Archive for the Category »1930′s Movies «
This post is a contribution to the Summer Under the Stars blogathon being hosted all month by Jill at Sittin’ on a Backyard Fence and Michael at Scribehard on Film. Please be sure to visit their sites and check out all the great entries submitted so far! Today, Turner Classic Movies will be airing Katharine Hepburn movies all day, including the movie I am discussing here, Bringing Up Baby (1938).
Are you ever hesitant or even a bit embarrassed to admit that you don’t like a classic movie that just about every classic film fan on the planet seems to love?
I know we all have different tastes and shouldn’t have to apologize for our honest thoughts and feelings about a movie, but when discussing popular classic movies, I usually keep it pretty quiet that I’m not a huge fan of Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and a few other movies that are loved by so many in the classic film community.
An example of one of those other movies is the classic screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby (1938) starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
I’ve told the story a few times about how The Philadelphia Story (1940), also starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, was instrumental in me becoming a classic film fan. I loved both of their performances in that movie, and also really enjoyed another comedy they starred in together, Holiday (1938).
So when I watched Bringing Up Baby a short time later, I was a bit surprised that I didn’t really like it that much. I was also very surprised to find out that so many classic movie fans love it, list it as one of their favorite movies of all time, and even consider it one of, if not the funniest movie ever made. Ever since then I’ve been meaning to watch it again to try to find out what I was missing, and I finally did this week for the blogathon. Continue reading »
Yay, I did it! I actually sat down and watched one of the classic movies I thought I’d never get myself to watch. See this previous post for a list of some of those movies. That may not seem like something to get excited about, but if you knew how little patience I have for watching the kind of movies I typically don’t like, you’d know how big of an accomplishment that is for me. 
After I wrote that post, I was encouraged by the reviews of a couple of my fellow classic movie bloggers to watch The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland, which I did last week.
The main thing that was keeping me from watching that movie is that it is an adventure film set in the year 1191, and that is so different from the type of movie I usually enjoy watching. But after reading a review by Audrey from the blog Fedoras and High Heels, I realized that out of all the movies on my list, it was the one I was most likely to enjoy. I figured even if I didn’t like the setting, I would at least be captivated by the beautiful Technicolor images and the charm of Olivia De Havilland and Errol Flynn. Continue reading »
Happy Birthday to one of my favorite actresses, Shirley Temple Black, who turns 83 today! Shirley was born on April 23, 1928 in Santa Monica, California to George and Gertrude Temple. It was Gertrude who encouraged Shirley to become a performer by exposing her to music and dance at an early age. She was known to advise Shirley before each of her movie scenes to “sparkle, Shirley, sparkle.” According to this preview of her biography on the Biography Channel, she didn’t really need much help as sparkling seemed to come naturally to Shirley.
Shirley Temple was discovered at the age of three by producers of a company called Educational Pictures while attending Mrs. Meglin’s Dance Studio in Los Angeles. They chose her to star in a number of short films called Baby Berlesks, which were parodies of the motion pictures of the day with casts made up entirely of children dressed up in adult costumes. I have seen a few of these films, and I have to say they made me a bit uncomfortable due to their somewhat exploitative nature. I much preferred watching her in the movies she was soon to star in. Continue reading »
When it comes to naming my favorite old movie star, no one else even comes close to Jimmy Stewart. I think he was a wonderful and diverse actor, a true gentleman in real life, and even though it’s not usually the first thing people think about him, at least not compared to actors like Clark Gable and Cary Grant, I find him to be extremely handsome and charming. I haven’t watched any of his westerns, but I have seen the majority of his most well-known or easy to find movies.
One of the movies that I had not yet seen until yesterday was the MGM musical Born to Dance (1936) starring Eleanor Powell. Jimmy Stewart’s profile on imdb.com mentioned that his undubbed singing voice was showcased in that movie, and I had been hoping to find a copy of it so I could hear him sing. While doing a search at my local library last week, I discovered that they had gotten a DVD collection of musicals called Classic Musicals From the Dream Factory, Volume 3 and was happy to find that it contained Born to Dance. Continue reading »
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