June 29th marks what would have been the 100th birthday of Frank Loesser, one of Broadway’s greatest songwriters (as both composer and lyricist), the man who gave us Guys and Dolls (1950), an enduring masterpiece of the American musical theatre, not to mention his Pulitzer Prize-winning How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1961).  [...]

[Read more →]

For my money, the 1950s was the greatest decade for the Hollywood western, the period that produced The Gunfighter (1950), Devil’s Doorway (1950), The Furies (1950), Rio Grande (1950), High Noon (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), Shane (1953), Johnny Guitar (1954), Wichita (1955), The Searchers (1956), Seven Men from Now (1956), and The Big Country (1958).  But [...]

[Read more →]

Just when I thought I had seen every major film noir (many times over), along comes Crime Wave.  I first became aware of this cops-and-robbers flick when Martin Scorsese featured it in his documentary on American film.  And I’ve had it in my Netflix queue for months and months.  I guess I wasn’t really expecting [...]

[Read more →]

Just a week after what would have been the 100th birthday of Paulette Goddard comes another Hollywood centenary, that of light comedian Robert Cummings, who would have turned 100 on June 10 and who died in 1990 at age 80.  Before becoming a sitcom star of the 1950s, Cummings had been a boyishly young screen [...]

[Read more →]