Reviews of Classic Film, with artwork and news

LAST UPDATE October 7, 2025

Fast Reviews:

Ladies Man – 1931: Early "talkie" with a primitive handling of audio and especially the pacing of dialogue. Film studios were still getting used to how to make the new technology work effectively on screen, and the speaking of dialogue back and forth between actors simply wasn't anything like silent film's title cards, but the new "talkies" couldn't be like a stage play either. The third problem here is that editing had yet to figure out that cutting dead space might be worthwhile, instead we get a lot of lines being launched by one actor, then a pause occurs that feels like the other actor is trying to remember their lines and respond while the camera does nothing but wait and watch, often just shooting down the center of a room while the characters stand in middle ground without moving (the director here is Lothar Mendes). The pauses might be the actor trying to portray circumspection about their next piece of dialogue, but since the camera isn't close enough to see an accompanying expression to define the silence, we instead get the sensation of a car puttering up hill while someone is tapping the brakes.

All that aside, the performances by the cast frequently snap to life when these dead space interruptions aren't plaguing the speed of the story, particularly Carol Lombard as a young woman infatuated with William Powell (as Jamie Darricott). As receptive as he appears to be to her affection, there's a huge problem: Darricott is preoccupied (and being kept by) Lombard's character's mother, the wealthy Mrs. Fendley (Olive Tell) who has a very distracted husband (Gilbert Emery as Horace Fendley) who is just glad she's off somewhere else and not bugging him while he is making fantastic sums in banking. Olive Tell plays a straight version of the kind of stuffy Grande dame that Margaret Dumont would caricature in Marx Bros' movies, but as the story in Ladies Man grows darker, Tell effectively portrays the twin terrors of public humiliation and a building fear of her husband finding out what she's been up to.

Lombard's character is lively but also going slowly off her rocker (she is drinking alcohol heavily so that doesn't help) because she can't obtain Darricott for her own, and she is pressuring Darricott to break things off with Mom Fendley or else she's going to spill the beans to her Dad. On top of that, everyone (except Dad Fendley) in their society set seems to know the truth about what's going on between gigolo Darricott and the famously wealthy Mrs. Fendley, and then in walks Kay Francis. Now it's Darricott's turn to be smitten.

Lombard puts a lot of real cinematic energy into her portrayal of a spoiled rich girl who is becoming increasingly dangerous when it looks like she can't get what she wants, which is simply a marriage proposal from Darricott. Lombard's performance shows a sort of madness racheting upward, and her fireworks (and especially her speed at communicating all this) are in a big contrast to the measured acting from nearly everyone else. The technology might still be trying to figure out how to do talkies, but not Lombard.

Kay Francis, with an acting style that simply smoothly pours itself across her scenes, plays a character who wants to stay clear of the huge scandal brewing and get out of town quickly. But, well, she'd also like for Powell's character to straighten himself out and exit the dirty business he is in and then come along with her. In this way, Francis's character (as Norma Page) is a nice, calm counter-balance to all the building fury over on the Fendley side of things.

A youngish William Powell shows off in Ladies Man many of the attributes that made him such a huge star later into the 1930's, but here he's so pulled back inside of himself he seems to be equating the role of gigolo to the role of being a butler, a sort of love servant who is simply administering to the direct needs and implied emotional wants of a clientele of women, something that the script (by Rupert Hughes and Herman J. Mankiewicz) takes time to explain in a bit of much needed exposition when Darricott needs to make new friend Norma (Kay Francis) to understand the mess he has gotten into. This somewhat sympathetic (or self-serving) self-portrait of a guy who has the problem of women throwing themselves at him (except for Kay!) means we can feel sorry for him and hope he gets his tuckas out of town before all this "love" hits the fan, so there's a tension building as we see all the different characters converging on our lead male actor in his modern, "hip" 1930 bachelor pad.

Without Lombard, Powell and Kay Francis on board, Ladies Man would be at best an antique document of early talkies' tech and the dilemma of early 20th century morality playing out into a looser art deco 1930's youth environment. But with these three we get a frozen-in-time melodramatic picture of crisis in the high social caste. The creeping public exposure makes even "the rich" to reckon with following the established procedural rules for speeding through divorce and remarriage at the proper time and in the proper order. But everyone wants what they want and they want it right now; and it just can't work that way.

Fast Reviews:

Funny Girl – 1968: For about 84 minutes this bio pic about early 20th century songstress and comedienne Fanny Brice is a perfectly capable story of a talented woman and her struggle getting onto stage as a "Ziegfield Follies Girl" and then her difficulties managing a relationship with a professional gambler (played here by Omar Sharif). Barbra Striesand got an Oscar for her role as the powerhouse performer Brice, and director Herbert Ross lets her have most of the screen whenever she launches into a singing number. But past that 84 minute mark, the film begins to unravel as a biopic and develops an obsessive preoccupation with Fanny Brice's emotional dilemmas and begins forgetting there's anybody else in the film at all (for awhile there's quite a cast: Anne Francis, Walter Pigeon, Kay Medford and more, but they practically become furniture as the script narrows itself down to just watching Fanny Brice's every move. There's also a daughter who appears then vanishes).

At first Funny Girl had Brice up against any number of obstacles and overcoming them, or at least temporarily outmaneuvering them, and this is a niceley done portrait of a focused performer employing humor and dedication to establish a showbusiness career, but this turns upside down later with everyone praising Brice from one scene to another, and even when Sharif's character decides to divorce our star he can't but heap praise upon her as he does it. Of course, Striesand's singing is strong throughout and unfortunately it is about the only thing that makes the second half of the film seem connected to the first half as story quality evaporates. It's as if the screenwriters just got tired. Funny Girl is half of a very, very good musical.

Why Did Bette Davis Appear on Gunsmoke in 1967? – MSN Remind

...[Bruce] Dern admitted that he knew Davis was not sure about appearing on television at first. But she accepted the job because she was having trouble finding movie roles and this fell into her lap. Even so, Dern shared in a 2013 interview with CBS News, "[I went] to work on a Gunsmoke. And Walter Hill, who’s a wonderful, fabulous director — I’d go anywhere for Walter Hill to work for him; I’ve done three [films] for him — he comes up to me (it was [my] second Gunsmoke) [and] he says, ‘Wait ’til you see who your mom is today.’ And I walk in, and there’s Bette Davis sitting a chair. And I get tears in my eyes. She said, ‘And what’s the matter with you, Brucester?’ I said, ‘Bette, it’s a Gunsmoke.’ [She said] ‘Who’s gonna pay for my cigarettes? I took an ad out in the trades, [saying] ‘seven-time Oscar nominee looking for work.’ Nobody cares.'"

Claudia Cardinale has died - 1938–2025

"Acclaimed Italian actor Claudia Cardinale, who starred in some of the most celebrated European films of the 1960s and 1970s, has died, AFP reported Tuesday. She was 87." – Associated Press - New York Post

"Claudia Cardinale, star of ‘8½’ and ‘The Leopard,’ dies at 87" – MSN CNN News

"The rebellious diva of Italian cinema" – La Repubblica [Italian]

From her first film Big Deal on Madonna Street by Mario Monicelli to her latest works with young directors, Claudia Cardinale made more than 150 films. Thus, ‘the girl who didn’t want to go into cinema’ became an icon of Italian identity thanks to collaborations with the greatest Italian directors, from Visconti to Fellini, from Comencini to Ferreri, from Leone to Blake Edwards. She also worked for Hollywood, though she fled from it. The list of awards is long as well: from the David di Donatello prizes for Girl with a Suitcase by Valerio Zurlini and The Day of the Owl by Damiano Damiani to the Silver Ribbons, from the Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement at the Berlin Festival in 2002 to the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Festival in 1993..."

"A symbol of Mediterranean beauty and a beloved actress for directors such as Visconti, Fellini, Leone, and Herzog" – La Stampa [Italian]

Fast Review

There's Always A Woman - 1938: Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell are a husband-wife team working from opposite sides on a murder mystery, with the story filled with their funny confrontations as clues are assembled and the mystery solved. The film starts with Douglas' character abandoning his floundering private investigation service and returning to a public servant job as a District Attorney, but Blondell's character is determined to keep their bankrupt family business going and almost immediately picks up a new client, a distressed Mary Astor who needs her husband watched because she's afraid he's mixed up with another woman. Since Blondell's character becomes a detective on the spur of the moment (she had originally come to the office to act as her husband's secretary after the original one was laid off) she tries to keep everyone in the dark about her new activities as a sleuth, and this leads to a lot of silly misunderstandings and helps feed the humorous bickering (and the general banter) of the two leads throwing lines at each other, back and forth, like a tennis match (the list of writers on this film is long: Gladys Lehman, Wilson Collison, Philip Rapp, Morrie Ryskind and Joel Sayre).

Melvyn Douglas and Blondell were both experienced at screwball comedy work by the time this 1938 film was made, and they bring their particular styles of high energy performance to their roles. However, since they're each somewhat similar in some ways in how they apply that energy (physically, and especially so with a hard-working Blondell scampering through the story trying to turn up the identity of the killer) There's Always A Woman can be a bit exhausting at times because director Alexander Hall doesn't take many breaks to let things cool down. Each time Mary Astor is allowed back into the story she transports the tale to a slower, more focused pace (just as she did a few years later as a different detective's client in The Maltese Falcon) but with Blondell and Douglas humorously and continuously at each other's throats, the friction between the two becomes a little engine for continuous one-liners. The one drawback to this film is that this "little engine" gets close to blurring the distinctions between the two actor's characters.

The breakneck pacing aside, Blondell is sharp and cutting with her dialogue and she moves as fast as any Marx Brother across the screen as she hunts down who-did-what-to-who. Douglas' long-suffering husband is usually two steps behind her (and his boss, played by Thurston Hall, is three steps behind) as she does all the hard work to make the evidence gel into a clear cut accusation. Douglas isn't completely overshadowed in There's Always A Woman, but though his character is presented as competent, professional and clever (and when with Blondell on screen he's supplied with plenty of fast-talking dialogue), Blondell is the one that pulls this story over the finish line.

Robert Redford has died - 1936–2025

"Elusive legend of the big screen" – UK The Times

When the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid elevated him from promising leading man to bona fide movie star status, Robert Redford did not celebrate. Rather, he sat down and wrote a list of the three key danger points of his newly minted celebrity.... It was a curiously wary response from an actor who had spent the film shoot terrifying the rest of the cast and crew by insisting that he did his own stunts ... Physically daring but intellectually cautious, he was deeply suspicious of Hollywood and its trappings, by nature distrustful of movie industry exuberance. He was — crucially — a very private person, who kept even his closest collaborators at arm’s length. The screenwriter William Goldman recalled that even on their third film together, All the President’s Men, Redford was still too cagey to give out his home phone number."

A movie star and founder of Sundance – Washington Post

Mr. Redford remained essentially a loner who craved the solitude of his wilderness home in Utah and pushed 120 mph on the open highway in his Porsche..."

Steven Spielberg purchased the Academy Awards of Bette Davis and Clark Gable, paying more than $1 million – Comic Basics

Davis’ Oscar went up for auction and sold for $578,000. The winning bidder was later revealed to be Spielberg, who immediately donated the award back to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to safeguard its legacy. Clark Gable’s Oscar followed a similar path. Spielberg placed an anonymous bid and paid $607,500 for the statuette, also returning it to the Academy for permanent preservation..."If not with the Clark Gable estate, I could think of no better sanctuary for Gabe’s only Oscar than the Motion Picture Academy. The Oscar statuette is the most personal recognition of good work our industry can ever bestow, and it strikes me as a sad sign of our times that this icon could be confused with a commercial treasure." Unlike some collectors who view Oscars as financial investments, Spielberg has made it clear that his goal is to protect the history of cinema..."

Fast Reviews

Sinners - 2025: Michael B. Jordan does double duty as a pair of twin brothers in this tale set in the Mississippi Delta. Sinners has a sociopolitical commentary running almost lengthwise through the story, with details about everything from racial politics to the dilemma of the meaning of music itself in the African American experience, and then there's, well, a lot of vampires.

More about Sinners - 2025

You buy a movie online, but do you own it? Class action against Amazon over misleading ownership issues for online streaming films – Hollywood Reporter

Consider the $4.99 director’s cut of Alien on Amazon Prime Video. Cheap, right? But if the tech giant loses the rights to that version, the movie can be replaced with a different cut, like the one for theaters. And if Amazon loses the rights to the film altogether, it’ll completely disappear from the viewer’s library...."

Fast Reviews:

Charlie Chan in Egypt - 1935: Chan (Warner Oland) arrives in Egypt investigating an archeological dig and comes across a strange phenomenon: an ancient mummy that under X-ray shows it has a very modern bullet in its chest. More about Charlie Chan in Egypt - 2015.

Fast Reviews:

Mr. Right - 2015: A highly skilled but now reformed hit man (Sam Rockwell) continues to shoot people, but only the ones who try to hire him, because, as he tells them before pulling the trigger "murder is wrong." More about Mr. Right – 2015.

Fast Reviews:

The Time of Their Lives - 1946: Out of the ordinary Abbott & Costello comedy with Marjorie Reynolds which starts in the American Revolution and then speeds up to an (unmentioned) post-WW2 time frame - more about The Time of Their Lives

Blu Ray 1924 He Who Gets Slapped – Flicker Alley

The disk comes with a lot of extras, commentary, cartoon (Koko at the Circus, 1926) and other items.

He Who Gets Slapped makes its high definition debut through the generous support of the Sunrise Foundation for Education & the Arts. The film was restored by Blackhawk Films in 2024 from a first generation 35mm safety print and a 16mm dupe negative. It is presented with two different scores: an original piano composition by Antonio Coppola and an original orchestral score by Alloy Orchestra, recorded live in 2013."

Our review of the 1924 He Who Gets Slapped

Steelbook Sale – Shout Factory

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 short silent movie, made by Edison Studios, has been found in a brick outhouse in the north of England. More remarkable is the fact that the film has spent the last sixty years in this dank haven.

It is: 'The Actress' (1913) pic.twitter.com/iESXitKkFr

— filmisfabulous (@filmisfabulous) August 12, 2025

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

Clark Gable and Doris Day butt heads then get friendly in this story of a veteran newsman who ends up back in school learning about his trade from university teacher (Day) with a little help from an unlikely ally (Gig Young.) More about Teacher's Pet - 1958

Fast Reviews - Champagne for Caesar, 1950

An unemployable genius (played by Ronald Colman) goes onto a TV Game Show that allows a winning participant to double their earnings each week by returning and maintaining an unbroken streak of correct answers, something that in Colman's case stretches into a hot streak where he may bankrupt the gameshow and it's corporate soap sponsor - more about Champagne for Caesar

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

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken - 1966: Don Knotts goes from rattling fear to determination and back again in the funny The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.

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

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