The rare MGM musical that went directly into oblivion, Broadway Rhythm is a fascinating oddity, a predominantly terrible movie photographed in the most rapturous Technicolor, a B musical trapped in an A production.  Unofficially, this was the fifth and final picture in the Broadway Melody series, and the only one in color.  The title comes from the [...]

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April 23rd marks what would have been the 100th birthday of French screen actress Simone Simon (who died in 2005).  Simon got her piece of Hollywood immortality when she starred in producer Val Lewton’s classic Cat People (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur, the film that kicked off Lewton’s great series of suggestive low-budget horror movies at [...]

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In 1942, Billy Wilder directed his first Hollywood movie, the comedy hit The Major and the Minor, starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland (who later starred in The Lost Weekend, Wilder’s big Oscar winner of 1945).  In 1944, Wilder made the classic film noir Double Indemnity, with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray (who later appeared [...]

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Though my face always goes blank whenever anyone asks me what my favorite movie is, I never pause when asked to name my favorite old-time movie actor.  Joel McCrea certainly wasn’t the greatest actor of the first three decades of talking pictures, but he was possibly the most underrated, the most taken for granted, often looked [...]

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