While Brazilian Bombshell Carmen Miranda was getting big laughs mangling the English language in Fox musicals during the early 1940s, Dominican-born Maria Montez was also getting big laughs, doing the same thing at the same time, but in Universal adventure films.  The more important difference is that Montez’s laughs were unintentional.  She was no actress, but she did reign as [...]

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John Payne, the epitome of tall-dark-and-handsome, and with a build that made most of Hollywood’s golden-age leading men look anemic, nabbed his piece of screen immortality when he played the lawyer and pal of Edmund Gwenn’s Kris Kringle (while simultaneously romancing a defiantly unromantic Maureen O’Hara) in the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947).  Even [...]

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May 18 marks what would have been the 100th birthday of writer-director Richard Brooks, who died at age 79 in 1992.  Brooks may never have been a household name but he directed quite a few famous movies, from Blackboard Jungle (1955) to In Cold Blood (1967) to Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), plus two Tennessee [...]

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I haven’t seen all thirteen feature films directed by the great French filmmaker Robert Bresson (1901-1999), but I have seen most of his major works, including The Diary of a Young Priest (1951), Pickpocket (1959), and Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966).  My overwhelming favorite is his extraordinary, low-key thriller A Man Escaped, based on the true story [...]

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