THREE LITTLE WORDS (Richard Thorpe, 1950)

Fred Astaire won a Golden Globe as pop lyricist Bert Kalmar, whose rocky Tin Pan Alley partnership with composer Harry Ruby is depicted in Three Little Words. Astaire deserved the prize; he is incisive, particular, at times brilliant, deftly creating a cynical, suspicious, intriguingly neurotic character who has little, if any, of Astaire’s own classy […]

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (Sidney Lumet, 1962)

Films by Sidney Lumet come in two varieties: sleek and swanky New York City-based crime dramas that are sometimes wrongly (insanely!) described as “gritty”; pretentious literary art for the culture-vultures. (Incredibly, Lumet was even once able to conflate his two kinds of films: Vu du pont, 1962, in French, and from Italy and France—Arthur Miller’s […]