The Man Who Came To Dinner is a story about a radio host, Sheridan Whiteside, who ruins Christmas, but since this is Hollywood, he also manages to save it in the end. And unlike the majority of real people, the titular man’s consistently caustic manner and maddening self-absorption is fairly amusing. The writers also understood the most rudimentary elements of comedy and thus we are also treated to penguins periodically running around loose in the house. Continue reading “The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)”
Category: Classic
Holiday Affair (1949)
Homecoming (1948)
Clark Gable plays a successful surgeon named Ulysses Lee Johnson, but you’ll immediately know him as Ulysses S. Hunk. Anne Baxter plays his wife, Penny and together they lead an existence that is so shallow that not only would Ulysses rather go dancing at his country club than helping out his doctor friend Robert Sunday fight malaria in the bad part of town, he actually tells this to Sunday’s face without a smidgen of guilt! Continue reading “Homecoming (1948)”
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Leslie Nielsen is Commander Adams, the skipper of a starship headed to the distant planet Altair-IV. The mission is to investigate what happened to a spaceship full of busy bodies that disappeared there about 20 years ago.
Once near the planet, Adams and his crew pick up a transmission from a man identifying himself as Dr. Morbius. Morbius radios that everything is A.O.K., everybody else is dead, and there’s really no reason why Adams and his crew should land and investigate everyone’s mysterious disappearance. Commander Adams though is well chosen for his job because he smells something fishy and it isn’t Cookie’s space tuna surprise! Continue reading “Forbidden Planet (1956)”
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
RKO was guilty of the performing the cinematic equivalent of a partial birth abortion on Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. Its 88 minute running time only came about after fifty minutes of it were shaved off by RKO butchers following a disastrous test screening.
And for some reason they thought they should show this movie to a Saturday night audience after they had already sat through a test screening of the upbeat musical The Fleet’s In! Guess what? People weren’t quite prepared to sit through Welles’ thoughtful meditation on the ending of a way of life and the coming technological boom after watching sailors sing and dance. Continue reading “The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)”
Mrs. Parkington (1944)
As soon as you see star Greer Garson hobble down the gigantic staircase of her ornate mansion all decked out in old gal makeup at the very beginning of the film, you immediately realize that you’re in for one of those deals where Old Girl is going to be sitting around flasbacking her way through her tumultuous life. Continue reading “Mrs. Parkington (1944)”
Torch Song (1953)
I’m assuming that there was a time when Joan Crawford didn’t resemble the cartoonish hag that Faye Dunaway portrayed her as in Mommie Dearest. By the time Torch Song was made however, that time had sadly passed. Continue reading “Torch Song (1953)”