Films

One of Columbia’s most acclaimed films was a picture that studio head Harry Cohn didn’t believe in. Producer-writer-director Robert Rossen had to beg him to open it in Los Angeles to qualify for the 1949 Oscars and then paid for his own ads promoting the picture. It must have worked, as this thinly veiled portrait of…

Realizing writer-director Cameron Crowe’s fictionalized account of his days as a teenaged rock journalist for Rolling Stone required more than just a good script and solid performances from a cast headed by Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand and Kate Hudson. It required painstaking accuracy in every design area, including makeup. For Lois Burwell, it…

Arthur Freed’s production unit at MGM didn’t just make musicals; it made magic. Working with the best in the industry, he showed that musicals could use song and dance to tell stories and reflect the emotional richness of American popular culture. For many, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS is the apotheosis of Freed’s aesthetic. Vincente Minnelli…

MGM’s top-grossing musical of 1950 remains an audience favorite because of its boisterous energy and the exuberant performances of Betty Hutton as sharp-shooter Annie Oakley and Howard Keel as rival gunman Frank Butler. The high spirits on screen belied some behind-the-scenes turmoil. The adaptation of Irving Berlin’s hit musical is often remembered more for the…

MGM entered the caper movie genre with this tense film noir. The 11-minute burglary scene was unusual for the day and inspired Jules Dassin’s later heist film Rififi (1955). But that wasn’t the picture’s only pioneering element. Heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism, director-co-writer John Huston set out to make the film as naturalistic as possible….

UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation, in collaboration with the Seth MacFarlane Foundation, have curated a program of rarely seen, newly restored shorts from the extensive animation collection held in the Archive’s Paramount Studios Collection. UCLA and The Film Foundation, with the help of Paramount Studios Archive, selected and restored these 9…

Comic Jerry Lewis stepped into the director’s role for this wild assemblage of gags, though it might be more accurate to say he fell. His home studio, Paramount, wanted a summer release, and rather than move up the already completed Cinderfella (1960), which he saw as a Christmas film, he decided to put something together…

Columbia Pictures was already a leading producer of films noir and gangster pictures when the Kefauver Senate hearings on organized crime shocked the nation in the early 1950s. With public interest in the mob on the rise, several studios turned out films about the creeping corruption in American life, but few had contract talent comparable…

MGM may be best known as the House of Glamour, but that didn’t stop the studio from getting down and dirty when they virtually created the prison picture. Inspired by recent jailhouse riots, director George W. Hill wrote a story about three men doing time: a drunk driver (Robert Montgomery) with no other criminal past,…

Billy Dee Williams had one of his best roles as the organizer of a maverick team hoping to break into Major League Baseball in the 1930s. As Bingo Long, a character inspired by Leroy “Satchel” Paige, he defies his tyrannical Negro League manager (Ted Ross) to poach Black players for a barnstorming tour of the…

By the 1950s, Columbia was trying to capture the energy of artistically ambitious independent producers like Stanley Kramer. He and studio head Harry Cohn clashed repeatedly, but before he left, he gave the studio one of the biggest hits of 1954 with this searing adaptation of Herman Wouk’s best-seller. Humphrey Bogart, who had also found…

A thriller about how Los Angeles set its boundaries hardly sounds like the most scintillating idea. But in the hands of screenwriter Robert Towne, director Roman Polanski and a top-notch cast headed by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston it became an enduring classic, as seductive today as it was 50 years ago. Nicholson…

Science-fiction jumped from the stuff of kiddie matinees to box-office bonanza in 1977, and Columbia Pictures reaped the benefits. Financially ailing at the time, the studio took a chance on young director Steven Spielberg’s dream project about UFOs. It paid off when production delays gave him the time to make the first summer blockbuster, Jaws…

“Whodunnit” is usually a question decided well before a film is released. With this 1985 spoof, it was determined by where you saw the film, with three different endings playing at various theaters across the country. Like the 1949 game that inspired it, Clue is a mystery revolving around who killed Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving…

With many of his films lost, silent screen comic Raymond Griffith is all but forgotten today. The rediscovery of all but the final reel of his film PATHS TO PARADISE in the 1970s was a revelation. The “Silk Hat Comedian” stars as a suave jewel thief who first cons lady thief Betty Compson and then…

Clint Eastwood made the transition from star to icon when he pointed a .44 Magnum at a bank robber and said, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” The role of Harry Callahan, a steely eyed San Francisco police detective on the trail of a serial killer…

Director Sidney Lumet loved rebels. From his big-screen debut with 12 Angry Men (1957) to his last film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), he captured the dignity of fighting against the odds. In this narrative inspired by a true story, he found one of his most dynamic and sympathetic heroes. Al Pacino’s Sonny…

Eighty years ago, director Billy Wilder taught audiences that “murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle.” DOUBLE INDEMNITY was not the first film noir, but it helped build a world where danger lurks in dark corners and you can’t tell whom to trust — certainly not a beautiful blonde with a seductive ankle bracelet.  Fred MacMurray is…

After helping define the film noir and reinvigorating the Western with more adult themes and complex characters, director Anthony Mann set his sights on the epic. It wasn’t that big a leap. As he told the press, he saw EL CID as “a Spanish Western.” Of course, not many Westerns back then shot for five…

Footloose may be 40 years old, but with its book-burning scene and a plot centered on youthful rebellion against unreasoning authority it seems all too timely today. Kevin Bacon stars as a big-city kid transplanted to a small town where dancing and rock music are prohibited. He’s soon branded a bad influence, particularly when he…

Budgets don’t matter when a film connects with an audience, and this low-budget romantic comedy resonated so well it hit number one at the box office and became the top-grossing British picture ever as of its release date. It all grew out of a chance encounter screenwriter Richard Curtis had at a wedding. He hit…

A newspaperman teaches an heiress how to eat raw carrots…A materialistic businessman discovers the simple joys in life by playing “Polly Wolly Doodle” on a harmonica…A small-town banker discovers how many lives he’s touched…These are just three images from the works of an Italian-American director whose work defined the American spirit for a generation of…

The star quality and exotic locales that drive this comic caper will be even more dazzling in this world premiere restoration. Con artist Michael Caine spots Eurasian nightclub dancer Shirley MacLaine and notes her resemblance to a priceless Chinese bust owned by the world’s richest man (Herbert Lom). His vision of the perfect heist is…

In the late 1950s, Hollywood discovered a new audience—teenagers. Columbia made its bid for that demographic with this romantic comedy about a young girl (Sandra Dee) who comes of age when she convinces the local beach crowd to teach her to surf. Most of the teen films of that era were little more than light…

One of the least seen of director William Wyler’s films is also one of his most charming. Adapted by Preston Sturges from Ferenc Molnar’s play, THE GOOD FAIRY follows the life of an orphan (Margaret Sullavan) who sees the world as a fairy tale. When her innocence gets her into trouble with men, she claims…

MGM production chief Irving G. Thalberg created the all-star film with this intricate tale of five lives intersecting in a posh Berlin hotel. A faded ballerina (Greta Garbo) considers suicide until she meets a dashing jewel thief (John Barrymore) out to rob her. An ambitious secretary (Joan Crawford) considers sleeping with unscrupulous boss Wallace Beery…

Eighties fads and fashions — including leg warmers, spandex and jazzercise — take center stage in this Canadian cult favorite. Made on the heels of Flashdance (1983), the film tells of three office workers who found their own exercise studio. When one of them (Cynthia Dale) beats out a rival club’s owner for a local…

In 1967, which has been called one of Hollywood’s watershed years, Columbia was at the vanguard of studios challenging old ways of doing things. They released two films defying racial stereotypes — Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) and To Sir, With Love (1967) — and challenged the ways we look at criminals with this…

Paramount Pictures sold this anarchic musical as “The Grand Hotel of comedy,” a claim supported by its wonderful array of clowns, including W.C. Fields, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Franklin Pangborn and Stu Erwin. The flimsy plot, about an inventor in a Chinese hotel demonstrating a super-television that can show anything anywhere, is just an excuse…

In the 1950s, director Jack Arnold had a run of work in the science fiction genre comparable to Val Lewton’s work in horror at RKO in the 1940s. In Arnold’s best work, such as Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) and The Space Children (1958), the monsters or aliens may actually be the good guys. His…

Ninety years ago, director Frank Capra put Columbia Pictures on the map when this delightful screwball comedy became the first picture to claim Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay. Nobody believed in it. The stars thought they had been assigned the film as punishment. Columbia didn’t do much to promote it, and…

The Gabor sisters had just started their reign as the first celebrities to be famous for being famous when writer Garson Kanin came up with the idea for a film about a woman so in love with notoriety she pays to have her name put on a billboard overlooking Columbus Circle in New York City….

Elvis Presley started his long affiliation with MGM with this musical drama. JAILHOUSE ROCK was the first film to capture the bad-boy image associated with his singing persona (though far removed from the real Elvis). He stars as a young troublemaker who learns to sing and play guitar while doing time for manslaughter. A prison…

Seventy years ago, Federico Fellini broke with neo-realism, the movement that brought the post-war Italian cinema international recognition, to create a much more personal film. Although it seems realistic on the surface, LA STRADA has lyrical and fairy tale elements that have led critics to call it Beauty and the Beast in reverse. Anthony Quinn…

As an amalgamation of Billie Holiday’s three husbands, Billy Dee Williams’ rapport with Diana Ross is one of the key factors in making this musical biography a success. He connects with her from the first moment and plays with a freshness that gives their love scenes an improvisatory feeling. The great singer’s autobiography had been…

The sight of a nondescript little man supervising armored cars loaded with millions of dollars worth of gold inspired T.E.B. Clarke to write one of the most popular British comedies of the 1950s. That inspired him to create the story of a frustrated bank clerk who assembles an unlikely band of thieves to steal the…

Three years after his death Wyatt Earp hit the screen as a character, albeit with a different name, in what some critics have hailed as his best on-screen interpretation and the best depiction of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Walter Huston stars as Frame “Saint” Johnson, described in the film as “the killingest peace…

It took over a thousand people to get the story of T.E. Lawrence to the screen, but there was one guiding intelligence ruling them all—director David Lean. He and producer Sam Spiegel decided to follow the Oscar-winning The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) with the story of Lawrence’s World War I campaign to unify…

With his portrayal of the U.S.’ 16th president, Daniel Day-Lewis became the only person to score three Oscars for Best Actor. It’s hardly a slight to his talent to suggest that one deciding factor in that win was Lois Burwell’s makeup. She had to come up with a look that fit the audience’s preconceptions while…

Long before small-screen audiences delighted in the machinations of the Ewings, the Colbys and the Lyons, the Hubbard clan of Alabama ruled stage and screen in Lillian Hellman’s explosive tale of big business in the old South. Embezzlement, blackmail and even murder are all tools of the trade as the three siblings jockey for wealth…

Not every actor gets to make their first film with one of the world’s greatest actors. Forty-five years ago, Diane Lane was lucky enough to do just that in this charming romantic comedy. The film features Lord Laurence Olivier as a con artist who helps (and sometimes hinders) Lane in her first great romance with…

RKO and MGM scored hits with their adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s tale of four sisters growing up in the late 19th century. Thirty years ago, Columbia took a stab at it, creating a Little Women for a new generation. The new version’s feminist slant, which emphasized sisterhood, feels natural. The production was spearheaded by…

In 1940, RKO Studios executives rejected Orson Welles’s daring idea—a comic thriller starring Lucille Ball—because they said she couldn’t carry a picture. Fourteen years later, she proved them wrong with this delightful comedy. She had a lot of help, of course, with visually elegant direction by Vincente Minnelli, a witty script by Frances Goodrich and…

Three years before they were seen onscreen in one of the premier screwball comedies, The Lady Eve, Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda co-starred for the first time in this comic mystery. Stanwyck’s the title character, an heiress up to her hips in murder after she discovers a dead body. When the corpse disappears, newspaperman Fonda…

When filmmaker Martin Scorsese was a child, watching films obsessively, he was particularly thrilled to see the logo of The Archers, the film company run by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It heralded a world of “fantasy, wonder, magic — real film magic” that would shape his aesthetic. He shares those and other insights in…

Two giants in the field of special effects came together 75 years ago for the only film for which either would win a competitive Oscar. Willis O’Brien had pioneered in stop-motion animation with pictures like The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933). The younger Ray Harryhausen had worked on George Pal’s Puppetoons when his…

Writer-producer Charles Brackett had been so impressed after working with Thelma Ritter on The Mating Season (1951), he decided to write another vehicle for her. Although she had to take third billing to conventional romantic leads Jeanne Crain and Scott Brady, Ritter was really the whole show in THE MODEL AND THE MARRIAGE BROKER. Crain…

MGM purchased the rights to most of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books in late 1959, planning to feature the character in a TV series. Instead, the studio’s British division in Elstree created four films, starting with MURDER, SHE SAID, that became huge fan favorites. Although nothing like the prim spinster in the novels, Margaret Rutherford…

MGM found a new star among its contract juveniles when Elizabeth Taylor gained weight and exercised her way into the role of horse-lover Velvet Brown. Originally, she had been told she was too short and frail-looking for a role once considered for Katharine Hepburn, Margaret Sullavan and Gene Tierney. Her performance as the girl who…

The ads for this film noir asked, “Would You Like To Know What Your Tomorrow Will Be?” If you’re living in a world envisioned by the great Cornell Woolrich (who published the original novel under the pseudonym George Hopley) as directed by noir specialist John Farrow, the answer is probably, “No.” Edward G. Robinson stars…

Screenwriter Ernest Lehman set out to write “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures,” a compilation of the tropes that had earned director Alfred Hitchcock the title Master of Suspense. You’ve got an innocent man (adman Cary Grant) accused of wrongdoing, a breakneck cross-country chase, a McGuffin, a cool blonde (Eva Marie Saint) who…

Like most of Hollywood, Columbia Pictures was moving into an era of independent production when producer Sam Spiegel brought them Budd Schulberg’s script about a longshoreman (Marlon Brando), standing up to the powerful gangster (Lee J. Cobb) who controls the waterfront unions. Kazan directed his cast — which also included Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger…

Walt Disney was considering shutting down his animation unit after the box office failure of Sleeping Beauty (1959). But when Ub Iwerks and art director Ken Anderson came upon a method of xeroxing drawings directly to animation cells, it allowed Disney to make this film for just over half of what the previous picture had…

Director John M. Stahl was a master of the “weepie,” with credits for the original screen versions of Back Street (1932) and Imitation of Life (1934). His ONLY YESTERDAY combines the plot of Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) with the title of a popular history book. Margaret Sullavan, in a memorable film…

Director Phil Karlson was already a master of film noir when he took on a real life murder case. In 1954, the criminal syndicate that ran Phenix City, Alabama —dubbed “Sin City, U.S.A.” in the press — assassinated reformer Albert Patterson. Karlson shot on location while the killers were on trial, and the production even…

John Ford started his long association with 20th Century Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck with this often-neglected fictionalization of history. The titular prisoner, Dr. Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter), is a Maryland physician wrongly charged as a co-conspirator with John Wilkes Booth because he treated the assassin’s broken leg before he knew of Lincoln’s death….

Quentin Tarantino’s films are as much about the movies as they are about violence. After bursting on the scene with his tribute to heist films, Reservoir Dogs (1992), he revolutionized the industry with Pulp Fiction. His time-jumbled tale of lowlifes (including John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis and Uma Thurman) revolving around a crime…

Blanche Yurka had already knitted her way through executions by guillotine as Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities (1935) when she became the first actress to play the notorious Ma Barker, renamed Ma Webster at FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s request. This was only the second sound film for the stage legend who…

It’s a murder mystery. It’s a love story. It’s a dark comedy. It’s an exercise in pure cinema. The marvel of REAR WINDOW is that it functions perfectly on so many different levels. Felled by a broken leg, photographer James Stewart spies on his neighbors, one of whom may be a killer. At the same…

During the studio era, extreme topics like promiscuity, abortion and drug abuse were forbidden under the Production Code. That didn’t stop independent companies from making sensationalistic films on those topics. For writer-director Dorothy Davenport, however, it wasn’t just exploitation. She had lived it. She was the widow of silent star Wallace Reid, who died trying…

Seventy years ago, Audrey Hepburn cemented her hold on stardom by following her Oscar-winning performance in Roman Holiday (1953) with another Cinderella story. She stars as Sabrina Fairchild, daughter of the chauffeur to a wealthy Long Island family. She has a hopeless crush on the family’s debonair younger son (William Holden), who barely notices her…

Although it’s not science fiction, SE7EN presents a dystopian view of the modern city. It’s a dark, rain-soaked place where rot and corruption thrive, the natural breeding ground for a serial killer punishing people representing the Seven Deadly Sins. Director David Fincher’s image of hell is even more vivid in this new restoration. Morgan Freeman…

David Lean said he learned how to shoot landscapes for LAWRENCE OF ARABIA by watching THE SEARCHERS. The story about a Civil War veteran (John Wayne) searching for his niece who has been kidnapped by the Comanches who slaughtered her family has been echoed in works by Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader and Wim Wenders. Although…

Before he made his name directing such socially conscious dramas as In the Heat of the Night (1967), TCM’s good friend Norman Jewison was one of Hollywood’s top comedy directors. He had already scored with Doris Day’s The Thrill of It All (1963) when he was tapped to direct the third and final film teaming…

Director Frank Capra’s stories of little men beating the odds were a key inspiration for writer-director Frank Darabont’s adaptation of the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. The film’s history turned out to be Capra-esque, too. Darabont fought for the right to make his feature directing debut with the picture and turned…

Paramount Pictures was $21 million in the red when George Raft convinced them to hire old friend Mae West to play a small role in Night After Night (1932). She completely stole the show, and soon exhibitors were clamoring for her to star in a picture. The Production Code refused to let her film her…

One hundred years ago, Buster Keaton exploded the film medium with this short feature about a projectionist who dreams himself into the movie he’s showing. At first, he’s trapped by the editing as the scene around him keeps changing. Then he moves into the plot of Hearts and Pearls or The Lounge Lizard’s Lost Love…

Producer-director Ernst Lubitsch was the master of sophisticated comedy, but after giving MGM Ninotchka (1939) he broke character with this touchingly sentimental romantic comedy. The tale of bickering co-workers who don’t realize they’re also romantic pen pals proved to be the perfect vehicle for off-screen friends James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. This was the third…

Jodie Foster was attracted to the role of FBI trainee Clarice Starling from the moment she read Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs. The role spoke to her because Starling is a woman using her wits and trusting her intuition rather than a macho action figure. When a serial killer kidnaps a senator’s…

Pre-Code audiences loved fallen women, and few fell as far and suffered as horribly as Zita Johann, star of 1932’s The Mummy, in this Poverty Row production. Johann’s Nora travels the road from losing her birth parents and adoptive parents, to rape, an affair with a wealthy politician, murder and the electric chair. None of…

Although not as famous as more florid films like Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s follow-up to the latter is a fascinating look at how deftly their aesthetic could translate to a more realistic, intimate story. David Farrar of Black Narcissus stars as an embittered scientist, one of…

Mel Brooks had already parodied classic genres like the Western in Blazing Saddles, the Universal horror films in Young Frankenstein (both 1974) and the Alfred Hitchcock thriller in High Anxiety (1977) when he took on the Star Wars franchise and other popular science fiction films. George Lucas didn’t just approve of his plot about an…

This may have been Judy Garland’s last musical at MGM, the studio that had been her home for 15 years, but she went out with a bang. The tale of a New England farmer (Garland) whose life is turned around when a theatrical troupe moves in to rehearse in her barn was planned to put…

MGM was widely considered the premier architect of musicals during Hollywood’s golden age. So, when the studio set out to celebrate its 50th anniversary 50 years ago, the logical move was to create a documentary highlighting the greatest musical moments from some of their greatest films. It’s an all-singing, all-dancing, all-star extravaganza with generous clips…

For the first time in more than 90 years, six Vitaphone vaudeville shorts of the 1920s will be projected in 35mm, with sound played back from their original 16-inch discs on a turntable designed and engineered by Warner Bros. Post Production Engineering Department. INTRODUCTION TO VITAPHONE, WILL H. HAYS  1926), 4 min MY BAG O’ TRIX…

The movies didn’t need CGI to scare people out of their wits 70 years ago when Warner Bros. set a colony of giant ants loose on the world. Even today, a throbbing high-pitched sound, a giant mandible and a traumatized little girl screaming “Them!” generate chills. Drawing on Cold War anxieties over nuclear proliferation, the…

MGM wasn’t noted for its westerns, but when they made one, they went all out, even at a time when few studios were making big-budget oaters. For this one, they bought the rights to Peter B. Kyne’s perennial Christmas favorite, which had already been filmed six times, and assigned legendary theater artist and acting teacher…

Although primarily associated with masculine genres like Westerns and war films, William A. Wellman had directed his fair share of pictures with strong female leads like Barbara Stanwyck, Ruth Chatterton and Loretta Young. So, when friend Frank Capra presented him with the idea for a Western about women taking over a wagon train, it seemed…

Warner Bros. had made film history in the 1930s with its run of gritty, violent gangster films with stars like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Most of them depicted the criminals as products of their environment. By 1949, however, times were changing. They lured Cagney back to the genre by following his suggestions to…