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Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
It takes a lot of skill to make a movie look easy, and when Billy Wilder’s at his best, his films can appear almost effortless, moving forward so naturally that I’m often surprised, and a bit...
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Accidentally Hilarious: Just Imagine (1930)
Imagine a world where you commute to work by hoverplane, consume all your food and drink via a digestible tablet, and use a sequence of letters and numbers as a name. That’s the speculative setting of...
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British Invasion: Summer Holiday (1963)
Considering the historical entwinement of the United States and Britain, for the most part, people on either side of the Atlantic know where to spot the differences between our two cultures. The chips,...
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1984-a-thon: Purple Rain (1984)
By the 1980s, the movie musical was… well, far beyond the time of transition. Since their heyday in the ’30s and ’40s, musicals had become limited to just a handful of movies per year, without a lot to...
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Mickey Rooney Blogathon: All Ashore (1953)
It’s no secret that I love a good sailor musical, so when I caught wind of the getTV Mickey Rooney Blogathon, hosted by Once Upon a Screen, Outspoken & Freckled and Paula’s Cinema Club, it took...
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Athena (1954)
When you start to watch a musical made in 1954, starring Jane Powell and Debbie Reynolds, with the same songwriters as Meet Me in St. Louis, you might think you have a pretty solid concept of what’s to...
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The Star (1952)
While FX’s Feud may have made an unsavory introduction of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis to non-classic movie fans, some theaters took the show’s popularity as an opportunity to highlight the earlier...
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Sudden Fear (1952)
Myra Hudson is a woman in control of her life. As a successful playwright, and an heiress to a significant fortune that she doesn’t particularly want or need, her life seems to be perfect. She knows...
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Lured (1947)
In many ways, Lured is a kind of dark cousin to the jaunty backstage musical comedies that populated the 1930s. Lucille Ball stars as Sandra, a taxi dancer who spends her evenings getting fed stale...
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Silk Stockings (1957) and the End of the Freed Unit
Last year, I wrote a paper on the unproduced Arthur Freed musicals—that is, the films that the Freed unit had started or planned to make, but, for various reasons, never actually finished or, in many...
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