I am very pleased to share the news that Marge Champion, one of the screen’s finest female dancers, will be our honored guest at the 11th annual Black Bear Film Festival in Milford (PA) on the weekend of Oct0ber 8-10.  I’ve had the privilege of interviewing Arlene Dahl and Farley Granger on the stage of previous [...]

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Though sorely underrated in her day, the great (and never Oscar-nominated) Myrna Loy gave at least a handful of magnificent performances, starting with the sophisticated comic artistry that she brought to The Thin Man (1934), opposite her favorite leading man, the equally witty William Powell.  Who can ever forget Loy’s moving understatement in the superb post-war drama The [...]

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In the same year that MGM released Mrs. Miniver (1942), its enormously popular and Oscar-laden tribute to the British home front, the studio delivered another morale booster for the war effort, more a B picture than an A, and with a much pricklier title character than Greer Garson’s impossibly “wonderful” Mrs. M.  The War Against Mrs. [...]

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Right before everything changed in the late 1960s, in terms of the screen’s new permissiveness and the emergence of the ratings system, there were a number of sex-driven trash spectaculars released, films that anticipated the imminent new era while still being mired in glossy artificiality.  Among these films are some of the most memorably awful motion pictures [...]

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Natalie Wood salvaged her career as a child actress when she made the enviable transition into teen stardom opposite James Dean and Sal Mineo in Nicholas Ray’s instant classic Rebel without a Cause (1955).  She even nabbed an Oscar nomination for supporting actress (compensation for not getting a juvenile Oscar for Miracle on 34th Street [...]

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