Howard Hawks

Red River is the most legendary of Howard Hawks’ western epics. Less well known is The Big Sky, a Kirk Douglas vehicle which evokes the Western frontier of the 1830s.

In Red River, John Wayne leads the first big cattle drive, thousands of miles north to the railroad. In The Big Sky, French merchant Jourdonnais (Steven Geray) becomes the first keelboat captain to journey up the wild, unexplored Missouri river, to trade for furs with the Blackfeet Indians.
Hawks takes his time, with even a musical number or two helping to develop his characters.Read More »

Synopsis wrote:
David Huxley is waiting to get a bone he needs for his museum collection. Through a series of strange circumstances, he meets Susan Vance, and the duo have a series of misadventures which include a leopard called Baby.

Rob Nixon, Kerryn Sherrod & Jeff Stafford wrote:

Why BRINGING UP BABY is Essential

In the eyes of many critics, Bringing Up Baby is the quintessentialscrewball comedy, incorporating all the standard elements of the genre such as themadcap heiress, a hapless leading man virtually victimized by herattentions and a group of stuffed shirts whose pomposity is deflated by thefarcical goings on. It also stands as a prime example of the liberatinginfluence of eccentricity (and the female) in the screwballcomedy.Read More »

Summoned by the dying General Sternwood, Philip Marlowe is asked to deal with several problems that are troubling his family. Marlowe finds that each problem centers about the disappearance of Sternwood’s favoured employee who has left with a mobster’s wife. Each of the problems becomes a cover for something else as Marlowe probes.Read More »

Plot Synopsis [AMG]
Completed in mid-1930, Scarface, based on Armitage Trail’s novel of the same name, might have been the first of the great talkie gangster flicks, but it was held up for release until after that honor was jointly usurped by Little Caesar and Public Enemy. Paul Muni stars as prohibition-era mobster Tony Camonte, a character obviously patterned on Al Capone (whose nickname was “Scarface”). The homicidal Camonte ruthlessly wrests control of the bootlegging racket from his boss, Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins), and claims Lovo’s mistress, Poppy (Karen Morley), in the bargain. But while Poppy satisfies him sexually, Tony has a soft spot in his heart only for his sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak). The film’s finale is one of the longest and bloodiest of the 1930s, maintaining suspense and concern for the characters involved even though Muni has deliberately done nothing to make Tony likeable to audience.Read More »

A spaceship lands in Arctic wastes, its only passenger a six-and-a-half-foot-tall frozen vegetable with a brain. (“An intellectual carrot — the mind boggles.”) That spells trouble for the small troupe of soldiers and scientists, plus a reporter and the token fabulous babe. Directed by Christian Nyby, The Thing has the hallmarks of movies by producer Howard Hawks: taut, snappy camaraderie and a preference for men of action over men of thought. Whereas 1951’s other big spaceman movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, took the liberal view that a visitor from another world would be benign, superior and peace-loving, this one suggests an interplanetary Cold War, with a creature (played by James Arness, later Sheriff Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke fame) who’s angry, hungry and hard to reason with. Humankind’s only logical response to this vegetable invader: cook ‘im! (But don’t eat ‘im.) –Richard Corliss, TIme MagazineRead More »

This is the 116 min. version that IMDB calls the director’s cut.

The following describes the main differences between the two versions and why two versions were created:
After the film was completed, it was shelved while Warner Bros. worked to release a backlog of war-related films. It was decided that since the war was drawing to a close, public interest in these films would substantially lessened after its conclusion, whereas The Big Sleep had no such obvious issues of time sensitivity which would require a more immediate release. (A careful eye will spot many indications of The Big Sleep being shot during the war, such as ration stamps and dialogue, and pictures of president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.)Read More »