Yipe! It's been a six-month gap for this particular project of mine! Sorry for the delay. Here's a kind of brief look at a very influential adventure film from 1920, Douglas Fairbanks in what may be the first "swashbuckler" film: The Mark of Zorro!


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Friday, May 18
8:00 PM: 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960)
10:00 PM: Jack the Giant Killer (1962)
A pair of George Pal-produced fantasy films. Both are well-regarded. “Jack” has apparently been hard to come by since some dinks bought it in the 1970s and re-edited it into a musical(!). This airing will be the original version (featuring sub-Harryhausen stop- ( Read more... )

So I got the idea to try to share some of my hard-earned filmic wisdom with my friends in a more immediately useful manner than occasional reviews of 80-year-old movies, and this is one of the plans I came up with: Each Thursday evening, I'll check over the next week's schedule form Turner Classic Movies (Best TV channel EVAR!) and highlight the, ( Read more... )

I thought I'd round out my first batch of reviews in my little project by mentioning a few more worthwhile films from 1930. Then I checked to find out how many films from 1930 were on DVD right now. The answer: 15, according to the IMDB. Wow. That's not many. There are probably a few more floating about in the public domain, and there are probably ( Read more... )

All Quiet On the Western Front
Universal pictures, USA, 1930
Directed by Lewis Milestone
From the novel by Erich Maria Remarque
Adaptation & Dialogue - Maxwell Anderson
Screenplay - George Abbott
Adaptation - Del Andrews


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"The Cuckoos"
RKO Radio Pictures, USA, 1930
Directed by Paul Sloane
Based on "The Ramblers" by Guy Bolton, Burt Kalmar and Harry Ruby
Adapted by Cyrus Wood

Time once again for a journey into the past, as we visit with one of the most popular comedy groups to enter film from vaudeville via Broadway. Huge crowd-pleasers in their day, this team rode a ( Read more... )

The Unholy Three
MGM, USA, 1930
Directed by Jack Conway
From the book by Clarence Aaron Robbins
Continuity and Dialogue by J. C. Nugent and Elliott Nugent

Pure pulp goodness after the cut.

Oh, yeah! Now we're talkin'! Here's where this little scheme really starts to pay off! Ladies and gentlemen... "The Unholy Three!" (That's my exclamation mark this ( Read more... )

Murder!
British International Pictures, 1930, UK
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Based on “Enter Sir John” by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson
Adapted by Alfred Hitchcock and Walter Mycroft

Onward and upward! After the inauspicious beginnings of "Golden Dawn," we move along to the next item in our menu: "Murder!" Yes, with an exclamation point. One of ( Read more... )

Beginning my little project of cinematic indulgence, we visit the year 1930 for the first of five films of varying quality, content and tone.

Review, several images, and the patronizing racial stereotypes of a bygone era after the cut:


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