Humphrey Bogart and George Raft play truck driver brothers, trying to get ahead before they get killed (who knew truck driving was so dangerous?), or, you know, framed into murder plots by Ida Lupino–their boss’s wife who has amorous designs on Raft, despite his much healthier relationship with a young Ann Sheridan (whose acting does, [...]
Sometimes I wonder about Hollywood. In 1940, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne made a film called My Favorite Wife in which Dunne was shipwrecked for seven years, and just when Grant had her declared dead and remarried, she showed back up. Also in 1940, this film was made, in which Fred MacMurray gets shipwrecked, and [...]
Bette Davis shoots a man on her front porch, claiming self-defense–but as could be expected, there’s more to the story, bound up in the letter of the title. It’s a good Davis vehicle, but not great. She owns the screen, but I’m not sure it’s worth her. It’s a strange, strange day when I start [...]
Charlie Chaplin moved into the world of sound twelve years later than everyone else with this satirical take on Hitler. Not that there’s anything wrong with moving into the sound era twelve years late–his two sound-era silent films City Lights and Modern Times both rank among the world’s all-time greatest films and didn’t need sound [...]
Second-rate vehicle for Fred Astaire. He and Burgess Meredith play college buddies (note that Astaire was in his forties at the time) who play together in a band. When both of them are forced to graduate–apparently they’ve been failing on purpose to continue getting lucrative college engagements–they both go after a spot in Artie Shaw’s [...]
