After his famous stint on Saturday Night Live and critically-acclaimed stand-up act, Steve Martin made his way into films in the late 1970s. Securing a solid (if completely bonkers) hit with The Jerk (1979), Hollywood seemed to feel Martin could only fill a very particular niche: the retro movie. Maybe it started with Sgt. Pepper’s…
Image courtesy Lolita’s Classics. – It’s often assumed that Norma Shearer’s good-girl image ended with the 1930 pre-Code flick The Divorcee, but that film, in truth, was the fourth in a row featuring the new, mature, slightly naughty Shearer. Beginning with The Trial of Mary Dugan and followed up immediately with The Last of Mrs.…
A lot of people for a lot of years tried to make Johnny Mack Brown happen. The handsome All-American halfback-turned-actor cut his teeth on a few silent films before being cast as the ostensible male lead in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), with Joan Crawford, Dorothy Sebastian and Anita Page originating a trio of what would…
Spunky, beautiful heiress Kay Bentley (Joan Crawford) decides to go ashore when her father’s yacht docks in the Greek Islands. While there, she meets handsome Irish archaeologist Terry O’Neill (Brian Aherne) on an important dig, and after the standard debutante flirtation-via-irritation method doesn’t work, she decides to try again the next day. Discovering he has…
Are you a fan of crazy weird 1970s made-for-TV movies? Then have I got a doozy for you: The Girl in the Empty Grave. What you need to know about this film before you even think about watching it is that Empty Grave was intended as a pilot for a new series starring Andy Griffith,…
There’s probably no such thing as a nice, quiet little film noir, but Roadblock is as close as you can get. It’s likely that director Harold Daniels just stumbled into this low-key style that works so nicely within the genre — Daniels was known for very little except television and those terrible horror flicks that…
Described as the first jock turned broadcaster in history, Marty Glickman began what would become an exceptional sports career while attending high school in Brooklyn. The HBO documentary Glickman (2013), now out from Warner Archive, traces Marty’s path from his difficult childhood to becoming a New York City phenomenon known as the “Flatbush Flash,” for…
Though I was only 10 years old, I remember the day my dad learned “Bret Maverick,” the 1980s reboot of the classic television Western “Maverick” (1957-1962), was cancelled. Dad followed James Garner through every television show he ever made — which meant everyone else in the house did, too, though I wasn’t complaining; “The Rockford…
Today’s Warner Archive film review is slightly NSFW! That means it’s even more fun than usual! But it’s probably not something you want your boss catching you looking at. *** Sex Kittens Go To College! (1960) A few months ago, a friend asked if I knew where to get a copy of Sex Kittens Go…
We’ve got quite a stack of most excellent Warner Archive releases to look at this week! *** Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973) Now is as good a time as any to confess that, despite it being nearly two years since my first entry in the so-called Neil Diamond Project, I never stopped working on it. For…