It is an inescapable fact that we don’t deserve Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Separately, together, it doesn’t matter. They were just too beautiful, too miraculous, too good. By the time I laid eyes on their second collaboration, Bringing Up Baby, in high school, I was already head over heels for Kate and Cary, but… Read more »
In the decadent French chateau of a frisky aristocrat and his wandering wife, a showgirl pretending to be a baroness and the cab driver she fell for are arguing about the practicality of a marriage surviving on 40 francs a day. “I know we’re right for each other,” he coos. “I know it deep down… Read more »
When the New York Evening Star carelessly prints a false story about society dame Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy) that results in a $5 million libel suit, editor Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy) decides to resolve the situation by hiring the sneakiest, smoothest operator he knows: ex-Evening Star reporter Bill Chandler (William Powell). The men don’t share… Read more »
In the cinema of Leo McCarey, the act of socializing takes on paramount importance. The rhythms of his films, and the way that they make meaning, largely derive from his direction of actors and from the characters’ behavior toward one another within the fiction — the ways that they look at, listen and react to… Read more »
Full transparency: all Blu-rays reviewed were provided by Criterion and Kino Lorber. We’re going to try and get a little more focused on Physical Media Isn’t Dead and highlight a couple of distributors at a time instead of making you listen to an hour of stream-of-consciousness rambling — now you’ll only have to listen to… Read more »
Guest post by Jack Miller. “I have a long-standing pet theory about Hawks’ comedies that I’m starting to question. The theory is that the comedies contain two different kinds of characters, pitched at different levels of abstraction: one more plausible and naturalistic, the other more stylized and exaggerated. And that the films document the perplexity… Read more »