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All together now: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

So goes the oft quoted maxim of producer Sam Goldwyn, speaking not in malapropism mode but properly enunciating a straightforward commandment for Hollywood filmmakers: keep your personal politics off screen and remember that the public comes to the motion picture theater for entertainment not lectures. Goldwyn’s rule was a guiding principle throughout the classical Hollywood era.*

The sentiment behind the saying is making a comeback. After being whiplashed by critics who’ve persistently linked box office disappointments to liberal political messaging, the success of the relatively talking points-free Twisters, A Quiet Place: Day One and Deadpool & Wolverine has revived the ancient wisdom.

Of course, Hollywood cinema has always telegraphed messages — often most effectively when it was unaware of sending them. In promoting the benefits of postwar capitalist democracy, no flag-waving lecture from an on-screen patriot...

The end of the Maxxxine trilogy lands in theaters this weekend. The trilogy of horror films explores generational journies of starlets and women reaching for superstardom. How they find that success varies greatly, from infamy to adult films and even iconic roles in B-movies. Ti West and Mia Goth collaborated to write Pearl while waiting to shoot X, while West wrote each of the other stories. With that much control over the franchise, we’ve assembled nine movies that inspired the horror showcases.

The Movies That Influenced X The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

The most obvious influence on X comes from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The 1974 horror classic not only broke the mold of what was possible in the genre. It also helped define a specific aesthetic that would be borrowed, recycled, and reused for years. Many grindhouse movies, including Ti West, Rob Zombie, and others, openly crib off The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Following the October parliamentary election that saw the defeat of the right-wing Law and Justice party and appointment of leader of the opposition party Donald Tusk as prime minister, Polish filmmakers are cautiously readying for change.

“So far, our cinema authorities have not changed. It remains to be seen whether they will change their approach to funding more topical or controversial projects. Recent years have been very difficult in this regard,” says acclaimed director Agnieszka Holland.

Holland’s latest film, refugee drama “Green Border,” had been attacked by the right-wing government last year. Her next film, “Franz,” about Franz Kafka, is a Czech-German-Polish co-production to be sold at EFM by Films Boutique.

“We know everything and nothing about Kafka. There are dozens of detailed biographies and the reasons for his growing importance remain a mystery. I am trying to put this film together like a scattered jigsaw puzzle,” she adds.

Bring up Golden Age Hollywood filmmaker Busby Berkeley, and most people conjure his staging of elaborate, kaleidoscopic dance numbers in such films as “Dames” and “Footlight Parade,” Ginger Rogers singing “We’re in the Money” at the height of the Depression in “Gold Diggers of 1933,” or his sinuous camera weaving through dancer’s legs in such hits as Oscar-nominated “42nd Street” (1933).

A three-time Oscar nominee (for Best Dance Direction), Berkeley’s musicals were credited with saving Warner Bros. from financial collapse before he became a key player in Arthur Freed’s unit at MGM, where he propelled the careers of numerous stars, including Rogers, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, and Gene Kelly. Behind the scenes, Berkeley’s life was darker and often tragic — beset by scandal and numerous brushes with the law.

Arguably, Berkeley’s Hollywood artist’s journey is the untold story that “Babylon” wasn’t — and it coincides...

That isn’t our Tyrannosaurus Rex… is it? It’s a question many moviegoers asked themselves when the Jurassic World: Dominion prologue played in theaters over the summer before screenings of F9, and it’s a query that became more prominent today with the same prologue finally being released online. In an opening sequence which takes place at the dawn of time—and sunset of the dinosaurs—we see a version of the iconic Jurassic Park T. Rex stomping around the Cretaceous, but she looks a might strange after the last five movies. Like feathers and chicken feet strange.

This is just one of the many impressive CG visuals in the sixth Jurassic Park movie and third installment of the Jurassic World trilogy. Beginning well before the events of the original film—and virtually all other motion pictures too—Jurassic World: Dominion’s prologue offers a vignette about life in...

When Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in 1981, it was like a jolt of lightning from out of the past. As with George Lucas’ Star Wars before it, here was a throwback to many of the cinematic touchstones high and low that Baby Boomers grew up with: Saturday morning serials, prestige Oscar winners from yesteryear, and even boys’ pulp magazines were sifted through, borrowed from, and recontextualized into one of the most thrilling action-adventure movies anyone had ever seen. Somehow Lucas, who was a producer on the project, director Steven Spielberg, and the whole Indiana Jones team were able to craft a movie simultaneously retro and new.

Of course the younger generations who were swept up in Indy’s adventures may not have noticed any of this. They were here to see Indy outrun a boulder. And as the years have passed, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the...

This article contains Marvel’s Loki episode 3 spoilers.

Marvel’s Loki episode 3 is a big one. It’s the first episode of the series to spend the entirety of its runtime outside of the Tva offices, the first where we get to spend a substantial amount of time with the mysterious Sylvie, and the coolest visit to an extraterrestrial location we’ve had in the MCU since Avengers: Endgame.

It’s a big one, and there’s lots of cool MCU things you might have missed, or might not know about from the pages of Marvel Comics…and more!

Here’s what we found in Marvel’s Loki episode 3.

Lamentis The planet Lamentis was introduced in the pages of Annihilation: Conquest Prologue (the very story that established the modern incarnation of the Guardians of the Galaxy). It exists on the outer rim of the Kree empire and is filled with...

Last night’s Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration online all-star tribute concert got off to a rocky start – technical difficulties pushed the YouTube special more than an hour past its planned “curtain” – but the impressive line-up, top-notch performances and celebratory mood combined for an all’s-well evening.

Watch the concert below.

More from DeadlineBroadway Star Laura Benanti Recently Tossed A Social Media Lifeline To Musical Theater Students Hit By The Shutdown; On May 2, She'll Give Them A National Stage: Guest ColumnBroadway Actor Nick Cordero Gets Temporary Pacemaker In Covid-19 Battle - UpdateReopening Broadway: Actors' Equity Recruits High-Profile Safety Consultant As Exec Director Details What's At Stake

The show – a Zoom-style benefit 3:28 – Broadway Musicians – “Overture” (Merrily We Roll Along) 8:47 – Sutton Foster – “There Won’t Be Trumpets” (Anyone Can Whistle) 12:47 – Neil Patrick Harris – “The Witch’s Rap” (Into the Woods) 16:26 – Kelli O’Hara – “What More Do I Need?” (Saturday Night) 19:56 – Judy Kuhn – “What Can You Lose?” (Dick Tracy) 23:53 – Katrina Lenk – “Johanna” (Sweeney Todd) 27:11 – Aaron Tveit – “Marry Me a Little” (Company) 32:58 – Beanie Feldstein & Ben Platt – “It Takes Two” (Into the Woods) 36:25 – Brandon Uranowitz – “With So Little to Be Sure Of” (Anyone Can Whistle) 41:04 – Melissa Errico – “Children and Art” (Sunday in the Park with George) 46:20 – Randy Rainbow – “By the Sea” (Sweeney Todd) 49:21 – Elizabeth Stanley – “The Miller’s Son” (A Little Night Music) 54:21 – Mandy Pantinkin – “Lesson #8” (Sunday in the Park with George) 59:05 – Maria Friedman – “Broadway Baby” (Follies) 1:02:36 – Lin-Manuel Miranda – “Giants in the Sky” (Into the Woods) 1:05:46 – Lea Salonga – “Loving You” (Passion) 1:08:28 – Laura Benanti – “I Remember” (Evening Primrose) 1:14:06 – Chip Zien – “No More” (Into the Woods) 1:19:27 – Josh Groban – “Children Will Listen/Not While I’m Around” (Into the Woods/Sweeney Todd) 1:25:13 – Brian Stokes Mitchell – “The Flag Song” (Assassins) 1:28:04 – Michael Cerveris – “Finishing the Hat” (Sunday in the Park with George) 1:33:28 – Linda Lavin – “The Boy From…” (The Mad Show) 1:37:10 – Alexander Gemignani – “Buddy’s Blues” (Follies) 1:41:08 – Ann Harada, Austin Ku, Kelvin Moon Loh & Thom Sesma – “Someone in a Tree” (Pacific Overtures) 1:50:59 – Raúl Esparza – “Take Me to the World” (Evening Primrose) 1:53:55 – Donna Murphy – “Send in the Clowns” (A Little Night Music) 1:58:47 – Christine Baranski, Meryl Streep & Audra McDonald – “The Ladies Who Lunch” (Company) 2:03:31 – Annaleigh Ashford & Jake Gyllenhaal – “Move On” (Sunday in the Park with George) 2:08:14 – Patti LuPone – “Anyone Can Whistle” (Anyone Can Whistle) 2:11:46 – Bernadette Peters – “No One Is Alone” (Into the Woods) 2:17:49 – Ensemble – “I’m Still Here” (Follies)...

The captivating soundtrack for Sam Raimi's 1990's classic Army Of Darkness, with a newly remastered score by composer Joe LoDuca is now available on CD exclusively from Var&#232se Sarabande Records and will soon be available on double LP in record stores. Please note the rescheduled CD and vinyl release dates in the media alert below. We previously reported an April 18th release for CD and LP, but the LP release will be rescheduled in accordance with the recently postponed Record Store Day, which is now set for June 20th. The CD release has moved up a week to today, April 10th. We would love for you to be so kind and share the updated news about these special releases with your audience - thank you in advance for your coverage consideration.

This double LP or single disc CD soundtrack for Sam Raimi's 1990's classic Army of Darkness film...

We shared a list of new to streaming titles and then polled you on which  new-to-streaming titles that Nathaniel had never seen did he have to watch and write about? The winner by a considerable margin was Voyage of the Damned (1976). This all star WW II era drama about a ship carrying German Jewish refugees away from Nazi Germany was nominated for 3 Oscars (including Supporting Actress) and 6 Golden Globes (including Best Picture Drama) and is now streaming on HBO. So watch it this week and we'll discuss on Monday February 24th. 

The vote totals if you're interested:

Voyage of the Damned (1976) - 40% of the votes The Tin Drum (1979) - 14% of the votes Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987) -14% of the votes The Island (2005) - 13% of the votes Footlight Parade (1933), Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974), Dirty Harry (1971), and Gate of Hell (1953) divvied up the remaining votes with under 5% each.

Great news for fans of old musicals! James Cagney in Footlight Parade (1932) is now available on Blu-ray from Warner Archives

Footlight Parade is sheer cinematic joy. In this Depression-era romp, a timid stenographer (Ruby Keeler) removes her glasses and – wow! – she’s a star. A gee-whiz tenor (Dick Powell) asserts his independence. Plucky chorines tap, greedy hangers-on get their comeuppances, and an indefatigable producer/dancer (James Cagney) and his Girl Friday (Joan Blondell) work showbiz miracles to stage live prologues for talkie houses to keep their company afloat during hard times. Honeymoon Hotel, By a Waterfall and Shanghai Lil are the shows, directed by Busby Berkeley and filled with imagination-bending sets, startling camera angles, kaleidoscopic pageantry and a 20,000-gallon-per-minute waterfall. Curtain up!

James Cagney demonstrates his Big Apple hoofer bonafides while adding his one-of-a-kind fiery grit to this Busby Berkeley musical packed with the usual sensational suspects. Chester Kent (Cagney...

This amazing Busby Berkeley extravaganza is the best choice to impress newbies to pre-Code musical madness: it is absolutely irresistible. James Cagney’s nervy, terminally excitable stage producer makes the tale of Chester Kent accessible to viewers otherwise allergic to musicals — he’s as electric here as he is in his gangster movies. Remastered in HD, the fantastic, kaleidoscopic visuals will wow anybody — we really expect Porky Pig to pop up and stutter, “N-n-n-o CGI, Folks!”

Footlight Parade

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1933 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 104 min. / Street Date July 16, 2019 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Frank McHugh, Ruth Donnelly, Guy Kibbee, Hugh Herbert.

Cinematography: George Barnes

Art Directors: Anton Grot, Jack Okey Film Editor: George Amy

Original Music: Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal Harry Warren, Al Dubin

Written by Manuel Seff, James Seymour

Produced by Robert Lord

Directed by Lloyd Bacon

Our...

James Cagney in Blonde CrazyBefore sound came into film, no one had ever moved like James Cagney, and no one has since. Like the face of Jerry Lewis, Cagney’s puppet limbs, his slashes of feet and gorilla-woodpecker hoots, are “where the height of artifice blends at times with the nobility of true documentary.”1 The arms move centrifugally away from the torso in a kind of dance for the rebel spirit, yet the body remains intact; take any of his body’s continuous moments and you could frame them in the Fraenkel Gallery for photographic prosperity, a tribute to an urban dandy. Cagney’s performances in his earliest and best pictures are of a piece with the contemporaneous film landscape, spiked (as we now know) with a surfeit of mutt landmarks. The Marx Brothers’s jabber, Mae West’s pimp-walk, her sass, Raoul Walsh’s Me and My Gal (1932), the...

As “Black-ish’s” production designer, Maxine Shepard not only created the specific color palettes of the home and office environments for Dre Johnson (Anthony Anderson) and his family, but she has often had to build fantasy or flashback sequences-specific sets ranging from an homage to “The Deer Hunter” to a historical slave cabin. “You just have to be flexible,” she says.

What were your earliest inspirations in the world of design in film or TV?

There used to be this retrospective theater in Santa Monica [that] played old movies, and my mom took me to this double feature and one of them was this old Busby Berkeley feature called “Footlight Parade.” I’d never see anything like that before with the women coming up the stairs and all of these graphics and it morphed into all of this type of stuff. I think that was the first time my interest was piqued.

You know, I don’t exactly go after him as much as I should, but, yeah, there’s a segment of Hell out there somewhere waiting for Chris Meladandri. For those who aren’t 100% familiar with him, he’s somewhat of an allusive figure, there’s actually not a lot of material out there on him, but I think I’m not gonna disappoint too many people by saying in animation terms at least, he’s probably the biggest hack out there. Well, I should say that he’s most known for animation, but honestly, he doesn’t have much of an animation background; he’s spent his whole career producing in fact, and his career didn’t start in animation. He’s not illustrious as a producer; the pre-Disney movies he made, range from the forgotten to the forgettable, until he had relatively minor hit with ‘Cool Runnings’. He...

Some actors manage to catch lightning in a bottle twice. It’s impressive enough to find your niche in Hollywood’s A-list even once. Occasionally, an actor will reinvent him/herself and begin a new phase of their careers that will be even more successful than it was before. Here are nine actors who had a cinematic rebirth.

Liam Neeson- Neeson has had a long career, and the early part of it was in dramatic roles. An intense dramatic actor, he apeared in films like The Dead Pool, Dark Man, Schindler’s List, Rob Roy and Les Miserables. His career rebirth came after playing Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars-Episode one: The Phantom Menace. After that, he got more offers for actions parts and recreated himself as an action hero in films like Gangs of NY, Batman Begins, Taken, Clash of the Titans, the A-Team, Unknown, the Grey, Taken 2,...

“We used to go to the movies. Now we want the movies to come to us, on our televisions, tablets and phones, as streams running into an increasingly unnavigable ocean of media. The dispersal of movie watching across technologies and contexts follows the multiplexing of movie theaters, itself a fragmenting of the single screen theater where movie love was first concentrated and consecrated. (But even in the “good old days,” movies were often only part of an evening’s entertainment that came complete with vaudeville acts and bank nights). For all this, moviegoing still means what it always meant, joining a community, forming an audience and participating in a collective dream.” –

From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”

Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”

The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.

Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.

Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:

“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”

Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”

“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:

“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.

But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:

“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”

Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)

Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.

Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.

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The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.

But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.

Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).

One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”

Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.

Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)

And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).

(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)

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(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)

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Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).

Amy HeckerlingThe films of Amy Heckerling reveal a heart guarded and tender, a penchant for the past without a whiff of the maudlin. Who could forget her debut, Fast Times at Ridgemont High? Directed from Cameron Crowe's script, the 1982 film gave us frank portrayals of sexuality and the detailed minutiae of growing up, suspended in the hazy tedium of high school, all without condescension or patronizing. Totally righteous. Heckerling proved attuned to the particulars of comedy with her next feature Johnny Dangerously (1984), a waggish send-up of the 1930s gangster comedy. In its cheeky beginning, a 1935 title card reveals itself to be a real material object that crumbles when car crash obliterates its façade. With a darkened lash line, a young Michael Keaton puts forth his best James Cagney as the titular mobster whose identity and status are known to all but his ailing ma and brother, a rising assistant Da.

The first time I saw anything from a Godard film, I hated it.

My first encounter with his work was perhaps appropriately abrupt and fragmentary. I was in my first year as a Film Studies major, in an introductory class about the French New Wave. Having grown up on a steady diet of Hollywood classics, I was hoping this would be an exciting new discovery. Mid-lecture, the professor showed a clip from the near the end of Tout va bien, his 1972 film co-directed with Jean-Pierre Gorin. The scene was the famous ten-minute-long tracking shot in which the camera moves laterally along a supermarket’s checkout aisles as student demonstrators wreak havoc. Going in, the professor warned us that we would likely find the scene annoying and overlong, and that that was “the point.”

I watched. I waited for enlightenment.

I was unimpressed.

I did not get it, but I was a quiet,...

Veterans Day movies on TCM: From 'The Sullivans' to 'Patton' (photo: George C. Scott in 'Patton') This evening, Turner Classic Movies is presenting five war or war-related films in celebration of Veterans Day. For those outside the United States, Veterans Day is not to be confused with Memorial Day, which takes place in late May. (Scroll down to check out TCM's Veterans Day movie schedule.) It's good to be aware that in the last century alone, the U.S. has been involved in more than a dozen armed conflicts, from World War I to the invasion of Iraq, not including direct or indirect military interventions in countries as disparate as Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. As to be expected in a society that reveres people in uniform, American war movies have almost invariably glorified American soldiers even in those rare instances when they have dared to criticize the military establishment.

★★★★★When we think of the American musical, our collective consciousness will immediately race to Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, but choreographer turned director Busby Berkeley is the flamboyant, wildcard auteur of the genre. After organising military parades as an army officer in the First World War, he made his name as the creator of some of the most astonishing set pieces in cinema with an unrivalled trio of 1933 pre-Code musicals; The Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade and 42nd Bacon Street, Berkeley managed to turn the chorus line into an art form. The sequences were sublime but they also tapped into the social issues of the day, from the men lost to war to the depths of The Great Depression.

Tod Browning’s “Freaks”

Before R-ratings, anti-heroes and gratuitous violence and nudity in mainstream Hollywood movies, there was the Hays Code. As a form of self-policing the industry, virtually every movie released up until 1968 needed that stamp of approval if it wanted distribution. And while it helped produce all of Old Hollywood’s true classics for several decades, it often included ridiculous rulings like not being able to show or flush a toilet on screen, not allowing married couples to be shown sleeping in the same bad or always making sure criminals, even protagonists of the movie, got punished in the end.

But before the Hays Code was nothing, and it was a gloriously weird, scandalous time for the movies. Certain Hollywood films in the early ’30s as “talkies” were rapidly taking hold have since been labeled “Pre-Code” films that never received Hollywood’s stamp of approval.

Every Friday in September,...

Hollywood got away with a hell of a lot before the Production Code, and Turner Classic Movies is offering a weekly taste of the bounty. Alec Baldwin and TCM's Robert Osborne will introduce 24 hours of pre-Code sex, drugs, profanity, nudity and bad behavior every Friday in September. TCM will highlight the freewheeling early careers of Barbara Stanwyck, Mae West, Jean Harlow, Warren William, James Cagney and more who starred in films where the bad guy sometimes won, and where the fallen heroine didn't need, or even want, to be saved. Classics on the docket include "Baby Face," "Footlight Parade," "Freaks," "Trouble in Paradise," "The Story of Temple Drake" and "Scarface" -- all wildly licentious for the time. Without censorship, during the 20s and early 30s sound boom, Hollywood did not sanitize sex, drug use, abortion, prostitution and extreme violence. Here's a look at the Code, which has some whacky do-nots.

Brendan Gleeson, John Michael McDonagh, Kelly Reilly and Chris O'Dowd on Calvary at the Explorers Club: "I can't go on. I'll go on" Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

After Kelly Reilly came three Calvary men - John Michael McDonagh, Brendan Gleeson and Chris O'Dowd. With McDonagh, I voyage through his many literary references, from Samuel Beckett to Herman Melville, from Albert Camus to James Joyce, and from Philip K. Dick to David Gates' Jernigan. James Cagney's Shanghai Lil with Busby Berkeley's choreography in Footlight Parade reveals Angels With Dirty Faces as another influence.

Peggy Siegal used her magic to snare O'Dowd, who is starring with James Franco on Broadway in John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men with Leighton Meester and Jim Norton, directed by Anna D. Shapiro. Joyce Carol Oates, who sat next to me during lunch, elegantly sums up Calvary.

Kelly Reilly as Fiona, reading H.P. Lovecraft...

Why am I jazzed at the idea of Ryan Gosling taking on a biopic of an old Hollywood choreographer and director who is long forgotten by too many? Because Busby Berkeley was cool. He's a great, sexy subject--not unlike doing a movie of the life of "Cabaret" director Bob Fosse. (Oh, he already did it himself: "All That Jazz." Btw, there's a must-read new bio out by Sam Wasson, who's picking up screenwriting gigs.) Berkeley moved from Broadway as a 20s dance director to Hollywood, where he helped to create the movie musical genre with a string of brilliant movies for Warner Bros. Check out the elaborate camera moves and kaleidoscopic dancers in "42nd Street," "Footlight Parade" and "Gold Diggers of 1933"-- all released in 1933 alone. Berkeley, who never trained as a dancer, drilled holes in soundstage ceiling for the overhead cameras. And watch the hallucinogenic clips below (Carmen Miranda with phallic bananas!

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Hey Girl, Wanna Dance?: Ryan Gosling will bust out some serious moves in his next project, a film about the life of Busby Berkeley, the iconic choreographer from the golden age of Hollywood. The actor will reportedly produce and possibly star in the biopic about the choreographer known for his over-the-top massive dance numbers seen in classic films like "42nd Street," "Footlight Parade" and "For Me and My Gal." Ryan, who got his start singing and dancing on the "Mickey Mouse Club" alongside Justin Timberlake, should have no shortage of ...

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Warner Bros. has picked up the rights to Jeffrey Spivak's book, Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley, and they are looking to bring it to the big screen. The studio is looking at Ryan Gosling to produce the film and potentially both star in and direct it as well.

The project is still in the early process of development, but if Gosling stars in the film he will play Berkeley, who was a famous director and choreographer of musicals from Hollywood’s golden age. Gosling is a hell of a talented guy, and this would be an interesting project for him to take on. I'd like to see him do it, but we'll see how it plays out. Gosling is currently working on his first directorial debut with How to Catch a Monster.

The book was published in 2010, and this is the official description:

Characterized by grandiose song-and-dance...

Actor to produce and possibly take lead role in film based on biography of celebrated choreographer and director

Ryan Gosling may star in a biopic of Hollywood legend Busby Berkeley, the choreographer and director who created some of the most famous dance routines in the history of film.

Gosling has signed on to produce a proposed movie from Warner Bros, which has optioned Jeffrey Spivak's biography Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley. The studio plans to develop the project as a vehicle for the star of Drive and Blue Valentine.

Born in Los Angeles in 1895, Berkeley rose to fame in the 1930s with his work on dance routines for hit Warner Bros musicals 42nd Street, Footlight Parade and Gold Diggers of 1933 – all of which were released in 1933 – and the following year's Fashions of 1934. He was known for his use of kaleidoscope-style imagery incorporating showgirls and props to create elaborate fantasy motifs.

Warner Bros. has optioned the biography Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley, written by Jeffrey Spivak.  THR reports Ryan Gosling and Marc Platt (Drive) will produce.  They are developing the project as a starring vehicle for Gosling to play the iconic musical director/choreographer.  Gosling may even direct the biopic---triple threat!  However, the project is still in the early stages, so the search is on for a writer.  Gosling recently wrapped production on his directorial debut, How to Catch a Monster, which Platt produced. Hit the jump for more on Berkeley's biography and a sampling of his elaborate musical production numbers. Here's the synopsis for Buzz: Characterized by grandiose song-and-dance numbers featuring ornate geometric patterns and mimicked in many modern films, Busby Berkeley's unique artistry is as recognizable and striking as ever. From his years on Broadway to the director's chair, Berkeley is notorious for his inventiveness and signature style.

The Hollywood Reporter brings word that Warner Bros. has picked up the big screen rights to Jeffrey Spivak's book, "Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkely," with plans for Ryan Gosling to produce and potentially both direct and star as well. Published in 2010, Spivak's biography is officially described as follows: Characterized by grandiose song-and-dance numbers featuring ornate geometric patterns and mimicked in many modern films, Busby Berkeley.s unique artistry is as recognizable and striking as ever. From his years on Broadway to the director.s chair, Berkeley is notorious for his inventiveness and signature style. Through sensational films like "42nd Street" (1933), "Gold Diggers of 1933" (1933), "Footlight Parade" (1933), and...

Pre-Code Hollywood studios spent millions transitioning their medium to sound and other new technologies that brought about major advances in photography, lighting, and set design. But there were still five million unemployed people in the United States and many more just getting by. The studios were losing money, many of them going bankrupt.

By 1930 the breadlines were longer than the ticket lines and people were slow to give up their hard earned money. They wanted to be entertained, they wanted to laugh and forget their troubles for just a while. Comedies, adventure, and musicals quickly became the most popular film genres of the time.

I. Pre-Code Action, Adventure, and Drama

Hollywood took their stories to the far corners of the earth as places like Africa, the South Pacific, and the Far East became exotic settings for movies. An island kingdom somewhere in the Pacific with strange creatures, even stranger natives,...

The controversial author and filmmaker, 86, on creating his own religion, working with Marianne Faithfull and living through the Red Scare

Time will conquer. Humans can attempt to freeze it and keep it, trick it and say: "You're not going to take it away from me." But it will win – every time.

I never worked in Hollywood because I had a political conscience. The Red Scare – fear of communism – was just a bluff for people like McCarthy to gain power. At 20th Century Fox you had to take a loyalty oath and swear you wouldn't do anything bad to the United States. I said: "Forget it."

You can express yourself as well in five minutes as three hours. I'm basically a short film-maker. I've never had the big, big grants. I could use $250,000 from the MacArthur Foundation, sure. But mostly I make "cine-poems".

I devised my religion basing it on the beauty of nature – the sunrise,...

Jeanne Crain: From Pinky to Margie Jeanne Crain, one of the most charming Hollywood actresses of the ’40s and ’50s, is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" featured player on Monday, August 26, 2013. Since Jeanne Crain was a top 20th Century Fox star for about a decade — a favorite of Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck — TCM will be showing quite a few films from the Fox library. And that’s great news. (Photo: Jeanne Crain ca. 1950.) (See also: “Jeanne Crain Movies: TCM’s ‘Summer Under the Stars’ Schedule.”) Now, my first recommendation is actually an MGM release. That’s Russell Rouse’s 1956 psychological Western The Fastest Gun Alive, an unusual movie in that the hero turns out to be a "coward" at heart: quick-on-the-trigger gunslinger Glenn Ford is reluctant to face an evil challenger (Broderick Crawford) in a small Western town. But why? Jeanne Crain is his serious-minded wife...

Here I am struggling to get an issue of my newsletter finished, after an embarrassing amount of time, and a brand-new fanzine arrives on my desk. Pop Twenty is an exceedingly handsome publication, bound like an oversized paperback and filled with rare and beautiful stills. It’s the brainchild of Bob Birchard and Mike Bifulco, who have pooled their resources to create a home for interviews, articles, and photo features focusing on all aspects of 20th Century pop culture, with an emphasis on the golden age of Hollywood. Bob’s lead article details the making of Footlight Parade, including the revelation that Busby Berkeley didn’t direct all of its musical numbers. Mike...

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MGM meant musicals for more than a decade after the second world war. David Thomson looks at a time when a little cheer at the movies was appreciated – and wonders if the same couldn't be said now

There had been musicals before. In the 1930s, as soon as sound permitted, Warner Brothers developed what we call the Busby Berkeley pictures: they were black and white, and often aware of the harsh Depression times, but a choreographic lather of girls and fluid, orgasmic forms where the camera was itching to plunge into the centre of the "big O" – think of Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933 or 42nd Street. They had aerial shots of waves and whirlpools of chorus girls, opening and closing their legs in time with our desire. A few years later, at Rko Pictures, the Astaire-Rogers films came into being – where the gravity, beauty, and exhilaration of the...

Joan Blondell. Those who have heard the name will most likely picture either a blowsy, older woman playing the worldwise but warm-hearted saloon owner in the late 1960s television series Here Come the Brides, or a lively, fast-talking, no-nonsense, and unconventionally sexy gold digger in numerous Pre-Code Warner Bros. comedies and musicals of the early 1930s. Matthew Kennedy's Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (University Press of Mississippi, 2007) seeks to rectify that cultural memory lapse. Not that Blondell doesn't deserve to be remembered for Here Come the Brides or, say, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade, Havana Widows, and Broadway Bad. It's just that her other work — from her immensely touching performance as a sexually liberated woman in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to her invariably welcome (if brief) appearances in films as varied as The Blue Veil, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and Grease — should be remembered as well.

Joan Blondell on TCM: Dames, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am The Reckless Hour (1931) A young innocent almost ruins her life for the love of an unfeeling cad. Dir: John Francis Dillon. Cast: Dorothy Mackaill, Conrad Nagel, H. B. Warner. Bw-71 mins. 7:15 Am Big City Blues (1932) A country boy finds love and heartache in New York City. Dir: Mervyn LeRoy. Cast: Joan Blondell, Eric Linden, Jobyna Howland. Bw-63 mins. 8:30 Am Central Park (1932) Small-town kids out to make it in the big city inadvertently get mixed up with gangsters. Dir: John G. Adolfi. Cast: Joan Blondell, Wallace Ford, Guy Kibbee. Bw-58 mins. 9:30 Am Lawyer Man (1933) Success corrupts a smooth-talking lawyer. Dir: William Dieterle. Cast: William Powell, Joan Blondell, David Landau. Bw-68 mins. 10:45 Am Traveling Saleslady (1935) A toothpaste tycoon's daughter joins his rival to teach him a lesson. Dir: Ray Enright.

Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, Dames Joan Blondell has always been a favorite of mine, much like fellow wisecracking 1930s Warner Bros. players Aline MacMahon and Glenda Farrell. The fact that Blondell never became a top star says more about audiences — who preferred, say, Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney — than about Blondell's screen presence and acting abilities. As part of its "Summer Under the Stars" film series, Turner Classic Movies is currently showing no less than 16 Joan Blondell movies today, including the TCM premiere of the 1968 crime drama Kona Coast. Directed by Lamont Johnson, Kona Coast stars Richard Boone and the capable Vera Miles. Blondell has a supporting role — one of two dozen from 1950 (For Heaven's Sake) to 1981 (The Woman Inside, released two years after Blondell's death from leukemia). [Joan Blondell Movie Schedule.] Unfortunately, TCM isn't showing the super-rare (apparently due to rights issues) The Blue Veil, Curtis Bernhardt's 1951 melodrama that earned Blondell her...

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, Busby Berkeley biographer Jeff Spivak joins us to talk in-depth about the movie icon’s life and art. From his early days of being born into the theater, to his success with 42nd Street and Footlight Parade, to his tragic car accident that threatened to derail his career (and his freedom), we cover it all. Or at least as much as possible. The guy was prolific. Fan of musicals? Fan of Buzz? Fan of just plain being entertained? Then this one’s for you. Listen Here: Download This Episode On This Week’s Show: Segment Three – The World Famous Segment Three [Start - Finish] The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley: Jeff Spivak’s “Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley” is an insanely detailed biography that charts Buzz’s life from the early days through his last. We take a conversational tour through the movies of the...

This Sunday, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, author of “Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley,” Jeffrey Spivak, will be my guest as we discuss the rise to fame of iconic director and choreographer Busby Berkeley. This innovator of musical theater was part of countless films, including 42nd Street, Footlight Parade and the Gold Diggers movies. We’ll get a chance to see just how golden the Golden Age of Hollywood really was. That’s right. With comic book movie news flying all over the place and Sundance starting up, we’ll be talking in-depth about a man who died over thirty years ago. That’s just how we roll. Classic movie fans, be sure to join us for Reject Radio this Sunday at 10pm Est/7pm Pst for what promises to be a lively, feather boa-filled discussion.

Edward G. Robinson in Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar Turner Classic Movies' Moguls & Movie Stars, A History of Hollywood continues this evening with "Brother, Can You Spare a Dream?" which takes us to the beginning of the talkie era and the Great Depression. That was the time when most studios faced bankruptcy; directors, screenwriters, and actors formed unions; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences found itself enmeshed in labor disputes; and Hollywood cranked out a mix of escapist fare and message movies, often with racy situations and even racier dialogue. Accompanying "Brother, Can You Spare a Dream?" will be: Lloyd Bacon's Footlight Parade (1933), one of the many Depression Era musicals with kaleidoscopic numbers directed by Busby Berkeley. James Cagney uses his tongue as a machine gun in this one, rat-a-tatting about 10,000 words per minute. The crime dramas The Public Enemy (1931) and Little Caesar (1930), which made stars [...]...