No one—not even Lon Chaney or Bela Lugosi—quite evokes Halloween at the movies like Boris Karloff.  Not only the iconic star of classics like Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and at least two great underrated chillers, The Black Room (1935) and Isle of the Dead (1945), Karloff spent an unfortunate number [...]

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Classy Ruth Hussey was at MGM from 1937-1942, and she was primarily used as a Myrna Loy in waiting, never really pushed by the studio for actual stardom, even though she had beauty, brains, and talent.  Hussey died in 2005 at age 93 and would have turned 100 this year on October 30th.  Director George Cukor certainly [...]

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It’s a movie about a maid secretly writing a tell-all book about her employers and subsequently rocking a wealthy community.  Did I mention that it’s set on Long Island and was released in 1942?  So, no, I’m not talking about this year’s mega-hit The Help.  Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon The Affairs of Martha, [...]

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When TCM aired The Constant Nymph (1943) on September 28th, it really was a major moment in the history of that beloved station, the end of a long struggle to untangle the film’s legal problems regarding rights.  The film in question had been publicly unavailable for sixty years, which was no service to star Joan Fontaine’s Oscar-nominated performance.  [...]

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