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At the conclusion of Apple TV +’s delightful 2021 musical comedy “Schmigadoon!,” Melissa (Cecily Strong) and Josh (Keegan-Michael Key) realized they loved each other and returned to the real world. The second season finds them blissfully married, but boredom soon sets in. And to add insult to injury, they can’t get pregnant. The two decide they need a boost, so they decide to return to the cotton-candy colored tuneful world of Schmigadoon.

But what they find this time around is Schmicago, a much darker town they can’t leave until they find their happy ending. Happy endings, though, are few and far between in the city that never sleeps. And it certainly looks like the two won’t find one anytime soon after Josh is soon arrested for murdering a showgirl.

Schmicago is Fosse-fied with more than a few jazz hands reflecting the adult musicals of the 1960s and 1970s including “Chicago,...

Desert Nights with John Gilbert and Mary Nolan: Enjoyable Sahara-set adventure – which happened to be Gilbert's last silent film – dares to ask the age-old philosophical question, “Is there honor among thieves?” John Gilbert late silent adventure 'Desert Nights' asks a question for the ages: Is there honor among thieves? The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer release Desert Nights arrived in theaters at the tail end of the silent era. By 1929, audiences wanted lots of singing and dancing – talkies! And they might have been impatient to hear John Gilbert's speaking voice. I can't tell whether sound would have improved it or not, but Desert Nights has a lot of title cards filled with dialogue. Directed by the prolific William Nigh,[1] the film tells the story of diamond thieves who get stranded in the Sahara and almost die of thirst. (At first, Desert Nights' was appropriately titled Thirst.) Cinematographer James Wong Howe perfectly captures the hot, dry...

Three Buster Keaton shorts: The Balloonatic, The Goat, and The High Sign will screen April 10th at 2pm at the Walt Theater in New Haven, Missouri. The films will be accompanied by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra.

There’s nothing better than silent films accompanied by the Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra. The group is a treasure and St. Louis is lucky to have them here. The group has actively redefined both the local music and film cultures of the area. The ensemble – equal parts indie/punk-stalwart and academically trained composer and musicians – provide life performance of new film scores to classic silent films. The Rats are hitting the road this Sunday, April 2nd and will be playing at the Walt Theater in New Haven, Missouri (about 60 miles west of St. Louis). The show starts at 2pm.

This is part of the Riverside Film Festival 2017. The Facebook...

What's this? John Ford's last silent western is as exciting and entertaining as his later classics. A trio of horse thieves turn noble when given the responsibility of a young woman lost on the prairie; Ford gives the show comedy, drama and spectacle. 3 Bad Men Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1926 / B&W / 1:33 Silent Ap. / 92 min. / Street Date August 23, 2016 / 29.95 Starring George O'Brien, Olive Borden, Lou Tellegen, Tom Santschi, J. Farrell MacDonald, Frank Campeau, Priscilla Bonner, Otis Harlan, Phyllis Haver, Georgie Harris, Alec Francis, Jay Hunt . Cinematography George Schneiderman Original Music Dana Kaproff (2007) Written by John Stone, Ralph Spence, Malcolm Stuart Boylan from a novel by Herman Whittaker Produced and Directed by John Ford

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

What a great discovery! Last year Kino brought us a good-looking disc of John Ford's Hurricane and now they take the bold step of issuing one of the director's oldest intact features,...

With a new film entitled The Birth of a Nation in cinemas, we may expect to hear more about D.W. Griffith, whose 1915 version stands as both a crowning glory and a primal sin of the early American film. The period of Griffith's career least discussed is the late silent era, when he was falling from both independence and preeminence and was forced to take work he might otherwise have looked down on. Nevertheless, his restless creativity sometimes found expression in what he probably saw as potboilers.Battle of the Sexes starts as a Jazz Age comedy in which flapper-vamp Phyllis Haver and her "jazz hound" lover Don Alvarado conspire to seduce (her department) and fleece (his specialty) a wealthy businessman (Jean Hersholt). Griffith sets up the good bourgeoise's family home with all the sentimentality one might expect from his Victorian sensibility, but unexpectedly finds far more fun in the bad guys.

Zellweger, Gere, Zeta-Jones, and Latifah: ten years later, Chicago cast to be reunited at the 85th Academy Awards ceremony Catherine Zeta-Jones, Queen Latifah, Renée Zellweger, and Richard Gere, who starred in director Rob Marshall's 2003 Best Picture Oscar winner Chicago, will join forces once again -- but as presenters at the 85th Academy Awards ceremony next February 24. Show producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron announced the latest additions earlier today. (Pictured above: Zellweger, Gere doing a dance number in Chicago.) Remember that the 2013 ceremony is supposed to revolve around a Hollywood Musical theme, and that a decade ago Chicago became the last musical to win the Academy's Best Picture accolade. And here's a curious coincidence: It has also been a whole decade since a Directors Guild of America Award winner failed to also win the Academy Award in the Best Director category -- something that is bound to take...

Bel Ami movie: Robert Pattinson The Bel Ami movie trailer was released a week ago. Now comes the Brazilian Bel Ami trailer (scroll down), which happens to be the (classy) English-language trailer with Portuguese subtitles. The text below is an expanded version of the article posted at the time of the original trailer's release. In the trailer, we get to watch Robert Pattinson play a radically different character from his lovestruck vampire in the Twilight movies. Instead of having sex with Breaking Dawn's virginal Kristen Stewart, in Bel Ami Pattinson keeps himself busy with the more mature Kristin Scott Thomas and a whole array of other females of varying ages, shapes, and civil and social statuses. Two veterans of the British stage, Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, directed this latest film adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's novel about Georges Duroy, an impoverished but ambitious ex-soldier who uses his drive,...

The big question about Chicago (1927), the first version of the famous play which later gave us Ginger Rogers as Roxie Hart and, ahem, some other people in a musical, is, "Did credited director Frank Urson really direct it, or is producer Cecil B. DeMille the film's true controller?"

I'm inclined to credit Urson, although I haven't seen any of his other fourteen films (he never made it into talkies, dying in 1928 just as the writing became visible on the wall, and the actors started reading it aloud). Possibly because the film's too good. But it certainly has a DeMille touch about it too, notably a reveling in sinful excess, followed by a bludgeoning morality play ending. Anybody who's enjoyed the crawling hypocrisy of a DeMille bible story will recognize the same mentality in Jazz Age drag.

Phyllis Haver is Roxie Hart, the most convincing if not the most charming embodiment of that particular fictionalized person.

Chicago, the restored 1927 silent (unofficially) directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring perky Phyllis Haver (right, with Victor Varconi) as Roxie Hart, is being released on DVD by Flicker Alley, in collaboration with The Blackhawk Films Collection. The 2002 Chicago remake, based on Bob Fosse’s musical which itself was taken from Maurine Watkins‘ stage play, starred Renee Zellweger (as Roxie), Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere. It was a good-sized box-office and critical hit. Directed by Rob Marshall from a screenplay by Bill Condon (who’ll next be directing The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn), Chicago won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress (Zeta-Jones). I’m probably in the minority here, but I thought the Chicago remake was all [...]...

"Sound and Silents" is the title of a four-film series — part of the wider "Birds Eye View Film Festival" celebrating women filmmakers — to be held at London’s bfi Southbank and the Barbican from March 6-10. The four screening silent films are: King Vidor’s The Patsy (1928), starring Marion Davies; Sidney Franklin’s Her Sister from Paris (1925), starring Constance Talmadge and Ronald Colman (right); Cecil B. DeMille’s Chicago (1927), with Phyllis Haver and Victor Varconi; and Lotte Reiniger’s animated The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). All four films will feature live musical accompaniment. The most enjoyable of the four is Sidney Franklin’s Lubitschesque Her Sister from Paris, which offers Constance Talmadge at her screwballish best — and this before screwball [...]...