"doubt"

In an age when fewer young people exhibit interest or knowledge about classic films made before 1970, I am always amazed at the staying power of Audrey Hepburn, particularly among women.

Sometimes love is grand, sometimes it’s a kick in the teeth, and sometimes it can be more than a little strange. The relationship between the beautiful Isabella Rossellini and “Tsar of Bizarre” director David Lynch lands squarely in that third category.

I can vividly recall the first moment I saw Meryl Streep on-screen. The film was “The Deer Hunter” (1978). Her part was relatively small — she played the stateside love interest of two men shipped off to Vietnam — but I was immediately struck by her presence. 

Over the course of movie history, there have been the great actresses, women who light up the screen with charisma and character, like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, and Meryl Streep. There have also been women whose special gifts had more to do with the sexual allure they projected. Hey fellas, you must have noticed them, right? Brace yourselves then- here are our picks for the top twenty female cinematic sex symbols of all time. (Drum roll). 

Given the reverence for Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece today, people are often surprised to learn that on release, “Vertigo” was a bit of a dud, barely recouping its costs and generating only mixed reviews. This tangled tale of murder and obsession may simply have been too twisted for Eisenhower-era audiences to accept.

By the time ambitious model-turned-actress Grace Kelly hit Hollywood at the dawn of the ‘50s, she was possessed of near-perfect looks, enormous ambition, a healthy sex drive, and… a major Daddy complex. As stunning and talented as she was, Grace could never seem to please her self-made businessman father, Jack Kelly. Somehow this drew her physically to older men. (I’ll have to ask my shrink how that works).

It seems implausible now, but fame did not come to Jack Nicholson quickly. In 1969, after a decade of trying to break through as a movie star, the 32-year-old was slowly acclimating himself to the idea of giving up the stage and working behind the camera.

“Noah,” starring Russell Crowe and a Pentateuchal God punishing the wicked with about 45 minutes of world-destroying CGI, opens today. While you could go blow money on this floating mess of animalia, we recommend you skip it, and watch a better Biblical movie – “The 10 Commandments” (1956), directed by the King of Spectacle Films, Cecil B. DeMille.  “Commandments” retells the Biblical tale of Moses, from his float down a river, to becoming a prince of Egypt, to his successful career as a prophet. It’s a film worthy of the record-breaking $13.5M budget it eventually received. It was to be DeMille’s magnum opus, and he treated it as such. When studio bean-counters complained about spiraling costs, DeMille asked if he should stop filming and make “The Five Commandments” instead.

Here’s a film that’s never quite got its due in Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre, an atypical feature for “the Master,” which posed a difficult challenge: sustaining tension and intrigue in the most confined of spaces.