He was a nice-looking young actor who made his screen debut in a big commercial and critical success of the mid-1950s but was soon dead in a 1955 accident.  No, I’m not talking about James Dean.  But how many people even remember the name Robert Francis?  It was Francis whose career got off to a grand [...]

[Read more →]

Like The Barbarian and the Geisha (director John Huston’s other flop from 1958), The Roots of Heaven is an underrated, unfairly forgotten film, an ambitious and unusual drama.  It’s natural Huston material.  There he is, helming another on-location African adventure, about a half decade after his great African Queen.  The film was truly ahead of its time, [...]

[Read more →]

Lauren Bacall turns 88 this Sunday.  She’s one of the last of the studio-system movie stars still with us, which got me thinking about her film Young Man with a Horn.  Why that one in particular?  Because Bacall’s co-stars, Kirk Douglas and Doris Day, are also still alive, which is rather remarkable considering that the [...]

[Read more →]

While director Stanley Kramer was carving his niche as the socially conscious, liberal-minded moviemaker of the 1950s and ’6os, he seemed to have a second agenda.  Perhaps inspired by Frank Sinatra’s “serious” Oscar-winning success in Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953), Kramer followed Zinnemann’s lead, casting Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Judy Garland in dramatic non-musical supporting roles.  [...]

[Read more →]