Frank Capra won his third directorial Oscar for the zany, frequently hilarious social comedy You Can’t Take It with You, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Robert Riskin wrote the film, which also won the best picture Oscar, to neutralize the tart Leftist politics of the original and […]
Tag Archives: Jimmy Stewart
Based on the actual case of a 1932 Chicago cop-killing during a store robbery, where two Polish-Americans, later exonerated, were prosecuted and sentenced to life imprisonment, Call Northside 777 is director Henry Hathaway’s finest achievement. It is Hathaway who had introduced (in The House on 92nd Street, 1945) the postwar style that applied documentary realism […]
We see films in the order that we happen to come by them. For me as a boy, Tom Destry meant Audie Murphy years before I saw James Stewart in the same role in the fifteen-years-earlier Destry Rides Again. Through numerous viewings of the 1939 version, I now know that Stewart’s performance is superior to […]
Slack and slight, the western Night Passage is most famous for Anthony Mann’s last-minute refusal to direct it, his taking the occasion to badmouth its premise and prospects, and star Jimmy Stewart’s subsequent refusal ever to work with, even to talk to, Mann again. Mann and Stewart had made eight films together, all in the […]
An amalgamation of elements from three recent films—Morning Glory (Lowell Sherman, 1933), 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933), Follow the Fleet (Mark Sandrich, 1936)—and an anticipation of another hit, On the Town (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1949), Roy Del Ruth’s Born to Dance sings and dances and charms—except when it doesn’t. At 109 minutes it wears […]
Dennis Grunes 