Cinemagraphe

Reviews of Classic Film, with artwork and news

LAST UPDATE August 18, 2025

Fast Reviews:

Daughter of Dr. Jekyll - 1957: Gloria Talbott and John Agar do what they can with the minimalist production of this story of Dr. Jekyll's daughter (Talbott) showing up at the family's gloomy estate to inherit and discover, previously unknown to her, that dad was the famous Hyde/Jekyll of legend. Arthur Shields plays a kindly family doctor who tries to help her through the turmoil of having the estate (and its wealth) dumped into her lap plus learning about the unwholesome "curse" that, with a full moon, she will have a propensity to become a monster like Jekyll did when becoming Mr. Hyde. John Agar is the girl's boyfriend and is (mostly) determined to dispel the "curse" as a faery tale, or, as the story proceeds, a psychological manipulation. Meanwhile, the daughter is becoming convinced something is horrifyingly happening to her that she can't remember or control.

The problem for this cast and the director, Edgar Ulmer, is that the lack of money is too evident, and the script is too bare of any subtleties. Like an already seen period TV drama you can tell where the plot twists are going long before they arrive, and the only real pleasure of the film is Ulmer's sometimes interesting visual work and Talbott and Agar trying to go the limit of their abilities to make their characters stick out from the mediocrity surrounding them. Arthur Shields is a high point of the production, but he nor the rest of the cast can perform any alchemy here.

Lemon Drop Kid - 1951: I read that Bob Hope, who stars in this film, wanted to make a Christmas movie with the staying power of other in-the-process-of-becoming-classic holiday films out of Hollywood, so he got together a Damon Runyon story with himself and Marilyn Maxwell about saving an old folks home in the middle of a plot which includes the tension of the "Lemon Drop Kid" (nicknamed this on account of his consuming lemon drops all the time) on a deadline to pay off some dangerous gangsters he owes $10K to. Sounds like a great list of ingredients, combining a Runyon tale about Christmas plus old ladies in need of help and Hope maneuvered into being the hero, but it just doesn't gel. The humor is announced in such a big way that you can almost see subliminal neon "applause" and "laughter" signs blinking. The construction of the tale is out of pace with itself and the laughs are too enunciated and seem to be exaggerated far beyond what any typical Runyon story would contain.

Here comes the Universal Legacy Dracula film collection: all in 4K – Collider

"The genius of ‘Sunset Boulevard’" – Washington Post

According to Lubin, D.W. Griffith

... was a living metaphor who probably influenced their script. After years at the top during the silent era, Griffith had fallen into intemperance and destitution. He was known for frequenting Los Angeles bars in his later years and haranguing people he had known during the good old days. Wilder had witnessed Griffith doing just that to movie producer Samuel Goldwyn in 1948. In the wake of Griffith’s death a few months later and the many contrived newspaper obituaries, Brackett saw a subject worth pursuing. As Lubin puts it, "Hollywood devours its own and has no respect for its past."

What's stored at "Iron Mountain"? – UK Far Out Magazine

The film and music world is still tethered to the physical archives of old analogue tapes and celluloid film. After years of subpar generation loss—the degradation of fidelity when media is transferred or copied to new mediums as technology evolves—the remastering boom of the last decade or so has demanded access to the source recordings to amplify the sonic character of our favourite albums and present the films we love in that beautiful 4K picture. The preciousness of such archives was once again made painfully apparent in 2008 when the music industry was struck with one of its worst accidents since the days of the nitrate explosions. Using a blowtorch to warm asphalt shingles on Universal Studios Hollywood’s backlot roofing, a worker had accidentally allowed a fire to sweep across three acres of the property, damaging the King Kong Encounter attraction and an estimated 50,000 archived digital video and film copies, including the original recordings of some of the biggest-selling artists of all time under Universal Music Group’s corporate umbrella...."

A 1915 silent film considered "lost" was found on Long Island – MSN New York Daily News

The short film is about Abraham Lincoln

Fast Reviews

Teachers Pet

Teacher's Pet - 1958: First-class production values and Clark Gable barking his lines like it’s 1934 help keep this two-hour comedy moving forward. For much of the first half, it’s almost all Gable in the role of James Gannon, managing editor of a daily newspaper, along with some scenes of Doris Day as a night school journalism teacher lecturing her students. The publisher of the newspaper where Gannon works wants him to go guest-lecture at the newspaper class to give them insight on the less theoretical aspects of the business.

Gannon, angry about the assignment, initially visits her class intending to tell the teacher off, intending to dismiss her teaching as nonsense and useless theory and to flatly state the only education a real newspaperman needs comes from hard won experience. But instead, he sizes her up, listens to her speak to the class, then thinks better of his plan, and sits down, fascinated. He then concocts a cover story to hide his real identity.

She becomes equally fascinated that this older student seems to have an unmatched natural talent for journalism, completely unaware he’s the seasoned managing editor of a large staff, looming like an emperor with his sleeves rolled up from a long table in the middle of a jammed newsroom. Between shouting out split-second orders and speed-reading through soon to be published copy, he grinds the whole staff through the every-second-counts method of getting out a daily paper. But aspects of her night class on the subject of journalism catch his curiosity, besides the point driven home by the film's director (George Seaton) that the gruff newspaperman finds the night class teacher extremely attractive.

Though a comedy, both Gable and Day take their parts seriously at times as legitimate characters in unique non-comedy situations. Beneath the gags and the somewhat familiar routine of mistaken identity, the story explores (written by Fay Kanin and Michael Kanin) the value of education and the peculiar situation of a professional expert in a field being thrust into exploring the fundamentals of his discipline from an angle he never considered.

Gig Young appears as a university professor named Hugo Pine, who at first comes across as something like a superman. He’s a psychologist fluent in multiple languages, a world traveller, the author of numerous books, capable of rattling off facts like a ticker tape, and seemingly a master of an endless array of skills. He’s also assisting Doris Day’s character with writing a book. When Clark Gable’s character sees them together at a nightclub, where he is cozily seated with Mamie Van Doren (as nightclub entertainer Peggy DeFore), he quickly concludes that, if he’s interested in the lady professor, Gig Young’s imposing psychologist is his immediate competition. Thus begins a funny game of one-upmanship.

Partly a comedy about how an old dog learns new tricks, Teacher's Pet also serves as a straightforward vehicle for Clark Gable to portray an older version of the fast-talking, hard-boiled reporter archetype he won an Oscar for in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934). But the film isn’t without its problems. Inserting a more sophisticated and illuminated understanding of the role and possibilities of journalism into Teacher's Pet jars a little against the comedy which is goofy and exaggerated like many romantic comedies of the era. At other times this duality modulates seamlessly and makes me wish they could have carried it further with a better exploration of that giant newsroom teaming with character actors.

Another problem is the noticeable age gap between Gable and Doris Day. This wouldn't be an issue if the story acknowledged it in some way, but instead, the story implies that Gable, Gig Young, and Day are all contemporaries in terms of maturity, which is fine as far as dialogue and the story goes, but is visually unconvincing.

At the time of filming, Gable was nearing the end of his life; he would die in 1960 after two heart attacks just eleven days apart. In Teacher's Pet, he often appears jowly and puffy, and with hindsight, there’s a kind of John Barrymore effect — much like watching Barrymore in his final films, you can see the deterioration in progress. As Gable smokes his way through the movie, lighting one cigarette after another (with one particular lighter even playing a part in the plot), you feel like yelling at the screen, “Clark, stop it! It’s no good for ya!”

Gig Young plays his psychologist character "straight" for a good stretch of the film, but eventually, small eccentricities begin to surface, though nothing approaching the scale of neurosis he portrayed in Touch of Mink (1962), also with Day. Young is a good match for Gable, and in a twist that helps to refresh this two-hour comedy, his psychologist character ends up coaching the frustratingly love-struck old newspaperman through rapid-fire growing-up therapy. This is so that Gannon the Managing Editor will have a fighting chance with the deeply offended lady professor, who by that point has uncovered the ruse played on her by her talented amateur "student."

Doris Day has limited space in Teacher's Pet to fully showcase her talents, but she is a good comedy sparring partner for Gable and she does get to pirate Van Doren's rendition of "I’m the Girl Who Invented Rock and Roll" and transforms it into a funny song parody. She also executes what seems to be her main purpose in the story, to cause Gable’s character to grind away in perplexity. The sophisticated, refined world of education that Managing Editor Gannon has long detested suddenly begins to look appealing with Doris Day as it's exponent.

Fast Reviews

Champagne for Caesar - 1950: As television spread across the United States, films began to incorporate this culture-changing phenomenon into cinematic storytelling. Champagne for Caesar centers on the immediate power of television programming to affect people’s lives, especially the life of an unemployable genius (Ronald Colman) who lives with his sister (Barbara Britton). A kind of "living encyclopedia" with a superhuman ability to recall even the most obscure facts, he appears on a television quiz show (despite loathing it on an intellectual level) and begins to amass a fortune. Each week, he refuses to accept a payout of his winnings, instead returning to face increasingly difficult double-or-nothing challenges. His reason for going to such lengths, and for refusing to cash out even as the prize climbs into the millions and threatens to bankrupt the sponsoring company, is simple: revenge.

The motive for his revenge stems from an encounter with the corporation that manufactures Milady Soap, the sponsor of the quiz show. He is offered a job, briefly hired, and then immediately fired by the company’s flamboyant leader, Burnbridge Waters (played by Vincent Price), who dismisses him with the line, "You’re a dreamer, and I’m a doer." The abrupt dismissal comes after Beauregard Bottomley (Ronald Colman) makes a small, humorous remark during their introductory conversation:

Burnbridge Waters: I have an idea. I want to find out what the average man thinks of it. Then when we find out what he thinks of it, we will change his thinking. What I am about to tell you now is very top secret. It ranks with the discovery of electricity and the invention of the wheel. I am thinking of putting on the market an all purpose cake of soap that would also be used to clean teeth.

Bottomley: I see, sort of the foam at the mouth approach, eh?

Burnbridge Waters:You would've started tomorrow morning.

Bottomley: That would've been fine but aren't we using rather a strange tense, "would've"?

Burnbridge Waters: No, Sir, we are not. I loathe humor and you are humorous. ...this is a deadly serious world, this world of business .... You are an improvident grasshopper and I am an industrious squirrel. Nothing personal.

As Bottomley protests about having gained and then abruptly lost the job, Burnbridge Waters (Vincent Price) calmly takes his seat at his corporate desk. Raising one hand into the air, he drifts into a meditative state, staring blankly into space. Bottomley continues to argue and hurl insults, but receives no response. An assistant quietly explains, “It’s no use—he’s no longer on this plane.”

The writing in Champagne for Caesar is often clever, and the dialogue is packed with double meanings, zingers, and witty wordplay that pokes fun at American culture circa 1950. However, the storytelling is rather loose, and the humor (whether satirical or farcical) is the only real force propelling the plot forward, aside from Bottomley's laid-back pursuit of vengeance.

At around the 48-minute mark, co-star Celeste Holm is finally introduced into the story, and at that point, the film begins to come together. With her arrival, the movie quickly finds a sense of human balance. Holm plays a beautiful and intelligent woman named Flame O’Neill, who has been hired by the soap company to derail Bottomley by acting as a "distraction."

When Bottomley falls slightly ill with the flu, Flame O’Neill appears at his apartment door dressed as a nurse, claiming she has been sent by the Beauregard Bottomley Fan Clubs to nurse him back to health. She promptly moves in, begins sleeping on a couch in his bedroom (in order to better monitor his condition), and is with him nearly every moment, day and night.

The distraction she provides isn’t simply that she’s an attractive woman in a nurse’s uniform. Instead, her true impact lies in her ability to engage with Bottomley on an intellectual level, debating abstract and rarified topics drawn from the same kinds of books he reads to "put himself to sleep" at night. Naturally, he is soon smitten.

Flame reports back to Burnbridge Waters: "I’ve managed to introduce a rather disorganized state of pleasant chaos. He is uncertain, puzzled, upset, and bewildered."

Now thoroughly distracted, Bottomley must prepare for the next quiz show appearance, where providing the correct answer will, in effect, make him the owner of the radically over-extended soap company — one that failed to place any upper limit on the prize money.

Though part farce, Champagne for Caesar is really a warm satire. It presents Ronald Colman as a dignified intellectual who turns a ridiculous game show backwards against itself, while also portraying a man inexperienced in basic human emotion, ultimately stripped of his protective genius by an unexpected vulnerability.

Told another way, the story could easily be a nightmare, a harsh critique of American pop culture and corporatism. But as written by Hans Jacoby and Frederick Brady, it is warm and human and not particularly deep. The playfully exaggerated character names (seemingly drawn from the same place as Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy comic strip) underscore the film’s satirical edge and an attitude of not taking itself too seriously..

In Champagne for Caesar, "brains" and "beauty" are not opposites but are evenly matched in the film’s central pair, Colman and Celeste Holm. Meanwhile, Vincent Price, as the soap company boss Burnbridge Waters, isn’t merely a cliché of the hard-driving American industrialist. He embodies that archetype but also reveals himself as something of a genius in his own right, extraordinarily eccentric and theatrically unpredictable.

Ironically, the story structure wanderingly resembles that of a television show more than a traditional Hollywood film, a trait it shares with another early 1950s film about TV, The Twonky. If Champagne for Caesar had been deliberately split into a two-part television program, with our other main character (played by Celeste Holm) introduced at the beginning of the second part, it would have made more thematic sense.

Instead, we get an oddly paced, almost Waiting for Godot-like first half, where the narrative seems devoid of any real project other than Colman's goofy revenge. The film finally gels together when Holm and Ronald Colman begin interacting. From that point forward, and in most ways making up for the void at the beginning, Champagne for Caesar becomes a well-done 1950 comedy, built on a screwball foundation and driven by two ace actors (or three, counting VIncent Price) expertly pulling the strings.

Cohen Media titles at 50% off at Kino for next few days – Kinolorber

Mostly more modern titles, but does include Buster Keaton films, Douglas Fairbanks silent films, the 1932 James Whale Old Dark House, among others.

Fast Reviews

Don Knotts

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken - 1966: Don Knotts' puts out a lot of energy as the "brave coward" Luthor Heggs, surrounded by a panoply of "Americana" character types (many of the actors we see on screen are veterans of numerous TV shows) and all of this gives The Ghost and Mr. Chicken the feel of a fast-moving TV comedy. The production values are better than TV, though, as we get to see the setting of the town called Rachel, Kansas, spread out before us in all of it's Universal backlot glory. We have scenes inside of diners, a police station, and especially the "haunted' mansion called "the Simmons place" by the characters, a visual treat that add up to much more than what a 1966 TV program could deliver on a cathode tube.

Rachel, Kansas, is the setting of a two decade old murder which becomes the focus of the aspirations of Heggs. He is frustratingly toiling away in the basement of the town's newspaper, wishing he was instead upstairs and a reporter. With some prodding from a fellow employee (Liam Redmond), Heggs puts together a "filler" article on an old unsolved murder and that immediately gets the rapt attention of everyone in town.

A combination of disgust and barely disguised jealousy comes Heggs' way from the paper's editor (Skip Homeier as Ollie Weaver) following the article's success, and pretty soon the quivering Heggs has got to spend the anniversary night of the murder at the run-down old mansion, the basis for producing a sensationalistic follow-up article to feed the town's interest in the old mystery. The editor is delighted with Heggs' rising, shaking fear and is hoping for a complete nervous collapse to humiliate the man. Ollie has more than just one reason for his jealousy: while all of this is transpiring and Heggs is becoming a local celebrity, his supposed girlfriend (Joan Staley as Alma Parker) is rapidly becoming more in more in simpatico with Heggs.

Knotts quivers, shakes and puffs out his chest when needed to play a character not far removed from his famous Barney Fife persona from the Andy Griffith Show TV program. But instead of being the goofy sidekick who goes out of control once handed too much authority by the stalwart and level-headed Sheriff of Mayberry, USA, Heggs is a bottled up character who is at war primarily with himself and his ambitions, a situation more conquerable than the repeating plots of sitcom TV programs. Heggs just has to hang in there, despite derision and setbacks, and to also let the other mass of characters do their own actions, for example an ensemble of spiritualist enthusiasts who gather and hold hands trying to commune with ghosts, or Heggs' friend from the newspaper (Redmond) who knows more than he is letting on.

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken is packed with oddball characters, and, despite no clear explanation for why Joan Staley's eyes are getting fixed upon Don Knotts' Heggs, everyone (and film audience) is fixated on both Heggs bravery (or lack) and the "old murder." With that in mind (all the time in this rather simple plot) we tour through the cobwebbed old mansion with its hidden staircases and trick doors, a portrait on the wall that bleeds, and an organ that bangs out a tune in the middle of the night all by itself.

Knotts is our main special effect, though, going from rattling fear to determination and back again. As silly as The Ghost and Mr. Chicken can be, it is also part satire on a kind of America that was already fading in 1966, but, like the "old murder" at the "Simmon's place," was still kept alive in the memory of the people who could see their own home towns in Rachel, Kansas.

Fast Reviews

The Parent Trap - 1961: At summer camp ("Camp Inch," though it keeps coming across as "Camp Itch,") two girls meet and instantly dislike each other: Susan Evers (Hayley Mills) from Monterey, California, and Sharon McKendrick (also Hayley Mills), from Boston. Incredibly, everyone notices that except for their differing hair styles, the two look exactly like one another.

More about The Parent Trap, 1961

Errol Flynn 6-Film BluRay Collection coming from Warner Archives – Twitter

September 2, 2025 release of set containing The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Adventures of Don Juan, Santa Fe Trail, Edge of Darkness, and Objective, Burma. ALso includes Classic Shorts and trailers.

Criterion disks are on sale 50% off at Barnes and Noble - - online and in the retail stores. – Barnesandnoble

Fast Reviews

Something for the Boys - 1944: Cheerful Technicolor musical from World War II era that somehow is mostly about the military but somehow doesn't touch upon World War II at all.

More about Something for the Boys

4K edition of Old Dark House (Karloff version) releasing July 28 – Eurekavideo

The 1939 Midnight with Colbert, Ameche and John Barrymore released on Blu Ray – Criterion

The June and July Warner Archive releases – Blu Ray

  • His Kind of Woman (1951)
  • Splendor in the Grass (1961)
  • Executive Suite (1954)
  • The Enchanted Cottage (1945)
  • A Date with Judy (1948)
  • The Citadel (1938)

Hammer Films 14-Movie Bundle – Shout Factory

KinoLorber has a 700+ title "summer sale" with Blurays and DVDs.

Archives

Archives

Shopping Page

Belief-Code, Body Code and T3 Therapy? See Belief Code Therapy.com