Today's pick is one of my favorite silents - the funny, bubbly, smart It which stars Clara Bow and Antonio Moreno.


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I have about 600 unanswered comments and I promise to get to them ASAP, but for now I am about to embark on a rewatch of one of my favorite movies of all time - El Cid with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, a grim and larger-than-life epic made in 1961. The story is about a Spanish nobleman and superb fighter (El Cid was a real historical ( Read more... )

This scene from For Whom the Bell Tolls always makes me cry. Always.

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I am not a total Hemingway fangirl but I adore his For Whom the Bell Tolls so. When I had a teeny tiny shelf my freshman year of college and so could only have a few permanent books of my own (as opposed to library ones), it was one of the ones I picked. And the 1943 movie is ( Read more... )

When I feel under the weather, I love watching the classic movies to cheer me up. Tonight's choice was the 1939 delight Balalaika, starring Nelson Eddy and Ilona Massey.


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One of my favorite actresses, Jean Simmons, has passed away tonight. She was wonderful in many excellent movies (Elmer Gantry is in my top 10 movies ever) but I think my favorite Jean Simmons moment EVER is this delightful song from Guys and Dolls, in which slightly tipsy Jean gets forward with Marlon Brando.

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G&D is actually one of my ultimate ( Read more... )

I plan to do a back-to-back watch of 1998 and 2008 adaptations of one of my favorite Victorian novels, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, whose tragic heroine is destroyed both by the sheer brutality of physical survival and the rigid social mores of Victorian England. I am clearly a glutton for punishment but then I like Hardy, so that is not a ( Read more... )

Yes, I am on a classic movie kick.

Sometimes when I look at how lush some 1930s movies were with their fancy elegant gowns and gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, it is almost a physical pleasure...

I mean, look at this:


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1. The 1930s movies had a huge fascination with gangsters. This is lucky for me, as I love 1930s gangster flicks and have tons to choose from ( Read more... )

Today's random movie rec is Johnny Eager, a 1942 movie starring Robert Taylor, Van Heflin (he won a supporting oscar for this role) and Lana Turner. It's an excellent, if overlooked, film noir.


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His head-piece was gone, his breastplate dinted, his right sleeve a rag hanging from his shoulder about a naked arm. He was splashed from head to foot with blood, and there was blood from a scalp-wound that he had taken matting his hair and mixing with the grime of powder on his face to render him unrecognizable ( Read more... )