Year in Film: 1956

Anastasia

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Although I am a history buff and occasionally even enjoy the odd conspiracy theory, I have always thought the whole lost Romanovs/Anastasia myth was nothing more than a bunch of hooey. The fact that this film is a very loose adaptation of the story of Anna Anderson, the most notorious and controversial of the many [...]


Autumn Leaves

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Autumn Leaves does not enjoy even a fraction of the acclaim thrown at the film that director Robert Aldrich later made by Joan Crawford, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? In fact, this earlier film has never been released on DVD and the VHS is long out of print. It seems it is best known [...]


Forbidden Planet

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Well, Leslie Nielsen has died. It should not come as a great shock when a man of 84 years dies of natural causes. But Nielsen seemed like an actor who would live forever. After a career as a straight leading man in the ’50, ‘60s and ‘70s which was remarkably long in itself, he made [...]


Please Murder Me

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It is hard to pass up a movie with a title like this. But after viewing it, it becomes clear that that the title is probably the best thing it has going. Despite big-name actors Raymond Burr and Angela Lansbury, the performances and direction are weak in this B film, which is in the public [...]


The Girl Can’t Help It

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The Girl Can’t Help It is the apex (or nadir, depending on how you look at it), of the CinemaScope, DeLuxe color fad of the ’50s. When How to Marry a Millionaire was made a s the first film shot in the new widescreen process, it opened with a five-minute overture, emphasizing to audience that [...]


Random Quote

“Have you noticed how nobody works anymore and everybody does something artistic?”
-Cheyenne (Sean Penn)
from This Must Be the Place