September marks Marcello Mastroianni’s centennial, and the Criterion Channel pays respect with a retrospective that puts the expected alongside some lesser-knowns: Monicelli’s The Organizer, Jacques Demy’s A Slightly Pregnant Man, and two by Ettore Scola. There’s also the welcome return of “Adventures In Moviegoing” with Rachel Kushner’s formidable selections, among them Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Pialat’s L’enfance nue, and Jean Eustache’s Le cochon. In the lead-up to His Three Daughters, a four-film Azazel Jacobs program arrives.
Theme-wise, a set of courtroom dramas runs from 12 Angry Men and Anatomy of a Murder to My Cousin Vinny and Philadelphia; a look at ’30s female screenwriters includes Fritz Lang’s You and Me, McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, and Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? There’s also a giallo series if you want to watch an Argento movie and ask yourself,...
Theme-wise, a set of courtroom dramas runs from 12 Angry Men and Anatomy of a Murder to My Cousin Vinny and Philadelphia; a look at ’30s female screenwriters includes Fritz Lang’s You and Me, McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, and Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? There’s also a giallo series if you want to watch an Argento movie and ask yourself,...
- 8/13/2024
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
On July 23, 1937, MGM unveiled in theaters Saratoga, a star vehicle for Jean Harlow, who had died suddenly weeks earlier. Additional shooting was needed to complete the film, which featured the actress alongside Clark Gable. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review, headlined “‘Saratoga’ Warmly Greeted … Jean Harlow’s Last Earns High Praise,” is below:
Jean Harlow’s last picture, Saratoga, cannot be reviewed unemotionally. It can only be reported.
Audience reception at a preview last evening in Glendale was unmistakably enthusiastic. Possibly surprised, but never shocked by the fact that the story is a riotous comedy, each time Miss Harlow’s name appeared on the screen and upon the occasion of her first entrance the house rocked with applause. It was more than cursory hand-clapping. The final hand was in honest appreciation of an honestly entertaining offering, splendidly performed, written and directed.
The production by Bernard H. Hyman, with John Emerson as associate producer,...
Jean Harlow’s last picture, Saratoga, cannot be reviewed unemotionally. It can only be reported.
Audience reception at a preview last evening in Glendale was unmistakably enthusiastic. Possibly surprised, but never shocked by the fact that the story is a riotous comedy, each time Miss Harlow’s name appeared on the screen and upon the occasion of her first entrance the house rocked with applause. It was more than cursory hand-clapping. The final hand was in honest appreciation of an honestly entertaining offering, splendidly performed, written and directed.
The production by Bernard H. Hyman, with John Emerson as associate producer,...
- 7/23/2024
- by THR Staff
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Cari Beauchamp, the respected film historian who put readers and viewers in close touch with the early days of Hollywood through her painstaking research as an author, editor and documentary filmmaker, died Thursday. She was 74.
Beauchamp died of natural causes at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, her son Jake Flynn told The Hollywood Reporter.
She was unable to attend an Oct. 28 event at the Tcl Chinese Theatre that celebrated authors represented on THR’s recent unveiling of “The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time.”
Beauchamp is on the exclusive list thanks to Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. First published in 1997, it centers on Marion, who became the highest-paid screenwriter, man or woman, in Hollywood by 1917 before receiving Oscars for The Big House (1930) and The Champ (1931).
Beauchamp then wrote and produced for TCM a 2001 documentary based on the book, earning a WGA nomination along the way.
Beauchamp died of natural causes at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, her son Jake Flynn told The Hollywood Reporter.
She was unable to attend an Oct. 28 event at the Tcl Chinese Theatre that celebrated authors represented on THR’s recent unveiling of “The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time.”
Beauchamp is on the exclusive list thanks to Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. First published in 1997, it centers on Marion, who became the highest-paid screenwriter, man or woman, in Hollywood by 1917 before receiving Oscars for The Big House (1930) and The Champ (1931).
Beauchamp then wrote and produced for TCM a 2001 documentary based on the book, earning a WGA nomination along the way.
- 12/15/2023
- by Mike Barnes
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Ronald Colman: Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Month in two major 1930s classics Updated: Turner Classic Movies' July 2017 Star of the Month is Ronald Colman, one of the finest performers of the studio era. On Thursday night, TCM presented five Colman star vehicles that should be popping up again in the not-too-distant future: A Tale of Two Cities, The Prisoner of Zenda, Kismet, Lucky Partners, and My Life with Caroline. The first two movies are among not only Colman's best, but also among Hollywood's best during its so-called Golden Age. Based on Charles Dickens' classic novel, Jack Conway's Academy Award-nominated A Tale of Two Cities (1936) is a rare Hollywood production indeed: it manages to effectively condense its sprawling source, it boasts first-rate production values, and it features a phenomenal central performance. Ah, it also shows its star without his trademark mustache – about as famous at the time as Clark Gable's. Perhaps...
- 7/21/2017
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Tod Browning’s “Freaks”
Before R-ratings, anti-heroes and gratuitous violence and nudity in mainstream Hollywood movies, there was the Hays Code. As a form of self-policing the industry, virtually every movie released up until 1968 needed that stamp of approval if it wanted distribution. And while it helped produce all of Old Hollywood’s true classics for several decades, it often included ridiculous rulings like not being able to show or flush a toilet on screen, not allowing married couples to be shown sleeping in the same bad or always making sure criminals, even protagonists of the movie, got punished in the end.
But before the Hays Code was nothing, and it was a gloriously weird, scandalous time for the movies. Certain Hollywood films in the early ’30s as “talkies” were rapidly taking hold have since been labeled “Pre-Code” films that never received Hollywood’s stamp of approval.
Every Friday in September,...
Before R-ratings, anti-heroes and gratuitous violence and nudity in mainstream Hollywood movies, there was the Hays Code. As a form of self-policing the industry, virtually every movie released up until 1968 needed that stamp of approval if it wanted distribution. And while it helped produce all of Old Hollywood’s true classics for several decades, it often included ridiculous rulings like not being able to show or flush a toilet on screen, not allowing married couples to be shown sleeping in the same bad or always making sure criminals, even protagonists of the movie, got punished in the end.
But before the Hays Code was nothing, and it was a gloriously weird, scandalous time for the movies. Certain Hollywood films in the early ’30s as “talkies” were rapidly taking hold have since been labeled “Pre-Code” films that never received Hollywood’s stamp of approval.
Every Friday in September,...
- 9/4/2014
- by Brian Welk
- SoundOnSight
Part of a series by David Cairns on forgotten pre-Code films.
Alice Brady said of her face: "It skids, that's the trouble with it. It needs chains. Just when I'm trying to be serious on the screen the thing skids, and I'm doing a tragic scene with a comic face. Look at it. I've often seen those little blonde babes around here giving me the once over. I'm sure they wonder how a face like that fits into pictures."
Stage Mother (1933) offers Brady, best remembered perhaps as the ditzy mom in My Man Godfrey (with Mischa Auer as her louche live-in lover), one of her rare dramatic roles, and she manages to keep her wonky face on the road throughout. With her unlikely, low voice, wide smile and indescribable cackle, Brady has a repertoire of grotesque traits to dazzle the viewer, but she also has an innate sympathy which she...
Alice Brady said of her face: "It skids, that's the trouble with it. It needs chains. Just when I'm trying to be serious on the screen the thing skids, and I'm doing a tragic scene with a comic face. Look at it. I've often seen those little blonde babes around here giving me the once over. I'm sure they wonder how a face like that fits into pictures."
Stage Mother (1933) offers Brady, best remembered perhaps as the ditzy mom in My Man Godfrey (with Mischa Auer as her louche live-in lover), one of her rare dramatic roles, and she manages to keep her wonky face on the road throughout. With her unlikely, low voice, wide smile and indescribable cackle, Brady has a repertoire of grotesque traits to dazzle the viewer, but she also has an innate sympathy which she...
- 12/1/2011
- MUBI
Each year New York residents can look forward to two essential series programmed at the Film Forum, noirs and pre-Coders (that is, films made before the strict enforcing of the Motion Picture Production Code). These near-annual retrospective traditions are refreshed and re-varied and re-repeated for neophytes and cinephiles alike, giving all the chance to see and see again great film on film. Many titles in this year's Essential Pre-Codeseries, running an epic July 15 - August 11, are old favorites and some ache to be new discoveries; all in all there are far too many racy, slipshod, patter-filled celluloid splendors to be covered by one critic alone. Faced with such a bounty, I've enlisted the kind help of some friends and colleagues, asking them to sent in short pieces on their favorites in an incomplete but also in-progress survey and guide to one of the summer's most sought-after series. In this entry: what's playing Friday,...
- 8/4/2011
- MUBI
Jean Harlow, Chester Morris in Jack Conway's Red-Headed Woman Jean Harlow, who died of complications from kidney disease at the age of 26 in 1937, would have turned 100 years old last March 3. In celebration of Harlow's centenary, Turner Classic Movies is presenting a series of Harlow movies every Tuesday evening this month. The Jean Harlow series begins tonight, with a mix that includes Harlow's early, pre-mgm work (a bit part in Charles Chaplin's City Lights, the Columbia release Three Wise Girls), the racy pre-Coder Red-Headed Woman, and a couple of her later MGM movies (Suzy, Riffraff). I haven't watched Three Wise Girls, yet. It sounds a bit like The Greeks Had a Word for Them, a United Artists release that also came out in 1932, and its many variations, e.g., the 20th Century Fox releases Three Blind Mice, Moon Over Miami, How to Marry a Millionaire. I'd say Three Wise...
- 3/8/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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