Happy Birthday, Cary Grant!
Posted on January 18, 2016 at 3:52 pm
I love this tribute to Cary Grant by Michael Caine.
TCM Salutes Fred MacMurray
Posted on January 5, 2016 at 3:40 pm
Turner Classic Movies is leading off 2016 with a great choice for their star of the month: Fred MacMurray. I grew up watching him as the genial single dad in “My Three Sons,” and the inventor of flubber (flying rubber) in “The Absent-Minded Professor.” It was only when I was a teenager that I discovered he was outstanding in films that included dark comedy (the fiendish boss in “The Apartment”), light romantic comedy (“Take a Letter, Darling”), westerns (“The Trail of the Lonesome Pine”), musicals (“Where Do We Go From Here?”), Disney family movies (“The Shaggy Dog”), touching love stories (“Remember the Night”), and the film noir classic, “Double Indemnity.”
MacMurray worked with top directors including Edward Dmytryk (“The Caine Mutiny”), George Stevens (“Alice Adams”), Mitchell Leisen (“No Time for Love”), Billy Wilder (“The Apartment”) and Preston Sturges (“Remember the Night”) and actors Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich and, in seven films, Claudette Colbert, beginning with “The Gilded Lily” (1935). He co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in “Alice Adams” (1935), with Joan Crawford in “Above Suspicion” (1943), and with Carole Lombard in four films: “Hands Across the Table” (1935), “The Princess Comes Across” (1936), “Swing High, Swing Low” (1937), and “True Confession” (1937). Here we see him go from insurance salesman to murder accomplice because Barbara Stanwyck is so impossible to resist. “I wonder if you wonder.”
On Wednesdays this month, TCM will show some of his best films, including “Double Indemnity,” “Too Many Husbands,” “Remember the Night,” “Woman’s World,” and “Callaway Went Thataway,” plus one of my favorite goofy movies, “Kisses for My President,” where he plays the husband of the first woman President.
120 Years of Cinema in 120 Seconds
Posted on December 31, 2015 at 3:00 pm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKPXV_DxbCE
Related Tags:The Moon Film team tells the story of cinema: After a brief overview of the processes that led to Cinema, from Nicéphore Niépce’s oldest surviving photograph in 1826 or 1827 to Charles-Émile Reynaud’s Théâtre optique in 1892, you’ll find 75 movies by 75 different directors starting with La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon) which opened the first commercial public screening in Paris on 28 December 1895. Though the first film was an obvious choice, we don’t have the necessary perspective to choose the last one objectively. By selecting Avengers: Age of Ultron we simply acknowledge the fact that the comic book movies have dominated the box office in the past decade.
Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn Dance in the New Year
Posted on December 31, 2015 at 11:44 am
Here’s a scene from my favorite New Year’s movie, Holiday
Happy new year to all!
Tribute: Haskell Wexler
Posted on December 27, 2015 at 12:00 pm
We mourn the loss of Haskell Wexler, one of the greatest cinematographers in Hollywood history, the director of the pioneering film “Medium Cool,” and the subject of a documentary by his son, Tell Them Who You Are
The International Cinematographers Guild voted him one of the ten most influential in his field. He began doing television (including “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”), documentaries, and ads. He made an enormous impression with the black and white “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” for which he won his first Oscar.
His other films include Best Picture Oscar winners “In the Heat of the Night” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” as well as “Bound for Glory,” and “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip.” He made “Medium Cool” in the midst of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, filming in the midst of protests. Famously, you can hear one of his crew say, “Look out, Haskell, it’s real!”
Wexler’s son Mark also became a filmmaker, pointedly on the other end of the political spectrum from his outspokenly liberal father. Like My Architect
May his memory be a blessing.