It is not possible to talk about the Hollywood star system or film culture or really mass media in general as those things existed in the 1930s without talking about Shirley Temple. She defines her era in a way that very few movie performers have: she was the most popular movie star in the world […]
In the history of the Oscars, there are few cases weirder and more impressive than Katharine Hepburn. Not only does she hold a record, unlikely to be matched and surely never to be beaten, of four competitive acting Oscars, all in the Lead category, but her first award came for her third movie role, in […]
“If you want to send a message, use Western Union”, said somebody, famously – Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and Frank Capra are the most common sources, so it’s probably none of them – but that’s advice that was already long-abandoned before it was ever spoken. The fact is, filmmakers, particularly Hollywood filmmakers well aware […]
The five films made by the four Marx brothers at Paramount between 1929 and 1933 are the stuff of legend, and the basis for what is likely the most famous career of any comic team in history (and this despite the first of those films, The Cocoanuts, sagging under the weight of an insipid romantic […]
The most expensive movie ever made as of 1930 was an independent production. That’s a weird thing on the face of it, except that in 1930, there was a fellow named Howard Hughes running loose in the world, and for all the wonderful advances made in the post-WWII world, we don’t have madcap billionaires to […]
You know Tay Garnett? You probably haven’t heard of Tay Garnett. The fact of the matter is, Tay Garnett really isn’t a terribly important film director, though there are those among us who perk up at checking out what promises to be yet another ’30s or ’40s programmer, and unexpectedly find his name attached. I […]
With the benefit of hindsight and the tendency of time periods to compress as we get further from them, it’s not uncommon to think of Universal Studios initial wave of monster movies as comprising a boom that stretched from 1931 to 1945, but it was nothing of the sort. There was an initial flurry of […]
The rise of horror as a real thing in American cinema was not an uncontroversial process; concerns over propriety and morality kept the genre from ever taking hold in the States during the silent era the way it so vitally did in Germany. When the dam finally broke in the early sound days, with Universal’s […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: when it’s not busy blowing Google, The Internship attempts to draw broad, crowd-pleasing laughs out of the very real […]
In all of movie history, Victor Hugo’s 1862 goliath of a novel Les Misérables has been filmed more times than any other single work of literature by a writer not named Charles Dickens or William Shakespeare; shockingly, only twice was that filming done in Hollywood, where prestigious, dour literature goes to be tricked out with […]
Once upon a time, there was a film director named Leo McCarey, who was beloved. He was beloved by mainstream Hollywood, who gave him several Oscar nominations and a victory for Going My Way in 1944; he was beloved by French critics, who spent a lot of energy exploring how brilliantly he made films in […]
To a certain kind of film lover – the kind writing this film blog, for starters – the phrase “pre-Code” sparks a particular kind of joy. It refers to the thin window between the arrival of sound in 1929 and the time late in 1934 when the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, and the […]
