Mervyn LeRoy

This season in Paris, Red is all the rage! Red Skelton headlines a joyful Technicolor® remake of Roberta as a New York producer who inherits a failing Parisian fashion house. His partners are Howard Keel and Gower Champion and the lovelies they look at are Kathyrn Grayson, Ann Miller and Marge Champion. Which means the zippy story (everyone falls in love with everyone else as they scramble to save the salon) is in masterful hands. But the talent doesn’t stop there. Jerome Kern provides 10 classics, including Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Yesterdays, I Won’t Dance and the title song. And Vincente Minnelli directs the finale, a razzling, dazzling, riotous-with-color Broadway-style fashion show featuring fabulous Adrian couture. From Warner Brothers!Read More »

The managing editor for a newspaper, in hot water with his boss, is demoted to writing the “Nellie Nelson” heart throb column, where he gets the unexpected opportunity to crack a major story.Read More »

Will Stockdale is a country bumpkin from Georgia who is drafted into the United States Air Force and is too dumb to realize that he is driving everyone around him crazy, no one more so than Sergeant King.Read More »

‘Rainbow Girls’ has just opened and closed on Broadway when Dixie, a actress in it, runs into smooth-talking Hollywood Director Frank Buelow. He tells her she would be a natural and promises her a movie contract, so she goes to Hollywood, but there is no contract for her. She meets washed-up actress Donny (Blanche Sweet) on the lot and they become friends. Frank is fired from his studio and the new director finds that Frank’s storyline is actually a copy of ‘Rainbow Girls,’ the Broadway stage play. They call Jimmy, the author and Dixie’s boyfriend, for the rights and he goes to Hollywood to produce it as a movie. Dixie gets the lead, but things start going wrong when dizzy Dixie, spurred on by the fired Director Buelow, thinks that she is better than the picture or the studio and starts to make demands. Interesting note: Good look at early Hollywood, with cameos by Loretta Young, Walter Pigeon, Noah Beery and a young Noah Beery, Jr. make the film fun to watch.Read More »

The City Editor of a sleazy tabloid goes against his own journalistic ethics to resurrect a twenty year old murder case – with tragic results.Read More »

At the dawn of supersonic flight in the 1950s, a group of Edwards Air Force Base experimental aircraft test pilots push themselves to the limit.Read More »

A dedicated FBI agent recalls the agency’s battles against the Klan, organized crime and Communist spies.Read More »

A chambermaid impersonates the fictional subject of a composite photo that won a beauty contest, with whom a famed aviator falls in love.Read More »

America’s mid-20th century love affair with the Biblical epic began with Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis (1951). And a new Blu-ray by Warner Home Video goes a long way to proving why that’s the case. The saturated colors and epic setpieces that dominate the film’s mise-en-scène are reason enough to sit back and enjoy the spectacle. But Peter Ustinov’s scenery-chewing performance as the last Roman Caesar, Nero, is another great justification. This film was the template for future movies of its ilk, and should be seen for that if for no other reason. Like The Robe (1953), or Ben-Hur (1959), Quo Vadis is based on a historical novel that examines the nascent religion of Christianity through the eyes of an outsider. Here it is loyal Roman commander Marcus Vinicius (Robert Taylor), who falls in love with a Christian slave, the beautiful Lygia (Deborah Kerr), while struggling to remain loyal to the increasingly mad Emperor Nero. Lygia’s entreaties for Vinicius to join her in following Christ’s teachings are initially dismissed.Read More »