The Philadelphia Story
by George Cukor
from Warner Home Video
Re-creating the role she originated in Philip Barry's wickedly witty Broadway play, Katharine Hepburn stars as the spoiled and snobby socialite Tracy Lord in this sparkling 1940 screen adaptation of The Philadelphia Story, one of the great romantic comedies from the golden age of MGM studios. Applying her impossibly high ideals to everyone but herself, Tracy is about to marry a stuffy executive when her congenial ex-husband (Cary Grant), arrives to protect his former father-in-law from a potentially scandalous tabloid exposé. In an Oscar-winning role, James Stewart is the scandal reporter who falls for Tracy as her wedding day arrives, throwing her into a dizzying state of premarital jitters. Who will join Tracy at the altar? Snappy dialogue flows like sparkling wine under the sophisticated direction of George Cukor in this film that turned the tide of Hepburn's career from "box-office poison" to glamorous Hollywood star. --Jeff Shannon
Katharine Hepburn reprises her triumphant Broadway role as a spoiled heir on the verge of marrying a snoot...but not if her ex-hubby (Cary Grant) and smitten reporter (James Stewart) can help it!
The Cary Grant Box Set (Holiday / Only Angels Have Wings / The Talk of the Town / His Girl Friday / The Awful Truth)
by George Cukor
from Sony Pictures
Witness For the Prosecution
by Billy Wilder
from MGM (Video & DVD)
Billy Wilder cowrote and directed this brilliant 1957 mystery based on Agatha Christie's celebrated play about an aging London barrister (Charles Laughton) who's preparing to retire when he takes the defense in the most vexing murder case of his distinguished career. In his final completed film (he died of a heart attack less than a year later), Tyrone Power plays the prime suspect in the murder of a wealthy widow, and Marlene Dietrich plays the wife of the accused, whose testimony--and true identity--holds the key to solving the case. A classic of courtroom suspense, Witness for the Prosecution is one of those movies with enough double-crossing twists to keep the viewer guessing right up to the very end, when yet another surprise is deftly revealed. This being a Billy Wilder film, the dialogue is first-rate and the acting superb, with both Laughton and his offscreen wife Elsa Lanchester (playing the barrister's pesty nurse) winning Academy Awards for their performances. Although later films would concoct even more complicated courtroom scenarios, this remains one of the best films of its kind and a model for all those films that followed its lead. --Jeff Shannon
Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton star in this brilliantly made courtroom drama (The Film Daily) that left audiences reeling from its surprise twists and shocking climax. Directed by Billy Wilder, scripted by Wilder and Harry Kurnitz and based on Agatha Christie's hit London play, this splendid, six-time Oscar-nominated* classic crackles with emotional electricity (The New York Times) and continues to keep movie lovers riveted until the final, mesmerizing frame. When a wealthy widow is found murdered, her married suitor, Leonard Vole (Power), is accused of the crime. Vole's only hope for acquittal is the testimony of his wife (Dietrich) but his airtightalibi shatters when she reveals some shocking secrets of her own! *1957: Best Picture, Actor (Laughton), Supporting Actress (Elsa Lanchester), Director, Sound, Film Editing
Holiday
by George Cukor
from Sony Pictures
Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant team up in this classic George Cukor comedy about love that finally finds its mark. Johnny (Grant) has just met the girl of his dreams so he proposes; she happily accepts. However he soon discovers that his lovely bride-to-be Julia (Doris Nolan) comes from a wealthy Park Avenue family with a father who likes to make all the decisions and to whom she seems incapable of defying. Her unconventional sister Linda (Hepburn) knows she wants something different from a mapped-out life; she also discovers she's falling in love with Johnny. Grant's effervescent performance is timeless and his onscreen chemistry with Hepburn electric. Based on the 1928 play by Philip Barry and the second time the story was adapted to the screen this version established the rules for intelligent romantic comedies and provided a template from which the deft Cukor could further expand.System Requirements:Run Time: 96 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 043396114166 Manufacturer No: 11416
This absolutely charming, wholly engaging romantic comedy is the hidden gem of the four collaborations of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Most everyone's seen The Philadelphia Story, but few know of this unorthodox, hilarious comedy of life among the rich and privileged, though both were Broadway hits by playwright Philip Barry. Grant plays the happy-go-lucky Johnny Case, a self-made man with a dream in his heart of making just enough money to retire on and then traveling around the world. Johnny proposes to the lovely Julia (Doris Nolan) in Lake Placid, but it isn't until he comes to pay her a visit in New York that he discovers she's the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Although his nonconformity ruffles the feathers of Julia's stuffy father, he's soon won over the whole family--most notably, Julia's rebellious sister Linda (Hepburn), who in becoming Johnny's greatest advocate finds herself irresistibly drawn to him. There's more going on here than a spiffy, surface romance, with Johnny's free-spirit determination going up against rock-hard establishment values, and director George Cukor plays up the social politics of the story just as well as the wonderful, exquisite romance. Hepburn and Grant, as always, are perfectly paired, and given able support by Lew Ayres as the black sheep of Hepburn's family, and Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon as Grant's longtime pals. Filmed previously in 1930; Hepburn understudied the role of Linda on Broadway and used a scene from the play in her first screen test. --Mark Englehart
This absolutely charming, wholly engaging romantic comedy is the hidden gem of the four collaborations of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Most everyone's seen The Philadelphia Story, but few know of this unorthodox, hilarious comedy of life among the rich and privileged, though both were Broadway hits by playwright Philip Barry. Grant plays the happy-go-lucky Johnny Case, a self-made man with a dream in his heart of making just enough money to retire on and then traveling around the world. Johnny proposes to the lovely Julia (Doris Nolan) in Lake Placid, but it isn't until he comes to pay her a visit in New York that he discovers she's the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Although his nonconformity ruffles the feathers of Julia's stuffy father, he's soon won over the whole family--most notably, Julia's rebellious sister Linda (Hepburn), who in becoming Johnny's greatest advocate finds herself irresistibly drawn to him. There's more going on here than a spiffy, surface romance, with Johnny's free-spirit determination going up against rock-hard establishment values, and director George Cukor plays up the social politics of the story just as well as the wonderful, exquisite romance. Hepburn and Grant, as always, are perfectly paired, and given able support by Lew Ayres as the black sheep of Hepburn's family, and Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon as Grant's longtime pals. Filmed previously in 1930; Hepburn understudied the role of Linda on Broadway and used a scene from the play in her first screen test. --Mark Englehart Stills from Holiday (click for larger image) 
Lust for Life
by Vincente Minnelli
from Warner Home Video
Vibrant orange sunflowers. Rippling yelow grain. Trees bursting with white bloom. "The pictures come to me as in a dream" Vincent Van Gogh said. A dream that too often turned to life-shattering nightmare. Winner of Golden Globe and New York Film Critics Best Actor Awards Kirk Douglas gives a fierce portrayal as the artist torn between the joyous inspiration of his genius and the dark desperation of his tormented mind. The obsessed Van Gogh painted the way other men breathe driving away family and friends including artist Paul Gauguin (1956 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winner Anthony Quinn). Directed by Vincente Minnelli and saturated with the hues of Van Gogh's sea field and sky Lust for Lifecaptures the ecstasy of art. And the agony of one man's life.Running Time: 122 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/CLASSIC UPC: 012569698826 Manufacturer No: 66988
Lust for Life is appropriately titled, for mere passion seems inadequate when describing this superb fictionalized biography (based on Irving Stone's popular novel) of Vincent Van Gogh. In a deservedly Oscar®- nominated performance, Kirk Douglas is physically and emotionally perfect as the tormented Dutch painter, whose life is chronicled from his ill-fated stint as a preacher to Belgian miners in 1878, to his Impressionist-inspired artistic awakening and psychological descent to suicide in 1890. Having triumphed with 1952's The Bad and the Beautiful, Douglas, producer John Houseman, and director Vincente Minnelli brought vigor and vitality to this blessed project, which centers on Van Gogh's stormy friendship with fellow artist Gaugin (Oscar-winner Anthony Quinn). Minnelli used an outmoded color film process and innovative camera techniques to vividly recreate Van Gogh's paintings, and he filmed on the actual Dutch and French locations where Van Gogh's mastery flourished. The artist's lust for life also fed his madness, and this film deeply understands the fine line in between. --Jeff Shannon
The Great Dictator (2 Disc Special Edition)
from Warner Home Video
The U.S. was not yet in World War II when Chaplin leveled his comedy arsenal at Der Fuehrer by playing the dual roles of Hitler-like Adenoid Hynkel and a Jewish barber who is a dead-ringer look-alike for der Nutsie. Puns sight gags and slapstick abound as Chaplin skewers fascism balancing his attack with poignant scenes of a ghetto in the clutches of storm-trooping terror. Immortal bits include Hynkel's besotted dance with a globe the upside-down flight and Hynkel and a Mussolini-like Jack Oakie madly cranking their barber chairs higher and higher. Great comedy meets great filmmaking passion in The Great Dictator.Running Time: 126 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY UPC: 085393765026
Since Adolf Hitler had the audacity to borrow his mustache from the most famous celebrity in the world--Charlie Chaplin--it meant Hitler was fair game for Chaplin's comedy. (Strangely, the two men were born within four days of each other.) The Great Dictator, conceived in the late thirties but not released until 1940, when Hitler's war was raging across Europe, is the film that skewered the tyrant. Chaplin plays both Adenoid Hynkel, the power-mad ruler of Tomania, and a humble Jewish barber suffering under the dictator's rule. Paulette Goddard, Chaplin's wife at the time, plays the barber's beloved; and the rotund comedian Jack Oakie turns in a weirdly accurate burlesque of Mussolini, as a bellowing fellow dictator named Benzino Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria. Chaplin himself hits one of his highest moments in the amazing sequence where he performs a dance of love with a large inflated globe of the world. Never has the hunger for world domination been more rhapsodically expressed. The slapstick is swift and sharp, but it was not enough for Chaplin. He ends the film with the barber's six-minute speech calling for peace and prophesying a hopeful future for troubled mankind. Some critics have always felt the monologue was out of place, but the lyricism and sheer humanity of it are still stirring. This was the last appearance of Chaplin's Little Tramp character, and not coincidentally it was his first all-talking picture. --Robert Horton
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
by Nunnally Johnson
from 20th Century Fox
Gregory Peck plays a young New York executive who defies the wisdom of the corporate class by deciding his family is more important than the offer of a new job. Lots of melodrama, guilt, and a revelation about a wartime affair (told in flashback), but this well-oiled, good-looking 1956 film still holds up pretty well. Based on a novel by Sloan Wilson, the script and direction are by Nunnally Johnson (The Three Faces of Eve). --Tom Keogh
Based on the novel by Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit stars Gregory Peck as a haunted New York executive whp defies convention and decides his family is more important than his career in this post-war melodrama scripted and directed by the celebrated Nunnally Johnson (The Three Faces of Eve).
The Comancheros
by Curtiz, Michael
from 20th Century Fox
Nobody made a fuss about The Comancheros when it came out, yet it has proved to be among the most enduringly entertaining of John Wayne's later Westerns. The Duke, just beginning to crease and thicken toward Rooster Cogburn proportions, plays a veteran Texas Ranger named Jake Cutter. When we first see him (in a tongue-in-cheek delayed entrance), he's catching up with a New Orleans dandy (Stuart Whitman) who killed a judge's son in a duel just after that gentlemanly practice was banned. Monsieur Paul Regret--or "Mon-sooor," as Jake insists on calling him--is not a bad fellow, let alone a badman, and it only follows that, after the requisite number of misunderstandings, he and Jake will join forces to subdue rampaging Indians and the evil white men behind their uprising.
The Comancheros was the last credit for Michael Curtiz, who, ravaged by cancer, ceded much of the direction to Wayne (uncredited) and action specialist Cliff Lyons. With support from Wayne stalwarts James Edward Grant (coscreenplay) and William Clothier (camera), the first of many rousing Elmer Bernstein scores for a Wayne picture, and a big, flavorful cast including Lee Marvin (the once and future Liberty Valance), Nehemiah Persoff, Bruce Cabot, and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams (in his last movie), they made a broad, cheerfully bloodthirsty adventure movie for red-meat-eating audiences of all ages. Even the liberal-pinko Time magazine had to second the salute from leading lady Ina Balin at film's end: "Take care of yourself, Big Jake ... we've sort of gotten used to you." --Richard T. Jameson
John Wayne is Capt. Jake Cutter, a Texas Ranger determined to crush a powerful outlaw gang that's selling guns to the Indians. Cutter is also trying to bring in gambler Paul Regret (Whitman), who's wanted for murder. Both missions get entangled when Cut
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (Global Warming Edition)
by Irwin Allen
from 20th Century Fox
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea gets a dose of On the Beach in Irwin Allen's visually impressive but scientifically silly Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. While the Seaview, the world's most advanced experimental submarine, maneuvers under the North Pole, the Van Allen radiation belt catches fire, giving the concept "global warming" an entirely new dimension. As the Earth broils in temperatures approaching 170 degrees F, Walter Pidgeon's maniacally driven Admiral Nelson hijacks the Seaview and plays tag with the world's combined naval forces on a race to the South Pacific, where he plans to extinguish the interstellar fire with a well-placed nuclear missile. But first he has to fight a mutinous crew, an alarmingly effective saboteur, not one but two giant squid attacks, and a host of design flaws that nearly cripple the mission (note to Nelson: think backup generators). Barbara Eden shimmies to Frankie Avalon's trumpet solos in the most formfitting naval uniform you've ever seen, fish-loving Peter Lorre plays in the shark tank, gloomy religious fanatic Michael Ansara preaches Armageddon, and Joan Fontaine looks very uncomfortable playing an armchair psychoanalyst. It's all pretty absurd, but Allen pumps it up with larger-than-life spectacle and lovely miniature work. --Sean Axmaker
A routine scientific expedition to the North Pole turns into a race to save all mankind when a radiation belt in space causes a fiery inferno on Earth. Admiral Nelson (Walter Pidgeon) and the crew of the atomic submarine Seaview battle saboteurs, giant sea-creatures and attacks by enemy submarines as they race to prevent global catastrophe. Renowned disaster film producer, Irwin Allen, produces and directs an all-star cast including Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, Peter Lore, and Frankie Avalon. The stunning visual effects and breathtaking underwater photography make this one of the most respected sci-fi adventure classics of all time.
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
by Michael Curtiz
from Warner Home Video
Bette Davis and Errol Flynn made The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex fascinatingly public striking sparks in this lavish Technicolor tale of the ill-fated love between the aging Elizabeth I and the dashing Earl of Essex. Thoroughly unglamorous here - eyes and hairline shaved face painted chalky white - double Academy AwardO winner* Davis exudes such intelligence energy and ardor that her romance with the decades-younger Essex (Flynn at the peak of his remarkable good looks and athletic verve) is completely believable. Based on Maxwell Anderson's play Elizabeth the Queen and directed by Michael Curtiz this nominee for five OscarsO** takes liberties with historical accuracy but none with dramatic impact. Long may these tempestuous titled lovers reign!Running Time: 106 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/CLASSIC UPC: 012569522824
+++
