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Every couple of years, right around Independence Day, I revisit this beloved 1942 musical biopic, and it’s always the same joyful, rousing experience.

As far as legendary tough guy actor Lino Ventura is concerned, to know him is to love him. The question is, do you know him? If not, you should. He happens to be a personal favorite of mine, and I want others to recognize — or be reminded of — just how talented he was. All it takes is watching some of his best films.

Never a big star but a welcome fixture in westerns and film noirs over three decades, Dan Duryea specialized in playing the heel. In those kinds of parts, no one could touch him.

In 1910, the prestigious Fred Karno theatrical troupe in England got the chance to tour America.  Its star attraction, a twenty-one-year-old performer named Charles Chaplin, was on-board that first ship crossing the Atlantic.

Recently I was asked to name the five movies that most affected me growing up. In identifying them, I didn’t think too hard. This required more of an emotional, instinctual response than a purely rational one. “The Best Years of Our Lives” was one of the films I selected. It has always stayed with me. While I cannot claim it’s the all-time best war movie, I think it may be our best drama about war. This intensely human film  portrays the effects and aftermath of war, but includes no battle scenes.

The actress who in 1938 came out of nowhere to win the most coveted role in Hollywood once said: “I'm not a film star; I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity… Actresses go on for a long time and there are always marvelous parts to play.” Vivien Leigh was first and foremost a creature of the theater who only made twenty films. Still, over the course of her career she managed to win two Best Actress Oscars, becoming the first British player to do so.

Fred Astaire called her “beautiful dynamite.” After nearly a decade in films, it was hardly surprising that she finally broke through playing a vamp who ensnares Gene Kelly in the immortal “Gotta Dance” sequence from “Singin’ in the Rain.”

By the age of thirty, Montgomery Clift seemed to have everything: youth, beauty, talent, and the prospect of a lucrative film career with limitless possibilities. Along with his friend and colleague Marlon Brando, Clift was the most visible and gifted of a new generation of movie star who’d been trained in “the Method” at Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio. The Studio’s fundamental goal was to help actors inhabit their characters more fully in order to achieve greater realism and intensity in their performances.

I will always remember my middle son’s devotion to Doris Day movies when he was very young. This otherwise very rough-and-tumble kid would look at me on a rainy Saturday afternoon and ask quietly, “Got any more Doris?” This always amused me. I couldn’t help thinking that Doris Day seemed so far removed from the 21st century, belonging exclusively to that bygone era of clean movies, saccharine songs, and prescribed gender roles.