Well it looks as though Meryl Streep is finally poised to bring home that elusive third Oscar that she has come so close to getting in recent years (thanks to The Devil Wears Prada and Doubt).  Oscar will arrive for a role and a performance worth the wait, one of Streep’s all-time best.  She doesn’t [...]

[Read more →]

August 25th marks what would have been the 100th birthday of British film actor Michael Rennie, who died at age 61 in 1971.  Though Rennie appeared in many high-profile Hollywood pictures of the 1950s, including The Robe (1953) and The Rains of Ranchipur (1955), plus the great spy movie 5 Fingers (1952), he is best [...]

[Read more →]

One of Elia Kazan’s best (and most overlooked and underrated) films, Wild River is a beautifully made drama set during the Depression, dealing specifically with the Tennessee Valley Authority.  TVA man Montgomery Clift must remove old Jo Van Fleet from the tiny island her family has owned and lived upon for generations.  A new dam is [...]

[Read more →]

Though Robert Taylor’s finest western is Anthony Mann’s extraordinary Devil’s Doorway (1950), one of the forty films featured in my book Screen Savers, Taylor made several other quality oaters in the 1950s, among them Westward the Women (1951) and Saddle the Wind.  Unlike Devil’s Doorway, in which Taylor played a Shoshone Indian (and was astoundingly [...]

[Read more →]

Did you read this week that Steven Spielberg is going to do a remake of Harvey, the 1950 semi-classic starring James Stewart?  I’m not a particular fan of the film, so I don’t hold out much hope for a new version, even if it ends up starring Tom Hanks, the man most often called this generation’s [...]

[Read more →]