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When you think of actors like Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, you think of their titanic starring roles that came at the peak of their powers. For Davis, it might well be something like the southern melodrama "Jezebel" or 1950's "All About Eve," the movie that revived her career by letting her embrace her age, her pettiness, and her acid tongue. For Bogart, it would be any of his many roles in film noir, a cinematic movement through the '40s and '50s of which he still registers as the face and the voice.

Digging through their respective careers, one can find early roles that show none of what would make the actors legendary. While technically impressive, these performances lack the vitality, electricity, and movie star charisma that both performers would come to master. And in the early '30s, with the industry in tumult and the Great Depression at its most suffocating,...

Part-Time Wife (1930)A “dame” is another word for a woman, but not all women are dames. Embodying both the vibrancy of the Jazz Age and the cynicism of the Great Depression, dames are fast-talking, sassy, and with a hard shell to match. Dames populate the world of early-1930s Hollywood cinema, personifying the socio-economic politics and (relative) gender progressivism of the decade. An upcoming MoMA film program entitled “Dames, Janes, Dolls, and Canaries: Woman Stars of the Pre-Code Era” explores the idea of the pre-Code Hollywood dame in all of her multitudes. Organized by film writer and historian Farran Nehme along with Dave Kehr and Olivia Priedite, the program showcases an array of talent from popular early-1930s actresses like Madge Evans, Mae Clarke, and Nancy Carroll, focusing specifically on stardom, femininity, and performance. Through this dive into the representation of gender in the pre-Code era (1929 to mid-1934), we can...

I find it impossible to believe anyone called Hobart Henley could ever be a great film director, but on the other hand, I also find it impossible to dislike a film director called Hobart Henley. It's too much fun reading his name in a credits sequence.Henley had been an actor, which seems to account for his preposterous, alliterative name, except it seems that really was his name, not a stage contrivance. He directed numerous silent films from the teens on, all of them obscure, but his late-career outpouring of a few cute pre-Codes is better remembered. Night World (1932) is enjoyable, and Roadhouse Nights (1930) is remarkable for being the only official adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (unofficial source material for Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing...), only you wouldn't know it because it reached the screen as a Jimmy Durante musical. The only thing it has...

Claudette Colbert movies on Turner Classic Movies: From ‘The Smiling Lieutenant’ to TCM premiere ‘Skylark’ (photo: Claudette Colbert and Maurice Chevalier in ‘The Smiling Lieutenant’) Claudette Colbert, the studio era’s perky, independent-minded — and French-born — "all-American" girlfriend (and later all-American wife and mother), is Turner Classic Movies’ star of the day today, August 18, 2014, as TCM continues with its "Summer Under the Stars" film series. Colbert, a surprise Best Actress Academy Award winner for Frank Capra’s 1934 comedy It Happened One Night, was one Paramount’s biggest box office draws for more than decade and Hollywood’s top-paid female star of 1938, with reported earnings of $426,944 — or about $7.21 million in 2014 dollars. (See also: TCM’s Claudette Colbert day in 2011.) Right now, TCM is showing Ernst Lubitsch’s light (but ultimately bittersweet) romantic comedy-musical The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), a Best Picture Academy Award nominee starring Maurice Chevalier as a French-accented Central European lieutenant in...

We at Mubi think that celebrating the films of 2010 should be a celebration of film viewing in 2010.  Since all film and video is "old" one way or another, we present Out of a Past, a small (re-) collection of some of our favorite of 2010's retrospective viewings.

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Always on Sunday (Ken Russell, 1965), pictured above

Always on Sunday is one of Ken Russell's early British television films, most of which were portraits of artists. It was customary for years for Russell's haters to praise these unavailable films and bemoan the director's decline into heavy-handed vulgarity. It turns out that they were half right: the TV work is excellent, and tends to be more muted than the gaudy features that followed, no doubt in part due to BBC censorship. But the critics were wrong to miss the nuances, and genius, of Russell's blockbuster marathons of bad taste and joyous camp, and...