Certainly not the only, but perhaps the single greatest, exception to the rule about sequels never surpassing their forerunners. A lively and densely packed hour and a quarter, overrun by an unsuppressed sense of humor, it begins with a one-stormy-night prologue in which the story is resumed by Mary Shelley …
Jack London’s semi-autobiographical The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, was based on an arduous year the author spent in the Yukon, looking to find a cure for Gold Rush fever — a time when a man’s best friend was his sled dog. The novel was told from the …
The last of Josef von Sternberg's collaborations with (i.e., adulations of) Marlene Dietrich, a made-to-order adaptation of the Pierre Louys novel, La Femme et le Pantin (lit., The Woman and the Puppet). Choked with décors and atmosphere -- to the point of asphyxiation. Pretty impressive before you lose consciousness. Luis …
One of John Ford's prestige pictures. The tense, doom-drenched tale of a remorseful traitor in the Irish Rebellion is played by Ford with a sort of crying-in-his-beer sentimentality: soul-stirring folk songs, lugubrious fogs and shadows, stereotyped cap-and-turtleneck costumes, limitless Catholic piety and forgiveness. Victor McLaglen, Joe Sawyer, Preston Foster.
Lovingly reproduced ships, a melodramatically fiendish Charles Laughton in the role of Capt. Bligh, and an upstandingly disapproving Clark Gable in the role of Mr. Christian. Pretty near everybody professes to favor this original version over the Trevor Howard-Marlon Brando remake, particularly those who haven't seen the original in twenty-five …
Not a patch on the anarchic insanity the boys got away with while at Paramount, why is it that A Night at the Opera is the one Marx Bros. movie that always gets revived? The musical numbers are oppressive and the laughs frequently clotheslined by director Sam Wood's leaden pacing …
Based on the George Du Maurier fantasy about two illicit lovers who, separated by prison walls, carry on their affair in their dreams. This ethereal Thirties romance is, in spite of — or because of — the masculine sobriety injected by action director Henry Hathaway and star Gary Cooper, something …
Katharine Hepburn's transvestite role -- she is disguised as an adolescent boy in the company of her fugitive father -- is really not much more out of character, nor more unwholesome, than most of her early roles. Only slightly. The movie flopped on its first release, ostensibly because her fans …
The vision of white-tie-and-tails highlife was held out to Depression audiences, without apologies, as pure escapism or eat-your-heart-out-ism. The overpunctuated comedy acting by Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, and Erik Rhodes and the directing by Mark Sandrich are pretty flat. But the Astaire-Rogers dance numbers, especially the "Isn't This a …