Easy Living, part of a Preston Sturges double feature at New Beverly this past week, is a delightful screwball comedy from 1937. It’s full of misunderstandings and mistaken identities, and it’s a great example of escapist fantasy for Depression-era (or modern day) moviegoers. Our Cinderella in this story is Mary Smith (Jean Arthur), who’s on …
TCM rounds out the end of the year with a spectacular lineup, thanks in part to its choice of Fred Astaire as December’s Star of the Month, which was, of course, a fantastic decision.
I’m digging further into the mass of Busby Berkeleys I accumulated last week, and I’ve run into another odd, very un-“Berkeley”-like picture: I Live for Love. It’s very interesting to look at these smaller films as a kind of career in and of itself, moving parallel to his more well-known musical spectacles. Here we see another highly melodramatic piece with little evidence of the signatures and trademarks he developed in his musical works.
I hadn’t actually planned on watching this movie–though it is directed by Busby Berkeley, it’s not actually a musical, so it didn’t cross on my radar while I was plotting this month’s Rare Musicals post. TCM had given us the gift of a whole day of rare Berkeleys, so while I was flipping through my …
The Broadway Melody is a curious little film, and certainly a testament to the mythos of the Academy, and the weight that a term like “Oscar-winner” is expected to imply. It was the first sound movie to win that now-coveted Best Picture award, but in revisiting it, viewers may find it a little… lacking.
One of the loveliest surprises in watching vintage movies is picking something at mostly-random–a poster, or an actor, or a general feeling–and having it turn out to contain something much deeper than your original shallow intentions.
That’s what happened to me and A Date with Judy, a choice I plucked somewhat randomly from the Netflix queue–mostly because I recognized the title from scouring the That’s Entertainment list, and when I saw that it combined the forces of Elizbaeth Taylor and Jane Powell, my subconscious lizard brain took over, and the next thing I knew, I was inserting the disc into my DVD player.