Though popular at the time, Northwest Passage is an entertaining action adventure set in the pre-revolutionary wilderness, but its attiude toward Indians was and still is debatable.
Oscar Movies: Not as a Stranger (1955)–Stanley Kramer’s Medical Melodrama Starring Robert Mitchum and Olivia De Havilland
September 5, 2014 by
Directed by Stanley Kramer, this medical melodrama is adapted from the best-selling novel by Morton Thompson. Cast against type and older for his role, Robert Mitchum plays an ambitious medical student named Lucas Marsh. To that extent, he marries the older not especially attractive Kristina Hedvigson (Olivia de Havilland) so that she can pay for […]
Oscar Movies: Nurse Edith Cavell (1939)–Anna Neagle in WWI Tale
September 5, 2014 by
In this earnest film, directed by Herbert Wilcox, British star Anna Neagle plays the titular role, a nurse who tends to the wounded in Belgium during WWI. Sadly she is caught and executed by the Germans as a spy. The female-dominated cast also includes Edna May Oliver, George Sanders, ZaSu Pitts, and May Robson Oscar […]
Oscar 2014: Accused is Netherlands Entry for Foreign Language
September 4, 2014 by
The feature film Accused (original title: Lucia de B.), directed by Paula van der Oest, has been chosen as the official entry from the Netherlands to the Academy’s Best Foreign Language Film Award. For Paula van der Oest this is the second time one of her films will be the Dutch submission for the Oscars. […]
Oscar Movies: Night and Day (1946)—Fictionalized Biopic of Gay Composer Cole Porter Starring Cary Grant
September 4, 2014 by
Cary Grant plays the gay composer Cole Porter in this embarrassingly fictionalized and corny biography of the brilliant musician, directed by Michael Curtiz. Covering the years 1912 to 1946, the story begins during Porter’s undergraduate days at Yale, where he participated in amateur theatricals under the tutelage of waspish professor Monty Woolley (playing himself). Though […]
