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Review: High, Wide and Handsome – 1937: This film is set up to be a musical about the love between a "Medicine Show" entertainer (Irene Dunne as Sally Watterson) and a Pennsylvania farmer (Randolph Scott as Peter Cortlandt), with the backdrop being 1859 and the oil boom as derricks go up on farmland and fortunes are being made by transporting "rock oil" (as they call it in this film) over to refineries.

Unfortunately, the musical staging of the story wilts away as melodrama and action sequences take over, and for awhile we've got a contest of the Pennsylvania farmers who've found oil up against a railroad tycoon magnate (Alan Hale as Walt Brennan) who is charging such high prices to freight the oil that he is angling to drive the farmers into a forced sell-off of their land so he can scoop it up, cheap. Helping him in this endeavor are thugs led by the local town bully (Charles Bickford as Red Scanlon) who sabotage the farmer's efforts and wield bullwhips.

This synchronized assault makes you wonder why this musical didn't come up with an appropriate song and more elaborate choreography for the spectacle of dozens of men snapping whips like a bizarre metronome. The tunes are by Jerome Kearn and Oscar Hammerstein II, and the film is directed by Rouben Mamoulian, but the musical packaging isn't sincere. There are a several staged songs, and Dunne of course hits every note with professional accuracy, but they're really set pieces for the entertainer and song itself, not integral in anyway to explaining the story as is done in a more developed Hollywood musical.

When Dorothy Lamour (as an important secondary character as a dance hall girl turned into a kind of double agent working for the farmers) gets on stage with Dunne for a duet, the musical bona fides of High, Wide and Handsome are again temporarily established. Comedy is generously ladled across the film, for example how Dorothy Lamour's character can only sing mopey, sad songs, and Dunne, in their shared duet, tries to kick up the timing and razzle dazzle, pulling Lamour across the stage like a puppet, trying to get her to "sell" the song to the audience of distracted men (and this is probably a reflection of the film itself: how do you tell a story about oil derricks?)

Randolph Scott is almost always on the "go" in this tale, rushing, moving, and even thinking at a desk as if it is an action sequence. There's deadlines-a-plenty counting down as the Pennsylvania farmers have to come up with a clever way to get their oil to the refineries on time or risk losing everything. Dunne's character pines away for marital attention and then leaves town to rejoin her father (Raymond Walburn as Doc Watterson), leaving Scott's over-worked character on his own to battle circumstances. It seems like the failure of the marriage and the failure of the farmers are coupled, and as the farmers try to lay pipeline over a mountain to get their oil pumped to the refineries on the other side, the bullwhip swinging bad guys attack again. This becomes the Ultimate Battle for the climax of the film, and things are not going well for the outnumbered and embattled farmers, none of who curiously own a gun and in this Pennsylvania of 1859 the police has yet to be invented, though there seems to be plenty of lawyers.

But then Irene Dunne reappears, leading a phalanx of circus performers who wade into the bad guys like the United States Marine Corps hitting the beach at Iwo Jima. With three armies battling and the clock ticking down, the farmers and the strongman, acrobats, little people and elephants have literally minutes left to reach the deadline for delivery of the oil. Can they do it?

This preposterous movie is a heady mix of tunes, farm-boy melodrama, marital blues and comedy with a slice of mad-inventor side-story as Scott's character has to keep thinking up new technical tricks to beat the odds. Elizabeth Patterson (as Grandma Cortlandt) appears throughout as the one woman who never fails to back Scott's ambitions, who can see through the meanness in the town's local "purity league" (led by Irving Pichel), can see that Irene Dunne and Dorothy Lamour are show business girls that have genuinely human sides, and brings a slightly goofy comedic angle to the whole affair, which is High, Wide and Handsome in a nutshell.

"Gorilla? I captured him as a baby. He was alright until he grew up."

Review: The Bride and the Beast - 1958: This film has enough stock footage in it of Africa (though some of it may be South America somehow pretending to be Africa) that if the melodrama of the story was deleted, you'd have an interesting though short travelogue in which fearsome animals roam about, eat, run, and attack each other.

But there is a melodrama in The Bride and the Beast, sometimes odd and fascinating but awfully tedious otherwise. A newly married couple (Charlotte Austin as Laura and Lance Fuller as Dan) arrive at their Southern California home and the new husband tells the new wife he had the servants "take the night off" so that they could be alone, but noises come up out of the basement. Turns out there's a gorilla locked up in the lower part of the house, named Spanky, who is very displeased with spending his time contained within what looks like a fifty-foot square cage. The new bride insists on seeing the creature, and when the animal reaches through the bars and grabs her, she is able to immediately calm him down by looking straight into his face and saying "you don't want to hurt me." Turns out, she's right, she has an immediate command over the creature.

When the newlyweds go to sleep later, the gorilla in the basement bends the bars of his cage, sneaks out, and goes upstairs to look for the new girl. She's been unable to sleep and is standing in the unusually large bedroom when Spanky steals into the room and gets back to what he was doing earlier, stroking her clothing and hair, hypnotized. The sleeping husband wakes up, gets a revolver from a side table, and interrupts the situation, simultaneously the gorilla relieves Laura of her nightgown (we can't see her because she is behind the gorilla) and the husband empties the gun into him. Spanky dies.

Why is the gorilla so concerned with Laura's clothing and hair? Why is Laura always wearing angora sweaters? Being as the script for this film is written by the famous anti-auteur and pro-angora Ed Wood, Jr., the gorilla appears to be an autobiographical stand-in for Wood himself, and the fascination of the gorilla for the girl is... well, that's where the film dives deep into hypnosis, past-life regression, and the startling conclusion that Laura is the Queen of the Gorillas. How did she happen to be reincarnated into the body of an American girl? Is this an inter-species goof by the design of, well, what? The situation isn't explained. There is a montage of statements inundating the story as Laura travels, eyes closed, telling us her experience, passing through long sections of stock footage of Africa, passing backward through her many previous lives.

Now we've got a puzzle on our hands: is Laura a nut or simply caught up in an inherited job position no one could reasonably expect to have thrust upon them because "Spanky" the gorilla has recognized her true status?

Though not directed by Ed Wood, Jr., (rather, by Adrian Weiss), The Bride and the Beast it saturated in Wood's personality and obsessions, which means a great deal of the tale is wide-open for unintended humor. Actual film dynamics are professionally done and quite a lot of the stock footage, visually obvious because of the sudden shifts in lighting and film grain, are striking and even astounding at times, and would be a highlight in a more appropriate venue, like Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.

Coming on disc July 14, 2026: Two Arabian Knights (1927) and The Racket (1928) from Howard Hughes in Hollywood Volume 1

Story at Flicker Alley

"Newly restored by Flicker Alley" - set includes audio commentaries, outtakes, the documentary Howard Hughes in Hollywood (2026), the First Academy Awards (2026), a "Hart Wegner Remembrance," Image Gallery of production stills, promotional material, and rare documents from the Howard Hughes Motion Picture Records at the University of Nevada. Las Vegas Souvenir Booklet with a new essay by film historian Imogen Sara Smith, vintage reviews, conservation notes, and introductions on each score. All Region Encoding (A,B,C).

A December 2019 review of Two Arabian Knights here at Cinemagraphe.

Criterion announces their September disc releases

Henry Fonda and director Sidney Lumet with 1957's 12 Angry Men

2K digital restoration - nine hours of first-person testimonies of Holocaust survivors - 1985 (French) – Shoah

Review: A Queen for Caesar - 1962: About six months after the release of this relatively modest Italian production telling the story of how Cleopatra (Pascale Petit) ended up in a rug rolled out at the feet of Caesar (Gordon Scott), the 1963 Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor appeared. Often cited as the most expensive film ever made (after adjustments for inflation and paying attention to a ratio of how production costs differ), the Taylor Cleopatra is famous for both the cost and gossip surrounding its production. That film came out in a flurry of publicity that had been building for years over which time the film had reached a status of fame where it was famous for being famous. Not the case here with this 1962 film.

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Amazon FreeTime Unlimited Free Trial

From former screen legends who have faded into obscurity to new revelations about the biggest movie stars, Valderrama unearths the most fascinating little-known tales from the birth of Hollywood through its Golden Age.

This Was Hollywood: Forgotten Stars and Stories (Turner Classic Movies)

"Film buff finds lost 1968 vampire TV movie that was rumored to be so scary it was ordered destroyed"

Story at MSN New York Post

On the occasion of her 100th birthday "Behind the myth" of Marilyn Monroe – Irish Times

The problem with writing about Marilyn Monroe to mark her centenary is that everything to be said about her has already been said, and almost all of it has been mediated through an event that took place 64 years ago: her fatal barbiturate overdose at the age of 36..."

Review: The Admirable Crichton - 1957: There was a slew of "island" movies post-World War II and through the 1950's. The Blue Lagoon (1949) and Island of Desire (1952), both British productions, built on the already existing genre of beachcomber stories in which someone (willingly or unwillingly) is isolated onto an island and has to either contend with weather, food sourcing, or simply a foreign environment of people and culture (for example the 1938 Beachcomber with Charles Laughton). With Blue Lagoon and Island of Desire, the situation is an echo of Adam and Eve, but 1957's The Admirable Crighton (aka Paradise Lagoon) pushes this into an almost (but not quite) farcical extreme with four couples marooned on an island. On top of this simple mathematical balance is an evaluation of the English class system run through a very unusual situation where tradition and genius have to come to terms with each other.

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Review: Zarak, 1956: Zarak Khan (Victor Mature) and dancer Salma (Anita Ekberg) are having a tough time making their mutual affection viable. It is the 1800's and the British Empire is cracking down on Afghan bandits like Zarak, and then there's the problem that Salma is one of Zarak's father's various wifes. A Technicolor/CinemaScope adventure shot on location in India, Morocco, and Myanmar.

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Review: Superman, 2025: This is, unfortunately, kind of a stupid movie. The special effects are often spectacular, though not always, and there are performances from the cast that are really quite good, but, again, not always. But, in the end the film is doomed by its script. Superhero films are not exactly renowned for adherence to reality, but even with the acceptance of the extraordinary physical powers of Superman, something easy enough to do after many decades of superhero movies (a cycle kicked off by the 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeves), it is the actions of the human cast that bogs down this movie into a Saturday morning cartoon level of storytelling. More about Superman, 2025

Review: Cat-Women of the Moon, 1953: Marie Windsor is having serious problems keeping her mind on her job as navigator on a rocketship traveling toward the moon. She keeps feeling compelling thoughts demanding she land the craft at a certain spot on the far side of the familiar space orb. Once landed, they disembark and Windsor deftly maneuvers the male crew (the ship's two leaders are both in love with her) toward a secret ruined city below the surface. There they discover a race of "cat-women" who run around in black leotard tights and who exercise a kind of mind-control skill that is at its most powerful when projected onto the female brain, that is, Windsor's. Meanwhile, the men are delighted to meet these beautiful denizens of an ancient space-empire, not suspecting the Cat-Woman have a master plan to swipe the rocketship and head to earth on a mission to conquor and repopulate their almost vanished species.

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The line-up of May releases from Warner Archive, quite a few titles with excellent new 4K scans from quality film elements.

Fast Review: The Return of Swamp Thing - 1989: This film doesn't have much ambition other than to play sequel to the original film of 1982 and to try to underline every character and story element with an alternative meaning that is pure camp humor. Louis Jourdan plays a villain that seems somehow bored no matter how much mayhem is happening in his immediate surroundings, and our main star, a young and pretty Heather Locklear, seems to happily grin bigger and bigger as the preposterousness of the story builds. The special effects, writing and side-characters are much better than a straight-to-VHS-tape movie of the 1980s, but somehow The Return of Swamp Thing seems like it was truly made to reside on the shelf of some eternal Blockbuster Video store where it is always ten-minutes before closing on a Friday night and you've already seen all the other "better" titles.

Fast Review: The Divorce of Lady X, 1938: Laurence Olivier is an attorney in London who is a jaded veteran of divorce trials. One evening he is forced by circumstances of weather to stay overnight at a hotel teeming with women who are also stuck there after an event at the hotel's dance hall. Mercilessly disregarding the plea of the hotel management to "double-up" on lodgings since there's not enough room for everyone, Olivier ends up being outsmarted by a clever Merle Oberon who practically steals his bed out from under him, an action that leaves him sleaping uncomfortably in an outer room and also quite smitten.

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Review: The Leech Woman, 1960: Colleen Gray spends part of this film under heavy age makeup, caught in a twisted variation on the “fountain of youth” story. In this case, a venal scientist (her husband!) is determined to make millions from an African tribe’s secret youth-restoring medicine. He pretends his efforts are meant to restore his much older wife’s health and beauty, but we can easily see this is merely a ploy to gain access to her wealth. When success comes, though, there's a price, one that catches the mendacious husband completely by surprise.

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The Marion Davies' film It's A Wise Child, 1931, Warner Archive Blu Ray, release coming May 26, 2026.

HD master from a new 4K scan of best preservation elements!" "...a witty portrait of small-town morality turned upside down – and a reminder of why she ranked among Hollywood’s most engaging stars. Out of general distribution for decades and never shown on television..."

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