Boris Karloff! Bela Lugosi! A black cat! Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Black and white.
A "lost" or anyhow neglected Frank Capra film from the same year as It Happened One Night. (A Columbia film re-released, perversely enough, by Paramount!) All the old gang is reassembled -- scriptwriter Robert Riskin, photographer Joseph Walker -- and Warner Baxter is a more soulful, more careworn, more human …
A pampered heiress jumps her father's yacht on the eve of her wedding, and sets off on a very educational tour of grassroots America, learning empirically about the art of hitchhiking, haystack-sleeping, donut-dunking and so forth, with a wiseguy newspaperman serving as her gruff guide to Real Life and True …
A honeymoon couple, a barge captain and a peasant girl, are split apart by their contrary hankerings — his for the timeless romance of the river, hers for the modern romance of the city. This, a more conventionally structured work than Zero for Conduct, is Jean Vigo's second and last …
A vacationing couple in Switzerland is whisked back home, swept into a political assassination scheme and a search for their kidnapped child — a characteristic Hitchcock notion about the little surprises that can quicken the heartbeat of middle-class normalcy. So characteristic, in fact, that Hitchcock made the same movie again, …
Ernst Lubitsch jumped from the Paramount lot, where he reigned supreme, to MGM for this one musical only. And to all of his lavish requests for re-creations of mythical kingdom and legendary Par-ee, the new studio did not know how to say no. Subsequently, this gargantuan dream, with hopes pinned …
Josef von Sternberg's starry-eyed historical hallucination -- a montage of virgins, a royal wedding set amid gargoyles and two-million soft-focus candles -- on the subject of Catherine the Great (Marlene Dietrich) and Peter the Loon (Sam Jaffe), the latter a Harpo Marx mischief maker who roams through his palace with …
Dashiell Hammett's duo of dipsomaniacal detectives, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) make their big screen debut.
The static elements -- peasant costumes and provincial locales -- are more lifelike and life-sized than most times in Jean Renoir (are even cited as precedent for Italian neo-realism). The closer he gets to a central storyline and professional actors, the more he reverts to standard overpunctuation.
Major John Barrymore; minor Howard Hawks. The former is cast to type, as they say, as an egomaniacal, megalomaniacal, and various other kinds of maniacal Broadway producer. Carole Lombard, as his temperamental protégé, attempts to match him, and certainly succeeds on the scale of shrillness. Written by Ben Hecht and …