One of my favorite movies, Remember the Night, became available on DVD this week, thanks to the TCM Vault Collection.  It is a film with an impressive pedigree: an original screenplay by Preston Sturges; direction by Mitchell Leisen; and a cast led by Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.  A bittersweet love story with romantic-comedy flourishes, it’s [...]

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During her box-office poison period, Marlene Dietrich starred in Angel, a sadly underrated Ernst Lubitsch picture that combines high comedy and romantic melodrama in its depiction of a love triangle.  An impossibly chic and elegant movie, the kind in which everyone can play the piano, Angel gave Dietrich two expert leading man, Herbert Marshall and [...]

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Last week I attended the evening tribute to Tennessee Williams at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, an event in anticipation of Williams’ induction into the cathedral’s Poets’ Corner (which happened yesterday).  The week’s events were presented in association with the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, which takes place annually in September.  Since I’ve [...]

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Though the sub-genre of screwball comedy was essentially over after Preston Sturges’ inspired 1944 pair of wartime Americana, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and the even better Hail the Conquering Hero (featured in my book Screen Savers), there was a delightful screwball holdover in 1948, Miss Tatlock’s Millions, an underrated charmer that’s clever and involving and completely [...]

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