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You may remember her as Rosanne Barr’s Granny on TV. Or perhaps the rotund former swimming champion who dives in on cue in 1972’s delightfully cheesy “The Poseidon Adventure.” 

If you’re like me, sometimes you’re in the mood for just that — a classic that takes you back to your childhood or gives you a glimpse into another era. Great older films tend to move slower, with longer scenes and fewer cuts. And they usually contain one precious ingredient that too many narrative films lack today: an emphasis on intelligent, clever dialogue, recalling a time when good conversation was considered an art.

Back in the day when this was considered fairly uncommon, Maureen O’Hara was the woman who could stand up to John Wayne. Or any other big man who got in her way.

His name is seldom invoked today, but if you compiled any list of innovators who’d actually changed the shape of movies, it would have to include Saul Bass.

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.

Buster became part of his parents’ act when he was just three, and the routine he did with his father made full use of the the tiny young boy’s uncanny flexibility. It involved young Buster goading his Dad to the point where the older man would knock the kid around the stage, or even throw him off it. A luggage handle was sown into young Buster’s costume to make it easier to toss him. The act was often billed as “The Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged.”