Joining the WWII drama Uncertain Glory (1944) and the Civil War western Rocky Mountain (1950), you can put Adventures of Don Juan on the list of underappreciated Errol Flynn films.  It’s easy to see why Don Juan might have seemed a letdown when it was released.  After all, its title invited comparison with Flynn’s most enduring achievement, The [...]

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Steve Cochran is one of my favorite undersung talents of the films of the 1940s and ’50s.  He had a leading man’s looks—handsome face, lustrous black hair, a well-toned body—yet was primarily a character actor, more specifically the kind of guy who played a lot of mugs and thugs.  Cochran was the fellow most likely [...]

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In 1939, Tasmanian-born Errol Flynn, already a superstar known to moviegoers as Captain Blood and Robin Hood, became a surprise western star in Dodge City and would continue to dabble successfully in the genre for the next decade, with his most famous western being Raoul Walsh’s They Died with Their Boots On (1942).  Flynn’s final western, Rocky [...]

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Yesterday, January 8th, would have been Oscar winner Jose Ferrer’s 100th birthday.  Once one of our most celebrated and admired stage-and-screen actor-directors, his renown hasn’t lasted, mostly because, it must be said, he was also prone to being one of our worst stage-and-screen actor-directors.  (Ferrer, who was born in Puerto Rico, died at age 80 [...]

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I admit that I have at least ten major year-end releases to see before I can begin to talk about the best and worst of 2011.  However, that doesn’t mean that I can’t say what my favorite movie of the year is, so far.  That would be Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, and I must say how [...]

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