I am pleased to make the official announcement of my upcoming book, Tennessee Williams and Company:  His Essential Screen Actors.  The focus is on the actors who appeared in more than one Tennesse Williams movie, creating an unofficial stock company of repeat players in the screen adaptations of his work.  Among those included you’ll find [...]

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Last week it was announced that Lauren Bacall would be receiving an honorary Oscar.  Whatever you think about the merits of such a gesture (more on that later), one thing is inarguable, the tacky and downright shameful decision to present this award not on the March 7th telecast, as would normally be the case, but at [...]

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I recently caught a 1934 programmer from Columbia titled Whirlpool on TCM.  I watched it only because it’s a Jean Arthur movie I had never seen before, assuming it would be forgettable nonsense that wasted her, unaware of her special gifts.  Though she would burst into major stardom in 1936 in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes [...]

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Director Elia Kazan, who died in 2003, would have turned 100 on September 7th.  His great decade on the screen was the 1950s, leaving behind such classics as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955), and Baby Doll (1956).  So, instead of revisiting the obvious high points, let’s take a [...]

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Inglourious Basterds, set primarily in 1944 France, is certainly the best Quentin Tarantino film since 1994′s Pulp Fiction and easily one of the best films of 2009.  Tarantino is quite the showman and, more than anything else, Basterds is an epic entertainment, a voluptuously conceived and executed WWII movie brimming with suspense and humor and outrageous [...]

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