Brian of the esteemed movie blog Rupert Pupkin Speaks has been hosting another of his wonderful “Underrated” series, this time focusing on the Detective and Mystery movie genre. He’s had a great line of movie folks submitting lists so far (and in fact, a bit dangerous in terms of rapidly expanding my queue of must-see movies), and today is my day!
When it comes to 1950s pop culture, you don’t find many pairs more iconic than Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. As stars of the beloved TV comedy I Love Lucy, which ran from 1951 to 1957, they were responsible for depicting consistent and relatable comedy about the all-American lifestyle to an audience of millions, while also juggling their real-life relationship …
Majorly adult themes like regret and loss take a teenage turn in Robert Z. Leonard’s 1947 film Cynthia, based on the play The Rich, Full Life by Viña Delmar. Mary Astor and George Murphy star as a set of parents who sacrificed their own young-adult ambitions for the sake of raising their sickly infant daughter, who, now at the cusp of adulthood herself (and played by Elizabeth Taylor), is beginning to bend after shouldering the weight of these sacrifices her entire life. This film is an interesting examination of the American teenager, which was a relatively new designation at this point in history, yet a natural story to be told.
When you settle in to watch a film called “Honolulu,” you might expect to see a lush, expansive musical with plenty of opulent sets and numbers, perhaps a sequence or two in Technicolor to highlight the natural beauty of the island and to wow the viewer’s imagination. But, lest you start to think that all of 1939’s films were big epics, that’s really not the case for MGM’s 1939 Honolulu—it’s a very small-scale movie, set mostly in the interiors of passenger ships and homes instead of tropical jungles and pristine beaches. Instead, we’re treated to some fun trick photography and several Eleanor Powell dance numbers, which may be a fair enough trade for some people.
In 1937, Katharine Hepburn was struggling. Or rather, the idea of “Katharine Hepburn” was struggling. Though she’d already claimed her first Oscar win in 1933 for Morning Glory, and contributed to the enormous success of George Cukor’s Little Women, a string of financial flops in the late ’30s meant she was proving Marie Dressler’s old adage true: “You’re only as …
Though romantic comedies have largely fallen out of respect in mainstream cinema today, there was a time—as has been proved repeatedly throughout the Romantic Comedy Blogathon—when romantic comedies were popular with both critics and audiences. Ninotchka is a fantastic example of these converging interests, as Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas make one of cinema’s most classic and celebrated pairings, and …