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Years in the making! The glory of MGM on parade! Enough studio resources to film twenty pictures were expended on this paean to showman Florenz Ziegfeld. It’s really Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s Technicolor valentine to itself, showing off the studio’s enormous stable of musical talent, along with various of its comic performers. Arthur Freed and Louis B. Mayer’s notion of ‘something for everyone’ results in weird stack of grandiose musical numbers and mostly weak comedy. The biggest draw is the incredible color cinematography that peeks through in three or four jaw-droppingly elaborate musical spectacles. The picture is a workout to find the artistic limits of the Technicolor system.

Ziegfeld Follies

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1945 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 117 110 min. / Street Date June 15, 2021 / 21.99

Starring: (alphabetically): Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, Lucille Bremer, Fanny Brice, Judy Garland, Kathryn Grayson, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly, Victor Moore, Red Skelton, Esther Williams. Also...

Alfred Hitchcock needs no introduction. Yet for the uninitiated, Hitchcock is known as the master of thriller and suspense in cinema and North by Northwest (1959) is arguably one of his best and most commercially successful works.

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Watch out for the opening credits of the film. North by Northwest is known to be the first feature film to make extended use of ‘kinetic typography’, a special type of animation technique in its opening credits. The credits fly in from off-screen and finally fade out into the film itself.

Hitchcock’s signature in his films was his cameo appearance. At the end of the opening credits,...