When 8-year-old Heidi (Shirley Temple) is orphaned, her mean Aunt Dete (Mady Christians) takes her to the mountains to live with her even meaner grandfather, Adolph (Jean Hersholt). Heidi’s eternal charm soon warms her grandfather’s heart, and the two become great friends. But when Aunt Dete returns and steals Heidi, Adolph sets out on a quest to find the girl and bring her home in this sweet classic from Hollywood’s golden age.
Jul 272010
Jul 212010
Steve Bradford (James Cagney) is a successful, older businessman who has made his fortune in the steel industry. As he gets older, he comes to regret many of the decisions that he made while he was a young man – especially abandoning a young woman who was pregnant with his child. Determined to make amends and find his long-lost heir, Steve returns to his college town and tries to persuade the head of the orphanage, Ann Dempster (Barbara Stanwyck), to reveal the name and location of his illegitimate son. Ann refuses to give the information to the brash Steve, despite all of his efforts to win her over. As Steve tries to change her mind, he becomes more involved with a young [...]
Jul 202010
When tempestuous Mary Lennox (Margaret O’Brien), born in India to wealthy parents, is orphaned by a cholera epidemic, she is sent to live with her reclusive and embittered Uncle Archibald Craven (Herbert Marshall) and her ill-behaved, bedridden cousin Colin (Dean Stockwell) at their desolate and decaying estate known as Misselthwaite Manor. Dickon (Brian Roper), the brother of one of the house maids, tells her of a garden secreted behind a hidden door in a vine-covered wall. When a raven unearths the key, the two enter and discover the garden is overgrown from neglect since Craven’s wife died there in an accident. They decide to keep their discovery a secret, and begin to restore it to its original grandeur. Under the influence of the Secret Garden, [...]
Investigator Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) is heading home aboard the Orient Express when a fellow passenger, American businessman Samuel Ratchett (Richard Widmark), is found murdered in this all-star whodunit by director Sidney Lumet, based on a novel Agatha Christie. Widely despised for his role in the kidnapping and death of a baby, Rachett had many enemies, so Poirot must sift through an eccentric group of suspects to find the killer.
Jul 032010
After he is discharged from the Marines, twenty-one-year-old Cliff Harper (Guy Madison) returns to his home in Los Angeles. Everyone seems excited to have him home, but Cliff just cannot get readjusted to being out of the military. He doesn’t want to return to school, he doesn’t want to work, the only thing that he does want is war widow Pat Ruscomb (Dorothy McGuire). But Pat is going through her own difficulties adjusting to life after the war – a life that she never envisioned for herself. Can these two lost souls move on and find a life together?
Marty (Ernest Borgnine) has a problem. Middle-aged and trapped by a smothering mother (Esther Minciotti), his future looks bleak. But when this butcher from the Bronx meets a lonely schoolteacher (Betsy Blair), suddenly everything is possible. Marty swept the Academy Awards in 1955, winning a Best Actor Oscar for Ernest Borgnine and a Best Screenplay award for Paddy Chayefsky (Network), as well as Best Picture and Best Director Awards.
Jun 242010
John Carteret (Brian Aherne) has long been depressed and lonely, because, at his wedding years ago, his bride, Moonyean (Jeanette MacDonald), was murdered. He accepts into his house Kathleen, the 5-year-old orphaned niece of Moonyean, and she quickly grows up to look just like her aunt. Kathleen (Jeanette MacDonald) meets and falls in love with a mysterious stranger from America, Kenneth Wayne (Gene Raymond). When John hears of this he is furious, and we learn that it was Kenneth’s father, Jeremy (Gene Raymond), who had killed Moonyean years before. John carries his grudge against Jeremy to the new generation, and threatens to ruin his niece’s happiness, but he softens in the end.
Jun 222010
Dorothy McGuire shines in Invitation (1952), a soapy tearjerker in which her emotionally fragile character comes to realize that her husband of less than a year (Van Johnson) only married her because her doting father (Louis Calhern) paid him to do so. Calhern had concocted the scheme in order to give his daughter a final year of happiness, as he knew that she has a medical condition which will eventually prove fatal. Johnson, however, claims to now really be in love with her…
Jun 222010
After a crash disfigures his face and maims his body, pilot Oliver Bradford (Robert Young) hides from family and friends in a seaside cottage. There he befriends homely, gentle Laura Pennington (Dorothy McGuire). The two marry for companionship – until some rare magic within the cottage transforms them into ardent and beautiful lovers. Director John Cromwell’s delicate, achingly romantic film is based on Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s play, written in a post-World War I era of broken men returning to families who could not recognize them. When history sadly repeated itself, World War II film audiences likewise embraced a story of the transcendent power of love. The film so moved Young that he named his own California home The Enchanted Cottage.
Jun 162010
Directed by Robert Stevenson, this is the story of a band of British explorers trying to find a missing adventurer who disappeared in search of the legendary diamond treasure known as King Solomon’s Mines. Led by a noble African native, Umbopa, (Paul Robeson), they delve deeper into uncharted territory. Cedric Hardwicke plays Allan Quartermain, the legendary hunter, who has agreed to go along on the quest, and Roland Young stars as Commander Good, another member of the search party. Along the way, they encounter numerous life-threatening situations before being captured by a tribe of natives once ruled by Umbopa, their guide.
Jun 152010
Fred Astaire is a dancin’ fool for love in this Oscar-nominated musical comedy about trumpet-playing pals who compete for the affections of a beautiful woman. Musician buddies Danny (Fred Astaire) and Hank (Burgess Meredith) follow their friend Ellen (Paulette Goddard) to New York City when she’s hired as Artie Shaw’s band manager. A string of comical mishaps ensues as Danny and Hank try to land spots in the band – and to win Ellen’s heart.
Jun 022010
This short film is the sequel to The Devil with Hitler and focuses on Adolf Hitler (Bobby Watson), Benito Mussolini (Joe Devlin) and “Suki Yaki” (Johnny Arthur). The three Axis leaders are out to sign a treaty with a sheik (Ian Keith) and have no idea that an American sailor (Frank Faylen) knows they are on the island. The seaman takes over for the magician of a magic act and sabotages the dinner with the sheik. He then has them believing that their submarine is taking on water and that they are going to die in a matter of moments, leading the 3 “allies” to start falling out amongst themselves.
