With March almost behind us, I see that I missed a few 100th birthdays while I was writing about other things.  Oscar-winning actress Claire Trevor would have turned 100 on March 8, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa would have done the same on March 23, and unjustly overlooked actor Richard Conte would have hit the big [...]

[Read more →]

This week marks the long-awaited DVD release of The African Queen (1951), the justly beloved John Huston movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn.  Set in German East Africa in 1914, the film is an irresistible combination of genres—comedy, romance, war, and adventure—with Bogart a boozing riverboat operator and Hepburn a straitlaced Methodist missionary.  (He’s Canadian; [...]

[Read more →]

The above line, and “Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?” are the two best remembered sentences ever uttered on-screen by actor Peter Graves.  These lines, spoken by pilot Graves to a boy in the beloved disaster-movie spoof Airplane! (1980), helped turn the middle-aged Graves into a deadpan comedy star after decades of firm-jawed leading-man status (admittedly of [...]

[Read more →]

It was great to see Kathryn Bigelow accepting an Oscar as the first female to win as Best Director, and it brought me a sigh of relief to see Jeff Bridges finally take home a prize that could have (and should have) been his many times in the last 35 years.  Though I was pulling for Meryl Streep [...]

[Read more →]