Tag Archives: Clara Bow

Beat Girls and Hep Cats

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Among the numerous Hollywood films that attempted to explore the subculture of the emerging beatnik and bohemian scene of the late fifties, none is odder or more blatantly miscast than The Wild Party (1956) which casts Anthony Quinn as Tom Kupfen, a former star football player turned full time deadbeat, hanging out at basement jazz clubs and dive bars, looking for action. He’s joined by a motley crew of hipster accomplices that includes Kicks (Nehemiah Persoff), a jazz pianist of some talent, Honey (Kathryn Grant), a spaced-out former girlfriend, and Gage (Jay Robinson), a switchblade-toting psychopath.

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Memories of the 2011 TCM Classic Film Festival

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*This article originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, Turner Classic Movies’s official blog in May 2011 (The blog was discontinued years ago and is no longer available)

In the event-packed hurly burly of TCM’s second annual Film Festival in Los Angeles from April 28-May 1 of 2011, I didn’t have a chance to blog about all of the films or attending guests that I saw but here are a few that linger in the memory and deserve to be singled out –cinematographer/director Haskell Wexler, who participated in a Q&A with Leonard Maltin before a screening of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(1966), Hayley Mills, who appeared after a screening of Whistle Down the Wind (1961) with interviewer/author Cari Beauchamp, a midnight screening of The Mummy (1932) introduced by Boris Karloff fan Ron Perlman, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928) accompanied by a live orchestra score by Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks, the MoMA restoration print showing of 1933’s Hoopla (Clara Bow’s final film) and the underrated Ernst Lubitsch Pre-Code delight Design for Living (1933).

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Movie Streaming in the Year of the Pandemic

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For most Americans, life, work and daily interactions with the outside world have been interrupted indefinitely and self-isolation at home is the new normal. How we fill those hours are a personal decision but even in the worst of times people need escapism. If you are an avid movie lover, you have a lot of options.

Hundreds of movies are available for free streaming from a variety of legal websites as long as you have access to a computer and a good Wi-fi connection. Below are a handful of options in no specified order for the more discriminating cinephile. These offer everything from classic Hollywood films to cult and indie fare to foreign language selections.   Continue reading →