It’s no secret that I love a good sailor musical, so when I caught wind of the getTV Mickey Rooney Blogathon, hosted by Once Upon a Screen, Outspoken & Freckled and Paula’s Cinema Club, it took only a moment’s perusal of the channel’s upcoming schedule to make my pick: All Ashore, the 1953 musical in which Rooney plays, yup, a sailor on …
By the 1980s, the movie musical was… well, far beyond the time of transition. Since their heyday in the ’30s and ’40s, musicals had become limited to just a handful of movies per year, without a lot to choose from—Disney films for kids, pop hits designed to sell soundtracks, the occasional prestigious musical dramas, and the cheesy movies that seemed to capture everything cringeworthy of their era. For the studios financing the films, musicals were, to put it mildly, anything but a sure thing. That’s partly what makes Purple Rain such an interesting moment in film history—though it’s easy to see its significance 25 years after the fact, Purple Rain is still a weird, weird movie.
Considering the historical entwinement of the United States and Britain, for the most part, people on either side of the Atlantic know where to spot the differences between our two cultures. The chips, the crisps, biscuits, boots, and lifts—as an American, I can accept all of those fairly easily, and will enthusiastically bring them up upon encountering …
Imagine a world where you commute to work by hoverplane, consume all your food and drink via a digestible tablet, and use a sequence of letters and numbers as a name. That’s the speculative setting of Just Imagine, the 1930 sci-fi musical that takes place in the far-off future of… 1980. Aside from that veneer, it’s a simple enough …
It takes a lot of skill to make a movie look easy, and when Billy Wilder’s at his best, his films can appear almost effortless, moving forward so naturally that I’m often surprised, and a bit disappointed, when they’re over. One stunning example of his prowess in that regard is Witness for the Prosecution, the …
The late 1960s were a turbulent time of new cultures, changing norms, and shifting values, and one place that was immediately obvious was in Hollywood. With the downfall of the studio system, the impending doom of the Code, and the radical growth of political cinema around the world, the American movie industry was working hard to alter its …