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This one has it all: A snappy script by Ben Hecht and Herman Manckiewitz, dazzling banter between two never-together-before stars, private dicks (1930s style), old-school theatricals, a madcap beauty paired with a hardboiled young cynic, plot twists and goofy characters--all adding up to a most entertaining time capsule of a vintage romcom. James Stewart plays the cynic, telegraphing the expected amount of dimwitted charm. Claudette Colbert is the madcap beauty, a role she mastered in many a film of the day. Guy Kibbe, Ernest Truex, and other great old character actors fill in this nutty little gem. If you're in the mood for a trip to the past, catch this one next time it comes around. You won't be sorry.

In BARRYMORE, Christopher Plummer, one of the greatest stage actors living, essays the role of John Barrymore, one of the greatest stage actors of a previous generation. Delicious, I thought. I can't miss this.

I've been a fan of Plummer forever, seeing him in minor films and minor roles in major films, and always wishing to see more of him. I'm also a fan of Ethel, Lionel, and John Barrymore, and have read a great deal about their lives. I read Plummer's memoir a few years back and enjoyed it immensely just to learn of the verve with which he approaches life, however alcohol-induced that verve may be; and also to read the tidbits about famous actors he has known and worked with.

The movie should be of interest to fans of old-school theater, but I suspect it will leave most audiences cold, or at least more than a little confused. Plummer is excellent--squeezing the juice out of every second he is on stage--but I was never convinced he was John Barrymore, even though he was telling me stories as if he was. I never heard how much young John hated his father, and somehow I cannot quite believe it. He saw the man's descent into hell through syphilis and was probably too young to understand or forgive it, but I never read that he was the one walking the old drunk into whorehouses. It may have happened, and it would have been traumatic, but I hadn't heard that one. I'm certain he would have treasured memories of his mother as he was 11 when she died, but in this play he says he hardly remembers her. It has often been stated how devoted he was to his grandmother, Mrs. Drew, until the day she died. This play doesn't capture that, but maybe I'm asking too much. To be as complex and confounding as John Barrymore was, one could not have had good memories of childhood, could one?

John Barrymore was indeed a garrulous drunk, and probably a fiercely angry one, which we didn't see. Somehow there were too many digressions to silly songs like "I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo," and "When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam", getting in the way of the picture of the classical actor we know he was. One silly song, I could have accepted, but two is one too many. The real John Barrymore did refer to his marriages as bus accidents, and his grandmother did call him her little Greengoose. She also is known to have said she loved him so much because he was "a bad boy--like my husband." The script is interesting, but it doesn't quite capture the bad boy, or the madness, or the self-loathing that caused Barrymore's retreat into the bottle. And Plummer is missing the main tool Barrymore had in his actor's bag of tricks--his magnificent, multidimensional voice. I was aware every moment that I was hearing Christopher Plummer relating Jack Barrymore stories, and it only made me want to find a DVD of a movie with John Barrymore.

REMEMBER THE NIGHT is one of my favorite Christmas movies, and maybe one of my favorite movies of any genre. The characters, quirky and sympathetic, endowed by writer Preston Sturges with his own unique brand of offbeat wit and wiliness, ring true from the opening sequence to the wrenching last scene.

Barbara Stanwyck is at the peak of her beauty, but here she plays a hardboiled shoplifter, cynical and icy. Her foil is the savvy D.A., played by Fred MacMurray at his most beguiling best. We learn early on that, although working the tough New York streets, they are both from Indiana, giving them the corn-fed, all-American heartland background, and making them somehow, in spite of being on the opposite sides of the law, perfectly right for each other.

A road trip to Indiana (with "Back Home in Indiana" woven into the sound track) brings them to Barbara's home, where Fred intends to drop her off for a Christmas visit. What ensues is one of the most effectively chilling scenes I've ever seen in a movie--a convincing picture of a mother with a hard heart and the total devastation of her daughter as a result. Stanwyck melts before our eyes. The brief performance of Georgia Caine, an actress unknown to me before this film, is one of the subtlest yet most powerful I've ever seen.

The bleak atmosphere is soon contrasted with the genuine warmth and tenderness--and Christmas spirit--of the home Fred grew up in. Beulah Bondi, Elizabeth Patterson, and Sterling Holloway create a totally convincing family, and Barbara's reaction to them, reflected in the sparkle in her eyes that seems to come from nowhere, is a hallmark of great film acting. I'm a sucker for families singing around the piano, and this scene is one of the most touching in any holiday movie. Sterling Holloway suddenly volunteers that he can "sing 'The End of a Perfect Day'" and Bondi retorts, "So can everybody," but soon he is singing it with full conviction and Stanwyck is accompanying him at the piano.

This is a complex little movie, full of lights and shadows, and ending on a slightly unsatisfying dark note. But you leave it pondering exactly what will happen next, and you can't help but think it will all work out well somehow. You have met some complete human beings, of another time and place, and they have stolen your heart.