Your mental process is contagious, JF. Not only will I make that same association from now on, I'll make it a point to step up my use of the word whenever the situation allows. I recently watched a very young Chester Morris in The Divorcee . He looked like he was still metabolizing his teen age year...

What great information, WG! Can you recommend a good biography on Karloff?

It's always nice to read others' appreciation of Boris Karloff, and I couldn't agree more with what has already been said. When TCM aired a birthday tribute to the beloved actor a few years ago, I recorded a number of the films he made at Columbia during the 1939-1940 period. The line-up included Th...

...also I love her voice.

Your personal story about Mary Astor resonates very strongly with my own, Knitty. Very well put!! Her character in The Maltese Falcons also left me at first with with a general feeling of "meh," as the kids say. (That haircut is pretty bad). She's announced by Sam Spade's secretary as bein...

I love him in Double Indemnity.

Being a guy, it's hard to talk about these actresses without acknowledging the personal "screen crush" factor I have for each of them. Constance Bennett and Fay Wray -- for example -- can do no wrong in my book. They both had their fair share of turkey films, but I can watch those again an...

Myrna's death scene in that one is perfect. (oops SPOILER ALERT). You've got to have some real depth as a person to die movingly on camera.

I like Billy Wilder's quote that Lubitsch could "make chocolate out of chicken sh*t."

Looking over the cast list on IMDb, one of the reasons that this movie seems so redolent of that time and place in Germany, even though it was made thousands of miles away in America jumped out at me--at least 30 cast members were there because of Nazism. I have a nice recording of a documentary th...

I was watching The Private Life of Henry the Eighth , the Korda film starring Charles Laughton. There's some great comic relief when he's getting ready to marry Anne of Cleves, played by Elsa Lanchester. She's strong-minded and isn't the least bit interested in the marriage. After the union is solem...

I don't have nearly enough Douglas Fairbanks (Sr) films in my collection. I've got The Mark of Zorro and The Iron Mask -- the one that features a voiceover by Doug Jr. One day I'd like to get one of those boxed sets. Yesterday I received a modest parcel of films which included the much awaited The P...

...and that Myrna Loy felt terribly guilty about it.

Thanks for the heads up, Mr A. I'm planning on screening it with my two sons (14 and 12) over the weekend. What's funny is that they saw the title Shewolf of London in my Universal boxed set and wanted to watch it a few weeks ago. I expected them to be disappointed that the whole thing was just a gr...

Nice post, JF. Congratulations on your conquest. How old is your daughter? When my youngest was 10 or 11, he was riveted by both I Walked with a Zombie and Curse of the Cat People . I was afraid he would find both of them boring, but he didn't -- not on the least. Between him and his brother -- two ...