A romantic-comedy sleeper, MGM’s A Letter for Evie is a charming wartime reworking of the basic Cyrano de Bergerac plot.  (Interestingly, 1945 also produced a dramatic update of Cyrano, the Joseph Cotten-Jennifer Jones “woman’s picture” Love Letters.)  The most refreshing element of Evie is its casting, moving two worthy supporting players up to lead status.  [...]

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I admit to not being a fan of the Elvis Presley films, and further admit that I have seen only about half of them, still waiting for the accidentally good one, if such a one exists.  I do like the black-and-white numbers in Jailhouse Rock (1957), but that’s as far as I can go in [...]

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This weekend marks what would have been the 100th birthdays of two great twentieth-century film actors, James Mason (May 15) and Margaret Sullavan (May 16).  Though beloved by devout film fans, both stars are not as well remembered as they deserve to be, particularly Sullavan, who didn’t make nearly as many films as Mason.  She committed suicide [...]

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For every undiscovered treasure of Hollywood’s Golden Age, there’s an undiscovered piece of drek.  An example of the latter is this oddball bit of whimsy, a charmless post-war semi-musical set during the war.  Hick farmer John Payne goes off to the navy, enlisting despite his deferment and leaving behind a waitress girlfriend (June Haver) and a kid sister [...]

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MGM’s Men Must Fight is one of the great curiosities in the Turner Classic Movies library.  Like most war movies made in the early 1930s, it is fervently anti-war, but this one has the twist of being set in 1940, predicting World War II.  In just 72 minutes, it manages to tackle an astonishing amount of [...]

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