In Their Own Words: Joseph Cotten on Tallulah, The Third Man, Citizen Kane, and his friendship with Orson Welles
Cotten as Holly Martins in The Third Man (1949) Joseph Cotten, who was born May 15, 1905, appeared in some of the best films of the 1940s, including Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Shadow of a Doubt, Gaslight, Portrait of Jennie, Lydia, and The Third Man. In...
A Viewer’s Guide: How to Watch Grand Hotel (1932)
“Grand Hotel…always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.” courtesy Pre-Code.com Grand Hotel took home the Best Picture Oscar for MGM in 1933, beating another MGM release, The Champ, as well as Samuel Goldwyn’s Arrowsmith, Fox’s Bad Girl, First...
Disembodied: Waldo Lydecker, the Voice in the Dark in Laura (1944)
“McPherson, if you know anything about faces, look at mine. How singularly innocent I look this morning. Have you ever seen such candid eyes?” “Laura considered me the wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting man she’d ever met. I was in complete accord with her on...
TCMFF 2016: Recap of Saturday, Day 3: Vitaphone, Reiner, Gould, Karina
From my comfortable perch back at my friend’s house in North Hollywood, the intensity, mad dashes, glorious experiences, and occasional frustrations of TCMFF 2016 seem rather remote, Gentle Reader, but at this time a little over one week ago I was watching Dead Men...
Anatomy of a scorcher: Mary Astor on Filming the Steamy Kiss in Red Dust
Mary Astor’s memoir A Life on Film is fantastic—she’s a wonderful writer, and her sharp observations on the industry and what went on behind the cameras are fascinating and incredibly useful to anyone who writes about classic film. Astor writes of being asked by a...
Elizabeth Taylor’s Best Actress Oscars: BUtterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
Elizabeth Taylor won two Best Actress Oscars, for BUtterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). The first she perhaps rightly dismissed as a pity vote. The second she won fair and square, and I hope it meant something to her. Until fairly recently I...
A Viewer’s Guide: How to Watch the Cinematic Collaboration of Humphrey Bogart and John Huston
On the set of The African Queen (1951) John Huston and Humphrey Bogart made six movies together, six points of intersection over their long careers. Three of the six were crucial in the careers of both men: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra...
A Viewer’s Guide: How to Watch The Gang’s All Here (1943)
sten your seat belts. The Gang’s All Here is too much. It’s the thrill ride of Hollywood musicals. If you’ve not seen it but have seen other Busby Berkeley movies you’re thinking, Yeah, got it. But all the fabulous excesses of Berkeley in black-and-white pale in...
In Her Own Words: Maureen O’Hara (1920-2015)
TCM is honoring Maureen O’Hara (1920-2015) with a 24-hour tribute starting at 6am ET on Friday, November 20. I thought some commentary from herself discussing her experiences shooting several of the movies in the TCM lineup would be add dimension to this day of...
Dickie Moore (1925-2015), Lost and Found
Where all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy and beloved… —H.I., Raising Arizona It’s an intense little face. The Cupid’s Bow mouth and tiny, turned-up nose sit beneath large, dark, deeply serious eyes. Dickie wasn’t just cute, he was...
A Dickie Moore Primer (1925-2015)
TCM’s tribute to Dickie Moore starts this morning at 6:15 a.m. Dickie Moore was one of those very rare people you can watch grow up onscreen, starting when he was 11 months old. That’s when he made his screen debut, playing John Barrymore as a baby in Beloved...
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)
“Where have you been all my life?” That’s how I feel when I see a movie for the first time and fall totally in love with it. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was a movie I had certainly heard of, but I knew the title from the Hope Lange TV series of the same name in the...
The More the Merrier (1943): Kissin’ on the Stoop
I Like a Man That Takes His Time “You look like a high-type, clean-cut, nice young fellow.” What’s really hard with a movie this delightful is to write just about one scene, even a scene this great. A brief digression: I’m posting this an hour before leaving for...
Desk Set (1957): Sapiosexuals Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy Find Love in the Library
The opening: The Mondrian carpet, the computer, clattering typewriter… the sprightly, lighthearted music tell us that it’s a comedy. Here is how I first saw Desk Set: At about 2:30am after working a double shift, one at Forbes and another at Newsweek, I got home,...
The Clock (1945)
The Clock (Vincente Minnelli), starring Judy Garland and Robert Walker, with scenes in the Central Park Zoo, Penn Station, The Astor Hotel, and atop a double-decker bus, a slightly surreal but benign after-hours interval in which Garland and Walker finish injured...