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Westerns are all about values: good and bad, law and lawlessness, etc. Joel McCrea and Frances Dee’s ‘bad man’ saga isn’t faith based, exactly, but it’s great for humanitarian values, the simple notion that the good in people should be encouraged. And one important detail may make it unique. Hint: John Milius might be strongly prejudiced against this picture.

Four Faces West

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1948 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 89 min. / Street Date December 19, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Joel McCrea, Frances Dee, Charles Bickford, Joseph Calleia, William Conrad.

Cinematography: Russell Harlan

Film Editor: Edward Mann

Original Music: Paul Sawtell

Written by C. Graham Baker, Teddi Sherman, William & Milarde Brent from the novel Pasó por aquí by Eugene Manlove Rhodes

Produced by Vernon E. Clark, Harry Sherman

Directed by Alfred E. Green

Faith-based westerns exist, but much more numerous are lightly inspirational sagebrush pictures that deal...

Updated: Following a couple of Julie London Westerns*, Turner Classic Movies will return to its July 2017 Star of the Month presentations. On July 27, Ronald Colman can be seen in five films from his later years: A Double Life, Random Harvest (1942), The Talk of the Town (1942), The Late George Apley (1947), and The Story of Mankind (1957). The first three titles are among the most important in Colman's long film career. George Cukor's A Double Life earned him his one and only Best Actor Oscar; Mervyn LeRoy's Random Harvest earned him his second Best Actor Oscar nomination; George Stevens' The Talk of the Town was shortlisted for seven Oscars, including Best Picture. All three feature Ronald Colman at his very best. The early 21st century motto of international trendsetters, from Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro and Turkey's Recep Erdogan to Russia's Vladimir Putin and the United States' Donald Trump, seems to be, The world is reality TV and reality TV...

On this day in showbiz history...

1886 Spring Byington is born in Colorado Springs. Goes on to supporting actress glory in Hollywood including Marmee in Little Women (1933, her feature debut) and an Oscar nomination as the eccentric hobbyist mom in You Can't Take It With You (1938). Curiously her screen daughter in that best picture winner Jean Arthur, an even bigger star, shares her same birthday (for the year of 1900)

1888 Thomas Edison files a patent for the Optical Phonograph (an early step in creating the cinema)

1903 Author and screenwriter Nathanael West is born in NYC. Movies adapted from his work include Lonelyhearts (1958) and The Day of the Locust (1975)

1915 One of the world's most celebrated playwrights, Arthur Miller, is born. His classics include Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View From the Bridge. After marrying movie star Marilyn Monroe, he wrote The Misfits (1961) for her which would eerily (considering its elegiac...

Top Ten Scream Queens: Barbara Steele, who both emitted screams and made others do same, is in a category of her own. Top Ten Scream Queens Halloween is over until next year, but the equally bewitching Day of the Dead is just around the corner. So, dead or alive, here's my revised and expanded list of cinema's Top Ten Scream Queens. This highly personal compilation is based on how memorable – as opposed to how loud or how frequent – were the screams. That's the key reason you won't find listed below actresses featured in gory slasher films. After all, the screams – and just about everything else in such movies – are as meaningless as their plots. You also won't find any screaming guys (i.e., Scream Kings) on the list below even though I've got absolutely nothing against guys who scream in horror, whether in movies or in life. There are...

“It isn’t here, you must have dreamed you put it there. Are you suggesting that this is a knife I hold in my hand? Have you gone mad, my husband?”

Gaslight plays at The Hi-Pointe Theater (1005 McCausland Ave., St. Louis, Mo 63117) September 19th at 10:30am as part of their Classic Film Series

Greetings again from the darkness! Husbands were surely disliked in the 1940’s, at least by writers of movies! There is no shortage of films depicting the villainous husband targeting the unsuspecting and defenseless wife. A couple years prior to Gaslight we had Suspcion, and a couple years after, we had Notorious. The latter also features Ingrid Bergman who won her first Oscar for Gaslight, one of the more atmospheric of the psychological thrillers.

Gaslight is based on the Patrick Hamilton play Angel Street, which will be performed live, on stage at St. Louis’ own Rep Theater...

Epilogue - In which we rank films, learn Life Lessons, climb Mount Hepburn, and wrap this up with the party it deserves!

Happy New Year, everybody! Before 2014 and A Year With Kate officially end, I wanted to give us all a proper send off. If Kate got 9 more years after she retired in 1994, consider this our own ride into the sunset, complete with gifs, gifts, and thank yous.

At the beginning of A Year With Kate, I set some unofficial goals. The most obvious was to watch all 52 films chronologically. In order to do this, I started building a stack of research that I dubbed “Mount Hepburn.” It changed size and content a bit thanks to library deadlines and a lot of late nights on ebay. To the right is a picture of Mount Hepburn at present, having outgrown my table and moved to the floor. It stands just about 3 feet tall.

Don't cry just yet, Kate the Great fans. While it's true that there is only one wrap-up episode left Tomorrow in Anne Marie's mammoth undertaking "A Year with Kate"* in which she reviewed every performance in Katharine Hepburn's fascinating career, we have exciting news. We're making it into a book! Details are not yet concrete but if you would like to be included in updates about pre-order and other 'Don't Miss It' news, please fill out this form at our Facebook page!

Anne Marie's last episodes airs tomorrow Wednesday December 31st. But until then... take a peak at any you missed. Some chapters will be substantially rewritten for the book.

1930s: A Bill of Divorcement, Christopher Strong, Morning Glory, Little Women, Spitfire, The Little Minister, Break of Hearts, Alice Adams, Sylvia Scarlett, Mary of Scotland, A Woman Rebels, Quality Street, Stage Door, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday,

1940s: Philadelphia Story,...

Howard Hughes movies (photo: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in 'The Aviator') Turner Classic Movies will be showing the Howard Hughes-produced, John Farrow-directed, Baja California-set gangster drama His Kind of Woman, starring Robert Mitchum, Hughes discovery Jane Russell, and Vincent Price, at 3 a.m. Pt / 6 a.m. Et on Saturday, November 8, 2014. Hughes produced a couple of dozen movies. (More on that below.) But what about "Howard Hughes movies"? Or rather, movies -- whether big-screen or made-for-television efforts -- featuring the visionary, eccentric, hypochondriac, compulsive-obsessive, all-American billionaire as a character? Besides Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a dashing if somewhat unbalanced Hughes in Martin Scorsese's 2004 Best Picture Academy Award-nominated The Aviator, other actors who have played Howard Hughes on film include the following: Tommy Lee Jones in William A. Graham's television movie The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), with Lee Purcell as silent film star Billie Dove, Tovah Feldshuh as Katharine Hepburn,...

Hedy Lamarr: 'Invention' and inventor on Turner Classic Movies (photo: Hedy Lamarr publicity shot ca. early '40s) Two Hedy Lamarr movies released during her heyday in the early '40s — Victor Fleming's Tortilla Flat (1942), co-starring Spencer Tracy and John Garfield, and King Vidor's H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), co-starring Robert Young and Ruth Hussey — will be broadcast on Turner Classic Movies on Wednesday, November 12, 2014, at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. Pt, respectively. Best known as a glamorous Hollywood star (Ziegfeld Girl, White Cargo, Samson and Delilah), the Viennese-born Lamarr (née Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler), who would have turned 100 on November 9, was also an inventor: she co-developed and patented with composer George Antheil the concept of frequency hopping, currently known as spread-spectrum communications (or "spread-spectrum broadcasting"), which ultimately led to the evolution of wireless technology. (More on the George Antheil and Hedy Lamarr invention further below.) Somewhat ironically,...

“No one paid any attention to the orchestra. I could have saved that 85 bucks!”

After his daughter selects a mate, the father must endure sleepless nights, sticker shock, and the disruption of his household as he navigates through the nightmare of wedding planning. In the original 1950 comedy classic Father Of The Bride, Spencer Tracy is terrific as Stanley banks, the harried father whose plans for a small wedding go awry. As his wife and daughter, Joan Bennett and Liz Taylor aren’t given much to do except look supportive and lovely, respectively (Interestingly, both actresses played Amy in film versions of Little Women; Bennett in 1933 and Taylor in 1949). Don Taylor, who plays the groom, would have a long career as a TV director. Director Vincent Minnelli does a nice job of balancing the comedy and the sentimentality in Father Of The Bride, which was a huge hit in 1950, spawning a...

Episode 4 of 52 Anne Marie is screening all of Katharine Hepburn's films in chronological order.

In which we remember childhood fondly.

When I was 11, our school librarian told me that if you love a book enough, you have its first line burned into your brain. Being a very literal child, I immediately selected my favorite book, Little Women, and studiously memorized the first line:

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents, grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.”

Later—much later than I’m comfortably willing to admit—I realized that Mrs. Krall actually meant that when you love a story, you revisit it so often that it stays with you. I think we can all agree this extends to film as well. [more...]...

The following is an essay featured in the anthology George Cukor - On/Off Hollywood (Capricci, Paris, 2013), for sale at www.capricci.fr.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center will be running a complete retrospective on the director, "The Discreet Charm of George Cukor," in New York December 13, 2013 - January 7, 2014. Many thanks to David Phelps, Fernando Ganzo, and Camille Pollas for their generous permission.

The Second-hand Illusion:

Notes on Cukor

Above: The Chapman Report (1962), A Life of Her Own (1950)

“There’s always something about them that you don’t know that you’d like to know. Spencer Tracy had that. In fact, they do all have that – all the big ones have it. You feel very close to them but there is the ultimate thing withheld from you – and you want to find out.” —George Cukor1

“Can you tell what a woman’s like by just looking at her?” —The Chapman Report...

Our daily countdown continues. Here is the fifth out of 30 in our list of the 300 Greatest Films Ever Made. These are numbers 260-251.

260) Sunrise (1927) F. W. Murnau USA/Germany Silent

 

259) Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001) Peter Jackson USA

 

258) Little Women (1933) George Cukor USA

 

257) Intolerance (1916) D. W. Griffith USA Silent

 

256) Network (1976) Sidney Lumet USA

 

255) Sullivan's Travels (1942) Preston Sturges USA

 

254) Blade Runner (1982) Ridley Scott USA

 

253) The Sixth Sense (1999) M. Night Shyamalan USA

 

252) Toy Story (1995) John Lasseter USA Animated

 

251) Saving Private Ryan (1998) Steven Speilberg USA

 

250-241 coming next.

film cultureClassicslist300...

Helena Bonham Carter as Dr. Julia Hoffman, Chloë Grace Moretz as Carolyn Stoddard, Eva Green as Angelique Bouchard, Gulliver McGrath as David Collins, Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters, Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins, Ray Shirley as Mrs. Johnson, Jackie Earle Haley as Willie Loomis, Jonny Lee Miller as Roger Collins, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Dark Shadows Tim Burton / Johnny Depp’s Dark Shadows is off to a middling start, earning $550,000 at Thursday midnight screenings in North America. Comparing the box-office performance of Dark Shadows to those of, say, Jennifer Lawrence’s eagerly awaited The Hunger Games or Joss Whedon’s superhero ensemble The Avengers would be not only cruel but downright unfair. Although the previous Burton / Depp collaboration, Alice in Wonderland, was a humongous hit, opening with $116 million in March 2010, Burton’s campy version of the late ’60s soap opera Dark Shadows has a different sort of appeal.

This article originally ran here at We Are Movie Geeks in January of 2010 but with everyone gearing up for Tim Burton’s hotly-anticipated update opening May 11th, we’re re-posting and keeping our fingers crossed that this excellent 1971 feature film, based on the show, gets a long-deserved DVD release.

Dark Shadows, the gothic daytime drama that premiered on the ABC Television network in 1966, was distinguished from other soap operas by it’s presence of vampires, werewolves, witches, and ghosts. The show was a cult phenomenon and there were soon Dark Shadows board games, jigsaw puzzles, model kits, and other merchandise aimed at kids, even though it was adult women and college students who comprised it’s core audience. The breakout star of Dark Shadows was Canadian actor Jonathan Frid who played Barnabas Collins, the 200-year-old vampire and heir to the Collingswood estate (where the show took place) constantly in search...

Philip French remembers the child star turned Oscar-winning actress, who was as celebrated as much for her tempestuous relationships as her movies

For people like myself, born in Britain in the inter-war years and growing up during the second world war, Elizabeth Taylor will always be thought of as the youngest of four British evacuees who brought their immaculate English accents to Hollywood and became an essential part of a corner of Tinseltown that was forever England. She and Peter Lawford were transported across the Atlantic by their parents as war clouds gathered over Europe and were put under contract by MGM in the early 1940s. Roddy McDowall followed when bombs began to fall on Britain, as did Angela Lansbury who was also signed by MGM. McDowall was the first to attain stardom, playing the Welsh miner's son in How Green Was My Valley and then appearing in MGM's children's classic,...

The actor Elizabeth Taylor has died aged 79. Here we look back over her work, from early roles in National Velvet and Little Women to her defining appearances opposite Richard Burton

News: Elizabeth Taylor dies at 79

Gallery: A career in pictures

It's difficult to think of a better argument for the separate-but-equal value of the terms "actor" and "film star" than the career of Elizabeth Taylor. If that reads as a slight on her ability, it shouldn't. Taylor was a sporadically marvellous performer, one who rarely superseded her director or material but who could, with those factors working in her favour, surpass some of her more gifted peers' capacity for reckless emotional danger.

She was the rare actor who was as interesting on a bad day as on a good one, and not just for her mesmeric physical beauty: like any great film star, she was as compelled by her own screen presence as we were,...

Besides Alfred Hitchcock, the other important director of American films whose centenary arrived in the final year of the 20th Century was George Cukor, and during the first year (of several) in which he got nominated for a directing Oscar (for Katharine Hepburn’s Little Women), he also did a remarkable all-star movie that could nearly stand as a time capsule for the state of popular U.S. cinema circa 1933: Dinner At Eight (available on DVD). The nation’s number one box office attraction, for the fourth consecutive year, was the pug-faced, rotund and aging character actress Marie Dressler, here in her…...

Peter O'Toole, Katharine Hepburn, The Lion in Winter Turner Classic Movies' Christmas daytime programming includes George Cukor's 1933 classic Little Women, the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol, and the tedious 1959 version of Ben-Hur. William Wyler was a great director, but this multi-Oscared epic pales in comparison to Fred Niblo's more concise, less pretentious, and (mercifully) dialogue-less 1925 version starring Ramon Novarro (who was eons better than Charlton Heston in the title role). Things get meatier on TCM in the evening as Oscar winner Katharine Hepburn spars with Oscar nominee Peter O'Toole in Anthony Harvey's New York Film Critics Circle winner The Lion in Winter (1968). That'll be followed by Mike Nichols' masterpiece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), in which Oscar winners Elizabeth Taylor and Sandy Dennis, and Oscar nominees Richard Burton and George Segal laugh, cry, yell, and then yell some more in this brilliant adaptation of Edward Albee...

Bette Davis, at 3 a.m. in Vincent Sherman's Mr. Skeffington Forget Judy Garland and Van Johnson (and Spring Byington and three-year-old Liza Minnelli) in Robert Z. Leonard's In the Good Old Summertime. Forget Janet Leigh and Robert Mitchum in Don Hartman's Holiday Affair. Forget June Allyson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rossano Brazzi in Mervyn LeRoy's Little Women. It's too late to watch any of those Turner Classic Movies Christmas presentations, anyhow. My first TCM Christmas recommendation kicks off at 11 p.m. Pt: Olivia Hussey (Romeo and Juliet), Margot Kidder (Superman), and Keir Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey) star in Black Christmas (1974), in which "a deranged killer terrorizes the women staying in a sorority house over Christmas." Bob Clark, best known for Porky's and the Jack Lemmon drama Tribute, directed. At 12:45 a.m., TCM offers another Christmas flick for the whole family: Nicholas Webster's Santa Claus Conquers the Martians...

It seems like every time there's a new biography about a past Hollywood star or starlet, we get to know a little more about their sexual history and it involves both sexes. The recent discovery that Vivien Leigh had several female lovers adds her to an ever-growing list of talented actresses that were married to men but involved with women in the early days of Hollywood. While we know about several already (Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo) there are several others who we can claim as well. Here's a small list of actresses with whom we share a kinship.

Spring Byington (1886 - 1971)

Most Famous For: Meet John Doe, Little Women

Romanced: Marjorie "Ma Kettle" Main, Maude Adams

Estelle Winwood (1883 - 1984)

Most Famous For: Quality Street, Camelot

Romanced: Tallulah Bankhead

Ona Munson (1903 - 1955)

Most Famous For: Gone With the Wind, The Hot Heiress

Romanced: Mercedes de Acosta

Joan Crawford (1905 - 1977)

Most Famous For: Mildred Pierce,...

While you’re already getting your big Academy Awards party ready in time for the telecast on March 7th, we’ve got something for even bigger movie fans to enjoy. Of course, we’re talking about a movie marathon!

All month long, Turner Classic Movies will be running over 360 Academy Award nominated and winning films, back to back, with an interesting twist. In the vain of the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” each film will have a common actor or actress from the previous film.

For example, tomorrow night’s schedule consists of The Graduate with Anne Bancroft and William Daniels, which goes into Reds which stars Daniels and Jack Nicholson, into Chinatown with Nicholson and John Huston. Though we’re already about two weeks into the marathon, there are still plenty of great films to look forward to, including some TCM firsts like Gladiator, Titanic, Alien, and Trading Places.

‘Dark Shadows’, the gothic daytime drama that premiered on the ABC Television network in 1966, was distinguished from other soap operas by it’s presence of vampires, werewolves, witches, and ghosts. The show was a cult phenomenon and there were soon ‘Dark Shadows’ board games, jigsaw puzzles, model kits, and other merchandise aimed at kids, even though it was adult women and college students who comprised it’s core audience. The breakout star of ‘Dark Shadows’ was Canadian actor Jonathan Frid who played Barnabas Collins, the 200-year-old vampire and heir to the Collingswood estate (where the show took place) constantly in search of fresh blood and pining for his lost love, Josette. In 1970 Dan Curtis, the show’s creator and producer, teamed up with MGM to make a theatrical feature spun from the show, and the result was House Of Dark Shadows. It was a huge success, spawning a sequel, Night Of Dark Shadows,...

Joan Bennett, Spring Buyington, Frances Dee, Jean Parker, Katharine Hepburn in Little Women (top); Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck in Remember the Night (bottom) The digitally remastered Remember the Night (1940), written by Preston Sturges, directed by Mitchell Leisen, and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, is the highlight of Turner Classic Movies‘ Christmas movie series this month. But there are other goodies — or potential goodies — as well. One such is It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947), a minor Allied Artists (ex-Monogram) comedy directed by former WB contractee Roy Del Ruth, and featuring Don DeFore, former Rko star Ann Harding, and Gale Storm. The story centers on a hobo and his buddies who take over a mansion while the [...]...

According to his official website, Jody McCrea, the actor-son of Frances Dee and Joel McCrea, died in in Roswell, New Mexico, of cardiac arrest on April 4. He was 74. Born on Sept. 6, 1934, in Los Angeles, Jody McCrea was the oldest of McCrea and Dee’s three sons. Frances Dee was best known for playing sweet young things in the 1930s, e.g., Little Women and The Gay Deception (though her most remarkable performance at that time was the nymphomaniac in Blood Money), and for the atmospheric I Walked with a Zombie in 1943. Joel McCrea starred in dozens of dramas and comedies in the 1930s and 1940s, including the classics The Palm Beach Story (1942) and The More the Merrier (1943), but in the 1950s spent most of his on-screen time riding horses and wearing cowboy hats, usually in B+ productions. Jody McCrea began his acting career in the short-lived 1959 television series Wichita Town,...

Actress Katharine Hepburn, one of the silver screen's true legends and the actress considered the first lady of cinema, has died at the age of 96; reports stated she passed away Sunday afternoon at her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. An iconoclast who worked the Hollywood system to her advantage, she was honored with 12 Academy Award nominations, the most for any actor until Meryl Streep broke that record last year. Hepburn won an unparalleled four Best Actress Oscars . one for the 1933 drama Morning Glory, two in a row in 1967 and 1968 for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and The Lion in Winter, and her final one for 1981's On Golden Pond. Known for her patrician New England accent, pioneering feminist stance and unconventional bearing and beauty, Hepburn acted onstage in New York before being lured to Hollywood with a role in A Bill of Divorcement opposite John Barrymore. From there, her career hit both highs and lows, but she remained a Hollywood fixture well into the latter part of the 20th century. Early successes such as Alice Adams and Little Women were followed by financial failures like Bringing Up Baby (now a classic of the screwball genre) which labeled her "box office poison." Going back to Broadway, she wowed critics and audiences with her turn in The Philadelphia Story, and bought the rights for the 1940 screen adaptation, which revived her film career. The `40s saw her paired with longtime lover Spencer Tracy (a relationship she rarely discussed) in films like Woman of the Year and Adam's Rib, while the `50s saw her star in the classic The African Queen, among other films. After her Oscar wins in the late `60s, Hepburn worked less, and also turned to the small screen in acclaimed television films. Her career was capped with her turn in On Golden Pond opposite Henry Fonda, and she made her last screen appearance in 1994's Love Affair. In the `90s she retired to her home in Connecticut, where she spent her remaining years in declining health. --Prepared by IMDb staff...

Actress Katharine Hepburn, one of the silver screen's true legends and the actress considered the first lady of cinema, has died at the age of 96; reports stated she passed away Sunday afternoon at her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. An iconoclast who worked the Hollywood system to her advantage, she was honored with 12 Academy Award nominations, the most for any actor until Meryl Streep broke that record last year. Hepburn won an unparalleled four Best Actress Oscars . one for the 1933 drama Morning Glory, two in a row in 1967 and 1968 for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and The Lion in Winter, and her final one for 1981's On Golden Pond. Known for her patrician New England accent, pioneering feminist stance and unconventional bearing and beauty, Hepburn acted onstage in New York before being lured to Hollywood with a role in A Bill of Divorcement opposite John Barrymore. From there, her career hit both highs and lows, but she remained a Hollywood fixture well into the latter part of the 20th century. Early successes such as Alice Adams and Little Women were followed by financial failures like Bringing Up Baby (now a classic of the screwball genre) which labeled her "box office poison." Going back to Broadway, she wowed critics and audiences with her turn in The Philadelphia Story, and bought the rights for the 1940 screen adaptation, which revived her film career. The `40s saw her paired with longtime lover Spencer Tracy (a relationship she rarely discussed) in films like Woman of the Year and Adam's Rib, while the `50s saw her star in the classic The African Queen, among other films. After her Oscar wins in the late `60s, Hepburn worked less, and also turned to the small screen in acclaimed television films. Her career was capped with her turn in On Golden Pond opposite Henry Fonda, and she made her last screen appearance in 1994's Love Affair. In the `90s she retired to her home in Connecticut, where she spent her remaining years in declining health. --Prepared by IMDb staff...