Reviews of Classic Film, with artwork and news
LAST UPDATE January 4, 2025
Hollywood 2024: no original movies made the domestic top 10 box office list – 10 top-grossing US films were all sequels and prequels – Techspot
Fast Reviews:
Bring Me No Flowers - 1964: Rock Hudson is a high-achieving hypochondriac who mistakenly hears his doctor referring to someone with only a few weeks to live before "their ticker" gives out, and he nervously applies the diagnoses to himself, goes home to his wife (Doris Day) and starts to get his affairs in order, confiding the dark news only to his next door neighbor (Tony Randall) about his impending doom. Out of concern for his wife he determines to set her up with an acceptable replacement "so she won't be lonely" but she mistakes this as an effort to push her out of the way so he can carry on romantic pursuits with other women in their gossip-soaked local area. Meanwhile, Tony Randall starts writing a rough draft of an heroic eulogy for the eventual funeral, fueled by an endless supply of alcohol to nurse his sadness over the coming death of his best friend.
What could have easily been a black comedy about death never really covers the ground necessary to do so, and is instead so wrapped up in silliness and gags of every variety that it seems to simply not dare to get near the actual thing it is satirizing (script by Julius J. Epstein, Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore). One acception is the jubilant, smiling Paul Lynde as an energetic undertaker selling burial plots "for the whole family" in a place called Green Hills "truly a home away from home," though this too is pretty silly stuff without any deeper notes.
Within its own narrow perimeters Bring Me No Flowers is as polished and as tight a comedy as Rock Hudson ever got to make, and he dominates this film in a way he never got to do in the other two films he made with Doris Day (Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back) and gives a very good and funny performance amid the frothy silliness (and gets off a wonderfully self-aware crack about wishing he could set up his soon-to-be-widow with Cary Grant.)
Tony Randall is a perfect sidekick to Hudson and his secret, is on screen as continually drunk or in the process of getting there and isn't the neurotic nebbish of other films. Edward Andrews appears as the aggravated doctor who complains how medical specialists get all the breaks and the high-end money in the wealth-generating part of the medicine industry, and there is a nice running joke about his trying to get rid of some of the fish he catches on a productive weekend excursion, but nobody wants any: in a way the dead fish he is carrying around is a metaphor for the actual topic of death, and in the case of this film, nobody wants to touch it.
Dracula's Daughter - 1936
Gloria Holden stars as the progeny of you-know-who and gives an interesting and sympathetic portrait of a very self-doubting vampire, giving us the grim haunted stoicism of Countess Marya Zaleska who has come to London to make sure her infamous father is truly dead as the story in Dracula's Daughter picks up immediately from the ending of the 1931 Dracula. She steals the body of the Count and then disposes of him in a thorough fashion that goes beyond even what Dr. Van Helsing (Edward van Sloan) might prescribe, he being inconveniently unavailable because the police have him locked up for Dracula's murder as he has happily confessed to putting a stake through the chest of Zaleska's pater familias ("I did humanity a service" he calmly tells the investigators who are not accepting any talk of Dracula's vampire activities).
What pulls this film more into the 20th century versus Todd Browning's earlier film which was bathed in an almost medieval atmosphere of dread is how daughter Zaleska becomes concerned about herself in a very 20th century way, seeking the help of London psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger) who she heard claim that any obsession can be defeated with the proper approach to dealing with it. Zaleska's self awareness goes in a dramatically different direction than Bela Lugosi's over-confident vampire king who we can not imagine seeking the help or sympathy of anyone other than a loyal coffin-lid lifter like Renfield, and in this way Dracula's Daughter is radically different with the vampire being both the victim and the monster at the same time.
Otto Kruger gives us an efficient and somewhat jocular Dr. Garth who meets Zaleska at a London cocktail party, and as he talks about his work with psychological problems, he provides the example of alcoholism as obsession, with his treatment method being one in which he puts the patient and a bottle of liquor together in a room and makes the patient overcome their compulsion in a direct test of willpower. Garth is confident of this method, but he little realizes that when Countess Zaleska puts her eyes (with perhaps a small seed of infatuation) upon him he has literally become the bottle. Though she makes a brittle pretense of certainty that she can fight the driving hunger of her vampirism, her manservant ("Sandor" played by Irving Pichel) coldly claims the effort can only fail, and in a kind of Iago-like whispering campaign he predicts the outcome of Zaleska trying to deny her "true" nature as only ending in a bloodbath.
Dracula's Daughter is early enough in the Universal monster movie cycle that it retains the flavor of those early films where the transition from silent film to "talkie" is still evident. The dramatic forms of the stage—and in this case, script writing—shape a story that is ostensibly a horror film but also remarkably contains both a basic melodramatic subplot and a prototypical screwball comedy undertone at the same time. Kruger's sharp-witted doctor is regularly battling a wise-cracking secretary (Marguerite Churchill) with the two firing funny dialogue back and forth in a style that was the bread and butter of comedy films like Bringing Up Baby just two years later.
Film historians typically congratulate producer Val Lewton for introducing a strong psychological presence within the horror film genre with 1942's Cat People, but in actual fact it was more or less there from the start if you consider the likes of 1920's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The psychological processes of madmen and monsters were already being explored in the early Universal horror movies, though usually in a cruder way compared to the sleight-of-hand that Lewton and his directors would use a decade later, but the template of a sympathetic but damned female "monster" is strongly outlined in Dracula's Daughter and has more than a little similarity to the outlines of the struggle Simone Simon portrayed as the "cat woman" in Lewton's later Cat People film.
Classic Flix has a sale on with a flat rate shipping of $4.99 and reduced prices on a list of BluRays and DVDs – Classicflix
Criterion announces Crossing Delancey on 4K Bluray for Feb 2025
The Criterion website talks about the many extras on the disk release including a "new program on the making of the film featuring actors Amy Irving and Peter Riegert and screenwriter Susan Sandler."
Here's our 2016 review of the film Crossing Delancey.
Review: The Hangman - 1959
Robert Taylor plays an embittered and jaded Deputy United States Marshal who is called "the Hangman" because of his success rate in bringing in escaped criminals. He has one final job to do before retirement, catching the last living member (named Johnny Butterfield) of a murderous gang that wiped out a Wells Fargo stage coach. The Marshal is faced with two obstacles: he doesn't know what the fleeing criminal looks like, and everyone he tries to enlist to help him identify the man refuses to do so. He ends up relying on the criminal's former girlfriend (Tina Louise) to help with the identification. More about The Hangman 1959
Teri Garr has died 1944–2024
The offbeat, quirky comic actor of Young Frankenstein and Tootsie has died – Associated Press MSN
Teri Garr was an original who fought typecasting to the end – Yahoo
Mel Brooks talks about Garr's "German accent" that got her a role for Young Frankenstein. – MSN Deadline
A Comedic Genius ahead of her time – Rolling Stone MSN
Updated review of the 1935 film directed by James Whale.
See this page on the coming release of the Our Gang/Little Rascals silent short films on Blu Ray – Classicflix.com
Years in the making, with over 800 man-hours of restoration invested in the shorts in this collection, ClassicFlix presents The Little Rascals - The Restored Silents, Volume 1 this November 19th. Volume 1 showcases the franchise in its infancy, including Our Gang (1922)—the premiere short in the series put together from eight different sources and now in its most complete form..."
Mitzi Gaynor has died - 1931-2024
South Pacific star Mitzi Gaynor dies at 93 – UPI Press
Legendary South Pacific Actress has died – People Magazine
Chicago Tribune 2013 Mitzi Gaynor’s interview – Chicago Tribune
"Showbiz Dynamo" Mitzi Gaynor – Hollywood Reporter
Mitzi Gaynor's top ten movies – Soap Central
The career of Mitzi gaynor – Soap Central
Kiss Me, Deadly - 1955
Kiss Me, Deadly can be a bit jarring if you're not prepared for how this story (courtesy of director Robert Alldrich) is told and if you're conditioned to seeing the other, more ethical 1950's noir investigators of filmdom. Here, the private detective (played by Ralph Meeker) doggedly pursues a "thread that becomes a string that becomes a rope."
More about Kiss Me, Deadly - 1955
Raymie – 1960
Though a children's film about the difficulties facing a young boy, Raymie also has a background story about the adults who congregate on a fishing pier, day after day, where they (and the young boy) deal with the circumstances of their lives. Features John Agar and Julie Adams as adults with an on-and-off-again relationship and David Ladd as the boy determined to catch an impossible fish. More about Raymie - 1964.
Belief-Code, Body Code and T3 Therapy? See Belief Code Therapy.com