Watching It’s a Wonderful Life is a holiday tradition, like hearing Bing sing “White Christmas” or glugging down Grandma’s eggnog. What may shock you is that the beloved drama tanked upon arrival in 1947, ranking 26th in the year-end box-office recap.Read More
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The best part about Spencer Tracy’s acting is that you rarely “catch” him doing it. There are no visible “Method” gears grinding, no hammy “Look-at-me!” moments. Spencer created real people from fictional characters and made it look easy, claiming his “technique” was simply “Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.”Read More
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Betcha if I say “Ginger Rogers,” you think “Fred Astaire.” It’s the classic-movie equivalent of the patellar reflex. Paired by destiny (or in their case, RKO), they dazzled Depression-weary audiences in nine musicals between 1933 and 1939.Read More
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Pop music is littered with One-Hit Wonders. Movie stars are hot...until they’re not. And then there’s Bing Crosby, who reigned for nearly 50 years atop a multimedia empire few performers can rival.Read More
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Why is The Asphalt Jungle the mack daddy of all caper films? It’s co-written and directed by John Huston, who made the criminally good classics Key Largo and The Maltese Falcon. It’s based on a book by W.R. Burnett, who established his street cred with Little Caesar and High Sierra.Read More
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The honey-soaked hive of Film Noir Bad Girls is always buzzing with Queen Bee candidates. Barbara Stanwyck from Double Indemnity. Jane Greer from Out of the Past. Audrey Totter from, well, every pic Totter ever made. But for pure “Wait...what?!” shock value, few dames can rival the on- and off-screen tale of Gloria Grahame, whose boudoir eyes and va-va-va-voom figure rocked Hollywood.Read More
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“Never have I seen a performer plagued with such a chronic case of stage jitters. I’m sure she vomited before and after every scene. When the cameras stopped, she’d run headlong to her dressing room, lock herself in and cry. Those weren’t butterflies in her stomach. They were wasps.”
So wrote director Frank Capra of Jean Arthur, the woman he called “my favorite actress.” I discovered Jean in my teens while reading Capra’s autobiography, The Name Above the Title. Who was this appealing, neurotic star, so publicity-shy that she was dubbed the “American Garbo” by Movie Classic magazine in 1937?
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