Drama

There’s a great American film that many, if not most people have ever seen or even heard of it. it’s The Set-Up, produced in 1949, and directed by Robert Wise. It’s dramatically tight and riveting and unfolds in the real-time length of the film’s running time—just 72 minutes. The story is about an aging fighter named Stoker Thompson played by Robert Ryan, who was a heavyweight boxer in real-life when he attended Dartmouth College. In the film, Stoker is battered, down-on-his-

If one movie has continued to haunt me since I first saw it on TV decades ago, it’s The Servant. I have seen it time and again over the years, and the experience is always unsettling, eerie, and seductive. It’s one of the darkest films I’ve ever seen—and one of my favorites. Made in England in 1963, the movie was directed by Joseph Losey, an American ex-pat who was blacklisted in Hollywood for being a member of the Communist Party. Working from a screenplay by the brilliant p

A lot of movies have been made about characters in the grip of a midlife crisis. Maybe the dreams of youth haven’t quite worked out the way they hoped. Or they’re unhappy with the lives they’ve made for themselves. For me, one of the very best midlife crisis movies is Seconds, a psychological thriller made in 1966. Directed by John Frankenheimer, it stars Rock Hudson and a lineup of classic Hollywood character actors. The story concerns a New York bank executive named Arthur

In the 1980s, during the heyday of video store rentals, one film company stood out as the king of B moviemaking—The Cannon Group. If fast, trashy, violent and often dumb action movies were what you wanted, Cannon delivered. Titles such as American Ninja, Tango and Cash, and many of the Death Wish sequels starring Charles Bronson were some of their low-brow classics. On occasion, however, Cannon swung for the fences, trying to make something better, something prestigious. And

Ira Levin was a great American novelist and playwright. His inventive thrillers are a special treat—The Boys from Brazil, The Stepford Wives, A Kiss Before Dying, and my personal favorite, Rosemary’s Baby. By now, the story that forms the basis of that landmark novel and of the 1968 film that was made from it is well-known. A young couple moves into an old, stylish New York apartment building. The husband—Guy—is a self-centered actor struggling for his big break, while Rosema

Here’s another movie from my Guilty Pleasure file. It’s 2001’s Rock Star, starring Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Aniston. Normally i don’t go for predictable rom-coms—unless, that is, they somehow surprise me with a fresh hook that I can’t turn away from. And in the case of Rock Star, which is definitely a paint-by-numbers light drama, the fact that it also takes place in the world of heavy metal arena rock makes it utterly goofy and irresistible to me. This movie is like a sitc

In the cinema of the fantastic, The Rocking Horse Winner ranks as a landmark work of art. Produced in Great Britain in 1949 and based on a short story by D.H. Lawrence, the film is both a cautionary tale of the dangers of material obsession and the psychological trauma that can haunt children when their desire to help fix what is broken in their families becomes desperate. In The Rocking Horse Winner, a young boy named Paul lives with his upper-class family in a world of weal

“The Magdalene Laundries” is a haunting song by Joni Mitchell. It’s about the real-life laundries in Ireland where many poor women were sentenced for the “sin” of being a “fallen woman” or for having a child out of wedlock. Incredibly, the laundries operated for centuries and were not shut down until the 1990s! They were oppressive asylums run by Roman Catholic nuns who treated the unmarried, imprisoned women as inmates. For their penance, the women were forced to do the wor

Long before director Stanley Kubrick made his classic horror film The Shining, he directed a horror film of a different kind—one based on the real-life horror of war. Made in 1957, Paths of Glory ranks as one of Kubrick’s finest achievements and one of the greatest anti-war films ever produced. Adapted from a novel by a World War One veteran named Humphrey Cobb, the story is based on a true, controversial incident that occurred in 1915. The film stars Kirk Douglas as Colonel

Composer Harold Arlen wrote over 500 songs in his illustrious career. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from 1939’s The Wizard of Oz is probably his most famous song. But a few years earlier he and lyricist Yip Harburg teamed up to write another classic called “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” And in 1973, that song became the theme and title for the movie Paper Moon, a wonderful film about a con man and a little girl who journey across the lonesome back roads of depression-era America. T

Imagine what it must have been like for audiences in the early 1950s to see the likes of Marlon Brando on their neighborhood movie screens. Seeing Brando in a burst of films like The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata, and On the Waterfront must ht from almost anything that had come before. The reason is that Brando had come out the New York thave been electrifying. Brando’s performances in those films were raw, psychologically real, radically differeneatre scene wher

In the history of the Academy Awards, only three films have ever won Oscars in all five of the top categories: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Screenplay. They are 1934’s It Happened One Night, 1991’s Silence of the Lambs, and 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher and a stunning supporting cast, Cuckoo’s Nest is a wonder. Based on a novel by the great American writer Ken Kes

For this week, my sister Christine asked me to review one of her favorite films for Silver Screen Radio. It’s Now, Voyager, a Warner Brothers film, made in 1942, starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains and Gladys George. I’m happy to grant my sister her wish because it’s a film much cherished by those who delight in great dramas from the Golden Age of Hollywood moviemaking. The title of the film is taken from a poem by Walt Whitman, who urges us to not be passive abo

The name Alfred Hitchcock is synonymous with movies that are both thrilling entertainment and great art. That’s a rare feat that few filmmakers have been able to achieve even once. But in Hitchcock’s case, he did it many times over an astonishing 50-year career. From his inventive use of visuals to startling set pieces, his films brim with the artistic vitality of a master film storyteller. The Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures. Of the Hitchcock films that I lov

The Night of the Hunter was produced in 1955 and directed by the esteemed British actor Charles Laughton. It is a certifiable masterpiece, a film so stylistically unique, beautiful, gripping, and nerve-wracking that many film directors have cited it as a profound influence on their careers—from Stanley Kubrick to Martin Scorsese. A devilish bird of prey on the hunt for his next victim. Based on a novel by Appalachian writer Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter is a classic...

Recently, I showed my 37-year-old son Dominic the 1975 film Nashville. He’s seen other movies directed by Robert Altman, but this was his first time seeing Nashville, where Altman’s mastery of weaving a menagerie of storylines into a crisscrossing maze of narratives is on full display. When it was over, Dominic exclaimed that it was one of the best films he’d ever seen. he couldn’t believe that a major studio had produced it. He said: “Now I understand why you’re so discourag

I was about 16- or 17-years old when I wrote a gushing fan letter to John Ford, the man who directed many of my all-time favorite movies—movies like My Darling Clementine, The Searchers and The Grapes of Wrath. As a teenager I didn’t yet knew that Ford was considered the greatest director of Hollywood’s Golden Age. All I knew was that I’d grown up watching movies “Directed by John Ford” whenever they were on TV, watching them over and over again with a kind of rapt, obsessive

“Whatever you hear about Midnight Cowboy is true.” With that provocative tagline, United Artists advertised what promised to be one of the most controversial movies to ever come out of the Hollywood studio system. And the tagline more than lived up to the hype. Released in 1969, Midnight Cowboy is about Joe Buck, a naïve, handsome young man who leaves a troubled past in West Texas and goes to New York with dreams of selling himself to rich, sex-starved women. But in no time,

In 1970, the movie MASH was a box office hit. Directed by Robert Altman, it defied all industry expectations of what a traditional war film should be. In this case it was the Korean War, and the film played it mostly for laughs, with a wild spirit of anarchy. The men and women working in the MASH surgical field hospital cracked jokes and played tricks on each other—just to keep their sanity in the face of so much pain and death. So, the following year, in the same vein, Altma

There’s a movie that no one seemed to think would amount to much, only to have it stun everyone and become a classic. It’s called Marty. It was made in 1955 and starred Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair. The story had already been made as a teleplay for TV when—legend has it—some film producers hatched the idea of remaking the play as a low-budget feature film that was sure to bomb at the box office, and they could use the loss as a tax-write off. That’s when this underdog of a