talent for creating a fantasy world around his romantic leads while also tethering them to real life. Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell face separation during World War I in 7th Heaven (1927); James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan fight to escape the Nazis in The Mortal Storm (1940); and Spencer Tracy…

With this warmhearted lampoon of the world of folk music, writer-director-actor Christopher Guest transitioned from the blistering satire of earlier films like Waiting for Guffman (1996) and Best in Show (2000) to a more affectionate tone. As with the earlier films, Guest and co-writer Eugene Levy created a detailed scenario and then turned their cast…

Warner Bros. publicists dubbed Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan’s Mister Roberts “the happiest play that ever played.” Things were certainly happy at the box office, with the film becoming the third-highest earner of its year. But that wasn’t the case off screen, where the production ended the 16-year friendship between star Henry Fonda and director…

Director William Beaudine was at the height of his career when he, along with Raoul Walsh and Allan Dwan, answered a call from Great Britain’s film studios to help bolster their industry by making pictures there. At the time he was commanding $2,000 per week on the strength of Mary Pickford hits like Little Annie…

Who is the only frog to graduate from Vassar? If you guessed Kermit, you’re right… sort of. Vassar served as a stand-in for the fictional Danhurst College from which Kermit and his Muppet friends graduate at the start of their third feature. It’s one of the many New York state locations in this lively musical…

Hollywood’s biggest singing stars, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, tried to buy the rights to Meredith Willson’s musical portrait of a small-town con artist, but Willson held out for the show’s original star, Robert Preston. That’s the kind of grit it took for the composer to bring his first musical to Broadway in the first…

One of Hollywood’s most iconic off-screen couples only worked together on screen once, and though they made a terrific team, this wasn’t the start of their love story. In fact, during the shoot, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard weren’t particularly impressed with each other. She found him conceited, while he found her bawdy language unladylike….

“They’re having so much fun it’s illegal,” read this film’s tagline, and fun was indeed the motivation behind director Steven Soderbergh’s remake of the Rat Pack’s 1960 hit. After making a sprawling and very serious take on the drug trade, Traffic (2000)—for which he would win an Oscar—he assembled a friendly group of A-listers, encouraged…

British-born Edmund Goulding was noted for his ability to get great performances out of actors, from Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel (1932) to Tyrone Power in the original Nightmare Alley (1947). He’d already directed Bette Davis twice—in That Certain Woman (1937) and Dark Victory (1939)—when he stepped in as referee between her another notably temperamental…

Before he teamed with Myrna Loy to play the perfect sophisticated couple in the Thin Man series at MGM, William Powell was paired with another glamorous leading lady, Kay Francis. They made six films together—four at Paramount and two at Warner Bros.—all just as sophisticated but with a risqué pre-Code edge, to boot. Their last…

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s music fills the screen in this tribute to Paris, the city of lovers and great jazz. Adding to the picture’s jazz credentials is the presence of Louis Armstrong, in one of the few films to cast him as a character rather than having him play himself. Their music provides the…

Paths of Glory opens and closes to the sound of a military snare drum. Between those two cues, director-cowriter Stanley Kubrick offers one of the most searing indictments of war and class consciousness ever put on screen. The film was far ahead of its time in its treatment of its subject and was—even with major…

When Irene Dunne snuck into a preview of her third and final teaming with Cary Grant, she overheard a woman behind her say, “Oh, another Irene Dunne-Cary Grant comedy.” Before the film was half over, that same woman was sobbing. That’s the charm of this film—the fact that it reveals a new side to a…

Young love clashes with old secrets in this adaptation of Grace Metalious’s scandalous book. The bestselling novel was controversial due of its depiction of unmentionable scandals—including rape, abortion, and sadomasochism—and seemed unfilmable. But producer Jerry Wald had made a career of taming works considered too hot for the screen, like Mildred Pierce (1945). With the…

During her career, Tuesday Weld was renowned for taking chances. She turned down films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) because she feared they would be too successful. “I do not ever want to be a huge star,” she once proclaimed. But she jumped at opportunities to…

For decades, young women have been inspired to study ballet by this elegant, romantic depiction of the life of a classical dancer. What started in the 1930s as a biography of Nijinsky for Alexander Korda and a vehicle for his wife, Merle Oberon, eventually became the crowning glory of the Archers, the production company founded…

After the box-office failure of Land of the Pharaohs (1955), director Howard Hawks took some time off to travel the world before returning to one of the genres he had long mastered, the Western. Where some of his earlier Westerns had been filled with action, however, Rio Bravo is more about character. The tale of…

A pair of tighty-whities and some of that old time rock and roll made Tom Cruise a star 40 years ago. The iconic image of him dancing to Bob Seger’s classic (by George Jackson and Tom E. Jones III) has tended to upstage the many considerable merits of this social satire, written and directed by…

When you’re a lonesome polecat, there’s no telling what you’ll do to find love. If you’re one of the seven redheaded Pontipee brothers living in the backwoods of the Oregon Territory, you might even resort to kidnapping. That’s the premise of this high-spirited musical, inspired by a Stephen Vincent Benét story. It would be easy…

It’s enlightening to consider what made this tale of evil invading a small town Alfred Hitchcock’s personal favorite of all the films he made. For the master director, the tale of a serial killer (Joseph Cotten) evading the law by visiting his family in a small California town was “one of those rare occasions where…

In his second film as the character, Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau moved to center stage. It wasn’t supposed to be that way; Clouseau wasn’t even in the play on which the film was based. But when the change was made, it produced a critical and box-office hit that officially established the Pink Panther franchise that…

Sometimes an art director goes far beyond the call of duty to give a film the proper look. When the perfect renovated condo for this upper-crust satirical drama became available in New York, Patrizia von Brandenstein cemented the deal by offering her services to the co-op board to design the building’s lobby. The condo became…

In 1948, the versatile Barbara Stanwyck put herself and the audience through the wringer—or rather, the ringer. Critics complained that expanding Lucille Fletcher’s 20-minute radio play with flashbacks and even flashbacks-within-flashbacks had diffused its power, but Stanwyck’s final ten minutes, as she tries desperately to save her life, are among the most gruelingly suspenseful in…

In the late ‘80s, director Ramón Menéndez scored a breakthrough success with this fact-based film about inspirational high-school math teacher Jaime Escalante. It wasn’t just that he and co-writer Tom Musca were working on their first feature film. At a time when Hollywood producers were considering casting white actresses like Meryl Streep or Jessica Lange…

“Warner Night at the Movies” has been a highlight of many of the Warner Bros. special edition Home Video releases. This unique presentation by Warner Bros. Discovery’s Library Historian George Feltenstein will recreate the typical moviegoing experience from Hollywood’s golden age, complete with cartoons, short subjects, and trailers from the era, followed by the studio’s…

It was 1940, and Louis B. Mayer had two things on his mind. He wanted patriotic titles to capitalize on a growing wave of nationalism, and he wanted to reteam Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland with Busby Berkeley following the huge success of Babes in Arms (1939). After considering a remake of Good News, which…

This popular sex farce could have been the next entry in the Doris Day-Rock Hudson-Tony Randall series had not the producer, Day’s husband Marty Melcher, decided the role of the amorous tycoon was better suited to Cary Grant, to whom Hudson had been favorably compared in films like Pillow Talk (1959) and Lover Come Back…

After the box-office failure of Kingpin (1996), directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, the brothers were convinced their next film would be their last. Deciding to go out with a bang, they threw every crazy gag they could think of into their script for There’s Something About Mary and got one of the year’s highest-grossing…

The swashbuckler genre got a fresh update when screenwriter George MacDonald Fraser crafted one of the most faithful of the couple dozen screen adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’s adventure tale. Director Richard Lester brought his unique comic approach to the work, with slapstick humor expertly played by an all-star cast. That shouldn’t have been a surprise,…

Actor Walter Huston had always told his son, John, that if he ever became a writer, he should create a good part for him. 75 years ago, John Huston did just that, though it wasn’t the part he’d originally intended. When he first encountered B. Traven’s novel, loosely inspired by “The Pardoner’s Tale” from Chaucer’s…

In a 1941 film, you’d expect any female character who succumbed to a playboy’s advances to pay dearly for her fall from grace. But an Irene Dunne character was not just any female character, and working with director-producer Gregory La Cava, the actress made her debauched innocent so pure at heart audiences couldn’t help but…

From the 1920s through the late ‘50s, the typical moviegoing experience involved more than just the one feature film you paid to see. A full program could include a newsreel, a cartoon, a travelogue, and a musical number—all to provide a varied and full night at the theater. Paramount produced shorts that looked into bizarre…

The world ended with one heck of a big bang more than 70 years ago, thanks to special effects wizard George Pal. The Oscar-winning technical work that flooded Times Square, sent a rogue star crashing into Earth, and launched a space ark with the last of humanity will be analyzed by sound designer Ben Burtt…

Director and co-writer Sam Peckinpah dragged the Western into the era of Vietnam and political protest with his revisionist view of an outlaw band looking to make one last score. It wasn’t just that he transformed violence from occasional garnish on a tale of action and heroism into an essential part of the world depicted…

Marlon Brando became an icon to generations of rebels when he donned the jeans, boots, leather jacket, and cap of Johnny Strabler, head of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Although made on a low budget and nowhere near as critically respectable as the films that were earning the rising star Oscar nominations in the early…

Ripe for rediscovery, this pre-Code comedy is surprisingly ahead of its time in its depiction of the female lead played by Claudette Colbert. Even more surprising is the fact that this was already the third American screen version of a 1905 play by hit-maker Clyde Fitch, The Woman in the Case, which focused on a…

Olivia Newton-John will bring your dreams alive if you believe in magic. That’s the message of this 1980 musical inspired by Rita Hayworth’s 1947 Down to Earth. It’s an explosion of vintage sounds and styles, from roller disco to flowing midi dresses, with musical performances by the Electric Light Orchestra, Cliff Richard and The Tubes,…