Motion pictures had been taking their cues from stage plays since the earliest days of narrative filmmaking, but something specific shifted in the 1950s. Part of that shift happened in theater itself: the evolution of the musical play in the years following Oklahoma! in 1943 introduced new psychological acuity and narrative complexity to what had […]

1961’s The Misfits is an awfully good movie with some very particular flaws, whose qualities as a work of cinema have been totally overshadowed by two facts concerning its production; or one fact with two branches, depending on how you want to look at it. Namely, it was the last completed feature for two titanic […]

It is frequently proposed that Some Like It Hot is the best movie comedy ever made, and those looking for an iconoclastic opinion on this front will, I am afraid, need to look elsewhere. For it is the best movie comedy of all time, says I, and only partially because it is the funniest. Which […]

In her relatively brief career (12 years from her featured coming-out moment in All About Eve until her death in 1962), Marilyn Monroe played all sorts of sex kittens – scheming, implausibly innocent, unexpectedly wounded – but the one that hews closest to the idea that has come down to the modern day as the […]