Ricardo Cortez: Although never as big a star as fellow 1920s screen heartthrobs Rudolph Valentino, Ramon Novarro, and John Gilbert, Cortez had a long – and, to some extent, prestigious – film career, appearing in nearly 100 movies between 1923 and 1950. Among his directors: Allan Dwan, Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, James Cruze, Alexander Korda, Herbert Brenon, Roy Del Ruth, Frank Lloyd, Gregory La Cava, William A. Wellman, Alexander Hall, Lloyd Bacon, Tay Garnett, Archie Mayo, Raoul Walsh, Frank Capra, Walter Lang, Michael Curtiz, and John Ford. See previous post: “Remembering Ricardo Cortez: Hollywood's Silent “Latin Lover” & Star of Original 'The Maltese Falcon'.” First of all, why Ricardo Cortez? Since I began writing about classic movies and vintage filmmakers roughly 30 years ago, people have always been curious why I choose particular subjects. It sounds kind of corny, but I have always wanted to do original work and perhaps make a minor contribution to film history at the...
- 7/7/2017
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Screwball comedy movies, rare screenings of epic box office disaster: Library of Congress’ Packard Theater in April 2014 (photo: Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in ‘The Awful Truth’) In April 2014, the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theater in Culpeper, Virginia, will celebrate Hollywood screwball comedy movies, from the Marx Brothers’ antics to Peter Bogdanovich’s early ’70s homage What’s Up, Doc?, a box office blockbuster starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. Additionally, the Packard Theater will present a couple of rarities, including an epoch-making box office disaster that led to the demise of a major studio. Among Packard’s April 2014 screwball comedies are the following: Leo McCarey’s Duck Soup (Saturday, April 5) — actually more zany, wacky, and totally insane than merely "screwball" — in which Groucho Marx stars as the recently (un)elected dictator of Freedonia, abetted by siblings Harpo Marx and Chico Marx, in addition to Groucho’s perennial foil,...
- 3/27/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Thomas Edison Turner Classic Movies' seven-part documentary Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood is described as "the comprehensive story of the men and women who built the American film industry." The mammoth documentary, which kicked off at 5 p.m. Pt today (the first episode, "Peepshow Pioneers," will be shown again on TCM at 8 p.m.) features rarely seen photographs and film footage, clips from numerous American movie productions, and interviews with historians and major Hollywood figures, including Sidney Lumet, Richard Zanuck, Samuel Goldwyn Jr., Peter Bogdanovich, Gore Vidal, Molly Haskell, and TCM's own Robert Osborne. Also this evening: the early Mary Pickford vehicle Ramona (1910), D. W. Griffith at the Biograph studios in 1909, seven early silent shorts based on the plays of William Shakespeare, the films of pioneer Thomas Edison, and the films of Georges Méliès, who, though no Hollywood filmmaker, was instrumental in the creation of early movie [...]...
- 11/2/2010
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Turner Classic Movies‘ series "Race in Hollywood: Latino Images in Film" kicks off this evening. So what if "Latino" isn’t a race? So what if it isn’t even an ethnic or a cultural group, but merely a Us-made sociopolitical construct? I’d say that what matters here are the films themselves — all Hollywood productions. And hopefully some of the introductions, provided by Robert Osborne and UCLA professor of film and media studies Chon A. Noriega, will be illuminating. Tonight, TCM watchers will be able to catch Hollywood’s foremost couple of the 1920s, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, playing Spanish-speaking characters (by way of English-language intertitles) in, respectively, the D. W. Griffith-directed early short Ramona — and we’re talking 1910 here, before Pickford became a superstar — and the 1920 feature The Mark of Zorro. The latter is much inferior to Rouben Mamoulian’s classy 1940 production starring Tyrone Power, but it...
- 5/5/2009
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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