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Looking at Kevin Costner’s filmography as a director, one thing is apparent: the guy loves his epics. His debut, 1990’s Dances with Wolves, clocked in at just over three hours, while his 1997 follow-up, The Postman, ran just under that. After practically making a short film with Open Range (139 minutes), he took a two-decade break before diving into his next: the multi-part Horizon, with its first two parts surpassing the six-hour mark. So what drives Kevin Costner to make such lengthy movies? It comes down to the classics.

At History Channel’s recent History Talks event (via Deadline), Kevin Costner said it was seeing movies of an epic scale that not only captured his curiosity for film but also subconsciously made him lean towards movies of such lengthy runtimes. In particular, he cited 1962’s How the West Was Won, which credits three directors – Henry Hathaway, John Ford and George Marshall...

Over the course of more than a century, nearly every one of the hundreds of acting Oscar winners has shared the big screen with at least one other film academy honoree. In some special cases, viewers have been treated to extraordinarily star-studded movies that feature six or more Oscar champs, with the record for largest Academy Award-winning ensemble standing at an even dozen. Check out our photo gallery in which we break down the 22 movies that each include performances by at least six acting Oscar recipients.

The eclectic entries on this list cover a staggering eight decades of film history, having all been released between 1939 and 2019. Collectively, they themselves won 22 Oscars from 73 nominations, with standouts including respective 1940 and 1957 Best Picture winners “Gone with the Wind” and “Around the World in 80 Days.” The only directors with multiple films on the list are George Marshall (“Variety Girl” and “How the West Was Won...

Over the course of more than a century, nearly every one of the hundreds of acting Oscar winners has shared the big screen with at least one other film academy honoree. In some special cases, viewers have been treated to extraordinarily star-studded movies that feature six or more Oscar champs, with the record for largest Academy Award-winning ensemble standing at an even dozen. Check out our photo gallery in which we break down the 22 movies that each include performances by at least six acting Oscar recipients.

The eclectic entries on this list cover a staggering eight decades of film history, having all been released between 1939 and 2019. Collectively, they themselves won 22 Oscars from 73 nominations, with standouts including respective 1940 and 1957 Best Picture winners “Gone with the Wind” and “Around the World in 80 Days.” The only directors with multiple films on the list are George Marshall (“Variety Girl” and “How the West Was Won...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Artists and Models.By rights, Martin and Lewis should have the kind of cultural footprint renders them permanent household names: the status that turns artists into Halloween costumes, as archetypal as cartoon characters and ancient gods. For ten years, from 1946 to 1956, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were a double act, and accurately describing how popular they were sounds like gross exaggeration. They were so big that the only fitting comparisons are to rock stars—and not just any rock stars, but Elvis Presley, or The Beatles. “For ten years after World War II, Dean and I were not only the most successful show-business act in history,” Jerry Lewis wrote with his trademark humility in Dean and Me: A Love Story (1984), “—we were history.” Their live shows were pandemonium. They reportedly made eleven million dollars in 1951 alone.

Los Angeles – Stella Stevens had a prolific and adventurous career, especially considering all the famous co-stars and directors she encountered over her 60 year run. She began near end of the studio system in the late 1950s, and worked through the first decade of the post millennium. Stevens was 84 years old when she passed away February 17th, 2023, in her native Los Angeles.

Her leading men were as diverse as Glenn Ford, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Elvis Presley, Jason Robards and Ernest Borgnine. The directors included Vincente Minnelli, Peter Bogdonovich, John Cassavetes, Sam Peckinpah and Jerry Lewis (he also directed “The Nutty Professor”).

Stella Stevens in Chicago circa 2011

Photo credit: Joe Arce of Starstruck Foto for HollywoodChicago.com

Stella was born in Mississippi as Estelle Egglston, and her family moved to Memphis soon thereafter. After an early marriage and divorce, she became interested in acting and modeling while at Memphis State University.

Before James Stewart became one of the most beloved stars in Hollywood history, he was -- believe it or not -- a struggling contract player at MGM. During the golden age of cinema, the small-town boy from Pennsylvania had found his way to Los Angeles, where he was churning out films as part of the studio system. It wasn't until Stewart stunned audiences with his turn as Senator Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra's 1939 comedy-drama "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" that his star seriously began to rise.

Considering how much work Stewart put into the part, the praise he received was well-deserved. Aside from breaking his rule regarding rushes for the great Capra, the actor also ingested mercury dichloride to give himself a sore throat and make his performance in the famous 24-hour filibuster scene more believable. Amazingly, after wrapping the movie, Stewart was far from "licked," as Senator Smith would say.

This year’s documentary nominees explore diverse subject matter as saving birds (“All that Breathes”) and an exploration of the life and career of photographer and activist Nan Goldin (“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”). But the documentary nominees, which took place at the 15th annual Oscars on March 4, 1943 at the Cocoanut Grove, primarly revolved around World War II.

There were 25 nominees — shorts and features competed against each other — and four winners. The US Navy was the producer of winner “The Battle of Midway,” directed by John Ford. The 18-minute film featured footage from the Battle of Midway which was a crucial victory in the Pacific in 1942. The film featured narration by Ford favorites Henry Fonda, Donald Crisp and Jane Darwell.

The Australian News and Information Bureau produced the full-length documentary winner “Kokoda Front Line!,” which was also the first film from Down Under to win an Oscar. The film...

It is fair to assume Criterion could plunder the world of licensed film to build an ultimate noir playlist; credit, then, for focusing sharp and nabbing deep cuts. The Criterion Channel’s November / Noirvember program will be headlined by “Fox Noir,” an eight-title program with Otto Preminger deep cut Fallen Angel, three by Henry Hathaway, Siodmak, Dassin, Kazan, and Robert Wise, and while retrospectives of Veronica Lake and John Garfield will bring some canon into the fold, I’m mostly thinking about that potential for discovery.

Following “Free Jazz,” Bob Hoskins, and Joyce Chopra programs, the other big series is a 30-year survey of Sony Pictures Classics: Sally Potter, Satoshi Kon, Panahi, Errol Morris, Almodóvar, Haneke, Mike Leigh, just a murderer’s row. Streaming premieres include 499 and A Night of Knowing Nothing, two recent epitomes of I Wish I Had Seen That; Criterion Editions comprise Cure, Brazil, Sullivan’s Travels,...

You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1939 / 1.33:1 / 79 Min.

Starring W.C. Fields, Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen

Written by Charles Bogle

Directed by George Marshall, Edward CLine

Charlie McCarthy was W.C. Fields’ most formidable antagonist—a wide-eyed charmer with a bright (not to mention permanent) smile, Charlie was everything the great comedian wasn’t. One thing Fields had that Charlie didn’t was flesh (admittedly sagging) and blood (80 proof on the best of days). The diminutive McCarthy was made of wood—only a dummy in top hat and tails but the most famous puppet on the planet, and operated by the worst ventriloquist in Hollywood, Edgar Bergen. Though Bergen couldn’t keep his own mouth from moving when he spoke for Charlie, the little fellow’s dialog still packed a punch. Indeed, the reason the duo proved so effective in their skirmishes with Fields was because their humor,...

While the summer movie season will kick off shortly––and we’ll be sharing a comprehensive preview on the arthouse, foreign, indie, and (few) studio films worth checking out––on the streaming side, The Criterion Channel and Mubi have unveiled their May 2021 lineups and there’s a treasure trove of highlights to dive into.

Timed with Satyajit Ray’s centenary, The Criterion Channel will have a retrospective of the Indian master, along with series on Gena Rowlands, Robert Ryan, Mitchell Leisen, Michael Almereyda, Josephine Decker, and more. In terms of recent releases, they’ll also feature Fire Will Come, The Booksellers, and the new restoration of Tom Noonan’s directorial debut What Happened Was….

On Mubi, in anticipation of Undine, they’ll feature two essential early features by Christian Petzold, Jerichow and The State That I Am In, along with his 1990 short documentary Süden. Also amongst the lineup is Sophy Romvari’s Still Processing,...

The Cat and the Canary

& The Ghost Breakers

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1939, 1940 / 72, 83 min.

Starring Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard

Cinematography by Charles B. Lang

Directed by Elliott Nugent, George Marshall

Bob Hope’s brand of comedy may have been extinct by the sixties but it was alive and kicking in the pages of God Save the Mark, Donald E. Westlake’s comic crime novel about a schnook on the run for a murder he didn’t commit. Published in 1967, Westlake’s farce resembles one of Hope’s own movies; the pace is frenetic and the patter is as snappy as the comedian’s in his prime—a golden age exemplified by his one-two punch from 1939 and 1940, The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers. Those films present Hope in excelsis but in the hands of directors Elliott Nugent and George Marshall they serve as master classes in the tricky art of the scare comedy.

We’ve got a big week of home media releases ahead of us, so I hope that your wallets are ready to suffer a whole lot of abuse this Tuesday, because there are a ton of must-own titles headed home that genre fans are definitely going to want to add to their collections. We have two new Vestron Video Collector’s Series releases to look forward to—David Cronenberg’s Shivers and Little Monsters (1989)—and for the first time ever, Wes Craven’s Vampire in Brooklyn is being released on Blu-ray.

If you’re a Stephen King fan, Paramount has assembled a 5-Movie Collection on Blu that includes both iterations of Pet Sematary, Silver Bullet, The Stand, and The Dead Zone. Kl Studio Classics is showing some love this Tuesday to the horror comedy The Ghost Breakers featuring Bob Hope, and Dark Sky Films is set to release Luz: The Flower of Evil this week,...

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By Tim McGlynn

$70,000 is hidden somewhere on the Fleagle family farm and everyone wants to find it. Kino-Lorber has released a Blu-ray of the madcap comedy Murder, He Says from Paramount in 1945 wherein a wild cast of crazies will do just about anything to find the loot.

Fred MacMurray plays pollster Pete Marshall who is searching the highways and byways of rural Arkansas looking for a fellow employee of his company, Trotter Polls. After he gets lost on a dark road one night he meets the Fleagle family led by the whip-snapping matriarch Mamie Fleagle Smithers Johnson (Marjorie Main). Aided by her twin sons Mert and Bert (Peter Whitney), Mamie believes that Pete knows where the booty from a bank holdup that their sister, Bonnie Fleagle (Barbara Pepper), hid on the grounds before she landed in the slammer. Add in Elany (Jean Heather...

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By John M. Whalen

There’s an old axiom often quoted by writers that once you find a winning formula for putting stories together, stick with it. That certainly must have been the case back in the 1940s when the films collected together by Kino Lorber for its “Western Classics I” three disc box set were made. “When the Daltons Rode” (1940), “The Virginian” (1946), and “Whispering Smith” (1948) are all different movies, made by different writers and directors, with different settings, characters and plots, but when all is said and done they all basically tell the same story. Two guys who are pals have their friendship strained when they both fall in love with the same woman. It’s obviously a formula that worked.

In “When the Dalton’s Rode,” Tod Jackson (Randolph Scott) is a lawyer who comes west to set up his practice in Oklahoma,...

Long before Ken Burns captured the nation with such landmark documentaries as “The Civil War” and “Baseball” and the world knew the bizarre world of “The Tiger King,” non-fiction specials and series played an important part on the television landscape. Here’s a look at some of the pioneering specials and series that either won or were nominated for the Emmy Award.

“Crusade in Europe”

Could a documentary lead to the Presidency?

Well, in the case of 1949’s “Crusade in Europe” the Emmy Award-winning 1949 ABC documentary series probably helped Dwight D. Eisenhower’s rise to the White House. The small screen’s first major documentary series was based on Eisenhower’s best-selling 1948 account of his experiences from World War II from his appointment by General George Marshall to plan the defense of the Philippines to him being named the Supreme Allied Commander in Northern Europe.

The 26-part series featured terrific...

Destry Rides Again

Blu ray

Criterion

1939 / 1.33:1/ 95 min.

Starring Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart

Cinematography by Hal Mohr

Directed by George Marshall

America’s favorite boy next door meets the Weimar Republic’s preeminent vamp in George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again. James Stewart plays Tom Destry, the self-effacing straight-shooter who cleans up a lawless backwater burg without firing a shot – almost. Marlene Dietrich is Frenchy, a world-weary chanteuse who rules the roost at the town’s only waterhole, the Last Chance saloon. Their relationship is more heated than the volatile town itself but after the final punch is thrown their bond is deeper than any typical Hollywood romance.

Marshall’s comic horse opera was released by Universal in 1939 and like so many of that studio’s horror films of the era, it opens with a slow pan over a moonlit graveyard with more than its fair share of tombstones. Instead...

George Marshall’s classic comedy Western Destry Rides Again finally gets its due with its inclusion in the esteemed Criterion Collection. A notable entry in the filmography of its director and lead stars, it was one of the first notable genre hybrids, the success of which would generate a legion of evolving formulaic successors.

Notably, this was the first time Jimmy Stewart would star in a Western, a genre he would return to in the 1950s with several Anthony Mann collaborations. The jack-of-all-trades Marshall would also return to the genre, directing a segment of the classic How the West Was Won (1962) and also remade the title in 1954 as Destry, starring Audie Murphy.…...

Murder, He Says

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1945 / 1.33:1 / 94 min.

Starring Fred MacMurray, Marjorie Main, Peter Whitney

Cinematography by Theodor Sparkuhl

Directed by George Marshall

The Snopes family were a collection of Southern-fried scoundrels introduced by William Faulkner in 1940’s The Hamlet. Over the course of three novels and several short stories, the clan proved themselves capable of just about any atrocity. They were so comically loathsome they could have been kissing cousins to Mamie, Mert and Bert: the Fleagle family – a slapstick version of the Snopes. Even the local sheriff is terrified of the Fleagles and a greenhorn census taker from the big city is about to find out why.

Fred MacMurray plays Pete Marshall, the eager beaver field man for the Trotter Poll who’s searching for a missing colleague last seen headed toward the Fleagle house, way, way out in the woods (where presumably no one can hear...

Above: Shit-heels at the diner.As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***The Lindbergh Baby Case enthralled not just the world's journalists; in the funny pages, Dick Tracy was soon on the case, in a fiction-reality crossover soon brought to a halt by the tragic discovery of the murdered tot's remains. But movies continued to exploit the theme of baby-napping, and for some reason George Marshall, a useful Fox journeyman, was most associated with this particular sub-sub-sub-genre.Marshall had worked with Laurel & Hardy and is best known today for Destry Rides Again. Despite these strong comic associations,...

The auteurists have been quiet too long about S. Sylvan Simon, the producer-director of Red Skelton and Abbout & Costello movies, and I'm not even kidding. His first claim to prominence is probably Grand Central Murder (1942), an absolute masterclass in camera blocking with large-ish groups of people, and his Skelton trilogy of Whistling in the Dark, Whistling in Dixie, and Whistling in Brooklyn would be Exhibit 2, maybe, but Lust for Gold (1949), which he was working on when he died is really strong too, and it's a noir disguised as a western with a crazy structure and you should see it.We start with a fervid voiceover read by an overheated William Prince, who's playing the author of the original book this is based on, and he's telling us about the famous Lost Dutchman Mine (so named because it was started by Spaniards then rediscovered by a German) at Superstition Mountain, and...

Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart will take off for the horizon once again in a newly restored version of George Marshall's rip-roaring Western Destry Rides Again, which will unspool at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival as part of its Berlinale Classics lineup.

Stewart plays the pacifist son of a hard-nosed sheriff who gets the job of taming a wild frontier town after his father is shot in the back by an unknown assailant. Dietrich is Frenchy, a sassy cabaret girl plying her trade at the Bloody Gulch Saloon. Interpreted by many as a comment on U.S. appeasement policy toward ...

Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart will take off for the horizon once again in a newly restored version of George Marshall's rip-roaring Western Destry Rides Again, which will unspool at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival as part of its Berlinale Classics lineup.

Stewart plays the pacifist son of a hard-nosed sheriff who gets the job of taming a wild frontier town after his father is shot in the back by an unknown assailant. Dietrich is Frenchy, a sassy cabaret girl plying her trade at the Bloody Gulch Saloon. Interpreted by many as a comment on U.S. appeasement policy toward ...

These wartime docu-propaganda films are fascinating, but critic Joseph McBride’s critical accompaniment is even better, nailing the meaning of five groundbreaking works of ‘indoctrination’ and giving us a refreshing revisionist take on one of America’s more revered film directors.

Mr. Capra Goes to War: Frank Capra’s World War II Documentaries

Blu-ray

Prelude to War, The Battle of Russia (1&2), The Negro Soldier, Tunisian Victory, Your Job in Germany

Olive Films

1942-1945 / B&W / 2:35 1:85 widescreen / 1:37 flat Academy / 310 min. / Street Date November 6, 2018 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring: Walter Huston (frequent Narrator).

Introduction and lecture: Joseph McBride

Executive-produced by Frank Capra

I just realized that this is a big year for the film scholar, biographer and critic Joseph McBride. Not only has he an important new book on the shelves, he plays a significant role in front of and behind the scenes in the finally-finished Orson Welles...

Considering everything that's been happening on the planet in the last several months, you'd have thought we're already in November or December – of 2117. But no. It's only June. 2017. And in some parts of the world, that's the month of brides, fathers, graduates, gays, and climate change denial. Beginning this evening, Thursday, June 1, Turner Classic Movies will be focusing on one of these June groups: Lgbt people, specifically those in the American film industry. Following the presentation of about 10 movies featuring Frank Morgan, who would have turned 127 years old today, TCM will set its cinematic sights on the likes of William Haines, James Whale, George Cukor, Mitchell Leisen, Dorothy Arzner, Patsy Kelly, and Ramon Novarro. In addition to, whether or not intentionally, Claudette Colbert, Colin Clive, Katharine Hepburn, Douglass Montgomery (a.k.a. Kent Douglass), Marjorie Main, and Billie Burke, among others. But this is ridiculous! Why should TCM present a...

Hate — as no one reading this needs to be reminded — clings for life to this country like a cat with its claws sunk into the side of a space shuttle as it screams towards the stratosphere. So while the inert, inelegant and (wait for it) somewhat problematic “Free State of Jones” may not be a valuable contribution to the canon of American historical epics, the shapelessness of its story is worth celebrating for how palpably it conveys the tenacity of prejudice.

In the wake of emancipation, a nefarious “apprenticeship” system is enacted in order to resume the tradition of slavery by another name; from the ruins of the Confederate Army, the Ku Klux Klan rises up to lynch a race of newly liberated citizens. And all the while, a brusque and bearded Matthew McConaughey rides against injustice from deep within the swampy heart of Mississippi, punctuating a half-century of historical...

New Series. Daniel Walber talks production design in "The Furniture". Previously we looked at The Exorcist, Carol and Brooklyn and Batman.

Gregory Peck, whose centennial we’ll all be celebrating tomorrow, was in a grand total of six films that were nominated for Best Production Design. Two of the best, To Kill a Mockingbird (the only winner) and Roman Holiday, will be featured in this week’s Hit Me with Your Best Shot. And so, in the interest of spreading the love, I’ll talk about a very different: 1962’s Cinerama epic, How the West Was Won.

The film, though it tells the story of a single American family, is broken up into five distinct sections. Peck is only in one of them, “The Plains.” This is actually good for our purposes, because it’s one of the three directed by Henry Hathaway. The John Ford and George Marshall chapters...

Filmed in 1940, director George Marshall’s elegantly eerie spook-fest looks better with each passing year. Bob Hope, in top form, plays a radio star who finds himself in the middle of a Havana-bound haunted-house mystery. Paulette Goddard is his luscious companion and as his valet the great Willie Best gives Bob as good as he gets in his definitive performance as a comic foil. Director Marshall went on to film the remake, Scared Stiff, starring Martin and Lewis (with a cameo from Hope and Crosby).

Above: Danish poster for Geisha Boy (Frank Tashlin, USA, 1958).On March 16 Jerry Lewis turns 90 years old, making him one of the oldest living great filmmakers along with Jonas Mekas (93), Seijun Suzuki (92), Stanley Donen (91), D.A. Pennebaker (90), Claude Lanzmann (90) and Andrzej Wajda (90). And if you have any doubt about his status as one of the great auteurs go and see any of the films he directed at Museum of Modern Art's’s current retrospective: Happy Birthday, Mr. Lewis: The Kid Turns 90.To flip through the films of Jerry Lewis in poster form is to encounter an awful lot of crossed eyes, toothy grins and outsized heads on small bodies (a familiar trope for comedians in movie posters whether it's Fernandel or Cantinflas or Buster Keaton.) That said, Lewis also seems to have inspired illustrators around the world. The French love Jerry Lewis, as the cliché goes, but so, it seemed, did the Germans,...

Marjorie Lord actress ca. early 1950s. Actress Marjorie Lord dead at 97: Best remembered for TV series 'Make Room for Daddy' Stage, film, and television actress Marjorie Lord, best remembered as Danny Thomas' second wife in Make Room for Daddy, died Nov. 28, '15, at her home in Beverly Hills. Lord (born Marjorie Wollenberg on July 26, 1918, in San Francisco) was 97. Marjorie Lord movies After moving with her family to New York, Marjorie Lord made her Broadway debut at age 17 in Zoe Akins' Pulitzer Prize-winning adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel The Old Maid (1935). Lord replaced Margaret Anderson in the role of Tina, played by Jane Bryan – as Bette Davis' out-of-wedlock daughter – in Warner Bros.' 1939 movie version directed by Edmund Goulding. Hollywood offers ensued, resulting in film appearances in a string of low-budget movies in the late 1930s and throughout much of the 1940s, initially (and...

Debbie Reynolds ca. early 1950s. Debbie Reynolds movies: Oscar nominee for 'The Unsinkable Molly Brown,' sweetness and light in phony 'The Singing Nun' Debbie Reynolds is Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” star today, Aug. 23, '15. An MGM contract player from 1950 to 1959, Reynolds' movies can be seen just about every week on TCM. The only premiere on Debbie Reynolds Day is Jerry Paris' lively marital comedy How Sweet It Is (1968), costarring James Garner. This evening, TCM is showing Divorce American Style, The Catered Affair, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and The Singing Nun. 'Divorce American Style,' 'The Catered Affair' Directed by the recently deceased Bud Yorkin, Divorce American Style (1967) is notable for its cast – Reynolds, Dick Van Dyke, Jean Simmons, Jason Robards, Van Johnson, Lee Grant – and for the fact that it earned Norman Lear (screenplay) and Robert Kaufman (story) a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award nomination.

It's fitting that Clint Eastwood and John Wayne both have the same birthday week. (Wayne, who died in 1979, was born May 26, 1907, while Eastwood turns 85 on May 31). After all, these two all-American actors' careers span the history of that most American of movie genres, the western.

Both iconic actors were top box office draws for decades, both seldom stretched from their familiar personas, and both played macho, conservative cowboy heroes who let their firearms do most of the talking. Each represented one of two very different strains of western, the traditional and the revisionist.

As a birthday present to Hollywood's biggest heroes of the Wild West, here are the top 57 westerns you need to see.

57. 'Meek's Cutoff' (2010)

Indie filmmaker Kelly Reichardt and her frequent leading lady, Michelle Williams, are the talents behind this sparse, docudrama about an 1845 wagon train whose Oregon Trail journey goes horribly awry. It's an intense...

Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson on the Oscars' Red Carpet Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson at the Academy Awards Eli Wallach and wife Anne Jackson are seen above arriving at the 2011 Academy Awards ceremony, held on Sunday, Feb. 27, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. The 95-year-old Wallach had received an Honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards in November 2010. See also: "Doris Day Inexplicably Snubbed by Academy," "Maureen O'Hara Honorary Oscar," "Honorary Oscars: Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo Among Rare Women Recipients," and "Hayao Miyazaki Getting Honorary Oscar." Delayed film debut The Actors Studio-trained Eli Wallach was to have made his film debut in Fred Zinnemann's Academy Award-winning 1953 blockbuster From Here to Eternity. Ultimately, however, Frank Sinatra – then a has-been following a string of box office duds – was cast for a pittance, getting beaten to a pulp by a pre-stardom Ernest Borgnine. For his bloodied efforts, Sinatra went on...

Teresa Wright-Samuel Goldwyn association comes to a nasty end (See preceding post: "Teresa Wright in 'Shadow of a Doubt': Alfred Hitchcock Heroine in His Favorite Film.") Whether or not because she was aware that Enchantment wasn't going to be the hit she needed – or perhaps some other disagreement with Samuel Goldwyn or personal issue with husband Niven Busch – Teresa Wright, claiming illness, refused to go to New York City to promote the film. (Top image: Teresa Wright in a publicity shot for The Men.) Goldwyn had previously announced that Wright, whose contract still had another four and half years to run, was to star in a film version of J.D. Salinger's 1948 short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut." Instead, he unceremoniously – and quite publicly – fired her.[1] The Goldwyn organization issued a statement, explaining that besides refusing the assignment to travel to New York to help generate pre-opening publicity for Enchantment,...

Exclusive: Matthew McConaughey and writer-director Gary Ross are the catalysts for a project called Free State Of Jones, which is getting some serious attention from Stx Entertainment, the new mini-studio founded by investors Tpg Growth, Gigi Pritzker, Hony and Robert Simonds. We hear that company reps, financial partner Im Global (who is handling foreign), and the filmmakers are heading to Afm this afternoon to discuss pre-sales. This is one of many projects Stx is considering pushing through as part of its first slate. They are looking to go before the cameras in the first quarter of 2015.

Free State Of Jones is based on the untold and extraordinary story of Newton Knight, the leader of one of the greatest rebellions in Civil War history, and we hear that Stx may finance (up to $20M) for the $65M-budgeted story of one of the most controversial men from the that era. McConaughey is...

I wanted to post something truly terrifying for Halloween this year—the first year I believe that Halloween has fallen on a Movie Poster of the Week Friday since I started—but then I came across this beautiful Boris Grinsson poster. Tu Trembles, Carcasse..., which translates very inelegantly as “You are trembling, corpse” is the French title for the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy horror musical Scared Stiff, which was the 8th of their sixteen collaborations (or 9th of their seventeen if you include their cameo in the Road to Bali, a gag appearance that was reciprocated by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in Scared Stiff). Scared Stiff was actually a 1953 remake of a 1940 Bob Hope film The Ghost Breakers, made by the same director, George Marshall, and it was made at the height of Martin & Lewis’s success, when they were the biggest double-act in America. It was...

San Francisco Silent Film Festival – Silent Autumn 2014: From The Great War to Charles Chaplin and Pearl White (image: Charles Chaplin in 'A Film Johnnie') Imagine, if you will, that you can go back one hundred years in time, when people were enjoying a new and pervasive art form: motion pictures. In 1914, the movies had already been around for a while, in peep shows, nickelodeons, and small screening rooms. But now movie theaters were springing up in every community large and small, where families could flock together and watch flickering images in comfort, with live musical accompaniment. On September 20, such was the experience provided by the 2014 San Francisco Silent Film Festival – Silent Autumn: "A Night at the Cinema in 1914." For a history buff like me, this was second best to getting into a time machine. True, the programs consisted mostly of films from the British Film Institute, but the variety content of newsreels,...

The first time I probably saw Eli Wallach was in the 1960s "Batman" television show as Mr. Freeze, but I don't remember anything from those episodes other than how it looked. The first time I saw Wallach and remember him from a role in a movie is probably as Don Altobello in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part III. But Wallach's most memorable role, for me at least, is undoubtedly as Tuco in Sergio Leone's iconic spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Today we learn Wallach is as we will remember him as he died Tuesday, June 24, at the age of 98. His death was confirmed by his daughter Katherine. Wallach's career spanned more than 60 years and also included films such as Elia Kazan's Baby Doll, Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, John Sturgess' The Magnificent Seven, John Huston's The Misfits and the massive ensemble...

Amazingly, the life story of Harry Houdini has never been brought to the big screen (at least not since George Marshall’s take way back in 1953), but Sony have enlisted Max Landis to work on a new draft of their biopic, Houdini.

Landis is of course best known for writing Chronicle, the Josh Trank helmed found footage movie which delivered a refreshing take on the superhero genre. His next movie is Frankenstein, the Paul McGuigan-directed movie that stars James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe. Deadline reveals that his take on Houdini will apparently have an “Hp Lovecraft influence,” although any other details are scarce at this point.

The original draft was scripted by Scott Frank (The Wolverine), while Francis Lawrence was attached to direct before signing up to direct The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and the two-part The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. There’s currently no word on who might direct it now.

The Blue Dahlia

Written by Raymond Chandler

Directed by George Marshall

USA, 1946

Three wartime veterans who served in the Navy return home to Los Angeles. They are Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd) and his two faithful companions, Buzz (William Bendix) and George (Hugh Beaumont). After an early tussle at a diner in which Buzz shows some unfortunate signs of postwar anxiety, Johnny heads home to re-acquaint with his wife Helen (Doris Dowling), who is hosting a party. Much to Johnny’s chagrin, it is clear that one of the guests, Eddie Harwood (Howard Da Silva), owner of a luxurious club downtown called The Blue Dahlia, is having a fling with Helen. The wedded couple do not get along swimmingly, yet the revelation stings Johnny nonetheless. Shortly after Johnny walks out on her and meets a beautiful blonde named Joyce (Veronica Lake), Helen is found shot dead on her couch. Evidence points to Johnny as the culprit,...

Eleanor Parker: Actress Wasted in ‘Valentino,’ brilliant in abortion-themed crime drama ‘Detective Story’ (photo: Eleanor Parker ca. 1955) (See previous post: "Eleanor Parker Dead at 91: ‘The Sound of Music’ Actress.") Eleanor Parker’s three 1950 releases were her last ones for Warner Bros. The following year, she starred in Columbia’s critical and box office flop Valentino, with Anthony Dexter as silent film idol Rudolph Valentino and Parker as a mix of Alice Terry (Valentino’s leading lady in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Conquering Power), Agnes Ayres (Valentino’s leading lady in The Sheik), and Hollywood bullshit. As an aside: Alice Terry wasn’t at all pleased with Valentino. Eleanor Parker wasn’t the problem; Terry was angry because Parker’s character, "Joan Carlisle" aka "Sarah Gray," is shown becoming involved with Valentino both before and after Terry’s marriage to The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse director Rex Ingram,...

Above: Us poster for Forbidden (Frank Capra, USA, 1932)

In honor of the month-long retrospective of the films of the great Barbara Stanwyck starting today at Film Forum in New York, I thought I’d select my favorite Stanwyck posters. Brooklyn-born Ruby Catherine Stevens made 85 films over 37 years in Hollywood so there is an awful lot to choose from. But the remarkable thing about looking back at these posters is how artists seemed to have had a hard time capturing her likeness. The poster for one of her earliest films, Capra’s 1932 Forbidden, above, captures her beautifully, but the poster for Stella Dallas (1937), her first Oscar-nominated role (she never won, shockingly), seems to be of a different actress entirely. As for the sexed-up illustration on the flyer for The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), in that she looks more like Jean Harlow. Some of my favorite posters for her films are the Swedish and Danish designs,...

Gregory Peck from ‘Duel in the Sun’ to ‘How the West Was Won’: TCM schedule (Pt) on August 15 (photo: Gregory Peck in ‘Duel in the Sun’) See previous post: “Gregory Peck Movies: Memorable Miscasting Tonight on Turner Classic Movies.” 3:00 Am Days Of Glory (1944). Director: Jacques Tourneur. Cast: Gregory Peck, Lowell Gilmore, Maria Palmer. Bw-86 mins. 4:30 Am Pork Chop Hill (1959). Director: Lewis Milestone. Cast: Gregory Peck, Harry Guardino, Rip Torn. Bw-98 mins. Letterbox Format. 6:15 Am The Valley Of Decision (1945). Director: Tay Garnett. Cast: Greer Garson, Gregory Peck, Donald Crisp. Bw-119 mins. 8:15 Am Spellbound (1945). Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov, Leo G. Carroll, Rhonda Fleming, Bill Goodwin, Norman Lloyd, Steve Geray, John Emery, Donald Curtis, Art Baker, Wallace Ford, Regis Toomey, Paul Harvey, Jean Acker, Irving Bacon, Jacqueline deWit, Edward Fielding, Matt Moore, Addison Richards, Erskine Sanford, Constance Purdy. Bw-111 mins. 10:15 Am Designing Woman (1957). Director: Vincente Minnelli.

Fred MacMurray movies: ‘Double Indemnity,’ ‘There’s Always Tomorrow’ Fred MacMurray is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" today, Thursday, August 7, 2013. Although perhaps best remembered as the insufferable All-American Dad on the long-running TV show My Three Sons and in several highly popular Disney movies from 1959 to 1967, e.g., The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber, Boy Voyage!, MacMurray was immeasurably more interesting as the All-American Jerk. (Photo: Fred MacMurray ca. 1940.) Someone once wrote that Fred MacMurray would have been an ideal choice to star in a biopic of disgraced Republican president Richard Nixon. Who knows, the (coincidentally Republican) MacMurray might have given Anthony Hopkins a run for his Best Actor Academy Award nomination. After all, MacMurray’s most admired movie performances are those in which he plays a scheming, conniving asshole: Billy Wilder’s classic film noir Double Indemnity (1944), in which he’s seduced by Barbara Stanwyck, and Wilder...

In 1982, Rex Allen, Jr. released a single entitled “Last of the Silver Screen Cowboys,” in which he bemoaned the way Western heroes in the movies had become “a fast dyin’ breed,” and how the days of folks like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and their ilk, when “we knew good would win in the end,” were being rapidly supplanted by the sort of shady fella who you couldn’t necessarily count on to be “standin’ tall for what he believes is right.” Thing is, that breed of cowboy had actually begun its slow death almost 20 years earlier, and it started, ironically enough, not long after the release of one of the most epic Westerns of all time. 1962’s How the West was Won is the sort of film you just don’t see any more, a sprawling saga which tells a 50-year tale of four generations of a family over the course of 162 minutes and five segments: “The...

Eleanor Parker 2013 movie series continues today (photo: Eleanor Parker in Detective Story) Palm Springs resident Eleanor Parker is Turner Classic Movies’ Star of the Month of June 2013. Thus, eight more Eleanor Parker movies will be shown this evening on TCM. Parker turns 91 on Wednesday, June 26. (See also: “Eleanor Parker Today.”) Eleanor Parker received her second Best Actress Academy Award nomination for William Wyler’s crime drama Detective Story (1951). The movie itself feels dated, partly because of several melodramatic plot developments, and partly because of Kirk Douglas’ excessive theatricality as the detective whose story is told. Parker, however, is excellent as Douglas’ wife, though her role is subordinate to his. Just about as good is Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominee Lee Grant, whose career would be derailed by the anti-Red hysteria of the ’50s. Grant would make her comeback in the ’70s, eventually winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her...

Betty Hutton movies (photo: Betty Hutton in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, with Eddie Bracken) [See previous post: "Betty Hutton Bio: The Blonde Bombshell."] Buddy DeSylva did as promised. Betty Hutton was given a key supporting role in Victor Schertzinger’s 1942 musical comedy The Fleet’s In, starring Dorothy Lamour, William Holden, and Eddie Bracken. “Her facial grimaces, body twists and man-pummeling gymnastics take wonderfully to the screen,” enthused Pm magazine. (Hutton would have a cameo, as Hetty Button, in the 1952 remake Sailor Beware, starring Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Corinne Calvet.) The following year, Betty Hutton landed the second female lead in Happy Go Lucky (1943), singing Jimmy McHugh and Frank Loesser’s "Murder, He Says," and stealing the show from fellow Broadway import Mary Martin and former Warner Bros. crooner Dick Powell. She also got co-star billing opposite Bob Hope in Sidney Lanfield’s musical comedy Let’s Face It. Additionally, Paramount’s hugely successful all-star war-effort...

When they say, "They don't make 'em like that anymore," this is what they're talking about. "How the West Was Won," released in America 50 years ago this week (on February 20, 1963) was probably the most ambitious western ever made, an epic saga spanning four generations, 50 years, two-and-a-half hours, five vignettes, three directors (well, actually four), the widest possible screen, and an enormous cast of A-listers, including James Stewart, Debbie Reynolds, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, and Spencer Tracy. It's hard to imagine any movie, let alone a western, being made on such a grand scale today, when it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Naturally, in a production that massive, there was a lot of chaos behind the scenes. Even fans of the movie may not be aware of the off-camera feud between Peck and his director, the technical challenges imposed by the untried widescreen format,...

By Lee Pfeiffer

The word "restrained" doesn't often fit into analysis of Jerry Lewis' film career, but in Hook, Line and Sinker, a 1969 black comedy, the legendary funnyman is indeed restrained, as least in comparison to most of the characters he played. The film is an unusual entry from this period of Lewis' film work in that he did not direct the movie. Instead, George Marshall, an old hand at helming diverse films, took on that responsibility. There isn't much discernible difference in the end result and one could easily be forgiven if they were to assume that Lewis directed. He plays Peter Ingersoll, a typical middle class suburbanite who is living the American dream. He has a boring but steady 9 to 5 job as an insurance salesman, a pretty wife (Anne Francis), two polite children, a comfortable home and a devoted best friend, Scott Carter (Peter Lawford), who also...

Cinema Retro will once again be attending the fabulous Widescreen Weekend at the National Media Museum in Bradford, England April 27-30. Retro movie lovers will be converging on Europe's last remaining Cinerama theater to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the legendary widescreen format. One of the great joys of the festival is that is that it allows like-minded movie lovers from around the globe to watch widescreen epics in the manner they were meant to be seen. Cinema Retro is proud to be one of the sponsors of a rare screening of MGM's The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm in its original 3-panel format. As in the tradition, Cinema Retro publishers Lee Pfeiffer and Dave Worrall will be holding court until the wee small hours at the bar of the historic Midland Hotel. Join us for a drink (or ten!) and share the mutual love of widescreen epics.

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Today sees the opening of "The Cabin In The Woods," one of the freshest, most enjoyable horror movies in years, one that we can only urge you to go see (read our review here). To mark its release, Time Out have polled critics, programmers and filmmakers as to their favorite horror movies, and collated their finds in a mammoth list.

Topped by "The Exorcist," it's an excellent read, and one you'll want to sit down with over the weekend, and as a taste, below you can find the top ten picks of ten of the most notable filmmaker contributors. You can find the full list, as well as picks from many, many more interesting figures, from Antonio Campos and Joe Dante to Simon Pegg and Rob Zombie, over at Time Out's site. And why not weigh in with your own ten picks over in the comments below?

Roger Corman ("The Pit & The Pendulum,...