Selecting the ten worst winners of the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar is a whole lot tougher than choosing the ten best. Why? Because I have not always bothered to see a lot of the rubbishy ones. Only recently I sat through several of those I had avoided like the plague for […]
There have been some quite wonderful ‘Best Picture’ Oscar winners since 1927/8 and there have been some shockers, too. Just for the heck of it, I went through the list and jotted down my top ten and my bottom ten. If anyone agrees with either list I shall be flabbergasted, […]
Director Charles Laughton thought Robert Mitchum was one of the finest actors in the world and he also respected him as a person. He wrote in Esquire about the American who starred in his masterpiece The Night of the Hunter in 1955: ‘All this tough talk is a blind, you […]
In the 1955 Hitchcock picture To Catch a Thief, there is a scene in which John Robie (Cary Grant) is discussing the cook’s ‘sensitive hands’ with an insurance agent and casually mentions that those hands once strangled a German general without a sound. For German audiences, however, the words were […]
Tea and Sympathy (1956) could have been a fine movie, but the Production Code Administration (PCA) and the Catholic Legion of Decency (CLOD) did all in their considerable powers to emasculate it. And they succeeded. No matter how many times the screenplay was rewritten, they continued to find it […]
The Moon is Blue (1953) is a pretty tame picture, yet it was the first post-Hayes mainstream Hollywood movie to use the words ‘virgin’, ‘seduce’ and ‘mistress’ (in the sexual partner sense). The mere utterance of these three words was enough to get the picture banned from theatres in Boston, […]
George Raft George Raft turned down the leads in High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon (both in 1941), thereby giving Humphrey Bogart’s career a huge kick-start. Contrary to public opinion though, he never turned down Casablanca (1942). Why? Because he […]
Right from the earliest days of the silent picture era the moving picture moguls were aware that, more than any other commodity, sex sold. And, until the Hays Office reared its censorial head in 1922, they sold plenty of it. After a string of risqué films and several off-screen […]
Joan Collins in The Opposite Sex (1956) The Opposite Sex (1956) was a musical re-make of the 1939 film The Women. It was also one of the early vehicles for the new British bombshell Joan Collins. New to the movies and to MGM, she recalled walking past the studio […]
In 2012 a restored print of the very first Oscar-winning feature Wings was released on DVD. It is quite a beautiful print, (although overlong at 144 minutes), and well worth taking two and a half hours out of one’s life to watch it. It is, of course, a silent picture, […]
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