"This is New York, Skyscraper Champion of the World...Where the Slickers and Know-It-Alls peddle gold bricks to each other...And where Truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye..." With this jaundiced opening title, scripter Ben Hecht introduces his classic comedy Nothing Sacred. Fredric March plays Wally Cook, a hotshot ...
Tom Destry (James Stewart), son of a legendary frontier peacekeeper, doesn't believe in gunplay. Thus he becomes the object of widespread ridicule when he rides into the wide-open town of Bottleneck, the personal fiefdom of the crooked Kent (Brian Donlevy). His detractors laugh even louder when Destry signs on as deputy to drunken sheriff Wash ...
This second film version of the Edna Ferber/Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II musical Show Boat is considered by many film buffs to be the best of the three. Covering nearly four decades (was there ever an Edna Ferber novel that didn't?), the film stars Irene Dunne as Magnolia Hawks, a role she'd previously played on stage, though not in the ...
In this sequel to 1936's Three Smart Girls, Deanna Durbin is back as the most precocious of a sister trio: the other girls are Nan Grey and Helen Parrish (replacing the first film's Barbara Read. Three Smart Girls dealt with the girls' efforts to reunite their parents. In the sequel, Durbin pokes her turned-up nose into the affairs of her older ...
Judy Garland performs her only on-screen death scene early in the proceedings of Little Nellie Kelly. But despair not! Garland soon reappears as the daughter of the character she was playing in the film's first reels. Now a girl of 20, Garland has fallen in love with Douglas McPhail, much to the dismay of her father George Murphy and grandfather ...
Twentieth Century-Fox couldn't make a film version of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's Oklahoma in 1945--that particular Broadway musical would remain a "hot ticket" until the end of the decade--so the studio did the next best thing by hiring Rodgers & Hammerstein to pen the score for the Technicolorful State Fair. Fox had previously made a ...
Harry Carey Sr., C. Aubrey Smith and Charles Winninger play three wealthy bachelors who have spent their lives wrapped up in themselves. Left all alone on Christmas eve, the elderly trio invite a couple of strangers to dinner: misplaced cowpoke Richard Carlson and pretty, but aimless, Jean Parker. Hoping that they've accomplished a bit of ...
Popular Broadway comedian Ted Healy (sort of a Milton Berle without the charm) was tapped for potential movie stardom by Fox Studios, who cast Healy in the wacky semi-musical comedy Soup to Nuts. The film was written by comic-strip artist Rube Goldberg (who also appears in the film), utilizing several of Goldberg's zanier comedy notions, including ...
This fun-filled spin-off of the Rodgers & Hart Broadway musical by the same name, features Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney as two young children of vaudevillian parents who aren't included in their parents travels, so they set out to produce a show of their own. Rooney's the driver here and he's up against the administrators of a fogy state-run ...
Despite MGM's insistence that star Gene Kelly, just returning from military service in 1947, appear exclusively in big-budget Technicolor musicals, maverick director Gregory La Cava showcased Kelly in the modest black and white tunefest Living in a Big Way. Kelly is cast as an ex-GI who discovers that his wealthy war bride (Marie McDonald) is an ...
Deanna Durbin, the teenaged soprano who literally saved Universal Pictures from bankruptcy, made her feature-film debut in Three Smart Girls. Durbin, Nan Grey and Barbara Read play three wealthy young sisters, living with their divorced mother (Nella Walker) in Europe. The girls learn that their father (Charles Winninger) has made plans to remarry ...
James Stewart once classified Pot O' Gold as his worst film, though this may have stemmed from his reported inability to get along with his costar Paulette Goddard (who is supposed to have dismissed Stewart's acting technique with a flippant "Anyone can swallow.") Inspired by the popular radio giveaway series of the same name, the film represented ...
The plot of the overinflated MGM musical Broadway Rhythm can be summed up briefly: Musical comedy producer Jonnie Demming (George Murphy) dismisses his vaudevillian dad Sam Demming (Charles Winninger) as old-fashioned. Jonnie signs Hollywood star Helen Hoyt (Ginny Simms) to a Broadway show, but she turns it down. Sam saves the day by dredging up ...
Belle Of The Yukon is standard backstage musical fare, featuring Randolph Scott as a reformed con man who has fled north from the law and opened a successful dancehall/ gambling establishment in the upper reaches of Malamute. Meanwhile, his former lover Belle (Gypsy Rose Lee), who he deserted when he went on the lam, arrives as part of a new show ...
Deanna Durbin stars in the musical shaggy dog story Something in the Wind. When the wealthy uncle of the Read family dies, he leaves instructions in his will to bequeath a set amount of money to his mistress, one Mary Collins. The family assumes it to be a pretty young female radio personality called Mary Collins (and played by Deanna Durbin), ...
Deanna Durbin is all grown up in Hers to Hold, the unofficial sequel to her "Three Smart Girls" films of the 1930s. Durbin plays Penelope Craig, the starry-eyed daughter of wealthy Judson and Dorothy Craig (Charles Winninger, Nella Walker). Developing a crush on much-older playboy Bill Morley (Joseph Cotton), Penelope stops at nothing to land the ...
Manhattan working girl Jean Arthur bids goodbye to her three erstwhile suitors (Grant Withers, Hans Conried and Grady Sutton) to take a bus tour of the west. En route, she meets handsome rodeo-star John Wayne, whose bucking bronco hurls him directly into her lap. Stranded in a tank town with Wayne and his sidekick Charles Winninger, Arthur is ...
Cafe Metropole stars Tyrone Power as an international playboy with a habit of writing rubber checks. Heavily in debt to cafe owner Adolphe Menjou, Power agrees to pose as a Russian nobleman and woo heiress Loretta Young, so that Menjou can get his mitts on the girl's money. Avarice gives way to love, but not before Young walks out on Power when ...
Flying High was a nonsensical Broadway musical hit of 1930 starring Bert Lahr. The film version, made one year later by MGM, made a few efforts to "cinematize" the stage original, but the focus was on Lahr, re-creating his Broadway performance virtually verbatim -- except for his famous (and notorious) gag sequence involving a urinalysis! Lahr ...
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