In July of 1944, MGM released The Seventh Cross, a film that departs from the period’s war movies in ways that make it one of the more penetrating and stirring made at that time. Set in Germany in 1936, this unusual film has a compassionate message about innate human decency in an indecent world, an [...]

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Set during the Civil War, [Bad Company]’s a war film that never gets near the war. Because the lead characters head west, it’s something of a western, though the “West” being sought never quite materializes, and is thus more an idea than a reality. With the war raging north, south, and east, and the West [...]

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This septet of color films is often regarded as a great B-movie series. They may be B in their unpretentiousness and brief running times (not one reaches 80 minutes), but certainly not thematically or visually. The deceptive simplicity of [director Budd] Boetticher’s artistry was ideally matched to [Randolph] Scott’s plain acting. Scott never could have [...]

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Not many would dispute that Hollywood horror movies had their heyday at Universal in the 1930s, the location and period that produced, among others, Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Invisible Man (1933). But Universal’s prowess in the genre had already been well established before the sound era immortalized Bela Lugosi’s accent [...]

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With this picture, the forties musical seemed to have found a forward-looking identity. In its freshness, Cover Girl also sowed the seeds for the sublime exuberance of the genre’s best works of the 1950s. It’s not a great musical, sometimes it’s not even a good one, but when it works, and it works often, it [...]

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