Show Stopper

The last Ziegfeld Follies Girl has died. Doris Eaton Travis, one of the legendary Ziegfeld Follies chorus girls, of the early 1900s, died Tuesday at age 106. She continued to work long after her Follies days ended, with annual appearances on Broadway, a small role in a Jim Carrey movie and a memoir, “The Days [...]

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My Fair Lady-1964

My Fair Lady is based on Pygmalion a play written by GB Shaw. It had been filmed earlier in 1938 while the irascible author was alive. He had his own ideas on cinema theory and how his play Pygmalion should be translated. Uncharacteristically he was happy with the version of  Gabriel Pascal, as he wrote [...]

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Amadeus-1984

What is in a man that his reputation outlives his narrow circumstances,- misfortunes and triumphs alike, and should glow all the more brighter when he has hit the dust? What is in him that his genius is more clearly understood in the imaginations of generations for whom it was not intended in the first place? [...]

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The Bank Dick-1940

Here is a quote from a movie released in 1940: Boy in bank: Mommy, doesn’t that man have a funny nose? Mother in bank: You mustn’t make fun of the gentleman, Clifford. You’d like to have a nose like that full of nickels, wouldn’t you? Whom the boy is referring to? (Hint: He isn’t JP [...]

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City Lights-1931

Many film scholars while discussing Chaplin films, make it a point of Chaplin being still stuck into silent mode (as though he was caught off guard) while movies were celebrating the freedom of sound all around. Of course talkies brought some silent stars to greater fame while ruined career for a few,- John Gilbert being [...]

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Annie Hall-1977

In Annie Hall we have the eponymous heroine, who is neurotic, trying to find some semblance of happiness. Pit her against another neurotic, a New York comedian Alvy Singer their combined neurosis must be a veritable mine and naturally enough with the success of Annie Hall a new genre of movies came in vogue of [...]

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Goodbye Mr.Chips-1939

Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) is a classic film looking at British school system with a rose tinted glass. It might well be for the author of the book on which the film was based was a teacher himself. Mr. Chips was modeled on W.H. Balgarnie, James Hilton’s old classics master who taught for over 50 [...]

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The Passion Of Joan Of Arc-1928

“The close quarter combat between Joan and her judges” is how Carl Theodor Dreyer described his vision of the film. It is set in a claustrophobic space in which we feel one with the Maid of Orleans. We also get caught up in the terror her face registers in the flurry of close-ups; her tremulous [...]

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Midnight Cowboy-1969

Midnight Cowboy is a 1969 drama film based on the 1965 novel of the same name by James Leo Herlihy. It was directed by the British director John Schlesinger who had directed previously Julie Cristie in the much critically acclaimed Darling (1965)). Dustin Hoffman took a calculated risk in accepting the role of Ratzo. The [...]

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One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest-1975

According to the film critic Roger Ebert ‘The movie’s simplistic approach to mental illness is not really a fault of the movie, because it has no interest in being about insanity. It is about a free spirit in a closed system’. But when Forman-Saentz team who gave us Amadeus have had dealt with Ken Kesey’s [...]

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