"Hello, gorgeous!" was Barbra Streisand's first comment to the Oscar statuette which she won for her performance in this biopic of entertainer Fanny Brice. This is also her first line in the film itself, the catalyst for a movie-long flashback. Repeating her Broadway role, Streisand stars as legendary comedienne Brice (1891-1951), whose life until ...
As Academy Award-winning films go, Mrs. Miniver has not weathered the years all that well. This prettified, idealized view of the upper-class British home front during World War II sometimes seems over-calculated and contrived when seen today. In particular, Greer Garson's Oscar-winning performance in the title role often comes off as artificial, ...
In The Big Country Gregory Peck plays a seafaring man who heads west to marry Carroll Baker, the daughter of rancher Charles Bickford. Bickford is currently embroiled in a water-rights feud with covetous Burl Ives, so both he and his daughter are hoping that Peck can take care of himself. But Peck, who doesn't belief in fisticuffs, appears to be a ...
Audrey Hepburn became a star with this film, in which she played Princess Anne, weary of protocol and anxious to have some fun before she is mummified by "affairs of state." On a diplomatic visit to Rome, Anne escapes her royal retainers and scampers incognito through the Eternal City. She happens to meet American journalist Joe Bradley (Gregory ...
Adapted from the best-selling novel by Jessamyn West, Friendly Persuasion is set in Southern Indiana in the early days of the Civil War. Gary Cooper plays Jess Birdwell, patriarch of a Quaker family which does not believe in warfare. Birdwell's son Josh (Anthony Perkins) wishes to adhere to his family's pacifism, but is afraid that if he doesn't ...
Playwright Lillian Hellman first wrote of the horrible Hubbard family in her 1939 play The Little Foxes. In this lavish 1941 film version, Bette Davis takes over for Broadway's Tallulah Bankhead in the role of conniving turn-of-the-century Southern aristocrat Regina Hubbard Giddens. Regina's equally odious brothers (Charles Dingle and Carl Benton ...
William Wyler's Wuthering Heights is one of the earliest screen adaptations of the classic Emily Brontė novel. A traveler named Lockwood (Miles Mander) is caught in the snow and stays at the estate of Wuthering Heights, where the housekeeper, Ellen Dean (Flora Robson), sits down to tell him the story in flashback. In the early 19th century, the ...
The postwar classic The Best Years of Our Lives, based on a novel in verse by MacKinlay Kantor about the difficult readjustments of returning World War II veterans, tells the intertwined homecoming stories of ex-sergeant Al Stephenson (Fredric March), former bombadier Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), and sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell). Having ...
The town of Vinegaroon, TX, is the home to Judge Roy Bean (Walter Brennan), who calls himself "The Only Law West of the Pecos." Bean keeps a saloon, where he also conducts trials, using his office to get fat on fines and the seizure of property, and hanging most of those who get in his way, sometimes more than one a day. Cole Hardin (Gary Cooper) ...
Based on the 1934 play by Lillian Hellman, The Children's Hour is set at an exclusive girl's school managed by best friends Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. When student Karen Balkin is punished for one of her many misdeeds, the mean-spirited youngster rushes to her wealthy aunt Fay Bainter, and, randomly choosing a phrase she has undoubtedly ...
William Wyler's dark and poisonous melodrama, based on the W. Somerset Maugham novel, features Bette Davis in one of her nastiest roles. The story begins in the shimmering moonlight on a tropical Malayan rubber plantation. Shots ring out and a wounded man, Geoffrey Hammond (David Newell) staggers from a bungalow as Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis) ...
John Fowles's novel The Collector was written in the form of a dual diary, one kept by a kidnapper, the other by his victim. The film is told almost exclusively from the point of view of the former, a nerdish British bank clerk named Freddy Clegg (Terence Stamp). A neurotic recluse whose only pleasure is butterfly collecting, Clegg wins $200,000 ...
In 1938, Jezebel was widely regarded as Warner Bros.' "compensation" to Bette Davis for her losing the opportunity to play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. Resemblances between the two properties are inescapable: Jezebel heroine Julie Marsden (Davis) is a headstrong Southern belle not unlike Scarlett (Julie lives in New Orleans rather than ...
One of three morale-boosting government documentaries directed by Lieutenant Colonel William Wyler (the others were The Memphis Belle and Thunderbolt), The Fighting Lady follows the exploits of an aircraft carrier, its crew, and the planes transported on its deck. The officers and enlistees are not required to perform; that function is handled by ...
This 1959 version of Lew Wallace's best-selling novel, which had already seen screen versions in 1907 and 1926, went on to win 11 Academy Awards. Adapted by Karl Tunberg and a raft of uncredited writers including Gore Vidal and Maxwell Anderson, the film once more recounts the tale of Jewish prince Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), who lives in ...
Filmed in color, The Memphis Belle has long been held up as a "model" wartime documentary. In a terse, exciting 41 minutes, the film assembles footage from several allied bombing missions into one single representative flight of the famed Flying Fortress known as The Memphis Belle. Though both the crewmen and the filmmakers take considerable pride ...
In this highly acclaimed adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' novel, Walter Huston plays Sam Dodsworth, a good-hearted, middle-aged man who runs an auto manufacturing firm. His wife Fran (Ruth Chatterton) is obsessed with the notion that she's growing old, and she eventually persuades Sam to sell his interest in the company and take her to Europe. He ...
The semi-feature-length wartime documentary Report From the Aleutians was written and directed by Captain John Huston. It was one of three such films turned out between 1942 and 1945 while Huston was assigned to the Signal Corps. In detailing the day-to-day activities of protecting Alaska's Aleutian Islands from Japanese attack, Huston ...
Adapted from the play by Elmer Rice, Counsellor-at-Law is the story of a successful Jewish lawyer George Simon (John Barrymore) who finds it's lonely at the top. Simon's wife (Doris Kenyon) and children look down upon him because of his humble upbringings, while his mother reprimands him for turning his back on his heritage. Simon is threatened ...
Set in the woodlands of Wisconsin, Come and Get It stars Edward Arnold as a logger-turned-lumber tycoon. In his rise to the top, Arnold loses out on a chance for lasting happiness by spurning earthy dance hall girl (Frances Farmer), who marries his best pal (Walter Brennan) on the rebound. Marrying for position rather than love, Arnold becomes a ...
Margaret Sullavan graduates from a girl's orphanage to an usherette's job at a Budapest movie theatre. Bibulous millionaire Frank Morgan makes a play for Margaret, but she keeps him at arm's length by picking a name from the phone book and insists that that's the name of her husband. The man chosen at random is attorney Herbert Marshall, who can't ...
In this elegant "caper" film, Audrey Hepburn stars as the daughter of a wealthy Parisian (Hugh Griffith), whose hobby is copying famous works of art. His replica of a famed Cellini sculpture is inadvertently displayed in an art museum, and he begins to worry that he'll lose his reputation once the experts evaluate the statuette. Audrey decides to ...
Filmed in Technicolor, Thunderbolt was the last of Major William Wyler's wartime directorial efforts on behalf of the US Army Air Corps. As in his previous WW2 documentaries, Wyler himself participated in the mission that he depicts herein on film. The title refers to the huge bombers used by the Corsica-based 57th fighter group. The film ...
Henry James based his 1881 novella Washington Square on a real-life incident, wherein a young actor of his acquaintance married an unattractive but very wealthy young woman for the express purpose of living the rest of his life in luxury. Washington Square was turned into a stage play in 1946 by Ruth and Augustus Goetz; this, in turn was adapted ...
Adapted by Lillian Hellman from Sidney Kingsley's Broadway play, Dead End concerns itself with several denizens of New York's East River district. Here the elite and the slum-dwellers rub shoulders due to the close proximity of the riverfront tenements with the East Side luxury hotels. Slum girl Drina Gordon (Sylvia Sidney) tries to prevent her ...
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