A strong candidate for possibly the most entertaining and enjoyable film ever made by a Hollywood studio, North by Northwest is positioned between the much heavier and more profoundly disturbing Vertigo (1958) and the stark horror of Psycho (1960). In the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock films it shows the director at his most effervescent in a romantic comedy-thriller that also ...
In 1941, when Frank Capra filmed Arsenic and Old Lace, he was in the midst of his string of social-concern pictures. So this uncharacteristic property must have seemed like a vacation; it's a straight farce, played at full tilt and closely adapted from the Broadway play. Almost all of the action takes place on a single set: the old home of the Brewster sisters (Josephine Hull and Jean ...
Get out your handkerchiefs for this four-star weepie, a 1957 remake of the 1939 Love Affair, directed by Leo McCarey, who also made the original. Grant and Kerr are strangers on an ocean liner, involved with other people, but who can't resist each other for a shipboard romance. They decide to test whether this is the real thing by agreeing to split up, then meet in six months atop the ...
"The love impulse in man," says a psychiatrist in Bringing Up Baby, "frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict." That's for sure. For a primer on the rules and regulations of the classic screwball comedy, which throws love and conflict into close proximity, look no further. A straight-laced paleontologist (Cary Grant) loses a dinosaur bone to a dog belonging to free-spirited heiress ...
Cary Grant stars as an advertising executive who dreams of getting out of the city and building a perfect home in the country, only to find the transition fraught with problems. (See the 1980s Tom Hanks comedy The Money Pit for an updated version of the same idea.) The big appeal here are the two leads, Grant and Myrna Loy, who were each in their early 40s and at the peak of their careers. ...