Top of Page
Actors

How Jack Palance Achieved Immortality With a Gun and a Few Push-Ups

Few will ever forget this year’s Oscars, when Faye Dunaway read off the wrong card and mistakenly announced “La La Land” as Best Picture winner. Awkward as that was, there have been other memorably offbeat moments in Oscar history.
Actors

How Bill Murray Forged His Own Path- And Prevailed

Today there are certainly bigger stars in Hollywood than Bill Murray, but few if any command the cult-like devotion and fascination that he does from his fans.
Directors

John Ford —  The Bright and Dark Sides to the Finest Director in History

This once-famous name may be unfamiliar to millennials, but even those with the remotest interest in film should discover him and his astounding body of work. Among the top directors who have credited him as a direct influence on their work: Ingmar Bergman (who described him as “the best director in the world”), Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Elia Kazan, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg.
Actors

The Short but Stunning Run of Tyrone Power

Tyrone Power: If ever a name sounded like the product of a studio publicity department, this was it. Yet this dark, impossibly handsome star (known to friends as “Ty”) used his own name, the same one carried by his actor father and his great-grandfather, also a famed actor in nineteenth-century Ireland.
Actors

Why 1939 Was the Year of Thomas Mitchell

Thomas Mitchell was one of the most admired and successful character actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, but to most viewers today, his face is more familiar than his name. When you hear more about Mitchell’s amazing career, you’ll agree we should all know his name — and revere his memory.
History

11 Outstanding Anti-War Movies That Prove War Is Hell

Though movies have often fueled our country’s propaganda machine in times of war, for me personally those films that expose war’s folly are more interesting simply because they feel more authentic and honest.
Actors

How the Communist Witch Hunt Killed John Garfield

Before Penn and De Niro, before Brando and Dean, there was John Garfield. Virtually forgotten today, he introduced an intense realism to movie acting in the 1940s, born of training and talent. Both later stars would build on what he started. Then, just as Garfield’s career was soaring, he became a victim of the notorious “Red Scare” at the dawn of the fifties. All too quickly, it was over.
Actors

Seriously Funny — The Curious Life and Career of Jean Arthur

In the 1930s, when so many women in America were still relegated to the kitchen and nursery, one actress in Hollywood became a star playing independent women who worked for a living, competing with men in a man’s world. Her name was Jean Arthur.
Actors

Just Plain Good: The Criminally Underrated Fred MacMurray

He was not the most exciting, dynamic star of his day. He had a casual air, a matter-of-fact delivery, and looked like a Regular Joe: tall, nice looking, but hardly sexy. He never took an acting lesson, and was never nominated for an Oscar.