Hopscotch (1980) starring Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson and Ned Beatty
Classic Film Freak - Classic Hollywood and Her Classic Films
by Orson De Welles
4y ago
A disgruntled CIA man decides to take revenge on his boss and expose the transgressions of the agency. The 1980s was a time of generally weak films for Walter Matthau.  Behind him were two of his biggest hits, Charade (1963) and The Odd Couple (1968).  In Mirage (1965) he is a sly detective working for amnesia victim Gregory Peck, in The Fortune Cookie (1966) a crooked insurance man in his third film for director Billy Wilder and in Grumpy Old Men (1993), a last hit, he is reunited in a final film with nine-time collaborator Jack Lem ..read more
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The War Wagon (1967) starring Kirk Douglas, John Wayne and Howard Keel
Classic Film Freak - Classic Hollywood and Her Classic Films
by Greg Orypeck
4y ago
Two enemies call a truce so, together, along with a drunken explosives expert, a born thief and an Indian, they can rob an armored wagon. Although they could not have known it at the time, for John Wayne and Kirk Douglas The War Wagon would be the last of the three films they made together, and for Dimitri Tiomkin, the composer par excellence of the American Western, the movie would be his last score in that genre. Even with all the prerequisites and necessary clichés of the standard Western—the saloon brawls, the street shoot-outs, the stagecoach chases, the Ind ..read more
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The Body Snatcher (1945) starring Boris Karloff, Henry Daniell and Bela Lugosi
Classic Film Freak - Classic Hollywood and Her Classic Films
by Greg Orypeck
4y ago
A proficient grave robber provides freshly exhumed corpses—or recently murdered bystanders, if necessary—to a medical school professor until things go awry for both. Although he is best known for those two giant milestones in horror film history, Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Boris Karloff as an actor, without heavy, expression-concealing makeup, is better experienced in the three films that producer Robert Lewton made for RKO in the mid-’40s.  Some of Karloff’s finest work. The last of these and the most famous, Bedlam (1946), is ..read more
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Coma (1978) starring Geneviève Bujold, Michael Douglas and Richard Widmark
Classic Film Freak - Classic Hollywood and Her Classic Films
by Greg Orypeck
4y ago
An unusual number of operations ending in patient comas at a large metropolitan hospital arouse the suspicions of a surgical resident, whose concerns aren’t at first taken seriously. No doubt about it.  In Coma, Geneviève Bujold is front and center in this science fiction/horror movie/romance, clearly the dominating force, although her live-in boyfriend thinks she’s paranoid about patient deaths.  Bujold is practically in every scene and earned an Oscar nomination. Her presence is far above and beyond that of her romantic co-star Michael Douglas, who is usually screen-cent ..read more
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The Yearling (1946) starring Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman and Claude Jarman, Jr.
Classic Film Freak - Classic Hollywood and Her Classic Films
by Greg Orypeck
4y ago
A boy’s love for a pet fawn risks the prosperity of a backwoods family living in the wilds of post-Civil War north Florida. Forty years had largely dimmed my memory since last seeing The Yearling, but a recent viewing was something of a revelation. Remembered was the pet fawn which continued to jump over higher and higher fences, erected to protect newly planted corn.  And, too, somehow as vivid as ever was the young boy of the story running and jumping through the forest with a herd of deer accompanied on the soundtrack by the music of Mendelssohn. The movie is a decent, caring scr ..read more
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The Window (1949) starring Bobby Driscoll, Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale
Classic Film Freak - Classic Hollywood and Her Classic Films
by Greg Orypeck
4y ago
A boy who cried “wolf” several times when there was no wolf isn’t believed when he witnesses a real murder. It’s possible, one can conjecture, that The Window might not have ever been released.  Made it was.  Howard Hughes had produced it in 1947, reluctantly because he preferred movies about he-men (The Conqueror, 1956) and buxom women (Underwater, 1955), and this film was about a marginalized little boy. Besides reviving the career of its ten-year-old hero, Bobby Driscoll, The Window was the sleeper hit of 1949 and remains one of the lesser known great fil ..read more
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Kirk Douglas, The Centennial Collection (2016) box set of eight of the star’s films 
Classic Film Freak - Classic Hollywood and Her Classic Films
by Orson De Welles
5y ago
Released four years ago, the set is, now, an appropriate memorial to the actor. With the passing, in early February, of one of the last, and biggest, stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, eight of Kirk Douglas’ films, collected in what was, in 2016, a centennial collection to celebrate his one hundredth birthday, now seems as fitting a way as any to examine his versatility and expertise as an actor. The earliest of the films included, Man Without a Star from 1955, to the last, A Lovely Way to Die from 1969, are good examples of his output, not the best nor quite the worst.  Although supported by t ..read more
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Caught (1949) starring James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes and Robert Ryan
Classic Film Freak - Classic Hollywood and Her Classic Films
by Orson De Welles
5y ago
With a woman living two lives, her life could go either way. In Fire Over England (1936), his first film of note—a distinction nothing to do with him but to the first-ever pairing of screen lovers Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh—he was an Englishman spying for Spain in the sixteenth-century court of Elizabeth I and ends up dead.  Already, with a few roles of either a villainous or, at least, a suspiciously duplicitous nature, his typecasting as a scoundrel seems to have been set by the time of I Met a Murderer (1939), when he does in a wife who killed his pet dog. So it came to be that James ..read more
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The Last of Sheila (1973) starring James Coburn, James Mason, Dyan Cannon
Classic Film Freak - Classic Hollywood and Her Classic Films
by Greg Orypeck
5y ago
The games people play can lead to . . . murder! Clinton Green, a multi-millionaire Hollywood producer who had, a year before, lost his wife, Sheila, in a hit-and-run accident, invites six of his old friends—all from the movie industry—to spend a week with him on his yacht in the south of France. A puzzle-game buff, he devises a most interesting diversion.  He gives each of his guests an index card with a secret, what Clinton calls a “pretend” bit of gossip—one card marked informant, another ex-con, another shoplifter, etc.—that they cannot share with any other player.  The attribute isn’t the ..read more
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter and Larry Gates
Classic Film Freak - Classic Hollywood and Her Classic Films
by Greg Orypeck
5y ago
They come from another world to occupy bodies in this world! It was such an original idea for a movie, alien seed pods taking possession of people, body and soul, with only two people aware of what was happening.  The idea became less original, the recreation less frightening—less everything—when studios insisted on remaking the first-filmed version, unnecessarily, as it turned out. In 1978, the first remake retains the original’s title.  It’s the turn of Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams to fight the power of the pods and their assimilation into “pod people,” now with the added twist in the ..read more
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