Christmas in July (1940)

Christmas in July (1940). 68 minutes. Directed by Preston Sturges. Starring Dick Powell (as Jimmy MacDonald), Ellen Drew (as Betty Casey), Raymond Walburn (as Dr. Maxford), Alexander Carr (as Mr. Shindel), William Demarest (as Mr. Bildocker), Ernest Truex (as Mr. Baxter), Franklin Pangborn (as Don Hartman), and Georgia Caine (as Ellen MacDonald). Written by Preston Sturges.

Christmas in July might initially appear to be a holiday film akin to It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Christmas in Connecticut (1945), or  Holiday Inn (1942); but Christmas in July, in spite of its name, is not an actual Christmas movie and does not take place during the holiday season. (It is also not the origin of the phrase, “Christmas in July,” which has roots in the late 19th century.) The movie is instead about gift-giving and abundance manifested outside of the winter months—in the spirit of Christmas beneficence but devoid of the religious sentiment. The film’s protagonist, Jimmy MacDonald,

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Bird of Paradise (1932)

Bird of Paradise (1932). 80 minutes. Directed by King Vidor. Starring Dolores Del Río (as Luana), Joel McCrea (as Johnny Baker), John Halliday (as Mac), Richard “Skeets” Gallagher (as Chester), Bert Roach (as Hector), Lon Chaney Jr. (as Thornton), Wade Boteler (as Skipper Johnson), Napoleon Pukui (as the King), Agostino Borgato (as medicine man), and Sofia Ortega (as native woman).

Bird of Paradise is a pre-Code tropical romance that buzzes with as much sex on the beach as a cocktail bar on ladies’ night. The movie follows the story of Johnny, an American yachtsman who disembarks for a month on an island in the Pacific so that he can pant and drool over Luana, a young native woman who can barely speak English. Bird of Paradise holds together by virtue of its layers of fantasy, both sexual fantasy and the fantasy of “going native,” the latter of which Johnny attempts to realize on the island with only minor success. It

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Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Bride of Frankenstein (1935). 75 minutes. Directed by James Whale. Starring Boris Karloff (as Frankenstein’s monster), Colin Clive (as Baron Henry Frankenstein), Valerie Hobson (as Elizabeth Frankenstein), Ernest Thesiger (as Doctor Pretorius), Elsa Lanchester (as the monster’s mate/bride of Frankenstein, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley), Gavin Gordon (as Lord Byron), Douglas Walton (as Percy Bysshe Shelley), Una O’Connor (as Minnie), E. E. Clive (as the Burgomaster), O. P. Heggie (as the hermit), and Dwight Frye (as Karl). Cinematography by John J. Mescall.

Bride of Frankenstein is one of those rare sequels that outdoes its predecessor. Frankenstein (1931), rooted in pre-Code and Depression-era culture, was itself a work of art and offered us insight into the 1818 novel of the same name by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. In the first film, Shelley’s protagonist, Henry Frankenstein, embarks on a grisly campaign to revivify human corpses with the aim of becoming god-like; he successfully regenerates life in the form of a humanoid monster. Bride … Read the rest

The Impossible Voyage (1904)

The Impossible Voyage (1904). 20 minutes. Directed by Georges Méliès. Starring Georges Méliès, Fernande Albany, and Jehanne d’Alcy.

Much like Georges Méliès’ 1902 silent short film A Trip to the Moon, the 1904 Méliès film The Impossible Voyage focuses on a group of proto-astronauts who plot to ascend to the heavens and explore the universe. As an adventure film and trick film, The Impossible Voyage clearly grows out of its sister attraction in terms of the earlier movie’s technological feats and focus on exploration. In the case of the 1904 film, however, the explorers land on the sun rather than the moon, do not encounter adversaries there, and end up journeying through the ocean in addition to the sky. Moreover, in comparison with A Trip to the Moon, The Impossible Voyage especially causes us to examine the character and ambitions of daring interstellar adventurers as they push forward, hell-bent on conquering the heavens; their at times reckless behavior … Read the rest

Red Dust (1932)

Red Dust (1932). 83 minutes. Directed by Victor Fleming. Starring Clark Gable (as Dennis Carson), Jean Harlow (as Vantine Jefferson), Mary Astor (as Barbara Willis), Gene Raymond (as Gary Willis), Tully Marshall (as “Mac” McQuarg), Donald Crisp (as Guidon), Willie Fung (as Hoy), and Forrester Harvey (as Captain Limey).

Those in search of the quintessentially sultry Hollywood romance will not be disappointed by Red Dust, a sizzling pre-Code drama that focuses on a ménage à trois in Indochina, now known as Vietnam. There on a rubber tree plantation, red-hot Dennis Carson has his hands full with two women—Vantine, who is possibly a prostitute, and Barbara, the uptight wife of one of Dennis’s workers. The balmy Vietnamese backdrop against which Red Dust’s melodrama unfolds both mimics and fuels these characters’ romances. The action is over the top, with a fair amount of yelling, face slapping, and boozing, and the film’s sexy subtext is so charged that it seems to almost … Read the rest

Porky in Wackyland (1938)

Porky in Wackyland (1938). 7 minutes. Directed by Bob Clampett. Starring Mel Blanc (as Porky Pig and the Dodo). Animated by Norman McCabe, I. Ellis, Vive Risto, John Carey, and Robert Cannon. Layouts by Bob Clampett. Backgrounds by Elmer Plummer. Music by Carl W. Stalling. Produced by Leon Schlesinger.

Porky in Wackyland is one of only a handful of Warner Bros. cartoons that the U.S. Library of Congress has designated as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Its title may make it seem like a bit of a stale joke that is trying too hard; the word “wacky” always sounds like a marketing department’s corny way of exaggerating a movie’s quirky inscrutability in order to sell it as a wild ride that is in reality not so wild. Porky in Wackyland is legitimately zany, yet because it draws on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) among other cultural touchpoints, the cartoon … Read the rest

Footlight Parade (1933)

Footlight Parade (1933). 102 minutes. Directed by Lloyd Bacon. Starring James Cagney (as Chester Kent), Joan Blondell (as Nan Prescott), Ruby Keeler (as Bea Thorn), Dick Powell (as Scott Blair), Frank McHugh (as Francis), Ruth Donnelly (as Harriet Bowers Gould), Guy Kibbee (as Silas Gould), Hugh Herbert (as Charlie Bowers), Claire Dodd (as Vivian Rich), Renee Whitney (as Cynthia Kent), Paul Porcasi (as George Apolinaris), and Barbara Rogers (as Gracie). Musical numbers directed and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Music by Harry Warren and Al Dubin, and Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal.

It is hard to believe that the pre-Code Footlight Parade is James Cagney’s first musical film. The actor, who became a superstar because of the gangster film The Public Enemy (1931), had actually trained as a singer and dancer on Broadway before making the leap to movies. But Footlight Parade is not merely notable for being Cagney’s debut as a tap-dancing featured player. It is an outstanding work … Read the rest

The Cabbage Fairy (1900)

The Cabbage Fairy (1900). 1 minute. Written and directed by Alice Guy-Blaché. Starring Yvonne Sérand (as the fairy).

The Cabbage Fairy is a short film by Alice Guy-Blaché, the world’s first female filmmaker. Originally based out of Paris and employed by the Gaumont Film Company (where she developed the Gaumont house style), Guy-Blaché worked as a director, producer, writer, and editor between 1896 and 1920, making approximately 1,000 (mostly silent) films during this period, of which 150 survive. Eventually she relocated to Fort Lee, New Jersey where she founded the Solax film studio in 1910, a time when films were exploding in popularity.

Many of her films are considered to be lost or else are not adequately documented, and Guy-Blaché herself has often been neglected as the pioneer that she was, with many of her films being misattributed to other, male filmmakers. Her work was a major influence on directors Alfred Hitchcock and Sergei Eisenstein (among others), and paved the … Read the rest

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

The Shop Around the Corner (1940). 99 minutes. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Starring Margaret Sullavan (as Klara Novak), James Stewart (as Alfred Kralik), Frank Morgan (as Hugo Matuschek), Joseph Schildkraut (as Ferencz Vadas), Sara Haden (as Flora Kaczek), Felix Bressart (as Pirovitch), William Tracy (as Pepi Katona), Inez Courtney (as Ilona Novotny), Charles Halton (as detective), and Charles Smith (as Rudy). Written by Samuel Raphaelson.

Ernst Lubitsch’s wonderful The Shop Around the Corner centers on a high-end Hungarian boutique at Christmastime, but the movie is about so much more than business during the holidays. In that store, two clerks, Alfred and Klara, write to pen pals that they fall in love with—not realizing that they are writing to each other. In contrast to the way they feel about their pen pals, in everyday life they loathe each other and bicker constantly, and therefore, as we know, they must eventually come to love each other outside of the letter writing. It … Read the rest

Three Little Pigs (1933)

Three Little Pigs (1933). 8 minutes. Produced by Walt Disney. Directed by Burt Gillett. Featuring the voices of Dorothy Compton (as the piper pig), Mary Moder (as the fiddler pig), Pinto Colvig (as the bricklayer pig), and Billy Bletcher (as the big bad wolf). Animated by Fred Moore, Jack King, Dick Lundy, Norm Ferguson, and Art Babbitt.

Walt Disney’s Academy Award-winning cartoon short Three Little Pigs was a massive success when it was released in the early 1930s; it earned a tidy sum of money for Disney and was screened continuously for several months. But Three Little Pigs is also an artistic achievement. Drawing on innovations in sound and color technology that the Disney studio had established earlier in Steamboat Willie (1928) and Flowers and Trees (1932), the 1933 cartoon demonstrates further techniques of individuation that would influence Disney’s first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). But perhaps equally important is the way that … Read the rest