TCM CLASSIC MOVIES...TCM WHERE THERE ARE MORE STARS THAN IN HEAVEN...

On Dave Kehr and “Movies That Mattered”

When I was in the film program at Northwestern University in Chicago, my peers and I were required to read the works of Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Michel Foucault and even Freud, Jung and Marx. The idea was to apply their theories to the cinema to better understand how film worked, or how it related […]

Making the Leap: Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Talkies

To view The Private Life of Don Juan click here. Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. made his last movie in 1934. The Private Life of Don Juan was, quite accidentally, a fitting farewell to one of the first megastars of the movie industry. It wasn’t clear while filming it that it would be Fairbanks’ last movie but […]

The Greatest Early Douglas Sirk: Lured (1947)

To view Lured click here. Writer and director Douglas Sirk is mainly known today for his exquisite technicolor melodramas, such as Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956) and Imitation of Life (1959), his last feature-length film. His work throughout the 1950s, and specifically these four films, are not […]