Classics
When I was 14 years old, I happened to catch John Huston’s 1948 noir Key Largo one night on Turner Classic Movies, and I was hooked. Looking back, I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly was so beguiling about that over-50-year-old movie to an eighth grader. Was it the electric casting—real-life couple Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson reinventing the gangster type that skyrocketed him to fame at the start of the 1930s, and Claire Trevor in an Oscar-winning turn as an alcoholic moll? Was it the claustrophobic atmosphere of being trapped in a ramshackle inn during a raging hurricane? Was it the turn in the final act from a tense chamber piece to a nail-biting action sequence at sea? I’m not positive about that, but I do remember my reaction to the concept of the Golden Age of Hollywood as a whole: “What else is out there?” A lot, as I was quick to discover. The output from the major American movie studios from the early days of cinema and the birth of talking pictures all the way to the end of the 1960s and the rapidly changing social mores provide a tantalizing glimpse into the past in ways both big and small: the jaunty slang and glamorous fashions of the 1930s, the wartime morale boosters of the 1940s, the anxiety-riddled thrillers of the 1950s. As much as these movies are windows to another time, they’ve rarely become outdated. The comedies still elicit laughs, the thrillers still put you on the edge of your seat, the musical numbers still hit, and the melodramas still tug at your heartstrings. There will never be another era like it, but we can always revisit it- and the filmmakers behind the camera and the faces on screen and the worlds they created—in the movies.
Mortimer Brewster, a newspaper drama critic, playwright, and author known for his diatribes against marriage, suddenly falls in love and gets married; but when he makes a quick trip home to tell…read more
Polly Parrish, a clerk at Merlin's Department Store, is mistakenly presumed to be the mother of a foundling. Outraged at Polly's unmotherly conduct, David Merlin becomes determined to keep the…read more
Two hapless freight handlers find themselves encountering Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster and the Wolf Man.
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While recovering in a hospital, war hero Jefferson Jones grows familiar with the "Diary of a Housewife" column written by Elizabeth Lane. Jeff's nurse arranges with Elizabeth's publisher,…read more
When scientists exploring the Amazon River stumble on a “missing link” connecting humans and fish, they plan to capture it for later study. But the Creature has plans of his own, and has set his…read more
Just before Christmas, department store clerk Steve Mason meets big spending customer Connie Ennis, who's actually a comparison shopper sent by another store. Steve lets her go, which gets him…read more
A New Yorker hobo moves into a mansion and along the way he gathers friends to live in the house with him. Before he knows it, he is living with the actual home owners.
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A young novelist, Richard Harland, meets beautiful Ellen Berent on a train where they fall in love and are soon married. When tragedies take first his handicapped young brother, then his unborn…read more
The disappearance of people and corpses leads a reporter to a wax museum and a sinister sculptor.
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Two employees at a gift shop can barely stand one another, without realising that they are falling in love through the post as each other's anonymous pen pal.
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A brother and sister move into an old seaside house that has been abandoned for many years on the Cornwellian coast only to soon discover that it is haunted by the ghost of the mother of their…read more
Alice, the only relatively normal member of the eccentric Sycamore family, falls in love with Tony Kirby, but his wealthy banker father and snobbish mother strongly disapprove of the match. When…read more
