Three Smart Girls was Deanna Durbin’s first movie. It has a good backstory. Its director, Henry Koster, had recently arrived in Hollywood after fleeing Europe. He had begun a career writing and directing in Germany, then in exile in France, and again in Hungary, where he made films in German and Hungarian for the EuropeanContinue reading “Three Smart Girls (1936)”
Category Archives: The Expanded Canon
Fifth Avenue Girl (1939)
Director Gregory LaCava’s enshrinement in the Hollywood comedy pantheon is mainly due to My Man Godfrey (1936), which is still considered one of the peak achievements of the period. I’m not as taken with that film as most folks, but it’s clear that LaCava was an original director with a strong personal sense of howContinue reading “Fifth Avenue Girl (1939)”
Footlight Parade (1933)
It’s standard practice among film historians to set up an opposition between the musicals of Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers. Until recently the preference was for the more intimate and individually graceful style of Astaire and Rogers. Their art was more personal than the monumental spectacles of Berkeley, and — so theContinue reading “Footlight Parade (1933)”
Ball of Fire (1941)
For some reason Ball of Fire doesn’t figure in the Grand Canon of classic Hollywood sound comedies. Film historians who write endlessly about its director, Howard Hawks, and its screenplay writers, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, rarely mention the film, except maybe in footnotes. Apparently it isn’t dazzling enough when compared with Hawks’s ground-breaking motormouthContinue reading “Ball of Fire (1941)”